The Honeymoon is Over: Parts VII & VIII

—7—

When they were alone, they each leaned in conspiratorially. Little Debbie said, "I want to dry; I like to dry, but you two will have to help me put away the big pots."

Dan said plainly, "We won't be doing any dishes tonight. Tonight we take care of Alex once and for all."

Allison, who never dealt well with surprises, said in a panic, "Tonight! You said we'd do it this weekend. I can't do it tonight. I have homework. The dishes will get all hard and crusty and it will take forever to get them clean tomorrow. Tonight is just out of the question."

Dan tried to keep his voice calm. "I know we said we were going to do it this weekend, but things have changed. The situation is worse than we imagined, and Elizabeth and I don't think it's safe to wait even one more night."

Allison said, "what do you mean worse? Mom looked fine at dinner. In fact, she looked great... and happy. In fact, I think we should cancel the whole thing. Maybe there was some yelling, but that doesn't mean he's hurting her. Maybe it really was a moped accident. Maybe..."

"He's got Mom in manacles," Dan said, cutting her off.

Little Debbie asked confused, "He's making her wear an eye glass like the guy in Hogan's Heroes?"

When Alex had first started dating their Mother, he got them a new huge flat screen TV and Blue Ray player. His mother had protested when he showed up with it all one night, and Alex had apologized saying, “You're right I'm being selfish.”

She was taken aback by this. “Selfish... no... no. It's generous, but too much.”

He looked embarrassed and said, “No, it was selfish. I want to spend all this time you guys, and I just hate small TVs, and I wanted the pleasure of sharing all my favorite shows from growing up with you and the kids, but only on my self-absorbed terms. I'm terrible. Here, I'll put it back in the car and we can watch your TV.”

Dan and the others had naturally taken a spastic fit screaming, “No, no, no!!!”

But Elizabeth won the day saying, “Mom, don't make Alex watch our tiny TV, that wouldn't be fair. How much can one guy take.” Holding her hands out to the other three she went on, “We are willing to let Alex have this one pleasure, since it seems to mean so much to him. At his age it must be very hard to see the screen on our TV.”

And that very night, Alex introduced them all to Hogan's Heroes, and Col. Klink's monocle.

"Manacle, not monocle,” Dan corrected, “You know… chains... imprisonment." Dan spilled it. "We got kicked off the bus today and snuck back here to check on Mom, and..."

"WE got kicked off the bus?" Elizabeth checked.

Dan said, "Well you were the only one doing any fighting. I was a victim of circumstances." When she just stared at him, eyebrows raised, he said, "Fine! I got kicked off the bus today, and Elizabeth jumped out the back to join me, and..."

"What'd ya do?" Little Debbie asked, excited for the drama.

Dan decided to explain the whole thing, to bring them back together as a family, one group against an intruder. It worked. Dan cast the picture of the bedroom in such vivid terms that the girls shed tears for their mother just imagining what she must be going through that very moment upstairs.

Eventually, Elizabeth's warnings about keeping things looking normal, convinced Dan that they did indeed need to do the dishes. So, letting Little Debbie dry, they divvied up the tasks and got to work, clearing, washing, drying, sweeping and the like. Then they began to set their trap.

—8—

The plan was simple. They'd worked out most of the details the night of the family meeting. Elizabeth kept warning them to make it simpler and simpler so that there were fewer things to explain, less things to clean up for the arrival of the police, fewer things that could go wrong. Everything had to look normal, and it was best to allow something else, something common, to do the killing rather than them. With Elizabeth's expertise garnered from watching every CSI type show ever made, they finally got it together; it was perfect, and made all the more perfect by the theoretical nature of it. As they schemed and argued, the whole affair seemed more like a puzzle than a murder, an academic exercise that ended with a gold star from teacher and hearty congratulations from their classmates, everyone shouting, look how clever you all are.

The plan involved each of them. Allison's step was first. It would have been better to entrust such a task to Elizabeth or Dan, in fact, it would have been better for Dan and Elizabeth to play all the parts, for Dan hated to involve the girls in any of this, but they needed four parts played-out and none of them could be in two places at once. Well, there was a chance they might need a fifth part, but Dan was ready for that eventuality as well; he’d pulled through for them in the clincher before, but he hoped it would be unnecessary.

Allison came screaming down the hall. They weren't sure whether Alex could hear screaming outside the Holy of Holies given the new soundproofing in the master bedroom, but they didn't want any inconsistencies to suggest that there was something false in their stage play; every part needed to be intuitively believable. She rushed upon the door, screaming and wailing. If her siblings, tucked away in the basement waiting for their own parts, had heard her, they would have been impressed; very convincing, she thought. She beat upon the door, screaming again and again, "Help! Debbie's hurt! Help! Debbie's hurt!"

After what seemed an age, making Allison wonder if Alex could hear even the pounding, the door opened a crack and the side of Dan’s face popped into the space. He was wild-eyed; beads of perspiration covered his forehead and cheeks. She could not exactly discern the meaning of his stare, but he was not happy to be disturbed, that was plain. "What do you want? I told you never to bother us in here. Your mother needs her rest, what are doing?"

Allison could hear her mother in the background. She wasn't resting. She was crying. She was whimpering and chuffing as if in great pain, gulping on her sobs. Allison swallowed hard, forgetting her lines for a second, "Uh, uh, um... Debbie."

Alex snapped, "What about Debbie!"

"Uh, Debbie, Debbie’s hurt. She fell down the basement stairs. I think she's dead."

This got through to him. He pulled the door open a little further, looking back nervously into the room, then hesitated.

Allison could see tiny spots of blood on his sweat soaked tee shirt.

Alex jerked into his pocket and pulled out the key, then slipped sideways out the door, pulled it too and locked it. He put the key back into the front pocket of his pajama bottoms, which were also sweat soaked.

This part taken care of, he seemed to focus better on her. Allison yelled, "The basement stairs, hurry!" It was like a fun game, a great trick that they would all sit around laughing about later. Alex would ruffle her hair and say, “You sure did fool me, Allison. You’re a great little actress.”

He rushed on, flying down the west stairs, hardly touching any of them, and skidded sideways across the marble foyer, barely keeping his footing. Then he charged through the archway leading to the kitchen and almost swung himself around the u-turn to the basement, using the doorknob for a pivot. There at the bottom of the stairs lay Little Debbie. Only a single basement bulb was lit, the others having been loosened by Dan and Elizabeth. The one that remained, however, coned down on Little Debbie’s motionless body, arms laid upon her chest as if asleep. Seeing her, he did not register the uncanny darkness. He said low, as if to Allison, who had caught up with him, "O thank God, she's breathing." Then, he shot down the stairs.

“It is important to use his momentum against him,” Elizabeth had said, “So, the rope has to be down the stairs a bit, not right at the top, which also made it easier for her to get some height on the rope when she pulled it tight from the shadows in basement.

Since Alex had no real need for it, the builders had never finished the basement. He'd said that he hoped when he got married that his wife could decide what to do with the space. In fact, he'd seemed excited at the prospect of converting the basement into “the best family game room ever” when the girls had run around the house looking at everything excitedly the first day they'd moved in. So the 2x4's making up the wall beside the basement stairs were exposed. Elizabeth did no more than tie one end of a clothesline through a knothole in one of the 2x4's three stairs down. She could have just tied it around the whole thing, but she had a knack for anticipating trouble, and was afraid it might slip down and she wouldn't be able to catch his leg as he flew passed. She had even gone to the top and stared down to where she set the rope across the third stair and kept adjusting its lie until she could not see it, even when she knew where it was.

As soon she heard him start down, Elizabeth, away in the dark, pulled the rope. It sprang up tight just in time to catch his passing bare foot. For a moment, Elizabeth thought all was lost. The rope pulled her right off her feet. She'd looped it around her body like she'd seen Mr. Munley do when playing anchor in the tug-of-war at the Church picnic. She had not anticipated this much pull, however, and as his foot tangled in, more than tripped over, the rope, she went off her feet and skidded toward the foot of the stairs where his tumbling body dragged her.

As soon as Alexander's foot touched the taut rope, Dan grabbed Little Debbie's ankles from the shadows, and yanked her out of Alexander's path. She'd worn extra pajamas and three pairs of undies to pad her way. In fact, they had to work hard to convince her that while a winter cap would make her head more comfortable, it might ruin the whole effect. She seemed to care little for that, she just didn't want her head to get cold... or scratched when he yanked her. She hoped that when this was over, Alex wouldn’t hate her like Dan said their real father hated him. She didn’t know where exactly he would go, but didn’t want him angry with her when he got there.

The final part of this plan might have been easier for all involved had the stairs descended into a foundation wall like their places in both Norfolk and the apartment building in Rochester, but Alexander’s somersaulting tumble down the stairs didn’t end with a crushed skull or broken neck at a cement terminus. The twist Alex sought to affect when his foot snagged the rope tangled him up in it and sent him rolling down, arms and legs spasming out, each breaking as he sought to stop his doomed spiral. His contact with the basement floor was surprisingly smooth, however, as if he’d slid into home plate face first to avoid a tag. He was not dead. In fact, he was not even unconscious.

Dan gave him no chance to play upon his pity. He’d found a piece of lumber matching the basement stairs in a scrap bin in Alexander’s workshop, and, heeding Elizabeth’s CSI warnings set it nearby just in case. If they found such a grove in his head, they would naturally accredit it to contact during his tumble. He used it now. As Alexander lie trembling on the floor, face up in the dark, one foot still stuck inside the cone of light from the canister, Dan moved in on him, club upraised. He was glad he could not see his face, it made it easier… like it was driving the knife into his father’s back. The blow was quieter than he expected. Years of TV sound effects had prepared him for a pop or crash or something. On TV every punch was a smack, every kick a thwack. But Alexander’s skull caved in under his repeated blows with the soft thunk of punching a pillow when beating it into shape for a good night’s sleep.

As he swung, he energized himself on images of his mother, when they’d first come home from the honeymoon. They’d rushed out to meet them in the driveway when the taxi pulled close to the house. They lined up on the grass eager to find out why they’d come back early, but glad to see them just the same. Then Alex came around and opened the door for her. He was well marked himself, but nothing compared to her. She looked doped out and punched out; her arm was bandaged as if in a cast. They had all bought the moped accident story, until that night, when the screaming started. They might not have even heard it if they hadn’t gone special to the door to say goodnight. Alex jerked the door open just enough to peek out when they pounded. The look on his face told Dan everything he needed to know, even without the increased volume of her piteous weeping from within. He was sweating, and red-faced. He snapped at them, “You need to get out of here. Go back to your beds, now!” Then he slammed the door in their faces.

All Dan could hear was thunk, thunk, thunk thunk, then, as if from a long distance, “Dan! Stop!” Elizabeth materialized out of the shadows before him, waving her hands at him and shouting. She seemed terrified, as if she were next. He pulled himself from his violent trance, tears streaming down his cheeks, and saw even in the darkness, what he had done. Alexander’s head was a ruin.

“Oh my,” she wept, looking down on him, “How are we going to explain that? Nobody can do that to themselves falling down the stairs. What are we going to do, Dan?”

As he looked down at the body, panic suddenly struggled with need. He barked, “Take Debbie upstairs and put her in bed. Snag Allison on your way by. I’ll take care of things down here.

As Elizabeth picked Little Debbie up, Dan heard her sob, “No matter what you do, don’t open your eyes.” Allison was crying at the top of the stairs with a scared siren more commonly heard from terrified two year olds.

When he saw and heard that they had gone, Dan started tightening the basement lights to make them look normal for the police. He must have touched his sticky face, though, for he left bloody fingerprints on each bulb, which started to smoke lightly with a horrid stench within seconds. In the newness of light he could see the hopelessness of what he’d done. He was a mess, splattered even worse than when he’d been hired for a buck and hour to help the landlord paint the outside of the Rochester apartment. The floor all around Alex and the floor joists above him were soaked and dripping. The streaks following the arch of his swing were evident even to him, and he hated CSI shows.

As he took in the scene, knowing that he would never be able to explain away any of this, the enormity of what he’d done came home to him. A human being lay at his feet, and he would never do anything in this world again. Dan had canceled his existence. He had taken away his parent’s son, snuffed out his siblings’ brother. He would never laugh, or think, or talk or eat… again.

One Christmas, he had saved up his money for months to buy his sister the best Christmas present ever, which is why he’d taken the painting job at the apartment in the first place. He bought Elizabeth a glass figurine of a twirling ballet dancer that she always stopped to gaze at in one of the shop windows downtown. It was the first year of his life that he could remember being more excited to give a gift at Christmas than he was to get one. The look on her face was worth every paint blotched minute.

The next day, she’d walked in on him in the bathroom and caught him playing with himself on the toilet. After half of second of embarrassment, she began to laugh at him, “You pervert; is that why you always take so long in the bathroom; you’re disgusting.”

He’d pulled his pants up quick, and tried to escape her taunts, but she followed him into the living room, threatening to tell their mother, and to let the girls know what a sicko their big brother was. He became so blinded by rage, so humiliated, that he marched into her room, took up the glass figurine and, with malicious glee, threw it against her bedroom wall.

The second it shattered and he saw her face fall, he’d realized his mistake. He wept over that look more than a few times. He didn’t break a piece of glass, he broke all the love that had purchased it, all the longing she laid upon it, all the happiness that it had brought her. Even if he worked another five months to earn the money for another, he knew in that instant that it would be no use. What he did was irrevocable. He’d not damaged a thing, he’d damaged a person, a relationship. She might forgive him in time, but things would never be the same between them... and they weren't.

She told their mother that she'd tripped with it in her hands and accidentally pitched it against the wall.

That shame, guilt and regret was nothing compared to what washed over him now, as he stood looking down upon Alex’s body. He’d built Alex up as a monster in his mind, a thing, a threat, an obstacle to happiness, but he now stood looking down on the corpse of a person whose life had meaning… and he could not give that life back. All blindness before the act. All condemning clarity after the act. Alex had broken Dan’s heart and hurt Dan’s mom, and Dan had taken everything this man had in this world. He’d even drawn his sisters into his twisted revenge. What could he possibly have been thinking. He did not want to live even one more day, not one more minute. If he had a gun in his hands he would put it to his temple and blow his own brains out.

He fell to his knees in the pool spreading slowly from Alexander, and the despair that had been growing since Elizabeth had first cut his rampage short bled from his lips, not as tears, or even sobs, but as a wail that came from the marrow of his soul and echoed through the basement like a chorus of wolves under that night's full moon.

In time, amid eventual silence born of exhaustion, body slumped, hands limp and twitching in the blood around him, Dan remembered the key. His sisters needed him still. His mother needed him. He’d hurt them all trying to save them, but he needed to get moving, to do what he could to salvage as much as he could of their lives before his life came to an end.

Continued and Concluded in Parts IX & X.