Authors: Don Aker
Part of Griff finally understood the poison she was spewing in his ear. His own stomach twisted at the lies Travis had told her, the filth the man had let fly just so he could leave like all the others had. And as black dots began to swim in Griff’s vision, another part of him understood something else—she wasn’t going to stop. If he didn’t get up off that floor in the next few seconds, he’d never get up again.
Placing both hands flat against the linoleum, he suddenly pushed upwards, thrusting her back, and he felt her body flop
like a rag doll as her grip broke and she fell to the floor behind him. Scrambling to his feet, he found himself trapped in the L of the kitchen cupboards, and he turned to make a run for the door. But she was already up and coming for him, the neck of a broken bottle now clutched in one fist.
“I shoulda done what my momma
tol’
me to do,” she growled. “I shoulda had the doctor suck you outta me when I found out I was knocked up! But I figured you was worth the welfare.” She brandished the bottle at him. “And now look what I got to show for it. Good for nothin’ faggot scum!”
“Mama!” pleaded Griff, stepping back, feeling the countertop dig into him. “Me ‘n’ Clovis—”
A shriek drowned out his words. “Don’t you
dare
say that pervert’s name in my house!” she cried. “I ain’t livin’ with no fuckin’ fudgepacker, you hear me? I brought you into this world and I can goddamn take you out of it.” She lunged at him, one edge of the broken bottle raking his face.
Oddly, there was no pain as his skin unzipped from his right ear to his chin. That would come later. What came now was the blood. And the certainty that he was dead at fifteen. It was that certainty that probably saved him, made his body react before his brain did, made him lash out to protect himself, shoving her away with every ounce of strength he could summon.
He’d seen lots of movies where the important action slowed down so the audience could appreciate the horror of it, and in the days and weeks and months that followed, his memory would do the same, replaying his mother’s fall in slow motion so he could see every detail clearly: the way she jerked back, the way her heels slid out from under her, the way her head hit an
overturned lampstand, the way her neck snapped just before her head bounced off the floor.
What his memory couldn’t seem to show him was what happened afterwards. He must have stayed with her for hours because he remembered the sun being up when he finally left, the ripeness of her on his skin and his clothes because of the heat in their double-wide. His mother’s bowels had loosened when her neck broke, the smell of her shit mingled with lily of the valley and the coppery tang of his own blood.
Somehow he’d gotten the bleeding to slow, but gravity kept pulling the flap of skin from his face, opening the wound to flies. At least, he vaguely recalled buzzing, lots of buzzing, but that might have been the pain. Agony had a way of involving all the senses, so buzzing might have been what pain sounded like in the aftermath of that night on Lancelot Way.
Eventually, he ended up in the only place he had to go—Clovis’s Airstream, where another nightmare was waiting for him: Clovis lying dead in his tiny back bedroom. And this time Griff knew the buzzing was real—flies that had found their way through a hole in a screen now crawled over his open eyes and slack mouth.
Griff figured it was a stroke or heart attack that took him, probably as Griff sat at Clovis’s computer, unaware of the final drama playing out in the back of that old Land Yacht. Despite the grief that brought him to his knees, Griff decided Clovis’s death was a good thing. That way, he hadn’t had to hear the lies Travis Hubley had told about him, the lies that had made Marsha Barnett meth herself into a murderous rage.
Griff sat with him until nightfall, holding Clovis’s hand,
oddly cold in that Arkansas heat, and then he left to dig the hole behind the dumpster on Roundtable Road. The people who lived at Camelot Trailer Park rarely went there, preferring to let their garbage pile up outside their trailers, so Griff worked undisturbed for hours that night. There were times when he grew faint from loss of blood, and a driving thirst threatened to overwhelm him, but he forced himself to keep going, to keep digging. It seemed important that he do this. He couldn’t bear the idea of Clovis buried someplace he didn’t know, someplace far from his flowers.
And after he’d dropped the last shovelful of earth on what had been his only friend, Griff had gone back to the Airstream to get the two lady’s slippers from their FedEx container. He was as gentle as he could be planting them in that turned earth, and he took care to soak the soil around their fragile roots, but minutes out of their special packing they’d already wilted. Afterwards, Griff figured there was a good chance the stuff leaking from that dumpster was toxic, and the soil’s alkalinity was probably for shit anyway. But if anyone could make a lady’s slipper grow, it was Clovis Lafayette.
Griff ended up in an institution, of course. The child-care system could find no foster family willing to take in a hulking teenager who had killed his mom, despite a ruined face that proved self-defence. Down deep, everyone else believed the myth that all mothers loved their sons and, regardless of gruesome evidence to the contrary, no one could quite accept the idea that Marsha Barnett of Camelot Trailer Park on Sweet Home Cutoff had tried to kill hers. So Griff spent the next three years at the Idlewood Home for Boys.
He made no friends there—a school psychiatrist said he suffered from “a dissociative disorder arising from a trauma in his fifteenth year that alienated him from others”—but he proved to be amazing at computers, easily outpacing all his classmates. Even his instructors were awed by his cyber skills, particularly his ability to locate anyone using data collection algorithms he created himself. No one suspected, of course, that Griff’s interest in that area was motivated by a very private goal: tracking down Travis Hubley and making him pay for what he’d done.
Planning a murder turned out to be a lot like writing computer code—you had to consider all the options and anticipate where each of them might take you, forever keeping in mind
If this, then what?
He spent three years working it out and was three weeks beyond his eighteenth birthday when he tied Travis to a metal chair in the basement of the house the guy was renting in Joliet, Illinois, with a bleached blond who looked a little like Griff’s mother. That wasn’t what got her killed, though. Travis must have had a thing for lily of the valley because she was wearing it, too, and the minute Griff smelled it, he knew there was no saving her. He didn’t make her suffer, though. He saved that for Travis.
As Griff unlocked his apartment door and swung it open, automatically performing a series of checks to determine whether the place had been breached, he recalled another Monday afternoon like this one. He knew it had been a Monday because Pavel Morozov made a practice of only interviewing new talent at the beginning of the workweek.
When Griff had finally taken care of Travis and had a chance to think about his future, he knew there was a market for the particular skill set he’d honed at Idlewood, not to mention his aptitude for cold-blooded murder. Trolling the DarkNet that he’d discovered while planning Travis’s execution, Griff had learned of people rumoured to hire guys with his special talents, and because Morozov was the closest to Joliet, Griff had set about arranging a meet. It had been easier than he thought—he’d simply hacked into Morozov’s email, which had gotten the man’s immediate attention. In fact, the first person Morozov had paid Griff to take out was the guy responsible for his online security.
While he’d been impressed with Griff’s technological skills, Morozov had been skeptical that someone so young would have the stomach for the kind of work he’d be required to do, which was why Griff had brought to their meeting pictures he’d taken of Travis before, during, and after their time together. Morozov had been impressed by those, too. “It would appear,” the man had murmured while fingering the photos, “that youth has its own special capacity for brutality.”
Watching his freaky pale hands fondle those pictures, Griff had wondered if maybe he’d made a mistake choosing this guy to work for. But he’d soon learned that no one chose Morozov. It was always the other way around.
And if Griff didn’t find the target soon, Morozov would be making another choice. The last choice Griff would ever have to worry about.
W
illa braked and turned into the d’Entremonts’ driveway. She’d forgotten to signal, and the driver behind her blared his horn, but she ignored it. After the bombshell that had just dropped on her, she felt lucky to have made it back to town in one piece.
As convincing as Bailey’s story sounded, Willa simply couldn’t accept it. There had to be some mistake, a colossal misunderstanding. That’s what she’d told herself again and again as she’d driven back to Brookdale at a speed well below the posted limit, earning honks from drivers behind her. But she couldn’t have gone any faster. With all those thoughts caroming around inside her head, she was lucky to keep the SUV on the road.
Easing the car to a stop, she shifted into park, shut off the motor, and sat staring at Wynn’s house, a large saltbox that his father had bought and renovated when he’d left Halifax ten years earlier, following his divorce from Wynn’s mother. Although the T-bird wasn’t in the driveway, she was sure soccer practice had to be over. The sooner this mess was cleared up, the better. As much as she needed to hear what Wynn had to say, though, her legs felt like sponges that would surely fold over themselves as
soon as her feet touched the ground. But they didn’t, carrying her somehow to the d’Entremonts’ front door.
Willa felt ridiculous ringing the bell. Any other time she’d have walked in and announced herself, something Wynn’s father had insisted she do when she and Wynn began getting serious. But now that didn’t seem right. She pressed the button again, and this time she heard movement inside. Seconds later, the door opened and Wynn’s dad stood in the foyer with a glass in his hand. Scotch, it looked like. At least two fingers. And judging from the redness of his face, she was pretty sure it wasn’t his first of the afternoon.
“Willa!” d’Entremont exclaimed, stepping back and waving her inside. The Scotch sloshed in the glass and some of the amber liquid ended up on the hardwood floor, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Come in, come in. You can keep me company until Wynn gets back.”
Stepping inside, Willa asked, “Is he still at soccer practice?”
D’Entremont shook his head and closed the door, movement that sent more Scotch floorward. “Got home a few minutes ago. I shent”—he grinned stupidly and tried again—”sent him on an errand.”
“When do you expect him?”
“Shouldn’t be”—he hiccuped—”more than a few minutes. He’s dropping off something for me at the town hall. The agenda for tonight’s council meeting. I’m gonna miss this one.” He took a swallow of the Scotch, swaying slightly, and Willa figured that his absence from the meeting was probably a good thing for everyone involved.
“Come sit down,” he said, leading her into his library, all four
of its walls lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves jammed with books. He gestured toward the leather loveseats on either end of an expensive handmade rug. She pushed aside some papers on one and sat down while he moved to its twin, ignoring the papers piled on it. They crinkled under him.
Besides the papers strewn on both the furniture and the floor, a layer of dust lined the shelves, and the rug looked like it hadn’t been vacuumed for some time. Wynn had told her that his stepmother had gone to visit her parents in Toronto and, if the mess was any indication, she hadn’t returned yet. Of course, the d’Entremonts had a housekeeper, so that really didn’t explain the condition of the library. Was the housekeeper away, too?
“So,” said d’Entremont after taking another swallow, “how’s the school year shaping up?”
“Fine,” she said. She knew he expected more from her, a few meaningless details that would go in one ear and out the other, but she was far too preoccupied to make small talk.
D’Entremont used the moment to drain his glass, the papers under him crinkling again. “Wynn never says much about school,” he murmured, the edges of his words soft and slurred. “Never says much of anything. You prob’ly know more about what’s he doing than I do,” he finished.
Willa thought it best not to say anything.
“Can I get you something? There’s Coke in the fridge,” he said. “And ginger ale, I think.”
“Coke would be nice,” said Willa, mostly to give him something to do besides trying to entertain her.
She could hear the Thunderbird rumble into the driveway just as Wynn’s father returned. Taking the glass from him, she
was surprised to see it wasn’t entirely clean. A filament of lettuce or celery was stuck to the outside, possibly glued there by the heat of a dishwasher that had failed to rinse properly. Or maybe the glass hadn’t been washed in the first place.
She could hear the back door open and footsteps approach along the hall.
“Here he is now,” said d’Entremont. He left the room, and Willa could hear father and son pass each other in the hallway, d’Entremont telling Wynn where to find her.
“Hey, Wills,” he said as he entered the room. “Thought I was coming over to your place later.” He bent to kiss her.
Without thinking, Willa turned her head away and his lips met air.
“Something wrong?” he asked as he straightened.
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Okay.” He was moving to plant himself beside her on the loveseat when she stood up.
“Not here,” she told him. “Let’s go outside.”
“Sure, but let me grab something to drink first.”
She held out her glass. “You can have this,” she said, leading him down the hallway through the similarly untidy living room and out the patio door into the d’Entremonts’ large backyard, which was surrounded by a two-metre-high privacy fence. She headed toward the small mechanical shed at the far end of the pool, where she hoped the low whir of the pump would mask their voices. She didn’t want Wynn’s dad hearing what she was going to say. She sat on one of several wicker chairs grouped beneath a tall oak, and Wynn lowered his large frame into an identical one beside her.