Animosity Read online

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  I motioned her into the bathroom. Closed the door behind me. Slid down the wall, and held my head in my hands. I tried not to hate my ex-wife. Tried to convince myself that she had merely waited too long to have this discussion with Sam, but she hadn’t planned to put it off forever. Perhaps she had been searching for the right words to say and hadn’t found them yet. I hoped that was the case. Prayed that was her excuse. Because I could certainly relate…

  “How the hell am I supposed to handle this?” I groaned. “I don’t have ovaries, for Christ’s sake.”

  For those next few minutes, as I listened to the sound of running water in the bathroom and the muffled flush of the toilet, I found myself wondering who my daughter would be when she grew older. Where would she go in life, after she stopped needing me? What amazing feats might she accomplish? Who would capture her heart one day, when she became a woman?

  I would know soon enough. The events of this afternoon had forced me to accept that fact, whether I wanted to or not.

  My God, where did the years go?

  And why, at a time like this, did I suddenly find myself thinking—out of all the people in the world—of Eldon Prescott, my jailbait girlfriend’s father from so many years ago? Why did I, for the first time ever, realize that I sympathized one hundred percent with the big man’s fury on that fateful night?

  I did not understand why he suddenly filled my thoughts. Then again, as I sat there brooding over how to explain to my daughter what was happening to her body… it all made perfect sense. Somehow. In some strange way.

  Finally, Sam came out of the bathroom wrapped in a pink Bugs Bunny beach towel. I exhaled loudly when the door opened, remembered to start breathing again.

  “Daddy?” she said, peering down at me. “I thought you were gonna get me some clean clothes.”

  I stood, composed myself.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Sorry…”

  I hurried down the hallway to her bedroom, wiping my eyes as I went.

  She followed me.

  “Are you all right, Dad?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You looked like you were getting ready to cry.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I just had something in my eye.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Do you want to go in with me?” I asked her as I parked the Explorer in front of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop.

  Locks of my daughter’s sweaty blond hair danced within the air-conditioner’s breeze as she reached to turn it down. Before we left the house, she had slipped into her favorite pajamas. She looked comfortable now, no longer scared, but very tired. And disappointed, somehow. As if she had barely survived some tragic ordeal far worse than her first menstruation, and she knew it had changed her forever.

  “I think I’ll wait in the car,” she said. “If that’s okay?”

  “Of course it’s okay.”

  She gave me a sad little smile, started fiddling with the radio.

  “Sit tight, sweetheart. I’ll be right back.”

  I sat there watching her until she found something she liked, and then I slowly climbed out of the Explorer.

  I felt so old. Useless.

  ***

  An electronic bell above the door chimed twice as I entered the building.

  “’Afternoon,” said the guy behind the counter, but he did not turn from his work as he said it. He was busy stocking a tall plastic shelf with cartons of Camel cigarettes, giving every customer who entered the store a free view of his enormous ass-crack each time he bent over to open a new box.

  “What’s up, Round Man,” I mumbled a dutiful reply.

  I headed for the toiletries aisle. My shoes squeaked like dying mice on the store’s recently-buffed tile floor.

  When I reached my destination, I gave an exasperated sigh. I hadn’t expected this to be a simple task by any means, but as I stood there staring at the myriad of choices before me, scratching my head like a chimpanzee trying to comprehend the fundamentals of long division, I felt as if I were drowning in a sea of feminine hygiene products.

  Thin… ultra-thin… ultra-thin with wings… super absorbency… regular absorbency… “light days”… “overnighters”…

  Christ. What the hell was I supposed to buy for an eleven-year-old? It gave me a headache, trying to sort it all out.

  After what felt like forever, I returned to the front of the store, placing a small blue box of maxi-pads on the counter beside the cash register.

  Ronnie “Round Man” Miller, owner of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop, continued his work at the cigarette racks.

  I coughed into my fist to get his attention.

  “Oh, sorry about that—”

  His eyes grew wide when he turned around. His Adam’s apple jiggled and twitched like some living thing stuck in his throat, trying to get out. He looked like an enormous deer caught in a hunter’s spotlight.

  “Um… h-hey there, Mr. Holland,” he stammered.

  Ronnie “Round Man” Miller had called me “Mr. Holland” from the first day we met, even though I was seven or eight years his junior and had reminded him countless times that my first name would suffice. He was a very obese fellow, the type of person I would have described as “pear-shaped” in one of my novels. He kept his hair shaved in a Marine-style buzz-cut, but a bushy salt-and-pepper goatee dangled at least three inches from his chin (in certain company he called it his “pussy tickler,” which never failed to make me chuckle despite the crudity of such a claim). He favored loud Hawaiian shirts and leather sandals, wore three silver hoops in his left ear. His breath always smelled suspiciously like the butterscotch candies he kept in the GIVE A NICKEL/SEND A BLIND KID TO BAND CAMP bowl beside his cash register.

  I liked Round Man a lot. I always had. He was a genuinely nice guy, an amicable sort with whom you could strike up a conversation about anything at any time and never find yourself growing bored. His perpetually meek demeanor never failed to belie his hulking, middle-aged-punk appearance.

  On the day in question, however, I knew—the second he saw me standing there—that something was wrong.

  “Hey, Round Man,” I said. “How’s business?”

  His mouth worked soundlessly for several seconds as he tried his damnedest not to look me in the eyes. He stared down at the box of maxi-pads on the counter between us, shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other. Behind him, on a battered old ghetto blaster with a peace symbol sticker over one speaker, Jimmy Buffet sang about growing older but not up.

  Round Man reached to turn down the radio.

  “I, um… heh… I woulda figured this was the kinda thing you didn’t have to worry about anymore, Mr. Holland,” he said, offering me a lop-sided smile.

  “Come again?” I said.

  “Being… ya know, divorced and all. I assumed trips to the store to pick up, uh, stuff like this for the, um, little lady was a thing of the past for ya.”

  “Right,” I said.

  He glanced outside, through the Stop-N-Shop’s plate glass window. When he saw Samantha sitting in the passenger seat of the Explorer, his fat face turned as red as the Marlboro sign on the wall behind him.

  “Oh,” he said. He looked sick.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I don’t mean to be rude, Round Man, but I’m sorta in a hurry, okay?”

  “Sure, sure. Sorry. Sorry.” Round Man’s head bobbed up and down as his chubby fingers rang up my purchase.

  It took him several tries to get it right. His hands were shaking.

  I crossed my arms. Glanced around the store, waiting.

  And I froze… when I spotted something that made my heart start to beat a little bit faster.

  For as long as I had lived on Poinsettia Lane less than a mile from his store, Round Man kept two crooked aluminum racks propped up on the counter to the right of the cash register. Normally, those racks were stocked with several dozen copies of my latest novels, mass
-market paperback editions the Stop-N-Shop’s rotund proprietor purchased from the distributor at bulk wholesale prices. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, read a bright yellow decal on every cover, above a penciled-in price at least twice that edition’s original value. The green placard at the top of the rack, its bottom edge carefully trimmed to look like dripping slime, advertised SPOOOOOKY BOOKS BY A LOCAL FAVE!!!!!, and every “O” resembled a bulging, bloodshot monster eye drawn in red Magic Marker.

  Today, though, that sign was nowhere to be seen.

  The racks were bare. My books were gone. Every last one of them.

  A chill caressed my spine at the sight of those empty, skeletal racks.

  There had to be a reasonable explanation, I told myself. Maybe every copy had sold out since my last visit, and Round Man was simply awaiting another shipment. Perhaps some horror-loving thief with impeccable taste had absconded with my portly pal’s entire inventory. Or… another unsettling possibility lurked in the back of my brain as well.

  “That’ll be, um, $6.99, Mr. Holland,” said Round Man. “Please.”

  I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “So what happened to all my books, Round Man? Some dealer buy you out?”

  He licked his lips. Scratched at an itchy spot behind his left ear. Watched a squat brown Toyota pull up at the gas pumps outside, and flinched at the resulting ding-ding as if he had never heard it before.

  In a voice so low I could barely hear him, he said to me, “It’s nothin’ personal, Mr. Holland. Swear to God.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Round Man’s face looked like that of a man in great agony as he set my change down on the counter. He scooted it toward me, along with my box of maxi-pads and my receipt. As if he were afraid to touch me, lest he contract some deadly disease.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I stepped back from the counter. Felt cold all over.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I said. “Not you too.”

  He fondled his monstrous goatee as if he wished he could crawl up inside of it and hide.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled again.

  I shoved my change into my pocket. “This is unbelievable.”

  He did not attempt to explain until I turned to leave.

  “I got a business to run, Mr. Holland,” he said when I was halfway to the door. “People know me. People like me. I got loyal customers, folks who come to the Stop-N-Shop to get what they need even though that new 7-Eleven down the block might be a few bucks cheaper. I can’t let nothin’ jeopardize that, man. I got a family to feed, two mortgages on my house.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there in front of the exit, my back to him. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

  “It’s nothin’ personal,” he assured me again. “It’s just—”

  “It’s just what, Round Man?” I said.

  “The things they’re saying on the news. About you. People are talking, Mr. Holland. I don’t believe a word of it, of course, but—”

  He glanced down at his sandals, then back up at me.

  “They turn on you,” Round Man whispered, “if you go against the flow.”

  “They turn on you,” I said, slowly nodding.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fucking tell me about it.”

  I glared at Round Man. The silence between us seemed to swirl about the store like something tangible. Something living, dark, and hungry leeching away at the friendship we once shared.

  He stared at the Slush Puppy machine along the Stop-N-Shop’s east wall. Toward the potato chip aisle behind me, and the beer coolers in the back. Anywhere but in my furious gaze.

  He shifted his weight yet again from one foot to the other, and pointed toward something off to my left.

  “You, uh… you wanna buy a ribbon, Mr. Holland?” he asked me.

  For the first time, I noticed the cardboard display at the far end of the counter. IN MEMORY OF REBECCA LANNING, read the cursive Magic Marker logo at the top of this rack, above a collection of pink ribbons designed to be worn on collars and lapels, $1.99 OR 3 FOR $5.00.

  “I was just thinking it might help matters,” Round Man babbled. “I mean… ya know… if you were, um, seen wearin’ one around town.”

  “Jesus,” I hissed under my breath.

  “Of course, it’s free for you,” he quickly added. “I wouldn’t think of charging my favorite writer, no way!”

  A hoarse laugh slipped out of me against my will.

  “Take one,” Round Man said. “Please? On the house. Here. Maybe your daughter would like one too?”

  I could look at him no more. I had to get the hell out of there now.

  Trembling with rage, I forced open the Stop-N-Shop’s front door with the palm of one hand. Hard.

  “God damn you,” I fumed, as I stormed back to my Explorer.

  At the gas pumps, an ancient black man in a LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT JESUS T-shirt paused in filling up his Toyota.

  I ignored his disapproving glare.

  “God damn every one of you two-faced motherfuckers.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  From Thursday’s edition of the Harris City Tribune, Page 1:

  SEARCH FOR CHILD’S KILLER CONTINUES

  ONE WEEK LATER, POLICE HAVE NO LEADS IN SHOCKING SEX CRIME

  Harris City Police report no new findings in their search for the murderer of nine-year-old Rebecca Faye Lanning, whose body was found on Poinsettia Lane one week ago.

  Rebecca Lanning’s nude body was discovered by local writer Andrew Holland last Thursday morning. Holland, a resident of Harrison County, is the popular horror novelist who penned such provocative titles as Blood Dance, Brain Fever, Cannibal High, and Mortuary Smile.

  “The citizens of our fair city can rest assured that we are working around the clock to apprehend Rebecca Lanning’s murderer as soon as possible,” said Detective Paul Hembry, who is in charge of the investigation. “Meanwhile, here is a case of one man simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time… no connection between Mr. Holland’s livelihood (and) this terrible crime is suspected, nor should one be implied.”

  Andrew Holland’s most recent novel, Slow Burn—a gory thriller about a serial murderer who burns pregnant women alive because he believes they are possessed by demons—debuted last year at #7 on the New York Times Bestseller List.

  According to police records in his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, Holland was sentenced to one year’s probation in April of ——, after pleading guilty to statutory rape.

  The writer was unavailable for comment.

  The Harris City Police Department urges anyone with information pertaining to the Rebecca Lanning case to call 704-555-4911 immediately.

  I have never made a habit of reading or watching the news regularly. I always found it all too depressing, and needless to say that opinion multiplied tenfold after a child was murdered in my neighborhood. But at least once a week I did log on to the Tribune’s website, skimming the day’s top stories if only to procrastinate for a few minutes before getting started on my latest project.

  On the morning in question, I slammed a fist down on my desk, narrowly missing my keyboard.

  “Hot damn!”

  It was not an exclamation of anger. A grin stretched across my face as I re-read that article on my computer screen a second time. A third. For now I barely even noticed the reporter’s enthusiastic mention of my chosen genre, or my indiscretion of twenty years ago. I had learned to expect as much, hated the media for what they were trying to do, but the only thing I could focus on for the next few minutes was that paragraph quoting Detective Paul Hembry. I almost wanted to hug him. God bless the chubby son of a bitch!

  No connection between Mr. Holland’s livelihood and this terrible crime is suspected, nor should one be implied…

  “It’s about freakin’ time!” I declared to my empty house. And again: “Hot damn!”

  Instantly, a ten-ton weight seemed to lift off of me. I felt an odd sense of victory
. Like a man who has beaten unbelievable odds, and can barely refrain from rubbing it in his detractors’ smug faces one by one.

  For a minute or two, before I logged off the Internet and began my work for the day, I considered buying hundreds of copies of that morning’s paper, pasting the front page all over Poinsettia Lane so my self-righteous, shithead neighbors could see the error of their ways. Perhaps I would start near town, at Round Man’s 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop, and work my way backwards. My last stop would be the cul-de-sac at the end of the block, right on the windshield of Keith Whitmire’s patrol car.

  It was certainly a tempting thought.

  Instead, I used my newfound energy to jump headfirst into my novel, reinvigorated and filled with an inner peace the likes of which I had not felt since long before Norman and I wandered onto the Clinton property at the end of the block.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The next few days passed uneventfully.

  I stayed inside, venturing out of my house only to feed Norman, check the mail, and to pick up Sam for our weekend together. Once I thought about mowing the lawn, but decided against it when I spotted Floyd Beecham puttering about with a weed-eater in his own yard across the street. While the article in Thursday’s Tribune confirmed I had nothing to worry about in regards to being blamed for Rebecca Lanning’s death—and I was sure my neighbors must have conceded to the truth as well by now, after reading that quote directly from Detective Hembry—I hoped if I just laid low for a day or two, everything would blow over once and for all. Once my time with Sam was over, I immersed myself in my work as best I could, and before long I began to float on that creative high which often results from periods of increased productivity. Despite everything that had recently transpired, the constrained edginess that tingled within my bones like some supernatural presentiment of horrors yet to come soon dissipated into nothing more than an anxious desire to convince myself that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they seemed. I had gotten it all wrong, misunderstood their intentions. I felt shunned by my neighbors, yes… but surely they meant me no harm. They were victims too, victims of their own paranoia in the wake of an unthinkable crime which had affected us all. The people of Poinsettia Lane only wanted to protect their children. I could not fault them for that. We were all afraid. Trust was a scarce commodity these days, and until the police caught the pervert who had raped and murdered Rebecca Lanning, any one of us could be her killer.