The Good House Read online

  She shook her head, smiling sadly. “A gun won’t help me, Rob,” she said.

  “That’s right, and a piece of shit-colored clay around our necks won’t help me or my deputies. Take the damn gun,” he said, and Angela relented. When she held the heavy gun in her palm, Rob stood beside her with a calm instructor’s voice. “Safety’s here. See? There’s the trigger. Just takes a squeeze. Aim for the chest or the back, where there’s the most body mass. Never fire blind. See what you’re shooting. You have five shots.”

  Angela tried to thank him, but her mouth wouldn’t open. She felt wearied by the realization that Rob was teaching her how to kill someone. And he was good at it.

  Rob surveyed the altar, then his eyes came back to hers. “My family had ministers to spare, so I know about praying. Praying is fine, so you go on and pray, as long as you don’t forget Jesus while you’re at it. I’m praying, too. But God helps those who help themselves. If you have to fire that thing, Angie,do it.”

  “Thanks, Rob,” she whispered.

  Tariq’s soul was already dead. She could shoot a dead man if she had to.

  Rob hugged her, a solid embrace that nearly cut off her breath, so quick it was over as soon as it began. “I’m sorry about your friend. We’ll catch that sonofabitch,” he said.

  But as he made the vow, Rob’s eyes were dim with doubt.

  Myles had left his house only thirty minutes ago.

  Thirty minutes ago, he and Candace had coaxed Ma into the car and driven to the Riverview nursing home in Skamokawa, and the move had been as smooth as satin. Ma had no complaints, no questions, no concerns. Ma thought it was a beautiful day despite the rain, chatting about how pretty everything was as she stared out of her car window. Her smile had faded when they parked in front of Riverview—which wasn’t a bad-looking place, more like a little retreat than a hospital—but when he asked her to give him her hand so he could help her out of the car, she’d agreed more readily than usual. He’d been surprised when he looked at his watch and saw the move had taken only twenty minutes. Candace had stayed with Ma, and Myles thought he was free.

  But he had misplaced his phone. His mobile wasn’t in the car cradle, it wasn’t on the seat, and it wasn’t in his pocket. Now that he thought about it, he couldsee where he’d left it, on his kitchen counter in the Mexican clay bowl Diego had sent him for a birthday a couple of years back, one he’d gotten on a cruise to Cozumel with his mother. The bowl was home to Myles’s keys, his wallet, and his cell phone, the first place he looked.

  On the day of an emergency, he thought, you don’t walk out of your house without your phone. It was bad enough he hadn’t had time to put on his contacts this morning, but he couldn’t do without his mobile. He had to go back home.

  Besides, he needed a weapon today.

  Myles had cut off the news station in his car because Ma preferred music, but he found his favorite AM station with one jab of a button as he drove east on the Four, back toward Sacajawea. “…back to this bizarre story about the death of Naomi Price, who was found stuffed in a trunk in Canada. Caller, you’re saying she was in the Portland area a few days ago?”

  A teenage girl sounded like she was hysterical. “Oh, my god,yes . She signed an autograph for me at the airport last week, and she wassoooooooo beautiful. I’m in line at the gift shop at PDX and I’m, like, ‘Isn’t that Naomi Price?’ And she sees me looking over and shesmiles , all friendly….”

  The story had already leaked to the press? There couldn’t have been time to notify Naomi’s family properly, Myles thought. He’d been at the sheriff’s office when Rob Graybold got the news, exactly an hour ago. Somebody up in Vancouver must be whispering,Hey, you’ll never guess who we found stuffed in a trunk today . Maybe the farmers who owned the Gran Fury were hawking tickets to their neighbors. Naomi’s family must have learned the hard way.

  Back when Myles was still writing newspaper obituaries because he hadn’t yet moved up to stories about the living, a college professor had died, and the college’s public relations department efficiently faxed him a list of friends of the deceased. Calling from the list to get the reactions of people who cared about the dead professor—because Myles had taken pride in writing good obituaries, getting the facts right, resurrecting souls for at least a day—he had identified himself and his business to one of the professor’s listed friends. “Could you tell me what kind of man he was?”

  The stranger’s voice had crumbled. “He’s dead?”

  Buddy dead.

  “Naomi Price, you’ve got strangers crying on the radio, sweetheart,” Myles said as his car pitched gently into his driveway, rolling over roots that felt like speed bumps. “Bless your heart.”

  Myles looked over both of his shoulders for Tariq’s van, surveying the road to the house, the yard near the shed. Clear. He thought he’d seen that van on the way to Riverview, but it had turned out to be an SUV painted the same color, driving toward Longview. Did he really think Tariq would leave himself in sight? Have the van waiting in his driveway?

  Myles turned the radio off and got out of his car. He didn’t have the stomachache Angie was so terrified of, but his head hurt like hell. Myles had studied Rob’s face as Rob took detailed notes during his call from police in Vancouver—when they both realized Art knew things Art had no business knowing—and Rob knew a war when he saw one.

  Somehow, Art Brunell and Tariq Hill were buddies, twisted soul mates. Maybe Art had managed to get a call to Tariq from jail, or the details of Naomi’s murder had been planned far in advance. Maybe Art and Tariq had run into each other in the River Saloon one day years back and struck up a conversation.I’m fine, how ’bout yourself? Kids are a royal pain in the ass, aren’t they? How ’bout I kill my kid, and you kill that actress—you know the one? Art had plotted to kill Glenn when the time was right. Then, together, they’d orchestrated the death of Naomi Price, with Art spilling his guts just in time for the sensational discovery of the body.

  Their plan, whatever it had actually been, was brilliant in its senseless sickness. Myles had spent years documenting human sickness, the price of his job as a police reporter back at the New YorkDaily News, the MiamiSun-Sentinel, and thenThe Washington Post, when he’d decided he wanted to sit behind an editor’s desk instead of reporting from the field. Myles was glad he’d left D.C. before the Twin Towers fell or the sniper rampage in his old backyard, because he’d had his fill of human monstrosity long ago. David Wolde, the black serial killer in Miami, had ruined Myles’s appetite for news-gathering. The man’s wife, Jessica, had worked with Myles on the Miami newspaper staff. Myles had met David Wolde and the little daughter he killed, his last victim. He’d known that child since she was a baby, and he’d had to write the 1A story about her murder at her father’s hands.

  No need to blame demons, Myles knew. There were plenty of humans to spread the misery.

  Angie didn’t understand that. She was shaping every new discovery to fit her conviction that human behavior alone could not explain Art and Tariq. She and Liza had sat under Art’s spell, eager to believe his psychopathic fantasies. Myles’s brow hardened with anger as he remembered being roused from sleep, summoned to that lunatic’s jail cell. Since when could an inmate demand a guest? And why the hell would Rob subject Angie to something so awful? Robknew better.

  The world had gone insane overnight.

  Myles stood in his driveway, nervous about walking into his own house in full daylight. He studied the house again, taking visual inventory. Curtains drawn in the living room. Lights off. No sounds that he could hear, except squabbling seagulls on the water out back.

  Still, a deep unease tickled Myles, and he suddenly realized why: It was anempty house. He hadn’t thought about it in the commotion; in the haste of packing Ma’s things, trying to get her to Riverview before registration closed at noon, and, incidentally, trying to dodge a murderer who might be coming after him personally.

  But here he was. He had sent Ma away, and she w
as gone. Maybe he could bring her back when this problem with Tariq passed, but he probably would not. He was losing her.This was the true state of his life, not the bubble of denial he’d been living in the past few months, telling Luisah how good he had it. He didn’t have it good. A wonderful actress, a friend of Angie’s, had been murdered, and after Angie already had lost so much. He had an ex-wife so unhinged that she still couldn’t speak a civil sentence, and she’d only allowed Myles to see his stepson ten times in fourteen years because he had no legal power and she was so jealous of the boy’s time. He had one mother dead, another dying. And he’d been doomed to cross paths with men like David Wolde, Art Brunell, and Tariq Hill, who were a mystery to him, who appalled his soul.

  On days like today, it was hard to see God’s hand at work in the world.

  Are you seeing it yet, Myles?Angie had asked. More and more, Myles couldn’t blame her. He had learned the scripture from the Book of Matthew in Sunday school, one he’d memorized to recite for Ma and Pa Fisher:Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

  “For we wrestlenot against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the world…against spiritual wickedness in high places,” Myles murmured as he walked the S-shaped path to the front door of his first real home, the home God had brought into his life in answer to his prayers as a boy. This home had been hisevidence of God. Ma had always expected him to be a preacher, and he might have gone to a seminary if he hadn’t loved writing about the world so much. God still might call him one day.

  Maybe God was calling him today.

  Myles climbed the two concrete steps to the narrow porch of his parents’ bungalow. “Wherefore take up the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, tostand.” Myles’s voice cracked as he remembered Naomi Price’s painfully lovely face, how he’d held her hands and helped her pray. Hot tears moistened his eyes. Myles whispered the rest.“Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth.”

  The front door came open with barely a touch, unlocked. Hardly closed.

  Inside, wreckage awaited him.

  The living room’s furniture was upside down. The sofa and chairs were on their backs, the coffee table’s legs in the air. The photographs on the mantel were facing the wall, lined up meticulously. Vandalism was one thing, but this felt planned to the minute. Myles’s skin went cold.

  The dining room—which Myles had painted and decorated himself, struggling not to lose touch with his life—was a contrast, the picture of rage. The table and chairs had been sliced and splintered to pieces, thrown around the room like cracked chicken bones. His masks were broken. Leftover food from the refrigerator was spattered over the dining room walls and the kitchen floor; streaks of red sauce, grains of cooked rice, curried chicken from Ming’s, sour-smelling milk.

  The kitchen’s black tiles were covered in powdery white flour tracks made by a small dog, by the look of it. Onyx. How they’d orchestratedthat part, Myles didn’t know, but the thought that Art might have helped Tariq steal the woman’s dog before killing her was another peak in sickness.

  They were monsters, both of them. The human kind. And Tariq had been here.

  Diego’s beautiful Mexican bowl was broken to dust on the tiles, deliberately crushed nearly beyond recognition, but the mobile phone on the floor beside it looked fine. Myles picked it up and dialed 911. The dispatcher picked up on the first ring, but the static was awful. “Emergency,” he heard a woman say amidst an ocean’s roar.

  Myles’s head pivoted around the room as he watched for motion, speaking softly. “Darlene? This is Myles Fisher, over at 620 Eagle’s Nest. Tariq was here. He’s trashed my house.”

  A sustainedsssssssssssssss sound made it impossible to hear most of what she said, but her voice came back at the end, clear as a summer sky. “…on the Four. The road’s blocked, and without units from Cowlitz County, we may not have the personnel to run out there. But I’ll tell Rob—”

  Myles’s line beeped, cutting her off. Myles saw theUNKNOWN CALLER identification, and the back of his neck twitched. He clicked to the incoming line, but he didn’t speak. No voice taunted him this time. He only heard music playing, Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” He didn’t hear any music playing in the house, so maybe that meant Tariq was gone, Jesus help him.

  But gone where?

  “What can we do to put a stop to this?” Myles said, his voice even, not betraying the part of him that wanted to curse nor the part of him that wanted to beg. “Tell us what to do.”

  He heard breathing, or he thought he did, maybe a chuckle huffed into the phone. But whatever the noise, it was the only response before the line died. He lost his connection to Darlene, too. When Myles tried to dial Angie’s number at the house, his hands felt as if they’d been immersed in freezing water, rubber weights at the ends of his wrists.

  Angie’s line was busy. That didn’t surprise him. She’d told him the phone wasn’t working.

  “Rob, you’d better be standing right beside Angie like you promised me,” Myles said to himself. He’d have to bring more than this dead-ass phone with him to Angie’s.

  Myles crept his way quietly through the house, his heart thrashing as he neared each hidden corner. They were clear. He made it to his bedroom, which was worse than the rooms he’d left behind. His computer screen and glass sliding door had been shattered, his books and picture frames were strewn across the floor, and there was a mud-colored mound in the middle of his bed that reeked of human feces. But the worst was the feces on thewall above his bed, four crude words smeared in shit:

  SEE YOU SOON SNOOK

  Ma’s words. His last good memory with her, when he’d put her to bed and believed she was talking to him; not to Pa Fisher, not to someone of her own invention, but tohim, her son. Had Tariq fed those words to Ma? But when? How? In that instant, it seemed as if the devil had used Ma to say what was on its mind, and the devil had made a special visit so Myles wouldn’t mistake whom he had been talking to. A final fuck-you from Hell.

  “This crazy son of abitch,” Myles said. The back of his neck felt numb. He had to get to Angie before Tariq did.

  Myles was afraid he wouldn’t find Pa Fisher’s wooden bow intact in all this destruction, but as he stepped gingerly over the thick glass chunks and shards near the deck, he saw the bow against the wall. It had fallen over behind his nightstand, directly beneath the firstS in the stinking message on the wall. “Ugh.” Myles covered his nose, stooping to reach for the bow.

  It would be too much to ask that the bow’s string would be intact. Yet, the string was pulled tight, taut and ready. He hadn’t hunted since he was twenty, since Pa Fisher died, but the bow-handle fit his hand just right. Myles had fished this bow out of the back shed soon after he came home, looking for good memories to dull the ache of why he was there. He’d laughed when he found the traditional wooden bow, since Pa Fisher rarely hit anything except tree trunks. Myles had grabbed both the bow and the new box of six aluminum arrows, just in case he might feel nostalgic enough to try hunting again. The arrows were supposed to be under his bed.

  “Please, Jesus, let them be there,” Myles said, because he didn’t think he’d have time to go to the shed and look. He’d used up all his time already.

  Pulling up the bedspread to gaze under the bed, Myles forgot what had happened to the rest of his room—and the defilement on the mattress—because it was pristine down here. His hiking boots were on the other side of the bed, standing where he’d left them. Two inches from his nose lay Pa Fisher’s camouflage-colored quiver and the box of new arrows, their feathers bright green. Myles didn’t even remember bringing the quiver from the shed to his room.

  That would have been too much to ask.

  “Where’s Rob?”

  Myles stood in Angela’s foyer with a bow readied, its arrow tip sharp. He had a quiver strapped to his leg, a
nd he wore a brown parka, ready to hunt. Seeing him, Angela was pulled out of her lethargy: Myles might be the most welcome sight of her life. She was so relieved, she felt a knot loosen in her chest she hadn’t known was binding there.

  She’d been almost sure Myles was dead, that he’d died at his house. Maybe he had brushed close to it. “Thank God, baby,” she said, pressing her lips to his. “Was Tariq at your house?”

  “I just missed him. Where the hell is Rob?” Myles glanced around the house, his eyes unblinking. “I only saw Colin out there.”

  “There are two deputies here, but Rob had to go. There was a rockslide. He gave me this.” Angela showed him the .38 she still held in her hand, keeping her fingers far from the trigger. The gun felt like a living creature, subject to an unexpected, deadly tantrum.

  Myles looked more alarmed than impressed. “Rob promised me he’d stayhere.”

  He was still missing the point. Angela pressed a palm to his cheek, trying to slacken Myles’s knitted face. “Myles, hush. This isn’t police business. You know it isn’t.”