“Out of the house?”
“Into the garage.”
“You didn’t.”
“Your father backs the car in.”
“Promise me you won’t do it again. Promise.”
“I won’t.”
“You won’t go, or you won’t promise?”
The other didn’t answer. He stood, and his height surprised Jeremy, who watched himself move toward the bed slowly, and lean down close and fade inside. “Answer me,” Jeremy said to the empty room.
Jeremy taped the door shut and fought sleep to hold the other in. But some mornings the tape was broken and he knew from his own exhaustion how far he must have gone.
“Are you slipping out at night?” his father asked. “You look like you’ve got a hangover.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course he’s not slipping out. He wouldn’t do that. Would you?”
“No,” he said. He woke that night to find his bedroom door open, and he rushed into the hallway whispering, “Get back here. Get back here now.” His parents’ door was open and he stepped inside, saw the shadow in the chair across the room. He didn’t dare speak, didn’t dare look toward the bed. He gestured, pleaded with his mind, backed out quietly when the other stood.
“What were you doing?” he said, when they were back in his room. “My God. In their bedroom. What if they had wakened?”
“Let them. Do them both good.” He lay down where Jeremy usually lay. “I don’t like them, you know.”
Jeremy stood quietly a moment. Then he lay down, too. “I know,” he said. “I wish you did, but I understand.”
Jeremy could do nothing to keep him from his parents’ room. He would wake, aware of danger, to hurry to the hallway so he could be nearby if they awoke. The other was coarser now to Jeremy, and seemed larger even than himself. He said terrible things, sometimes using Jeremy’s own lips.
“I could kill them,” he said once, in a soft voice. “And no one would know.”
“I would.”
The other laughed with Jeremy’s voice.
Jeremy knew when it was going to happen. In the kitchen his eyes were caught by the glint of knives; outside, by stones. When he tied the newspapers in the garage, his hands braided the twine thicker, knotted it. “Oh don’t,” he whispered.
“I need to leave,” he told his mother.
“What do you mean, leave? Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”
“I mean leave the house. Move away.”
“When the right time comes, I’ll help you do just that. But that’s a year or two in the future.”
He took hammer and nails from his father’s tool chest, put the nails in his pocket, the hammer in his waistband. He put them in his dresser. “Shut up,” he said.
When dinner was over and his parents sat in the living room before the television, he went to his room and closed the door. He pushed and tapped the nails in. Every now and then he would kick the door lightly to mask a final drive of the hammer. It still took a long time.
He had to leave, but he didn’t know how.
He heard them go to bed. He didn’t undress or turn out the light, but he got under the covers. He kept his eyes open, but it didn’t work. He tried to hold the other in, then pull him back. He threw his arms around the thick chest and tugged, but was shaken off. The hammer was taken up, the nails jerked out wildly, and Jeremy raced down the hall, finally even yelling, “Stop, stop, for God’s sake stop,” but there was nothing he could do. He wasn’t big enough or strong enough. He was thrown out of the room and the door shut in his face. When it opened again, he didn’t need to see what was in there. He had heard it. He followed himself through the kitchen, into the garage. “Come back,” he said. “Come back.” He stood there a long time. Then he went in the kitchen and wiped up the floor and folded the rag neatly on the washer. He took his father’s keys from the wall hook and returned to the garage. He started the motor. He lay down in the seat to wait for the other to return.
No Apparent Malice
by Terry Mullins
When the murder victim is the life of every party, a hail-fellow everyone appears to like, the problem, series sleuth Denver Styx discovers, may be not too many suspects, but none at all...
The night before the murder there had been a party. As Denver Styx tried to remember details of it, Lieutenant Horn prodded him from time to time— Which guests were there when he arrived; how did new guests act when they arrived; what gestures did they make? Denver was not sure the prodding was helpful. He preferred to present the facts in his own way, but the detective had something special on his mind and Denver was forced to go along with him.
He looked around the lieutenant’s utilitarian office and found little in it to stimulate him, few touches of civilization. Horn’s assistant sat writing down every word that was said, like a studious but unimaginative undergraduate taking notes on his lectures.
“Sam Tarn crashed the party at about ten o’clock,” he reported. “He and his wife had obviously been drinking and they just barged right past Fine.”
“He didn’t invite them in, then?”
“On the contrary, when he answered the door he said, ‘I’m sorry, Sam, but I have a few friends over tonight. Come back another time.’ ”
“And what happened then?”
“Tarn gave a sort of happy whoop and shouted, ‘A party! We’re in luck, Dolly. There’s a party.’ And the two of them swept in past Fine and into the living room. They knew more than half the guests and went about hugging and kissing them as if they hadn’t seen them for years.”
“One of the other guests said they added life to the party,” Horn suggested.
“You could put it that way. We had been having an animated conversation about trends in modern art. Tarn and his wife put a stop to that. The whole affair became a lot more boisterous than it had been before.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“I guess in a way I did. I would have preferred to go on with the discussion we had been having. There were some very intelligent people there, some of whom I’d met for the first time. They had provocative and well-informed views. The evening had been turning into one of those rare stimulating exchanges of ideas.”
“Highbrow?”
“I suppose so.”
“And Sam Tarn wrecked it.”
“He didn’t exactly wreck it. He interrupted it. He changed the whole tenor of the evening.”
“Had you met him before?”
“I had met both of them on a few social occasions informally, not to speak with at any length. I also dealt with Sam in a business way. I’d never met either at a party before. It was a revelation.”
“Did you like him?”
“I liked him the way one likes a large friendly dog with muddy paws.”
The detective laughed. “So you enjoyed the party even after Sam Tarn interrupted it.”
“He was entertaining. At one point he lined up twelve wineglasses on the table and poured different levels of wine into them. Then he played tunes on them with a spoon. He pulled it off quite well at first, clowning around to get just the right level in each glass, filling the glass to the full and drinking off the excess. He played ‘Mona Lisa’ on the glasses. Then he and his wife sang while he played. They spoiled the whole thing by putting some very objectionable lyrics to the song. He wound up with a flourish that cracked two of the glasses and shattered a third. His wife thought it was hilarious.”
“But Fine did not.”
“No, he certainly didn’t. He apparently had been anticipating something like that. His wife mopped up the mess while he restrained Tarn, who wanted to snatch the tablecloth off with one quick flip and leave everything on the table as it was. He claimed to have performed that trick successfully on stage at a children’s program. Fine wasn’t about to let him try it with a wine-drenched tablecloth and a table full of fine china and crystal.”