Guilty Until Proven Innocent Read online

  I nodded, watching him go. Then I repeated: “Booty call?”

  He didn’t even turn around. Instead, he gave me a peace sign over his shoulder. “See you on the flip side, brother.”

  I was right. Booty call. Or his mom. Whatever.

  I strolled down Bridge Street toward the house. You couldn’t miss it. Mrs. P was right about the police tape around the house, it gave the house a wide berth, all the way to the front fence line.

  The house was darker than its neighbors, even the ones with the lights off. There was just something inkier, blacker about the Gabarski’s. It was the soot. The front windows had blown out and black marks licked up the weatherboards, the fresh, once cream paint was now either blackened or a dull grey, the paint peeled and popped from the intense heat.

  I sighed to myself, running a hand through my hair.

  Scary. Thank God they were okay. Though who knew about Peter. I wondered if they had reached him yet, told him about his home, his family. That they were okay, but homeless. I ran the plastic police tape between my fingers, walking along the edge of the property. Where on Earth was he?

  Sometimes he’d go into the city overnight for meetings and I could always tell when he was gone because Shana would treat the kids to burgers at Bodecker’s and maybe a movie at the drive in or bowling or something. She didn’t like being without him so she packed up the kids and spent the night with people, keeping their minds off wishing he was there. They were 100% the happiest family I knew.

  I just didn’t get why he of all people would want to kill his family? There was just no way. That being said, there had to be a reason he was missing, a reason why he wasn’t by his family’s side comforting and protecting them.

  I grimaced. There was definitely something off about the whole thing. As I took one last look at the charred exterior before heading for home, I wondered what the forensic investigators had found.

  *

  “Definitely arson,” Garry Saunders said, as he swung open the glass door the next morning. He limped on arthritic legs to his regular table with Mrs. P. in the silence his statement had created. The coffee pot hovered above Theo Pagoulia’s cup as I completely forgot what I was doing.

  “Where’d you get your intel, dude?” Noah said, wiping sprinkles off the counter.

  “Just spoke with one of the deputies. The new one,” Garry said. “Young fella with that stupid-looking patch of fuzz on his chin.”

  “Macnamara.”

  “That’s the one. Macnamara. Told me the arson team said there was no doubting it. The fire had been lit deliberately. In the living room, I think. That makes it attempted murder for sure, doesn’t it.”

  “Poor Shana.”

  “It has to have been Peter then, doesn’t it. I never would have believed it.”

  “Here’s the proof, I guess.”

  “I heard Darwin’s was struggling. Maybe he was getting the flick.”

  “They were behind on their mortgage, too,” Mr. Windofska, the manager of Carringwood’s only bank looked guiltily at the edge of his table. He picked determinedly at a crack in the corner. “I shouldn’t be telling you all this,” he said, not looking up. “But it’s true.”

  “Peter’s an insurance guy,” Garry said. “Any bets he had a hefty life insurance policy out on Shana and the girls.”

  “Set himself up for life, knocking off his family.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said, putting the coffee pot on the counter. This was getting out of hand.

  “That’s it then,” Mrs. P said. “Peter did it. I hope he rots in jail.”

  The room murmured angry agreement. I couldn’t believe my ears. Who needed a judge, the jury of his peers had found him guilty. I was glad they weren’t in charge of the real investigation. If they had been, there wouldn’t be an investigation. Peter, where the hell are you?

  *

  Within a week, the crime scene tape was down and rumor was that Shana and the kids were packing up the plentiful second-hand donated goods and meager amount of belongings they’d salvaged from the house and heading to Shana’s mom’s place in Kentucky.

  With Peter in the wind, and nothing new to report, the gossip mill slowed down. Unfortunately for Peter, the investigators came to the same conclusion as the rumor mill: Peter was a wanted man. I didn’t like it, but at least they had evidence to back it up that was a little more credible than hearsay.

  I never knew Peter that well. He was a decade ahead of me at the high school and tended to gravitate more toward the white collar folks in town, the people from his office, the bank and realtor. And other parents. But I had a relationship with him that no one else had. I saw him down at the lake sometimes, out before dawn like me with his fishing rod and bait, basking in the pre-dawn quiet time and bird calls. The time to think.

  We stood on the bank in companionable silence, celebrating each other’s catch with a smile and a nod. Not friends as such, but we nodded, said hello to each other as we passed by in the market. I remember he sat by me in the town meeting one time and we spent the night muttering mockeries of the council to each other to ease the tedium of the obligatory snorefest.

  And he never had any intention of eating or doing anything with the fish he caught so he threw every single one of them back into the lake to live another day.

  Yet even his friends, his family believed he tried to murder his wife and daughters. For insurance money, really? I wondered what Shana thought, but she hadn’t been to Bodecker’s since the fire. Unsurprisingly, she hadn’t been anywhere near the rumor mill. The unofficial headquarters of all things ‘Peter Gabarski tried to murder his family’. I hadn’t seen her at all since Paddy bundled her up in a blanket and sat her down on the back step of the ambulance with an oxygen mask over her face.

  No. Wait. I had seen her since then. She was in the passenger seat of her cousin’s Range Rover, they drove past as I was mediating the battle between the key to Bodecker’s and the lock. She looked okay. Just…haunted. I imagine she was looking forward to getting to Kentucky, where she would be a stranger. Where she could breathe and not have the town buzz about it.

  Soon she’d be gone forever with a fresh start. And Carringwood will be that little bit emptier. Die that little bit sooner. Population 199. At least until the house insurance claim came through. If it came through. I have no idea what happens with insurance in arson cases. I don’t have any.

  Peter would know.

  *

  After closing that night, the sky turning from blue to pink to purple, I found myself standing in the middle of Bridge Street, in front of number twenty-four. There was a new sign on the door. I squinted at it from the street, but couldn’t make out the thick black letters, cast in shadow from the stoop. Glancing both ways down the street, I listened. Number twenty-two, the Tams were watching an action movie, light from the TV flickering against the blinds. Number twenty-six was dark, Ethel and Graham were early risers.

  Across the street, the front porch light was off, Toyota was in the driveway and little Helen’s nightlight made her upstairs window glow purple.

  Cars were bedded in driveways. Dogs were already walked and dinner had been delivered. Everyone was home, settled inside and away from the windows.

  I hurried across the front lawn, past the singed rose bush and up the front steps.

  Demolition. They sure weren’t screwing around. Soon the ugly tarnish of malice and terror would be scrubbed clean with a fresh new home. A home with no history, no messy stories the realtor would have to stuff under the new carpet.

  A fresh new home that let the sunshine back into Bridge Street, into Carringwood as a whole. Put the whole town at ease again, made us feel safe. Made us forget.

  Shards of glass littered the stoop from the broken front window that had blown out in the fire. Or Shana had broken out in her escape. Or the fire fighters had broken in.

  I stepped up to the window and peered into the dark. The full moon illuminated the living room. Halfway up the
once cream walls, they blackened and bubbled. The green and white striped feature wallpaper hung from the wall in strips. There was an unrecognizable lump of melted plastic stuck to the carpet in front of it.

  I paused for a moment, considering. Then I just did it. It wasn’t a crime scene anymore, and tomorrow it would be completely gone. I gingerly braced myself against the weatherboards, finding a good handhold on the window frame, a section free of jutting spikes of glass, and climbed through the window. Lifting and sliding my legs, my body clear of the broken edges, I was in. I was in Peter’s old house. Shana’s living room. A former crime scene.

  I was officially trespassing.

  I didn’t know what to feel. I shouldn’t be doing this. Shouldn’t be here. But at the same time, I had to go forward. Who was I hurting, anyway? I stepped carefully into the room and let my eyes adjust to the severe darkness of the black walls and black ceiling. I spotted a puddle of light on the muddied carpet. Beside the light was a lump of white plastic, like melted wax. It was stuck good. Stuck in that carpet forever. Looking up, hunting out the light source, I laughed to myself in the silence. The skylight. There was a hole open to the sky now, with plastic having dribbled and dried like stalactites. Like man-made icicles in the middle of an inferno.

  I started to notice things. The way the wall-mounted air conditioner hung at an angle, unstable, its vents softened and stuck together. The gleaming white, now soot speckled and faded to a dull grey.

  I stepped back to get a better look at the room and my foot struck something solid. My body jerked and crashed onto the carpet. Softer, spongier than it should have been. And damp. I squinted down at myself in the gloom. I, too, was being blackened by the house, taken as one of its own. I wrinkled my nose as I sniffed the carpet in front of it. Mold. The water hoses that were used to save the house had in fact destroyed it, the carpet left flooded and forgotten for the week.

  But there was another smell, too. Something sharp. Something I couldn’t quite recognize, but it turned my stomach, put my senses on edge.

  I sat up and looked around for what I had tripped on.

  And I found it.

  Scrambling to my feet I was at the kitchen doorway before I looked again. I wasn’t alone here.

  But I was the only one alive.

  The body lay on the carpet, half concealed behind the couch. On his back, with his arm sprawled at a right angle, that’s what I’d tripped over. His forearm.

  Only now did I hear the buzz of flies, the friction of their wings rubbing together as they perched on the arm, then the stomach, then the nose.

  The nose on the face I recognized. Oh God, it was Peter. I took a step closer but that was when I spotted the maggots.

  Writhing.

  Squirming.

  Wriggling.

  My stomach heaved and throat tightened. There was movement in my throat and I dashed to the kitchen door out into the backyard. Thankfully it swung open first try, I guess they hadn’t thought to lock it.

  I heaved up my dinner into the azalea bush by the back step.

  I’d wanted to see a burnt out house, not a dead body. A murdered dead body. No wonder they couldn’t find him.

  I stood on the back step, hands on my hips, trying to breathe. Breathe, breathe. Calm down. Calm the fuck down.

  I had to do something. I swear there was something specific you have to do times like this.

  I blinked, and shook my head. The panic, the fear-induced brain fuzz made thinking and connecting thoughts feel like my head was filled with soup. Peter was dead. And he’d been dead awhile.

  What should I – the police! I had to call the Sherriff. Had to let somebody know. My head started to clear. I patted down my pockets, but my cell wasn’t there. Where was it, where was it? Did I leave it at Bodecker’s? No, I never even used it today. It stayed in my right pocket all shift.

  I turned my attention to the kitchen door. Maybe it fell out when I tripped?

  I took a deep breath. I had to go back in there.

  I stiffened as there was a noise inside. A thump. Movement. Was he alive after all? I swung the kitchen door open and charged back inside, straight through the kitchen to the living room. There was a figure in the shadows. It turned to face me, stepped forward under the skylight.

  “Dude?”

  “Noah – what are you doing here?” I said, my heart thudding with relief against my ribcage. I scanned the carpet again, stepped around the couch. He hadn’t risen. Peter was exactly as he had been. I pulled my gaze away from his open, cloudy eyes, my stomach convulsing in a wave of repulsion. I was going to…I nearly…no. False alarm. “He’s dead,” I said. “Peter’s dead.”

  “I know,” Noah said, face grim as he looked down at Peter.

  “We have to do something,” I said. “We have to tell the Sherriff.”

  Noah stepped carefully over to me and put a hand on my shoulder, rubbing my back gently. “I did. I called it in a second ago. As soon as I got here.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Good.”

  “It’s gonna be okay, dude. It’s messed up, but it’s gonna be okay.”

  “I knew he didn’t do it,” I said, shaking my head. I took slow, deep breaths again, closing my eyes, trying to ignore the stench as my heart rate slowed, returned at least close to normal. It was okay, the Sherriff would be here any minute. It would be okay. “I knew all along. He couldn’t have.”

  “But that means someone else did,” Noah said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. I opened my eyes again and turned my back on the body. Between the molten TV with the cracked screen and the couch, was a wooden toy box. Charred and brittle on the outside, but the lid was open.

  “Look at that,” I said, stepping over to the box. “It survived.” The inside of the box was intact, half a dozen toys lightly speckled with soot, but still good. Still whole. I picked up a doll and stroked her brown hair. “I wonder why they didn’t take these?”

  “Rita always hated that doll,” Noah said. “And Shana wants a fresh start.”

  I turned to face Noah, my forehead furrowed. “I thought you said you didn’t know Shana.” I said. “Dude, what are you even doing here?”

  I stopped speaking as Noah raised the hammer, gripped tightly in his hand and-

  THE END

  ###

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