The Boulevard Monster, page 12
“And get your head on straight. Stop fucking thinking so much. You have a great life. If you don’t stop worrying, you’re not going to enjoy it. And then what would all this be for?” He shoved his hands in his pants pockets. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and walked around the side of the house and out of sight.
Seconds later, Brianne came outside in her pink robe, a mug of warm tea in her hand, and sat down next to me on the swing. She asked if I was having trouble sleeping and I said yes. We listened to the birds sing their morning songs as the sun appeared and climbed the horizon. When she went inside, I was glad to be alone.
Seventeen
Brianne’s Blind-Side
The first couple of years after Brianne, Sera, and I had moved into the duplex, we’d spent many Saturday and Sunday afternoons treasure hunting at antique shops downtown. It was Brianne’s idea. She’d wanted us to shop together, to have objects around the house that would connect us as a group. As a family.
On those days, we would search our nightstand drawers, empty the Chevy’s ashtray, dig under the cushions on the sofa and recliner, clean out the pocket-bowl in the laundry room, and Sera would dump her piggy bank, looking for as much change as possible. Then we’d head down to 10th Street—a section of old Route 66 that had been transformed into an eight-block thrift/antique shop extravaganza—to see what treasure we could buy with the change we’d found.
The treasures never had any monetary value. We never spent more than six or seven dollars on any given day, and we never found that twenty-five cent painting that turned out to be a million dollar Monet. But each item we found was a treasure to us.
The cloudy snow globe, ugly over-sized Cosby sweater, stuffed sock-puppet (Sera named him Stu and keeps on her bed to this day.), and odd trinkets like rusty key chains and bizarre scarves and ties that most people wouldn’t be caught dead in, became our own little time capsules. They littered our duplex, each holding a secret, a day’s journey and choice that only one of us three could explain. Sometimes one of us would pick an item up, show the others, and we’d all smile or laugh. It was like that.
But over time, for reasons I’m unsure of, the shopping trips became farther and farther apart and eventually faded into the past. Eight years into the past. Sometimes late at night when drunk on alcohol or sex, we reminisced about the shopping days, saying we should do it again someday, but we never had. Then one Saturday morning eight months ago, I woke to find Brianne scrounging for change under the couch cushions in the living room.
“Are you doing what I think you’re doing?” I asked.
The corners of her mouth curved up in a smile that spread to her eyes. A similar smile formed on my face, and without asking why she had the sudden desire to revisit the past, I began searching as well. Thirty minutes later Sera was up and dressed and happily involved in the search. We left the house around 10AM with $9.43 in our pocket.
After visiting two stores without any item calling out to us, Brianne, who seemed distracted and had been holding my hand tighter and longer than usual, stopped on the corner of 10th and Georgia, grabbed the back of my shirt when I kept moving, and spun me around. Sera stopped behind us.
Brianne’s eyes flicked from Sera’s to mine. “I need to tell you guys something,” she said, obviously nervous. Her hand was balmy.
“What?” I asked.
She blinked slowly, then said, “I’m pregnant.”
“Are you sure?” I asked as Sera squealed like a mouse and hugged Brianne. As far as I knew, she was on birth control. She had been since she was sixteen.
“I took a home test four days ago and went to Dr. Stevens to confirm it yesterday.”
I pulled her against my chest and wrapped my arms around her. “That’s great,” I said, her behavior over the last month suddenly making sense. Her new health food kick. Her picking up extra shifts at work to “save for the future.” Her latest and best attempt to stop smoking. The desire to revisit treasure shopping.
She pulled away and wiped the moisture from her eyes before it could escape.
“This baby is destined for greatness,” I said, half-serious and half-joking. “I mean… how many babies are born when the woman’s on birth control?”
She searched my eyes for a moment, then said, “I stopped taking the pill almost six months ago.” When I didn’t immediately respond, she added, “I was going to tell you but you were stressed about work, and I didn’t want to add…” She looked down, fidgeted with her nails, looked up. “You know I’m approaching the dreaded thirty-five. At my last checkup Dr. Stevens said that after thirty-five the chance for miscarriage, or having a child with Down’s syndrome or autism or any other horrifying problem, drastically increased. He said if I ever wanted a child, now was the best—”
I placed my finger on her lips. “It’s all right,” I said, and she laid her head on my chest and exhaled deeply. “Is that why you wanted to come shopping again? To buy something new as a family like we used to?”
She nodded.
“When do we find out if it’s a boy or a girl…or twins?” Sera asked with the eagerness of a child picking out their first puppy. “And when do we find out when the due date is?”
“Not for a while,” Brianne said. “You can go to the doctor with me next time and ask him if you want.”
Sera wrapped her arms partially around Brianne, partially me. Her curls tickled my mouth, and I turned my head to the side. “I’m going to be a big sister,” she said, happily stomping her sandals on the sidewalk a couple of times.
As I stood there with my two girls in my arms, I glanced up and saw a slew of missing persons fliers taped on a glass window behind them. Amber Powell’s giant eyes jumped out at me. She would have been twenty-one the following month based on her birthdate on the flier. Of course I had the unfortunate knowledge that she would never celebrate that birthday. She would remain twenty forever.
To the right of Amber’s picture was Staci Umbarger’s water-damaged pink flier. Twenty-eight, single, loved to ballet dance, the flier said. I didn’t recognize her face, didn’t know if I’d carried her to her final resting place, but she’d been one of the girls named on the news report I’d seen at my dad’s house.
I let my eyes slide over the remaining seven or eight fliers but not long enough to read the names. I closed my eyes tight and tried to think about the baby. What he or she may look like, be like. I tried to think about Brianne holding the baby, Sera playing with it. I tried to think about the positive, I did. But I couldn’t get the sight of the Amber Powell’s eyes out of my head.
“Are you all right?” Brianne asked after we’d hugged for a long while.
Smiling thinly, I opened my eyes. “Fine. A little shocked. But fine.”
She pressed her lips to mine. In that moment, with her warm lips on mine, our bean-size baby snuggled between us, Sera looking on with a delighted expression on her face, and the large, accusatory eyes of Amber Powell boring into my heart, reminding me that she was someone’s baby, that they all were, a breaker tripped inside my head and I knew I had to find a way to end my relationship with Luther. I had to take back control over my life.
I couldn’t keep burying his victims and prolonging their family’s pain. I couldn’t keep lying to my family. I couldn’t allow the guilt and fear to continue eating away at me, chewing up any happiness I happened on. I had a baby on the way. A long life ahead of me. I had to find a way out. I just had to. But it had to be a way that wouldn’t endanger my family. And although the idea scared the shit out of me, I knew there was only one way to absolutely secure my family’s safety. I would have to kill Luther…if he could die. There was no other option. He’d reminded more than once that I could never just quit and go on my merry way. Our agreement was for life.
As we continued shopping, Sera demanded we find something for the baby. In the two- story labyrinth of a building called Alley Cats, she found a light blue, hand-knitted baby beanie with a sunflower on it. She said it would work for a girl or a boy and Brianne agreed. It cost $4.95. She also located a scratched-up plastic rattle from the late 50’s or early 60’s. It had a guitar on it and cost $6.95, which would put us over our limit. So she marched the rattle up to the register and told the owner, Gwendolyn, an elderly woman with red hair and thick glasses who’d sold us the cloudy snow globe eight years earlier, about our spending limit and the baby (which Brianne didn’t seem to like much), and the woman said she could have the rattle for three bucks, keeping us under our limit.
Eighteen
Anonymous Tip
When we arrived home that afternoon with the rattle and beanie and I saw the blue jays sitting in the front yard, staring at me, I felt more vulnerable than I had since the first time Luther had laid his hand on me in my truck and forced immeasurable fear into me. I was terrified that somehow he would know my unspoken decision, be aware of my secret intentions. Or that the blue jays would somehow know, or somehow find out, and would relay the message to him. I had no idea how deep Luther’s mental or psychological reach went. But I knew how sincere his threats were.
Based on our conversations, I didn’t think he could read minds. But hearts? Desires? Intentions? I didn’t know. There were a lot of things I didn’t know about him, but I had no doubts that he’d only shown me the tip of his abilities.
With an uneasy, desperate feeling prodding me, compelling me, I headed to my dad’s house after dinner to get my guns. I didn’t know if Luther could die by a bullet, or at all for that matter, but putting my family’s life at risk for an unknown wasn’t an option. I had to have something to try and protect us in case he found out and paid us a visit.
As a kid, I’d gone deer and turkey hunting with my dad. He berated me most of the time, calling me loud and stupid and clumsy, but my mom made him take me a couple of times each fall, and I have some good memories. In my teens, I stopped going with Dad and would go alone, or with my friend Tommy. Once I started working full time after high school, I pretty much stopped hunting. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve gone in the past fifteen years, although me and Ryan would occasionally take a twelve pack down to the river and shoot at bottles and cans. I took Esperanza once, too. She was a damn good shot. She said her dad had taught her how to shoot. They regularly cleared the area behind their house in Mexico of prairie dogs.
My arsenal wasn’t large or spectacular. I had a .22 rifle my mom and dad had gotten me for Christmas when I was sixteen, and I had 9MM handgun I’d bought from of one my co-workers at Howe’s who’d fallen on hard times and needed cash. The guns were at my dad’s because Brianne wouldn’t allow guns in her house, and I didn’t bother fighting her when we moved in together and she insisted I keep them somewhere else. When she was eleven, one of her friends in the apartment complex they lived in found her daddy’s gun and accidentally shot herself in the face. Brianne found the girl, blood and brains leaking from her head, coloring her blonde hair crimson. The one time she told me the story was one of the few times I ever saw her cry.
I planned on sneaking the guns into our house and hiding them well, and after I’d taken care of Luther, I’d sneak them back to Dad’s place. If I was careful (and lucky), she would never know they’d been there.
When I arrived at Dad’s house, a couple of blue jays flew over my head and landed in the dead elm in the front yard. I opened the front door and found Brenda and Dad sitting on the couch flipping through photo albums.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?” Brenda looked up at me. Dad appeared exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks dry and ruddy, like they’d been scrubbed with sandpaper.
Brenda tried to give me her classic motherly smile, but something was missing from it. “We’re just looking at old pictures,” she said. The way she said it, the way her eyes searched mine, I knew there was more she wanted to tell me, but not in front of Dad.
“Can you come outside for a second, Brenda?” I asked. “I wanted to ask you something about that bush on the side of your house.”
“Sure.” She patted Dad’s thigh. “Be right back.”
Dad didn’t look up as we stepped outside onto the porch and closed the door behind us.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Well, I came to check on him like I do every Saturday and Sunday, you know, on Lucy’s days off, and I found him sitting there cursing and crying looking at those albums.”
“Why’s he crying?”
“He’s angry because he can’t remember some of the people and places in the pictures. And he was yelling at me because I didn’t know some of them either.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since about one, I guess.”
I closed my eyes, tipped my head back, and shook my head. “I’m sorry. I need to hire someone to watch him on the weekends so you don’t have to come over here and—”
“I’ve told you,” She cut in, touching my forearm lightly, as though it would shatter if she put too much force on it. “I come because I want to, not because I have to. He’s family to me, too. Besides, he’s just having a bad day. Not every day is like this.”
“I know, but as he gets worse, I’ll have to—”
She cut me off again, using the same advice that my mom would’ve given had she been there. “We’ll deal with that when it happens. Not now.”
“You’re right,” I admitted, nodding. “Thanks for coming by. I’ll stay with him until he falls asleep. Maybe I’ll even stay the night.”
“Okay, Honey. Try and get him to eat something, too. He refused to eat dinner for me.”
I nodded again.
“And holler if you need anything. You know where I am.”
I watched Brenda make her way to her house, waved when she reached the front door, then went inside and sat with Dad.
We flipped through two or three albums. Unprovoked, I named the people in each picture and said what I knew about them. When they were taken, where, etc. Dad stared at the pictures with a serious expression on his face, as if studying for an important exam. He flipped the pages and nodded at my explanations, although only occasionally commented. He never asked where Brenda went or why I was there.
We spent a good hour looking. Some of my favorite pictures were of me and mom. The Polaroid pictures taken while Dad was at work, while Mom and I were deep in the heart of Lurth, playing, adventuring, escaping. Of course I didn’t tell Dad the truth behind those pictures, or what the letter labels Mom had written on the thick white strips on the bottom meant. I told him, “Here’s me and Mom jacking around with the camera when I was four or five again.” He didn’t seem too interested and only asked once what the letters were for.
One photo had LLFT written below it in Mom’s bubbly letters. I told him I had no idea what they meant. “Mom must have done it,” I said. But I knew. The picture showed me wearing a pair of ears we’d made with construction paper and one of Mom’s headbands. I had my arm draped over my stuffed teddy bear that also had pointy paper ears, a paper horn, and two paper tails. LLFT stood for Lenny Lummox’s Field Trip. Mom and I took my special pet, Lenny, on a field trip in Lummorville that afternoon. We took him to the rainbow forest (the bathroom with colorful strips of construction paper taped to the mirror and hanging from the ceiling), and to Piddler’s Pond (the bath tub filled with water tainted red with food coloring; sponges we’d cut into weird shapes floating around) where time slowed to a crawl, allowing Lenny to bask in the sun beside the pond for as long as he wished and listen to the song of the Lurdlings (small bird-like creatures we’d made from boiled eggs and construction paper sitting on the edge of the tub and the windowsill).
After an hour of looking, I asked Dad if he wanted something to eat and he nodded. I heated him up two bean and cheese burritos, took them into the living room, and popped in one of his favorite Clint Eastwood movies, Pale Rider. As he ate and watched, I snuck the albums back up into the attic, then retrieved my two guns from the locked gun case in the garage. I wrapped the rifle in an old striped quilt Mom had started on but never finished. The blue jays would be waiting outside when I left, and I didn’t want them seeing the guns. The less they knew, the less they could tell Luther, the better. Sure, simply carrying a gun didn’t necessarily mean I was going to use it on Luther, or that it was related to my relationship with him whatsoever, but my paranoid mind knew they would assume that.
I asked Dad if he needed anything else or if he wanted me to stay the night with him. He gave me a quick, are you fucking kidding me eye-shot, and then flicked his eyes back to the TV screen. Holding the rifle wrapped in the quilt parallel to my leg, I told him I loved him and headed out the front door. He either didn’t notice the quilt, or the jingle of bullets in my pocket, or the bulge in the back of my pants where the 9MM was stuffed in my waistband, or he didn’t care.
I had shoved the 9MM under the seat of The Chevy and was about to lay the quilt in the bed when I heard a car pull up behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that it was Detective Morrell. I hurriedly lay the quilted-rifle down and walked to greet him by the tailgate. Smiling, I extended my hand, and he shook it.
“How are you, Seth?” he asked.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and curled my fingers around the bullets. “Good.”
“How’s your dad?” he asked. During our talks after Randy vanished, I’d told him about Dad’s condition.
“He had a bad afternoon, but he seems to be doing better now.”
Morrell nodded, then cut his droopy eyes at the bed of the truck. “What’s in the quilt?”
I glanced at it, back at him. “Oh, that’s my .22. Brianne won’t let me keep guns at the house, and I wanted to go target shooting down at the river tomorrow so…”
He nodded again, but didn’t say anything. My heart was hammering, hands growing sweaty in my pockets.
“What brings you over here?” I asked.
“Well, I needed to ask you a few questions about Randy.”
