—
Life out of prison is full of easily overlooked luxuries, such as using a public urinal without having to check your back. He smiled at that adage as it shaped in his mind, and took pleasure in reading the ageless poetry scribbled on the tiles and trying to aim at the little pink spongey cube near the drain.
Thirteen goddamn years.
He was free.
Without the warning of a toilet flush, the door to the stall behind him slammed open.
“Good morning, Mr. Wickley.”
He knew then, by the sudden suspension of all lower bodily functions, that his subconscious mind had recognized the voice. Even thirteen years and a puberty later.
He spun on his feet and corrected his visual line upward and choked at the face of the bully confronting him—the dark-browed figure filling and brimming over the ghostly contour of a smiling memory.
“Andrea ‘Andy’ Rodriguez!” he blurted out.
The woman blew a bang of black hair off her face. “Andy. My name’s Andy.”
“I am not allowed to talk to you,” he protested. “I just got outta jail.”
“Really? Me too,” she said, checking her freebie Coca-Cola digital watch. “They must have noticed by now.”
He tried to sidestep her; she blocked his way. Wickley quivered, his fortitude crumbling at the sight of his own hands surrendering to shakes.
“I did my time!” he whimpered. “I paid my debt to society!”
“Hell yeah, you paid it, and with interest. Explain that to me. Thirteen years in a high-security prison with no visitors, for what? For putting on a costume and chasing kids around a tumbledown house? Are you kidding me?”
“I kidnapped one of you.”
“Please.”
“I staged a haunting. I made an elaborate scheme for fraud.”
“You are the fraud, Wickley. You’re nothing but a careless gold digger. You want me to believe you went to all that trouble just to scare people? The mystic symbols? The dead animals?”
“They were props.”
“The hanged corpses? The things in the basement?!”
“All props.”
“Steven fucking Spielberg could not have made props like that and you know it! It wasn’t you!”
“It was! And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you med—”
“Liar!” She clutched his neck and shoved him into the wall, shattering some tiles with the back of his head.
One of the baseball talkers entered the restroom at that moment and stopped dead at the sight.
On the left, standing, Andrea “Andy” Rodriguez, 25, in big military boots and a white tank top, turns to camera as she lifts a squirming old man two inches off the floor.
“Fuck off,” she growled, and the intruder obediently retreated.
Wickley was gagging, writhing, kicking the air. Andy turned back to him, face slashed by the obstinate bang of hair, a furious and not fully devoid of self-satisfaction smile in her lips.
“I was twelve years old in ’seventy-seven and I beat you; now I’m twenty-five and you’re old and weak; just imagine the ways in which I can humiliate you. Tell me, why did you confess?”
“I did it.”
“Bullshit. Why did you take the blame?”
“I did it. I made my costume out of a diving suit. It was a good costume.”
“No, it wasn’t, really.”
“I set everything up. I made the lights fade and the house shake.”
“No, you fucking didn’t!” (She slams him to the wall.)
“I did, and you were terrified. (Sniggering in pain.) You pissed your pants.”
“That was Nate, not me! And it wasn’t you! (Her grip hardens, closing shut his windpipe.) Why did you take the fall?”
“Ack! G-g-g—”
“Tell me or I swear I’ll throw you in my trunk, drive to Blyton Hills, and dump my car into Sleepy Lake!”
“Ng…ng…”
“Why?”
“Ng’ngah…ng’ngah’hai!”
“WHY?!”
“I? fhtagn Thtaggoa! I? mwlgn nekrosunai! Ng’ngah’hai, zhro!”
Andy banged him against the wall and released her grip, gaping at the echo of the odious words that had made the hair on her arms stand and the sun dim, shocked by the blasphemy.
Slowly daylight returned, and a silence punctuated by dripping water pipes. The old man slid to the floor, leaving a little smear of blood from the back of his skull along the way.
“I wanted to go to jail,” he moaned, panting, clinging to consciousness.
Andy stood, full of hate, fists clenched, adrenaline trickling down her temples.
“I wanted them to lock me away,” Wickley sobbed. “I had to get away from that place. I can’t go back. I don’t want to go to that devil house ever again! Never!”
And he sank his head in his palms and broke into tears. Sitting on the floor in a public restroom, crying grown-up sobs.
Andy snorted back the fury, panting, and flushed the urinal for him.
“You won’t. Good-bye, Mr. Wickley.”
And she stormed out, feeling not the least sorry for the pathetic old man left crying on the floor. Because he was right: he would never have to go back to that house.
Lucky bastard.
PART ONE
REUNION
She flung the door open to clamorous nonreaction, silhouetted down to a bulky jacket and a baseball cap, the blue wind blowing away the title card. Dramatically opening doors was one of Andy’s few natural talents, one she had perfected in the last thirteen years while roaming over the country. She could push or pull or even slide a door open and either go entirely unnoticed or make all heads turn and music stop, at her will. She even succeeded in causing the latter effect in a concert hall, during a Van Halen gig. It’s all in the wrist, really.
This time she’d gone for incognito: the country singer continued to wail in the jukebox, the beer-drinkers didn’t sense her, a couple of pool players hardly glanced in the direction of the EXIT sign in the second it took her to canvass the place. She had to step forward—Insert close-up shot of military surplus boots abusing the floorboards—to locate the person she’d come to fetch behind the counter, blocked by a group of cough-a-chuckling workmen.