Microsoft word winterb.., p.32
Microsoft Word - Winterborn_final-ADRoland, page 32
She inserted the drive into the computer. The tower hummed, working. The options window came
up and she chose to play the CD.
'BG' meant Busch Gardens, the Tampa theme park. Pictures of Sean and Sharla filled the screen.
Laughing. Kissing. Happy.
Tam bit her lips together and blinked back tears. She’d never seen these before. Hundreds of
photos. Every one a new insult.
She’s dead and gone. Don’t let her affect you like this. You already decided your marriage is
over!
In one of the snapshots, Sharla held a drink in her left hand, the straw between her lips. The flash
of the camera reflected off the simple gold band on her ring finger.
Old insults or not, seeing that ring hurt like hell.
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Chapter Twenty-Two
“It was a game. A sick game.” Sean perched on the edge of his desk. With his shoulders slumped
and his face as pale as milk, he looked pitiful.
Tam had no pity for him.
He stared at the floor, kicking his feet a little bit every now and then. Five minutes ago, he had
walked in on her as she clicked through the pictures, four disks deep in her revelatory adventure into
his secrets.
Tam refused to accept his ridiculous excuse. “You didn't start seeing her again until we'd been
married six months. Why didn't you divorce me, so you could be with her, instead of playing that
stupid little game?”
“She didn't want to get married.”
Tam laughed, a stark, emotionless sound of disbelief. “She liked your little arrangement, huh. So
you did think about leaving me?”
Sean shrugged and buried his face in his hands. “It was so long ago.”
“Might have been a long time ago, but you still played her game. What did you do, have some sort
of little play wedding?” A thought struck her like a lightning bolt. “Sharla was never the other woman.
It was always me.”
“That's ridiculous.”
“No, you're ridiculous. I was your legal wife, but Sharla was...whatever. And you are fully
conscious of that. I can't get over the fact that you just accepted that she would never love you, never adore you, never just sit and wait for you to come home at night...I did all that, and you never even saw it.”
“I knew it.” He spoke in a low voice, a guilty voice. “I just wanted her.”
Dang it, when he struck, it was always a low blow. “I guess I understand that, sort of. I wanted
you. All of you. I wanted to be your everything. I just pretended I was for so long.”
Tam gathered the CD's into a stack. She stood up and stalked out of the room. He hurried after
her. “What are you doing with those?”
His demand echoed down the stairs. She raced to the kitchen and stared around, searching for
some way to destroy the discs. Just cracking them in half wouldn’t be good enough.
Microwave. Yes! She popped open the door and threw the entire stack inside. Just as Sean burst
into the kitchen, she slammed the door and hit ‘start’. An automatic thirty-second cycle began.
Immediately, a miniature firework show lit up within. Sean shoved her aside and jabbed the button
for the door. It swung open, releasing an acrid stench of burned plastic. He reached in and snatched
out the spider-webbed remains.
He hissed and dropped the CDs. Dots of melted plastic clung to his fingertips. “I was saving those
for Kevin.”
“Shut up, Sean. The only thing you were saving those for involved your fantasies and your penis.”
That weird feeling, the world-crushing sense of pressure, caused her to stumble slightly. Sean
reached out for her.
The skin of his hand changed, turned dry, gray. Rips and tears formed, splitting like old
parchment paper. The faint blue veins that traced through his arms withered and flaked open. The
cracks formed all the way up his arm like a bad science-fiction special effect.
“Sean...”
It's in my head.
Time to go.
“I have to go. It's this place that's making me sick.” Her stomach tightened and bile burned the
back of her throat. The air around her thickened, clogging her sinuses. Inside the kitchen she paused
long enough to grab a water bottle from the fridge. The handle nearly came off the door when she
tugged it open. Loose screws. Sean was supposed to fix those. She reached in.
What the hell’s that smell?
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Plastic containers full of thick sludgy black stuff overflowed into the bottom of the
refrigerator. The smell drove her back a step. It brought to mind pasta left in the fridge too long.
Dishes left unwashed for weeks. Old garbage stuck to the bottom of a trashcan.
“What...?”
The stuff bubbled out of the containers and oozed down the sides. All the food in the fridge wore a
thick coat of fuzzy grayish-green mold.
“This is insane.” Tam closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. When she opened them
again, the mold, the black crud, remained. “Oh, no.”
That stuff couldn't be real.
Sean rose from his crouched position, hands full of the destroyed CDs. “What are you doing?”
“Do you see this?” she asked, not daring to look away. “This just can't be real.”
Sean groaned and peered over her shoulder. He didn't say anything. Tam took that as
confirmation and started to shut the fridge door. The handle shifted in her hand.
“That little punk,” Sean muttered.
“What?”
“That's pond sludge. Out of the fish pond in the atrium over at the Estate.”
Tam frowned and glanced back in the fridge. The stuff in the bowls and containers now looked
different. Ordinary. She identified leaves, sticks, dead bugs.
“Why are there bowls of it in the fridge? I told you he was over there.” Satisfied that the goop was nothing more than nasty pond water, Tam slipped on a pair of bright yellow latex cleaning gloves and
gingerly took the first bowl off the top shelf. She dumped it in the sink without looking, and went back for another.
The smell grew worse, saturating the kitchen so heavily that Tam could taste it in the back of her
throat. Sean passed by her with two containers of filth. He gagged and nearly dropped what he carried
before he got to the sink.
“Oh, crap. Oh, shit.”
“What?” The tone of his voice scared her. He never sounded that shaky, that weird. Tam turned
toward him, toward the sink. “What is it?”
“Stay over there. Holy crap, just—just stay over there.” He looked away.
“Sean, you're white as a ghost. What's going on?” She took one step. Another. She could just see
into the sink. Something lay on the bright-white porcelain surface. Two more steps, she saw inside
and she dropped to her knees.
“You see?” she gasped, arms clenched across her mid-section as if it would control the nausea.
“You see, you see? He's doing this, Sean.”
Sean staggered away from the sink and grabbed the phone off the wall-mounted base. He replaced
it, picked it up again only to put it back again unused. His skin looked as pale as the things in the sink, and just as bloodless. “He's a child. He couldn't have done that.”
“His monsters could have. You haven't seen the new one, Sean.”
“For heaven's sake, shut up about monsters, Tamsyn. They’re not monsters—they’re just
animals—sick animals—and—oh God.” He paced across the kitchen, his arms going from his chest to
his head and back again to over his mouth. “Oh God, oh God...Do you know what they'll do if they find
these? Dear God, why would he put them in the fridge? In the fridge, Tamsyn! ”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a hard little shake. Her head flopped back and
forth. After her head snapped back and forth a couple of times, she recovered from her shock enough
to slug him hard in the gut. He let her go and paced away again, arms akimbo. She massaged her
shoulders and glared at him, threats on her lips regarding what she would cut off if he ever touched
her like that again.
His white face, trembling lips, and bulging eyes talked her out of ripping him a new one.
A morbid curiosity overcame Tam. She hadn't seen everything, just the outside edge of a pinky
toe, a foot, blue-white in death and stained by a couple of days in a stagnant pond.
The foot had been chewed away below the ankle. Half the heel had been gnawed away. Tam stared
at the mangled pinkish tissue. The skin had a wrinkled, loose look, like water-logged cellophane.
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She felt woozy. She sucked in a deep breath, another, trying to keep from gagging. The
sensation stuck in her throat, taunting her. She clamped her lips shut on it.
Against the chipped white enamel sink lay a hand, no, half a hand, beneath the foot. Two fingers
and a thumb, some of the palm. A wedding ring glinted on the stub of a third finger. Chewed, ragged-
edged, bloodless.
Something else, too. Black, flat. Not a body part, at least. A gold edge...
“Sean, what's that other thing?”
Too busy pacing and talking to himself, he groaned and leaned his forehead against the doorway
dividing the kitchen from the dining room. He bounced his skull against the wood. “Sean, that’s not
going to fix this. You already have a concussion.”
He wasn't any help. She was going to have to do it.
With a grimace she couldn't help, she plucked some long-handled broken utensil off the floor.
Quickly, she reached out and jabbed the butchered body parts. A large half-moon sliver of skin peeled
off the foot.
“Oh, oh,” Tam turned away, squeezing her eyes shut, so she wouldn't puke. When the urge passed,
she dared to glance into the sink to see if the black thing was more visible.
It was, and she wished with all her heart that it wasn't.
Wished that it wasn't there to begin with.
Wished that she wasn't there.
“Sean, this is a problem,” she whispered.
“How could anything be a bigger problem than a foot and a hand lying in our sink?”
She found another tool in the drawer, a pair of long tongs. “The fact that I think they belonged to
the detectives that were here yesterday.”
She held up the black thing for him to see. She watched the terror blossom in his eyes as he
recognized the badge clamped in the ends of the tongs.
****
Sean watched the blue-gray smoke spiral up to the darkening sky.
He was alone.
The body parts still lay in the bottom of the sink. What were you supposed to do with severed
body parts that more than likely belonged to two of the best detectives in the county?
The wind blew hard, gusting through the trees. The leaves rustled and branches cracked softly.
The song of the forest comforted him. He’d spent his childhood listening to it. Taking solace in it.
Tonight was no different.
Scattered all around his feet lay the remains of his life with Sharla. Spiderwebbed cracks scarred
the shiny, discolored surface of the discs.
Stupid. He never made backup copies.
Or smart, since Tam was his wife and he loved her. She loved him. That was what mattered, right?
I’m such a friggin’ screwup.
Still listening to the night song, he went back in the house. Locked the doors, went into the living
room. Went back to the kitchen and dug around in the cabinets over the fridge for the bottle of vodka.
Never one to drown his problems with alcohol, tonight seemed to be a good time to start.
The silence sounded as loud as a scream. It wore on in his ears, in his head. The hairs on the back
of his neck, on his arms, stood on end. A new awareness broke through the numb spell the afternoon's
horrific discoveries and inevitable incidents had woven over him. He threw back two shots, three
shots, finally gave up on the wussy little shot glass and lifted the bottle to his lips.
Somebody’s watching me. He shook off the paranoid chill. Little tendrils of numbness slipped
around his brain.
No, something had him in its sights. Something...bad.
He felt it to his core.
Fear charged through his cells, igniting his nerves. Every sound, every creak and groan of the
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ancient house, seemed magnified. The last lingering rational bit of his brain fought his paranoia
and insisted it was just the vodka, screwing with his head.
I'd never be able to hear someone—something—else in the house.
He longed for the safety of a room with one door that he could lock and barricade. Out in the
living room, he felt like a sitting duck. All those deadbolts on the front door did nothing to reassure
him.
For once, he was glad the windows were so weird, so high and narrow and perhaps the most
useless fixtures he'd ever seen. The ones in the living room and the dining room were high, too high to
see in through, and the remaining one in the kitchen had a huge old pie safe covering most of it. The
other window, the one Tam claimed Kevin threw a rock through, he boarded over from the outside.
Two narrow windows bookended the front door. Custom-made blinds stretched from top to
bottom. Both were so narrow that even scrawny Kevin would have trouble climbing through.
Fighting the worst of his fear, Sean walked the ground floor, double-checking doors and windows.
Paranoia pushed him to wedge a chair under the back door and another under the door that led to the
back stairs. He imagined he heard creaky stairs, shuffling footsteps from behind the thin piece of
wood. Fear made the temptation so strong, almost unbearable. If he opened that door, whatever crazy
monster Tam believed in would be in there, waiting to jump out and get him.
The vodka didn’t do him any favors, so he abandoned the bottle in the kitchen and opened the
fridge. Every light in the house blazed by the time he got back to the couch and settled down with a
bottle of water and a bag of pretzels.
For hours he sat in silence, listening to the night noises and scaring himself silly. The living room
turned out to be the best place, he decided. He had exits, guns, and phones. His truck waited twenty
feet beyond the porch, and the keys lay two feet away on the coffee table.
He felt remarkably calmer although the sense of being watched never faded. The silence started
getting to him, so he turned on the television. He flicked through the channels, disturbed by the
number of horror flicks playing. He settled on a Reno 911 marathon.
Cops.
Dead cops.
Feet and hands, a bloody, dented badge, hidden in bowls of pond sludge.
Nope. South Park reruns on another channel. For a while the inane television shows kept him
halfway distracted. He dragged Tam's beloved chenille blanket over his lap and slouched down. The
soft yarn smelled like Tam's hair.
She had even taken her shampoo when she left.
He fingered the woven fabric and brushed it across his cheek. Where had she gone? Did she miss
him? Did she think, maybe, leaving was the wrong thing to do?
Don't forget, d-bag, you kept those blasted pictures. Idiot. You thought that one out real well.
He groaned and slouched even farther into the couch. Every friggin' day he did something else to
dig their marriage's grave just a little deeper. No wonder she finally left.
Footsteps rattled through the house. Startled, Sean looked up. A little foggy from his near-doze
and the alcohol, he yawned and stretched. The vaulted ceiling of the living room provided no answers.
He stared at the highest point of the common wall between the living room and Kevin's room. Had the
footsteps come from his room?
Sean frowned. Had he even heard anything?
Nah. He just wasn't used to being completely alone in the house. Tam swore she heard things,
saw things while she was alone.
He yawned again, rubbed at the goose bumps on his arms, and stretched out on the couch. The
movement sent the remote clattering to the floor.
Channel change. Sean let out a strangled cry and backed away from the television. The unknown
left him edgy, anxious. Overhead, he swore he heard more footsteps, voices. That doorknob rattled
again.
The back stairs. The door was locked, with a chair beneath the handle. The upstairs door was
locked as well. His hands shook like leaves, so he stuck them in his pockets for a moment, fists
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clenched. He would not let night noises frighten him.
This was his home.
He was safe here, if he was safe anywhere. Tam's paranoia left him nervous, that was all. There
was absolutely no reason to be afraid of anything out here. In here.
Sean peered through the brightly lit house toward the front door. The shotgun hung over the
doorframe, loaded and ready. Tam insisted on removing the trigger lock, so it was ready to go. He got
the gun and went upstairs.
He left all the lights on.
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