Famous (22 page)

For once, my mailbox wasn’t overflowing. Two
envelopes lay inside, one a bill, the other blank except for my
address typed on the outside. Fan mail.

Back inside, I mixed myself a Jack Daniel’s
and Sun-Drop and took my mail and a book on criminal pathology out
onto the deck. Settling into a rocking chair, I set everything but
my drink on a small glass table and gazed down to the water. My
backyard is narrow, and the woods flourish a quarter mile on either
side, keeping my home of ten years in isolation from my closest
neighbors. Spring had not come this year until mid-April, so the
last of the pink and white dogwood blossoms still specked the
variably green interior of the surrounding forest. Bright grass ran
down to a weathered gray pier at the water’s edge, where an ancient
weeping willow sagged over the bank, the tips of its branches
dabbling in the surface of the water.

The lake is more than a mile wide where it
touches my property, making houses on the opposite shore visible
only in winter, when the blanket of leaves has been stripped from
the trees. So now, in the thick of spring, branches thriving with
baby greens and yellows, the lake was mine alone, and I felt like
the only living soul for miles around.

I put my glass down half-empty and opened the
first envelope. As expected, I found a bill from the phone company,
and I scrutinized the lengthy list of calls. When I’d finished, I
set it down and lifted the lighter envelope. There was no stamp,
which I thought strange, and upon slicing it open, I extracted a
single piece of white paper and unfolded it. In the center of the
page, one paragraph had been typed in black ink:

Greetings. There is a body buried on your
property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady’s name
is Rita Jones. You’ve seen this missing schoolteacher’s face on the
news, I’m sure. In her jeans pocket you’ll find a slip of paper
with a phone number on it. You have one day to call that number. If
I have not heard from you by 8:00 p.m. tomorrow (5/17), the
Charlotte Police Department will receive an anonymous phone call.
I’ll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on Andrew Thomas’s
lakefront property, how he killed her, and where the murder weapon
can be found in his house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing
from your kitchen.) I hope for your sake I don’t have to make that
call. I’ve placed a property marker on the grave site. Just walk
along the shoreline toward the southern boundary of your property
and you’ll find it. I strongly advise against going to the police,
as I am always watching you.

A smile edged across my lips. I even chuckled
to myself. Because my novels treat crime and violence, my fans
often have a demented sense of humor. I’ve received death threats,
graphic artwork, even notes from people claiming to have murdered
in the same fashion as the serial killers in my books. But I’ll
save this, I thought. I couldn’t remember one so original.

I read it again, but a premonitory twinge
struck me the second time, particularly because the author had some
knowledge regarding the layout of my property. And a paring knife
was, in fact, missing from my cutlery block. Carefully refolding
the letter, I slipped it into the pocket of my khakis and walked
down the steps toward the lake.

As the sun cascaded through the hazy sky,
beams of light drained like spilled paint across the western
horizon. Looking at the lacquered lake suffused with deep orange,
garnet, and magenta, I stood by the shore for several moments,
watching two sunsets collide.

Against my better judgment, I followed the
shoreline south and was soon tramping through a noisy bed of
leaves. I’d gone an eighth of a mile when I stopped. At my feet,
amid a coppice of pink flowering mountain laurel, I saw a miniature
red flag attached to a strip of rusted metal thrust into the
ground. The flag fluttered in a breeze that curled off the water.
This has to be a joke, I thought, and if so, it’s a damn good
one.

As I brushed away the dead leaves that
surrounded the marker, my heart began to pound. The dirt beneath
the flag was packed, not crumbly like undisturbed soil. I even saw
half a footprint when I’d swept all the leaves away.

I ran back to the house and returned with a
shovel. Because the soil had previously been unearthed, I dug
easily through the first foot and a half, directly below where the
marker had been placed. At two feet, the head of the shovel stabbed
into something soft. My heart stopped. Throwing the shovel aside, I
dropped to my hands and knees and clawed through the dirt. A rotten
stench enveloped me, and as the hole deepened, the smell grew more
pungent.

My fingers touched flesh. I drew my hand back
in horror and scrambled away from the hole. Rising to my feet, I
stared down at a coffee brown ankle, barely showing through the
dirt. The odor of rot overwhelmed me, so I breathed only through my
mouth as I took up the shovel again.

When the corpse was completely exposed, and I
saw what a month of putrefaction could do to a human face, I
vomited into the leaves. I kept thinking that I should have the
stomach for this because I write about it. Researching the grisly
handiwork of serial killers, I’d studied countless mutilated
cadavers. But I had never smelled a human being decomposing in the
ground, or seen how insects teem in the moist cavities.

I composed myself, held my hand over my mouth
and nose, and peered again into the hole. The face was
unrecognizable, but the body was undoubtedly that of a short black
female, thick in the legs, plump through the torso. She wore a
formerly white shirt, now marred with blood and dirt, the fabric
rent over much of the chest, primarily in the vicinity of her
heart. Jean shorts covered her legs down to the knees. I got back
down on all fours, held my breath, and reached for one of her
pockets. Her legs were mushy and turgid, and I had great difficulty
forcing my hand into the tight jeans. Finding nothing in the first
pocket, I stepped across the hole and tried the other. Sticking my
hand inside it, I withdrew a slip of paper from a fortune cookie
and fell back into the leaves, gasping for clean lungfuls of air.
On one side, I saw the phone number; on the other: “you are the
only flower of meditation in the wilderness.”

In five minutes, I’d reburied the body and
the marker. I took a small chunk of granite from the shore and
placed it on the thicketed grave site. Then I returned to the
house. It was quarter to eight, and there was hardly any light left
in the sky.

Two hours later, sitting on the sofa in my
living room, I dialed the number on the slip of paper. Every door
to the house was locked, most of the lights turned on, and in my
lap, a cold satin stainless .357 revolver.

I had not called the police for a very good
reason. The claim that it was my blood on the woman was probably a
lie, but the paring knife had been missing from my kitchen for
weeks. Also, with the Charlotte Police Department’s search for Rita
Jones dominating local news headlines, her body on my property,
murdered with my knife, possibly with my fingerprints on it, would
be more than sufficient evidence to indict me. I’d researched
enough murder trials to know that.

As the phone rang, I stared up at the vaulted
ceiling of my living room, glanced at the black baby grand piano
I’d never learned to play, the marble fireplace, the odd artwork
that adorned the walls. A woman named Karen, whom I’d dated for
nearly two years, had convinced me to buy half a dozen pieces of
art from a recently deceased minimalist from New York, a man who
signed his work “Loman.” I hadn’t initially taken to Loman, but
Karen had promised me I’d eventually “get” him. Now, $27,000 and
one fiancee lighter, I stared at the ten-by-twelve-foot abomination
that hung above the mantel: shit brown on canvas, with a
basketball-size yellow sphere in the upper right-hand corner. Aside
from Brown No. 2, four similar marvels of artistic genius
pockmarked other walls of my home, but these I could suffer.
Mounted on the wall at the foot of the staircase, it was Playtime,
the twelve-thousand-dollar glass-encased heap of stuffed animals,
sewn together in an orgiastic conglomeration, which reddened my
face even now. But I smiled, and the knot that had been absent
since late winter shot a needle of pain through my gut. My Karen
ulcer. You’re still there. Still hurting me. At least it’s you.

The second ring.

I peered up the staircase that ascended to
the exposed second-floor hallway, and closing my eyes, I recalled
the party I’d thrown just a week ago-guests laughing, talking
politics and books, filling up my silence. I saw a man and a woman
upstairs, elbows resting against the oak banister, overlooking the
living room, the wet bar, and the kitchen. Holding their
wineglasses, they waved down to me, smiling at their host.

The third ring.

My eyes fell on a photograph of my mother-a
five-by-seven in a stained-glass frame, sitting atop the obsidian
piano. She was the only family member with whom I maintained
regular contact. Though I had relatives in the Pacific Northwest,
Florida, and a handful in the Carolinas, I saw them rarely-at
reunions, weddings, or funerals that my mother shamed me into
attending with her. But with my father having passed away and a
brother I hadn’t seen in thirteen years, family meant little to me.
My friends sustained me, and contrary to popular belief, I didn’t
have the true reclusive spirit imputed to me. I did need them.

In the photograph, my mother is squatting
down at my father’s grave, pruning a tuft of carmine canna lilies
in the shadow of the headstone. But you can only see her strong,
kind face among the blossoms, intent on tidying up her husband’s
plot of earth under that magnolia he’d taught me to climb, the blur
of its waxy green leaves behind her.

The fourth ring.

“Did you see the body?”

It sounded as if the man were speaking
through a towel. There was no emotion or hesitation in his staccato
voice.

“Yes.”

“I gutted her with your paring knife and hid
the knife in your house. It has your fingerprints all over it.” He
cleared his throat. “Four months ago, you had blood work done by
Dr. Xu. They misplaced a vial. You remember having to go back and
give more?”

“Yes.”

“I stole that vial. Some is on Rita Jones’s
white T-shirt. The rest is on the others.”

“What others?”

“I make a phone call, and you spend the rest
of your life in prison, possibly death row....”

“I just want you-”

“Shut your mouth. You’ll receive a plane
ticket in the mail. Take the flight. Pack clothes, toiletries,
nothing else. You spent last summer in Aruba. Tell your friends
you’re going again.”

“How did you know that?”

“I know many things, Andrew.”

“I have a book coming out,” I pleaded. “I’ve
got readings scheduled. My agent-”

“Lie to her.”

“She won’t understand me just leaving like
this.”

“Fuck Cynthia Mathis. You lie to her for your
safety, because if I even suspect you’ve brought someone along or
that someone knows, you’ll go to jail or you’ll die. One or the
other, guaranteed. And I hope you aren’t stupid enough to trace
this number. I promise you it’s stolen.”

“How do I know I won’t be hurt?”

“You don’t. But if I get off the phone with
you and I’m not convinced you’ll be on that flight, I’ll call the
police tonight. Or I may visit you while you’re sleeping. You’ve
got to put that Smith and Wesson away sometime.”

I stood up and spun around, the gun clenched
in my sweaty hands. The house was silent, though chimes on the deck
were clanging in a zephyr. I looked through the large living room
windows at the black lake, its wind-rippled surface reflecting the
pier lights. The blue light at the end of Walter’s pier shone out
across the water from a distant inlet. His “Gatsby light,” we
called it. My eyes scanned the grass and the edge of the trees, but
it was far too dark to see anything in the woods.

“I’m not in the house,” he said. “Sit
down.”

I felt something well up inside of me-anger
at the fear, rage at this injustice.

“Change of plan,” I said. “I’m going to hang
up, dial nine one one, and take my chances. You can go-”

“If you aren’t motivated by
self-preservation, there’s an old woman named Jeanette I
could-”

“I’ll kill you.”

“Sixty-five, lives alone, I think she’d love
the company. What do you think? Do I have to visit your mother to
show you I’m serious? What is there to consider? Tell me you’ll be
on that plane, Andrew. Tell me so I don’t have to visit your mother
tonight.”

“I’ll be on that plane.”

The phone clicked, and he was gone.

LOCKED DOORS

Published July 2005 by Thomas Dunne
Books

DESCRIPTION: Seven years ago, suspense
novelist Andrew Thomas’s life was shattered when he was framed for
a series of murders. The killer’s victims were unearthed on
Andrew’s lakefront property, and since he was wanted by the FBI,
Andrew had no choice but to flee and to create a new identity.
Andrew does just that in a cabin tucked away in the remote
wilderness near Haines Junction, Yukon. His only link to society is
by e-mail, through which he learns that all the people he ever
loved are being stalked and murdered. Culminating in the spooky and
secluded Outer Banks of North Carolina, the paths of Andrew Thomas,
a psychotic named Luther Kite, and a young female detective
collide.
Locked Doors
is a novel of blistering suspense that
will scare you to death.

Crouch quite simply is a marvel.
Locked
Doors
is as good as anything I’ve read all year, a
stay-up-all-night thriller that will have you chewing your fingers
down to the nub even as you’re reading its last paragraph. Highest
possible recommendation.
BOOKREPORTER