Flypaper Opus: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 2 Read online

  She pulled her pad out of her pocket. “So, here’s what we’ve learned about your little friends and their owner in the last twenty-four hours. We called around to any pet stores in a hundred miles, found one over in Beasley that sold animals matching descriptions to these to a single buyer, quote, ‘a peculiar guy’.”

  Nick mimicked the professional detachment he’d seen in a hundred procedural shows. “Ahhh, good work, Detective.”

  Reed looked up at him. Her face read: Sheriff and Detective are not the same thing, and I can’t tell if you’re kidding.

  He cleared his throat. “The peculiar guy? I guess we’re assuming he’s Maggot Maestro?” Nick scrunched up his nose as though he’d caught of whiff of something rotten. “Sorry. No. I can’t call him that, it’s ridiculous. This guy though, did he pay with credit?”

  Reed’s face softened. “That’s actually a good question. No, he paid with cash, but ‘A’ for effort.”

  “Shit.”

  “But,” Reed pointed a finger in the air. “They do register pet buyers over there and he gave a name. Evan Craigs.”

  Nick gave the Sheriff his full attention. “Evan Craigs, seriously?”

  She nodded. “It didn’t pull anything off the database, but I Googled it.”

  “You guys have Google here?”

  Reed turned cross. “You think we don’t have internet?”

  “I was kidding.” Nick pointed at the smile on his face. “Kidding, see? This is my kidding face.”

  “That’s what your face always looks like.”

  Nick smiled broadly and waited for her to get the joke. He would have been waiting a long time so he straightened up and continued. “But yeah, I have an idea of what you found.”

  Reed went back to her pad. “Right. Evan Craigs was the name of the kid in the short story.”

  Nick rested his hands on the table and looked at the slab of dead pets spread out before him. “Pet Project. I guess it’s not surprising.”

  Reed looked at her pad. “No, but here’s something that might be. The Animalgamation, it’s complete, right? It’s not missing anything?”

  Nick shook his head. “Not that I can think of.”

  “So why was this guy asking the pet store clerk if he knew where he could find live crabs?”

  That threw Nick. Live crabs. Had he ever written about crabs? He dug deep. Writing was stream of consciousness sometimes. It was easy to write something and forget about it until it was time to go over the editor’s notes. But ‘crabs’ didn’t ring any bells.

  Live crabs. Huh.

  “Sheriff Reed, I can honestly say I don’t remember writing anything about crabs at any point, ever.”

  Reed tapped at her pad. “Well, that’s disappointing. You’ve never written about crabs, ever? Not as food, not the sexually transmitted kind, nothing?”

  He had to think about it for a second. Someone getting crabs sounded like a punch line he might use.

  “No, sorry, I got nada.”

  Reed closed her notepad. “If you think of anything, call me. That’s more or less the only lead we have at this point. More troubling though, it tells me he’s not done. Or at least it’s a possibility.”

  Nick tried to gauge the serious look on Reed’s face. He wasn’t sure if it was more or less serious than her regular one. “You think he’s going to do something else, on top of this?” He motioned at the Animalgamation.

  Reed slapped the notepad against her other hand. “He wanted those crabs for something.”

  Nick shot for the best case scenario. “Maybe he wanted to eat them.”

  The Sheriff was quiet. Lost in thought. After a few seconds, she rejoined Nick in the there and then. “You’re off to visit your Mom?”

  Nick deflated. He’d rather spend the rest of the day in the police station dissecting the intentions of the emotionally disturbed than go down the street and actually spend time with the emotionally disturbed. “Yes,” was all he could muster.

  “It’s not my business,” Reed said as she led Nick back up the stairs, “but you don’t seem too happy your mom moved to town.”

  He wasn’t, and he’d yet to find an opportune time to tell Reed that it was because his mother had spent the first third of his life poisoning him to fill a psychologically obsessive need for attention. By the way, my mother had Munchausen’s by proxy wasn’t a graceful conversational segue.

  “Psh,” he said. “Who wants their mom around? She’s always wantin’ to play bridge and shit. I mean whaaaaaaaat?”

  Reed shook her head. She wasn’t buying. But she wasn’t pressing, either. She showed him the door. “You have a good day, Mr. Dawkins. Say hi to Mr. and Mrs. Littleberry for me on the way up to see mommy dearest.”

  Mommy dearest. Nick pictured Joan Crawford and wire hangers. Sheriff Reed had absolutely no idea how close she was to his actual perception of his mother. He stopped dead in his tracks, shivered, and then kept walking.

  He stepped out into the grey and murky daylight and looked over at Bonnie and Chuck’s general store. Mommy dearest, indeed. Why? Of all the rooms, apartments and houses within thirty miles of Forest Down, why in the name of Cthulhu’s thumbnail had his mom moved into Danielle’s old place?

  He breathed deep. Good air in, bad air out.

  Chapter 6

  The bell above Bonnie and Chuck’s door had become a Pavlovian anxiety trigger for Nick over the course of the last few months.

  At first it had been Danielle, or the memory of her. Knowing she’d lurked in the room above the store for an extraordinary amount of time, waiting for an opportunity to bump into him made it easier to imagine that she was somehow still there. Waiting.

  He’d only just shaken that feeling when someone else with an unhealthy preoccupation for him had elected to move into the available space.

  “Howdy Nick!” Bonnie Littleberry waved at him from behind the counter. An excess of effort still marred her cookie-package-ready smile. He’d succeeded in getting her to stop apologizing for introducing him to someone who would eventually try to kill him, but her ongoing contrition was written across her face. “Business or pleasure?”

  Neither, but it didn’t seem right to say that out loud. “Little of column ‘A’, little of column ‘B’.” That was within throwing distance of the truth. He was almost out of juice boxes.

  “Mornin’ Nick.” Chuck Littleberry’s voice came from somewhere in the back of the store.

  “Hi, Chuck. Wherever you are.” Nick stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck, but the male Littleberry was nowhere to be seen.

  “Down here.”

  Nick walked around a rack and found Chuck lying on his back, tinkering with a freezer unit. “Hey, freezer crapped out?”

  Chuck wiped his brow with his forearm. “Ahhh, I don’t know what’s wrong with the damn thing. It worked fine a week ago, and now it won’t stay cool.”

  Has Mom been tinkering with it? Another joke, but again, not appropriate to say out loud. They also had no idea of his mother’s troubled history. He’d wrestled with whether or not to say anything, but had elected against it. Her mental troubles revolved around him specifically. He doubted she was a danger to anyone else.

  Nick patted at his leg, needing something to do with his hands. “I wish I knew absolutely anything about freezers; I’d help you myself.”

  The ceiling above them creaked. The creature stirs.

  Bonnie nodded upwards. “Don’t you worry about it, dear, you go on up and see your mother.” The Littleberrys always made it so difficult to procrastinate. Damn their generation with their get shit done attitudes and work ethics.

  Nick walked around to the stairs in the back of the store. They led up to the second floor, where the Littleberrys called home. They, and whatever mental case they were housing this month. That wasn’t fair. So far they’d only housed two people who had, at some point or another, tried to physically harm him. It would have to be three before he could objectively call it a pattern.

/>   The ceiling creaked again.

  “She’s expecting you.” Bless her heart, Bonnie being her helpful self.

  “Right.” Nick walked around the racks of food and household essentials. “Alright, up I go.”

  Man up dude, you’ve got like eighty pounds on her. Just remember the rules.

  Nick moved up the stairs, into the dark.

  Don’t eat or drink anything she gives you.

  He stood outside his mother’s door; outside what used to be Danielle’s room.

  Watch her hands at all times.

  He raised a fist to knock.

  Never, ever feed her after midnight.

  The door swung open before he had a chance to make contact with it. Meredith Dawkins stood on the other side, her eyes as wide as her smile. “Nickie, baby! I heard you coming up the stairs.”

  “Yeah Mom, and it wasn’t creepy at all.” Would Bonnie and Chuck like to come up too? Close up shop and take a load off? It seemed rude not to invite them.

  “Come on in, baby, have a seat.” Meredith waved her son inside.

  The place was still a room with a sink, but Nick had to hand it to her, she made it homier than Danielle had. For one, the chemical stench had long dissipated. For another, there was no blood in sight.

  Nick picked up a tiny statue of a cat in roller skates on a shelf. A tiny inscription on the base of the statue said, Can’t stop me meow! That was the one other thing she had in common with the previous tenant; absolutely atrocious taste in home décor. “This is new.”

  “His name’s Francis.” His mom pointed at another statue on the shelf—a cat in an undersized race car. The base read: Tinkles wins by a whisker! “That little scamp is Tinkles.”

  This must be what having a normal mom felt like. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, but he didn’t dare entertain the idea as anything more than a fleeting indulgence.

  New cat statues out of the way, Nick floundered for interesting topics of conversation.

  He sat in the chair by the window and looked out at Forest Down’s Main Street. Nothing out there to talk about unless he wanted to have a conversation about the new stop light they’d put in. Forest Down’s first. They were beyond proud. He’d asked Reed when the parade was. She hadn’t found it funny.

  The sky was blackening.

  “Holy crap, it’s been raining a lot, right?” The weather, perfect, now it was a real Momversation.

  Meredith sat on her bed and folded her hands in her lap. “You know, I noticed that. I meant to ask if it always rained so much here.”

  Nick shook his head. “Nah, this is the rainy season. It’ll all turn to ice next month.”

  They stared at each other. Nick slapped his legs to the beat of no song in particular. Would it be rude to leave after three minutes? Did he care?

  Then it hit him. Salvation.

  “I was on the radio yesterday.”

  Meredith brightened. “That’s wonderful! Do you have a copy?”

  “Mom, you don’t need a copy of anything anymore, it’s all on the internet now. I’ll find you a link, email it to you.”

  Meredith’s hand flopped up and down at the wrist. “How’d you do, how’d you do? I want to hear all about it.”

  Nick ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. Not so good, I guess. The guys were kind of jerks. I got heated.”

  His mom teared up. “You were always like that. So passionate.”

  Nick gripped the arm on the chair. He didn’t remember being all that passionate back then. He remembered spending a lot of time looking down into trash cans sitting next to his bed. He remembered sleeping with towels on his pillow and bed sheets.

  He maintained calm. “I couldn’t say. But yeah, I kind of went off on these guys yesterday. If you knew about Twitter, you’d have heard about it.”

  “What what is?”

  He pointed at her. “Exactly. But like I said, I’ll email you a link. Oh, and then of course there was the whole—” Nick stopped himself. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might not have heard about the gift on his doorstep.

  “What, baby?” She cocked her head to the side. He recognized himself in the movement. He’d picked it up from her.

  “Someone uh—they left some dead animals on my porch. So that happened.”

  Meredith shook her head, one hand to her chest. “Dead animals, I don’t understand. Why would they do that?”

  Nick waved his hand. “It was a sick person. Someone like, you know…” You. “…Danielle. It’s a person that’s fixated on me for whatever reason. Whoever this guy is, he sewed a bunch of animals together, dead ones, and left them there for me to find.”

  “Why on Earth would someone do that?”

  Speculating on the thought processes of a mentally unstable person with his Munchausen’s by proxy mother; the irony didn’t elude him. “A long time ago I wrote a story about a kid who sewed a bunch of animals together. This guy tried to like, recreate what the kid made in the story. Probably wanted attention.”

  He didn’t mean the “wanted attention” bit to be a jab at her, but when he realized it could have been interpreted that way he wasn’t terribly bothered by it either.

  Meredith lifted a hand to her slack mouth. “Oh, baby.”

  Here came the waterworks. Wait for it. Wait for it.

  “That is wonderful.”

  Nick rewound the previous two seconds in his head to make sure he’d heard her right. “What?”

  “That’s wonderful, baby. I’m so proud of you.”

  The reason Nick hadn’t been in contact with his mother for the past two decades clotheslined him. She had, in layman’s terms, ‘a skewed perspective’ to say the least. “It’s not wonderful, Mom, it’s—do I have to explain this?”

  Meredith fidgeted in place on her bed. “I mean it’s nice that you inspire people like that.”

  Nick stood up. “It’s not nice. It’s kind of super horrible. You understand a crazy person killed a bunch of animals? He bought them from a pet store, cobbled them together and left them at my front door. You understand that’s what I’m saying, right? So we’re clear.”

  His mother looked around nervously, as though he’d asked a difficult question and she wanted to use her lifeline. His skin crawled. Had he underestimated how far gone she was? Was that even possible? “Mom, I feel the need to ask; do you know the difference between right and wrong?”

  She got awfully quiet. She should have been saying something. A normal person would say something. Yes, I know the difference between right and wrong. Saving a drowning child is right. Killing animals and desecrating their corpses is wrong.

  His mom stood up, wringing her hands together. “I don’t mean to upset you baby, I’m saying you’ve always had a knack for that sort of thing. There’s something special about you and your writing that draws people in.”

  He fumed. “Stop saying that.”

  “Saying what? I don’t think I’ve ever told you that before.”

  She was right, it hadn’t been her who said that. It was Danielle. In his head, he was arguing with Danielle. He shifted back to the room’s current alleged sociopathic occupant. “Stop saying ‘you were always’ like you’re getting nostalgic about my childhood. I get to be nostalgic—about certain parts—you get to be sorry.”

  Meredith’s voice cracked. “You know I’m sorry, baby. I am. Actually, you don’t know how sorry I am. You couldn’t know. I could never put it into words, I’m not a wordsmith. That was always you—”

  Nick clenched his fist. “Holy shit. I have to go. For real, right now, before I lose my fucking mind.”

  Meredith raised her hands, imploring him to listen. “Baby, please don’t go. Don’t go mad. Calm down and have a seat and we can have a nice talk about anything you like.”

  Nick made for the door. “We don’t have anything to talk about, that’s the problem here.”

  She moved in front of him, palms outward, going out of her way to appear non-threatening. “W
e were talking, we were having a nice conversation about my new cat statues, and the rain we’ve been getting, and your radio show.”

  “It was bullshit. Seriously, your knick-knacks? The stupid weather? All small-talk. It was the kind of garbage people pull out of their asses when they have nothing at all to talk about and can’t stand the silence. We have absolutely nothing in common.” He moved around her and opened the door. He lowered his voice so as not to disturb Bonnie and Chuck. “Wait, that’s not true. We have my childhood. That’s the one thing. And it was a huge lie. That’s it. So I’m leaving now.”

  She didn’t try to stop him. “I know I’ve said this before, but Mom, it was a mistake for you to move here.”

  The door slammed, and on the other side Nick heard the tears start to flow.

  ***

  The sky opened up fifteen minutes later. Nick slowed his car down considerably. The road out to his place was far too curvy to be whipping around while rain-slick.

  His mother sat so prevalently in his mind; he glanced over his shoulder to make sure she wasn’t in the back seat. It was ridiculous; of course she hadn’t followed him to his car and snuck into it. But in the back of his head, she was right there. Just over his shoulder.

  Twenty years of relative peace of mind, and now this. Thanks, Dani.

  The Dragnet theme pounded through the car’s speakers. Reed. Nick pushed a button on his steering wheel. “Hey Reed, what’s up?”

  “Dawkins, you still downtown?”

  The altercation with his mother had left Nick in a mood. His response consisted of snarky with a dash of combative. “Downtown, what downtown? You mean the six buildings on Main Street?”

  “Dawkins, cut the shit and listen to me. Kern got back from checking an abandoned vehicle out on Somerset.”

  Nick turned up his wipers. It was coming down hard out there. He raised his voice to be heard over the din of the pouring rain. “Yeah, you’d mentioned something about that earlier.”

  “While he was out there, he found an empty syringe by the side of the road.” The rain slapped the windshield in sheets. He could barely hear Reed over the racket. “We think the Maggot Maestro took the driver.”