Authors: J. A. Kerley
Ava sat on the edge of the couch, watching and listening, nervous, something stirring on her tongue. She started to speak, but thunder rolled and she waited. When she spoke her voice was as sad as her eyes.
“You’ve been burned before. On your other arm. Badly. There’s tissue seared away.”
Harry froze. Turned to Ava. Back to me. Before I could move he gripped my arm in his hand, looking at the year-old scars.
Whispered, Jesus.
“Tell me about the past,” Ava said. “Everything.”
T
he heart of the storm covered us. A chair on the deck pitched over in a gust, the rain cutting at a hard angle now. Wind moaned through the joists beneath the floor.
“My father was a civil engineer,” I began, “who crossed between sanity and insanity as easily as he could lay a bridge over a shallow gorge. He was a dark force who fed on fear and pain and panic.”
Ava said, “Yours.”
“Jeremy’s. He abused him in ways beyond desperation. My mother’s pain was excruciating, but wholly mental.”
“He didn’t touch you?”
“He hardly saw me. Not until I grew large enough to catch his attention.”
Harry said, “How old were you when “
“I turned ten the day before Jeremy lured my father into the woods and ripped him apart.”
A siren in the distance, the fire department racing to a lightning strike.
“My father discovered my brother when Jeremy was ten. Like he’d suddenly materialized. I think ten was an age of significance to my father. Something from his own history.”
Harry said, “You think Jeremy killed your father to save you?”
“Himself as well. It was too late, he’d become the past.”
“Where was your mother?” Harry asked.
“She was a seamstress. Whenever things slipped into nightmare mode she went to her room and sewed wedding dresses, her speciality, great flowing cocoons of silk and lace. She was a simple woman whose only strength was a transient youthful beauty, and who found herself in a situation she couldn’t describe, much less affect.”
Harry said, “Jeremy continued killing. Women.”
The room stopped spinning; I pushed up on my good arm. “Though he’d exorcised the father demon, he had to keep killing Mother over and over again. For never standing between father and him.”
“Why didn’t he kill her, Cars? I mean, her?
“The other killings didn’t start for five years. Like they were fermenting inside him. And had he killed her I’d have been sent to a foster home or whatever. He didn’t want that.”
“But why does he burn you? Is it something to do with Adrian, the burning?
“Not directly, but it may have been what gave him the idea. It’s how I’m supposed to share the pain with him, the burden. That’s how he sees it. In return for his giving me a childhood.”
It s savage, it s … evil.
I fell back into the pillows, laid my forearm over my forehead. “It’s mental illness, Harry, a sickness beyond all control. He’s extremely intelligent, seemingly rational at times, but the way he sees the world has no basis in what we call reality.”
“How could you let him do it?”
“If I hadn’t let Jeremy exact his moment of what he terms equality, Adrian might still be out there.”
Ava crossed the room to the deck doors. The rain pelted the glass like hail. She touched the glass, her fingertips lingering over it for a moment, then turned to me. “It’s not over, is it?” she whispered. “It’s happening again.”
“Yeah, it’s over,” Harry said. “Look at what happened to his arm tonight. He’s paid up.”
Ava walked over and stood above me. “No. It’s not over. He’s going to burn you again. Tonight was what? A test? A down payment? Next time he’s going to really burn you. Just like before.”
Wind rattled the house, died away. I said, “I lent him certain materials that might be helpful in solving the beheadings … “
Ava stared at me, waiting.
I looked at the floor. “I’m required to return for them.”
She started shaking, then crying soundlessly, the tears flowing down her face. Her chest heaved and bucked and the ragged sobs broke through. She clenched her hands into fists and beat against the air. Harry and I ran to her but she waved us away as though we were a cloud of wasps. As though my house had filled with indescribable pain, Ava opened the deck doors and escaped into the rain. I moved to follow her.
Harry, smarter than me, held me back.
We heard a few long loud moans like she was finding the key, and then Ava grabbed the railing, threw back her head, and started screaming like the world giving birth. Howls, shrieks, growls. She picked up a plastic chair and winged it off the deck, screaming between the bolts, beside them, and above them. She screamed to turn the night and the storm inside out. She grabbed the small table and flung it over the railing. The lightning flashed the world white and black and she screamed like she was going mad. Thunder rattled the foundations of my home and she screamed like she was going sane. She pulled off her left shoe and threw it at the rain. She howled, she moaned, she bellowed. She sounded sad and angry and together and apart and all pounded by rain and electrified by the night. She pulled off her right shoe and threw it at the sky. The storm roared at her and she roared back, charged and defiant. She peeled away her clothes and gave them to the wind.
Harry turned away and began pulling on his raincoat.
I went out to join Ava.
The morning smelled pure enough to drink when we awakened at dawn. The storm slipped north around 3:00 a.m.” the only relics of its passing were breeze in the sea grasses and the pockmark stippling of the sand. I opened the window to the sound of waves.
Ava rolled toward me, her eyes calm and steady. “I wasn’t thinking of such things last night, but we could have been electrocuted, you know, on the deck.”
Her forehead was warm beneath my kiss. “Yes, and wouldn’t that have confounded them that found us?”
It had amazed me last night, the possibilities of joy, even in a weakened condition with one working arm. First on the rain-swept deck, the rain only against our skins, far away from where we were, then, later, rocking the bed as the rain softened to a sussurious undercurrent.
The possibilities continued afresh: We spent the opening hours in experimentation with the new. Whether to be shy while naked and dressing (neither of us was stricken with false modesty), whether to touch in passing (yes, lightly), who would instigate another session of lovemaking (a tie). Ava inspected my dressings and applied another round of the salve. Neither of us mentioned the cause of the burns, a tacit agreement allowing refreshment at the small oasis blooming in our lives. It was only mentioned as I left for work.
“When you go again,” Ava said, “to see your brother?” “Yes?”
“I’m coming with you. Don’t give me that look. I’m as good as there.”
At four Harry made a run to the bank, and I’d started a half-hearted run to Billie Messer’s, Nelson’s aunt. I was going to reinterview everyone if that’s what it took, hoping to shake something, anything, loose. My phone rang, Harry.
“Cars, we’ve got another one. A beheading. I’m there now.” Harry gave me the address. His voice was tight, clipped.
I said, “What’s the physical type?”
Harry took a breath. “You know how big Burlew is?”
“The vic’s as big as Burlew?”
“Same exact size,” Harry said. “It is Burlew.”
I’d never seen anything like Burlew’s home that wasn’t in a hothouse. Orchids flourished everywhere: shelves, low tables, hanging baskets, driftwood fixed to the walls. Some bloomed pink trumpets, others squirted pearlescent bells. There were red cups and blue saucers, yellow lanterns and lavendar chandeliers. A small solarium off the dining room seemed the incubator, cuttings and plant lets getting their legs in small brown pots. The air smelled dense with fecundity, as if you could sprout seeds by letting them drop from your palm.
Burlew’s headless body was supine in the kitchen. Squill had been and gone. I figured there were heavy-duty meetings among the bras shat clan. Hembree and his people were finishing up, two techs stowing gear. Harry and I stood in the living room, pressed close by the plants at our backs.
I said, “I been meaning to ask about what you and Burlew were walking around yesterday. Giddy-up?”
Harry studied the peaceful jungle around us. He reached to a shelf and touched a white cascade of tubular blossoms. “Look like candles, don’t they?” he mused.
“Burlew and you shared a car?” I asked. “You were partners?”
“Not long after he’d left his training officer. I was twenty-eight, he was twenty-four.”
“You and Burlew on the streets together? Strange brew.”
“Back then he wasn’t the Burlew you knew. You could talk to him. He even looked different, a tall, lanky, wide-shouldered country boy.”
A wall-mounted branch beside Harry’s head cradled an orchid: a garland of jingle-bell blossoms dangling from a spray of leaves. Harry flicked a blossom and seemed surprised when it didn’t ring.
“We got a call to the Tallrico Apartments, that sprawling scruff-hole out northwest. Resident said she’d seen a man with a gun running around. It was maybe two a.m. We rolled up and rolled out, Burlew left, me right. I ended up with some woman babbling about a giggling guy waving a gun and running crazy around the place. I left her and went off to see what Burlew’d come up with, but couldn’t find him.”
Hembree waved me into the kitchen. I flipped my index finger up, one minute.
“I heard a commotion from the left and doubled back that way. Heard sounds from the back of the building, voices. I crept back to the trash bins.”
Harry made sure no one else was near and leaned close enough to warm my ear with his breath. “Burlew was stark naked on the ground with this skinny little guy riding him like a horse. The guy had a brain-load of uppers and downers and acid and was zooming with the asteroids. He’d gotten Burlew’s gun and was jumping him through the hoops he’d always fantasized about putting cops through. Burlew was crying, crawling in filth, pissing down his thigh, hands and knees ripped up from busted glass. The guy’s banging his gun against Burlew’s head, yelling giddy-up and whoopy ti-yay. He’s got Burlew making horsey sounds, whinnying.”
I closed my eyes and saw the pictures. “You dropped the guy”
“The looney’s waving the gun like a fly swatter I waited until he’d swung it off Burlew and I stepped around the corner yelling, “Police. Freeze.” I had about another half ounce to go on that trigger. The guy smiled like I was his mama bringing him a bowl of warm oatmeal and laid the gun on the ground. He sat next to it and started picking at his face.”
The fingerprint guy walked past, bag in hand. Hembree was waving me over like a windmill.
I yelled, “One minute, Bree. Hang on, dammit,” and turned back to Harry.
“That night Burlew broke down and told me how he hated being on the streets; how his old man, a cop, made Burlew be a cop, no choice. He had an uncle was a landscaper, gardener; that’s what Burlew secretly wanted to be.”
“Was that Burlew’s last day on the street?”
Harry nodded. “Next morning he applied for an admin position.”
“When’d he become the bottomless box of toothaches?”
“He started lifting, power stuff, bulk. The bigger he got the meaner he got.”
Harry studied a small bloom in a hanging basket, a chartreuse pennant the size of a dime. “Burlew put on muscles like a costume. Then he had to drag the muscles around with him, too. He got hitched up with Squill’s detail a few years back, became his de facto adjutant. I think Squill liked to have a guy Burlew’s size with him like a short guy strutting behind a pit bull.”
“Burlew ever talk about that night?” I asked.
“He never looked at me again unless it was on his way to look past me.”
Harry shook his head and let the pennant drift from his fingertips. “Every year when I was little my aunt used to read A Christmas Carol to me. I loved it but it scared me. What got me most wasn’t the Ghosts of Christmas, but the picture I’d get in my head of Jacob Mar ley, this faded old guy bound up in all the chains and money boxes of his past. I swear I could hear the clanging and banging as he dragged his shit across eternity.”
Harry looked around and I saw his nostrils flare as he breathed in the subtle perfume of the blossoms tinting Burlew’s hidden life, his real life. My previous concept of Burlew forbade him a capacity for devotion, but as I studied the books, the misters, scissors, the bags of plant food and moss, my surprise at Burlew’s ability to nurture gave way to mourning for the missed and misplaced, and for pasts that, allowed to dry and set, formed the path of our futures.
I said, “He thought you’d told me about that night. It’s why he always went out of his way to jump on my feet.”
Harry shrugged. He looked through the door at Burlew’s body, then turned back to me.
“Think people ever shake off those chains to their pasts, Cars?”
“Never happens, Harry. The trick is to keep adding links so you don’t pull it forward with you.”
“I’m coming with you tomorrow. You know that.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Thanks, amigo, but Ava volunteered. She wants to be my zuithre.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“Power over ambush, Harry,” I said. “If you hold it just right.”
“Come on, Carson,” Hembree pleaded. “Check this out so we can get rolling.”
I dodged tables and plant stands on my walk to the kitchen, each crowded with blooms and petals and thickets of green. Hembree and his assistant had the body on its side, Hembree pointing at Burlew’s back. I knelt and saw a broad expanse of flesh turned crimson and purple by the settling of blood. All across Burlew’s back were words. Not the tiny writing, but maybe half- to three-quarter-inch letters, running from the back of his truncated neck to his buttocks, a nonstop scrawl of black ink.
“Looks like our boy’s graduated to epistles,” Hembree said. “Happy reading.”
L
ike so often happens, the moment that Ava had been dreading her return to work, seeing Clair passed by almost without touching. Clair sat behind her desk peering at correspondence over half-glasses. She seemed to barely notice as as Ava and I walked by.