Page 33 of Little Deaths
As he’d gotten older and his feelings towards her had begun to cloud and shift, he kept waiting for her to really notice him, not as the child he no longer was and didn’t want to be, but as the man who had desperately wanted to love her. He couldn’t believe that he could feel something so powerfully while she was completely immune. He’d convinced himself that she must have secretly returned his feelings and that his father’s dominion over her was causing her to wither, like a flower without sunlight. That she was just waiting for a single sign from him before packing up and leaving everything.
His classmates thought he was odd and intense and his father thought he was a disappointment. “A lazy dilettante and a sorry excuse of a man,” was how he’d heard his father describe him to others, when he was drunk and the truth would out. Even his own mother cringed away from his touch. Was it any small wonder that he would fall so hard for the first person to show him tenderness? Back then, he had been a romantic, too.
He glanced at her small shelf of romance novels, wondering if she still believed in hearts and flowers, or if, like him, her ideals had been crumpled into a red mess of pulp and shards.
Her confession had instilled a rather vague and terrible suspicion.
So had the way she’d responded to him in the car.
As he stepped out of the house, he locked the door behind him before he was even aware of doing so. The key turned neatly in the lock. She hadn’t had them changed.
If she really believed he was a monster, wouldn’t she have done that?
Or had she put all her trust in his father to keep her safe?
As he drove out of Donni’s neighborhood, he flicked on his headlights, startling a driver in an Escalade who honked at him, the blare of the horn echoing menacingly in the dark streets.
Once inside his freezing motel room, he went right to his laptop and typed in “Adonica Blake” and “Johnathan Steel.” Several articles about their collaborative work came up, but he was more interested in the one that said “’90s Horror Actress Comes Forward with Accusations of Sexual Misconduct Regarding Director-Producer Mogul, Johnathan Steel.”
It didn’t mention Donni in the name of the article, but it was definitely about her. “It started when I was seventeen,” a then-thirty-year-old Donni had been quoted. “He would meet me in his trailer and tell me to strip. At first, he told me it was an exercise to get young actresses comfortable with nude scenes, but pretty soon, I wasn’t even worth the pretense of an excuse.”
Nobody had taken her seriously. Even the article, allegedly sympathetic, made a point of using publicity stills from her most sexually explicit films. A quote from the article, “. . . I would stare at the mask on the wall while he touched me, and wonder why this would make me feel so bad if it was supposed to make me feel better . . .” was paired with an image of her character, Ivy, fromSilent to the Grave, braless beneath a white tank top, with heavily lined come-hither eyes.
Eventually, several more successful actresses had come forward with similar accusations, and an investigation had been launched several years later. After months of stalling, Johnathan had been sentenced to five years in prison. On his way out of the courthouse, he had walked right up to Donni, practically brushing against her, before collapsing dead of a heart attack.
There was a picture of the incident: Donni, wide-eyed and afraid, clutching her quilted bag to her chest with an expression of shocked disbelief.
People were more sympathetic to her, then, although not everyone was. There an interview with Johnathan Steel’s son, Jason Steel, called, “Son Contests Father’s Death, Citing Forensic Incompetence.” The badly written article was a five-page tirade calling Donni a murderer in every single way but the one that legally mattered.
Rafe shut his laptop heavily and uncapped one of the bottled waters he’d purchased at the store. As he drank, he heard the shallow echoes of someone walking along the concrete walkway that curved around the motel rooms.
A shadow flickered across the bluish gap of darkness beneath his door as whoever it was paused outside. There was an ominous scratching sound, like they were clawing at the wood.
He instantly went tense, reaching into his pocket for the rosewood handle of his switchblade.Break-in?he wondered, his pale eyes fixed on the door.Meth addict?
Eventually, the footsteps moved on, faster now, as if they had achieved their purpose, but a shadow continued to obstruct the glow from the harsh blue-white bulb fixed above his door outside.
Rafe waited a few more minutes before he went to the door. Peering through the peephole, he could see only the distorted parking lot. He pulled back the rusty deadbolt and flipped the lock, holding his now-open knife behind his back as he slowly turned the doorknob.
The sight of his own parked Prius greeted him, along with a few other cars. To his left, surrounded by iron rails, was the green swimming pool. He could smell the putrid blend of algae and chlorine carried on the breeze, mingling with the faint petrol stink of the highway.
At his feet, someone had left an unmarked black giftbag. Still looking around, Rafe bent down to pinch the material between his fingers. It looked matte and expensive. It also looked strangely familiar, though he couldn’t remember where he’d last seen wrapping like that.
He bent to pick it up, and grunted, surprised at how heavy it was. Hoisting it, Rafe backed into his room without taking his eyes off the walkway. When he did the deadbolt back up, he was annoyed to realize that his hands were shaking.
Telling himself it was likely nothing—kids pulling a prank—he shoved aside the food items he’d lined up on the scarred and dusty desk, and emptied the bag out on its wooden surface.
It was . . . a box. No, not just a box. It was one of those rosewood funerary boxes for cremation. That was where he had seen the bag; they’d been hanging on a rack at Red Cypress Estates in the reception area, where he’d checked in. The lid clattered off when he nudged it, revealing not ash, but several Polaroids, which slipped and skidded over each other, almost in sequence.
The photos were of him and Donni.
Rafe picked them up, rifling through them. The shots were all in focus, trained carefully on their subjects. On the white space beneath each photograph was a caption.
There was one of them embracing at the funeral, with his fingers biting into the open back of her dress (“MOURNING AFTER”). Another of him driving her home (“SLOW RIDE”). Then one of the two of them on her front lawn (“LAWN PARTY”). The last showed them in the car, caught mid-kiss, with Donni’s blouse peeled down to her elbows (“FAMILY REUNION”).
“Fuck,” Rafe hissed, slamming his knife into the table.
Untitled (Madison Hawthorne, #3)