Crystal Grader - Tag Cavello (reading women .TXT) 📗

I can.”

Jarett stared at her. “Does that involve sending me to prison?”

“You won’t go to prison. I’m taking responsibility, Jarett. For the first time in my life, I’m taking responsibility.”

“Is that what this mystery man told you?”

“His name is Levi Cutler. And yes, he did.”

***

“Doctor Cookie?” the patient said. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, of course,” Cookie answered.

“Well you look distracted. Do you want to hear this story or not?”

“As a matter of fact,” Cookie said, pulling a notebook from the pocket of his jacket, “I don’t.”

“What?”

Cookie flipped the notebook open. The story that Jarett had told the police—the bullshit story—was here laid out in bullet form. He knew it by heart. But it didn’t belong in the kind of book he wanted to write. Lies were of no use when it came to understanding the motives of a criminal mind. He needed facts, cold and hard. You couldn’t treat a patient if you didn’t know what was making him sick.

“Miss Genesio told you that she saw a ghost,” Cookie said. “Is that correct?”

“Maybe,” Jarett told him.

His stand-offish tone no longer bothered Cookie. He was either going to get the truth from this man, or not. If not, he would simply scratch his name out of the book. What did he care if the damned thing wound up having ten fewer pages than originally planned?

“She was frightened at first, but then the ghost started to speak to her,” Cookie went on. “Common sense. Words of wisdom.”

Jarett looked away, his mouth tight.

“Mr. Powell?”

“What?” he growled.

“Is that correct?”

“I don’t want to talk anymore.”

***

“You don’t have to talk anymore,” Crystal said. “You don’t have to say anything or do anything. I’ll take care of this. For real this time.”

“I want you to wait here while I look around the house for this man,” Jarett said. “Okay?”

“Sure.”

He looked in the other bedrooms first before going downstairs to check every hiding place he could think of. The endeavor took time, but he was determined to find out what, if anything, Crystal had seen. The bulb of his flashlight shined to and fro, turning up nothing except empty corners and snow-covered windows. Played out, Jarett then went to the basement door. He opened it and went down. Two hundred year-old foundation closed in around the beam. The shape of an old furnace brooded in one corner. Along the far wall was the washer and dryer. The water heater. A crack in the concrete floor led to an empty butcher shower.

And that was it. There was nobody else in the house, real or imagined. Jarett went back upstairs to tell Crystal. She was still sitting on the bed, the gun in her hand.

“Nothing,” he said. “No one’s here.”

Her face showed no surprise. She picked one of Jarett’s shoes up from the floor and pitched it into the closet.

“What did he say to you?” he asked.

“He told me to grow up and go home.”

“And that changed your mind?”

After a moment’s thought, Crystal nodded. “I guess it did. He called me selfish. Irresponsible. Told me I was hurting the people who loved me.” Her eyes flicked upward. “And that includes you, dear. Especially you.”

“I don’t know if—“

“And then he said something he’d already told me once. He said to be mindful of the corn.”

“Mindful of the corn?”

“Yeah. So”—she shrugged her shoulders—“that’s what I’m going to do from now on. Be mindful of the corn.”

“Crystal, I don’t get this. I really don’t.”

“I know,” she told him, rising from the mattress. “But Jarett…what happened just now, it made me realize that it’s time to grow up.”

“Crystal—“

“Maybe I didn’t see a ghost. Maybe there’s no one here, like you said. Either way, I’ve come to my senses. And just barely in the nick of time.” A laugh burst from her throat, like a bubble of air from a girl who’d been underwater for too long. “So this will be my final act as crazy little Crystal Genesio.”

“Don’t do that!”

She had the gun pressed to her temple. “It isn’t loaded, dummy.”

“I know, but—“

What he might have said would never be known. A muffled pop from the gun cut him off. A splatter of blood. The sound of a body hitting the floor. And his own screams, one after the next, that rose into the night to be lost forever with the snowy wind.

31

 

The dogwoods were in bloom. Whispering on the balmy spring wind, they sent their pink petals over the field, and along the old cart-path, and down the orchard lane. Sometimes these petals would gather on the sills of the farmhouse where Crystal lived, so that their scent drifted into her kitchen to accompany what bubbled on the stove with sweetness. And they may have been doing something of that sort today, except that she wasn’t in the kitchen to know for certain. She was outside beneath one of the larger elms, swinging on a stick at the end of a rope, and singing a song.

She leaned back between lines to take a breath. Her bare feet gave a kick at the puffy clouds. The collar of her blouse rippled; the flowers of her skirt billowed. Oh, beautiful morning. Warm and alive. On the house was a fresh coat of white paint. The window frames were green. Oh perfect world. Oh lovely life.

The sound of a dog barking turned her head. Just off the back porch, a black and white border collie chased a butterfly down the hill.

“Chubby!” Crystal called, just for the pleasure of sending her voice to the wind.

The dog glanced back with the biggest, happiest smile he had ever worn, but didn’t stop running. And when the butterfly got away, he simply found another one to chase.

That reminded her of Luke. The boy could be so fickle about what he wanted. On some days it was lemonade stands. On others, he talked of writing poetry. Others still had him dreaming of baseball, or of piloting airplanes. Or even (and these had become more common of late) just staying at home and tending his crops, the way his step-father did. The way she did.

None of it distressed her much. Luke was only twelve, after all; he had plenty of time yet to decide which butterfly to bark after. Making a mental note to tell him this later when he got home from school, Crystal jumped off the swing. It was almost lunchtime. Jarett would be in from the field soon. She went round the house to the front door with leaves swirling at her feet.

Verdancy frolics in the wind, she thought, where does it go, and where has it been? Verdancy frolics in the wind, as does our love, every now and then.

Once in the kitchen, she made two turkey sandwiches and set two cans of Diet Coke on the table next to them. Then she dialed Jarett’s number on her cell phone.

“Hey, you. Lunch is ready.”

“Whoops,” came her man’s voice through the receiver. “My bad, honey, I lost track of time. Be right in.”

In less than ten minutes his boots were clumping on the anteroom floor. And when he appeared in the kitchen, tall and rugged in denim clothes, she went to him for a kiss. Her fingers indulged in the stubble of his face, the coarseness of his hair. Two powerful arms engulfed her waist and lifted. Up went her feet from the floor. Higher and higher.

“Everything been okay around here?” he asked.

“Perfect,” she breathed back. “I finished painting the bathroom door. Changed a couple of light-bulbs. After lunch I’ll hang the laundry. Clothes’ll be dry in no time in this weather. What?” Jarett had begun to rub her back as she spoke, and his smile had deepened. Crystal tilted her head. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” was his soft reply. “You make me very happy.”

“Well someone had to come help you out with this place before it fell down around your ears.”

“I love you, Crystal,” Jarett said. “You make every day worth living.”

Crystal closed her eyes. A gust of warm wind rattled the kitchen window. From somewhere down the hill Chubby began to bark afresh. The trees swayed. The dogwood petals fell.

It was a long time before she opened her eyes again. She wanted to wait, to hold on, to make it last forever.

A knock came at the front door. Crystal turned to look down the hall. The knocking sped up, became almost frantic. Someone outside the door began calling her name.

“Crystal? Crystal? Let me in, please!”

Jarett’s hand touched her chin and gently turned her back to his eyes. “You don’t need to wake up,” he said. “Not if you don’t want to.”

“I love you, Jarett.”

He smiled. “Then let’s just stay here.”

She kissed him again, while the voice behind the door kept calling. Calling and calling. Eventually, whoever it belonged to gave up and went away.

Feeling safer than she ever had in her whole life, Crystal sat down with Jarett to eat.

 

July, 2014-September, 2015

Afterword

 

Squeezing this section of Crystal Grader in, almost a year after its publication date, makes me nervous. I’m afraid I might mess up how the text displays for you later on, or corrupt the font somehow, or even—God forbid—delete an entire fucking chapter without knowing it. Imagine that. Not a lot of people read the book you just finished, but I sure want it intact for anyone else who decides to give it a whirl. As things are, no one trusts indy authors, so we need to make damned sure we get things as perfect as possible. One wrong move and it’s curtains.

But I want to write this afterword anyway. I did it for Regions of Passion on its first anniversary, so here we are. I would also like to tell you why, just in case you’re curious, I even wrote Crystal Grader in the first place.

It started with its leading lady. Like my heroine from the first novel, I’ve known Crystal since the nineties. We started out doing some photo-shoots together. She had this really cool black outfit she liked to wear and I had a camera. She was also willing to work underwater while holding her breath—another thing she had in common with Ingrid from Regions. From these photo-shoots we moved on to doing short fiction. In one story Crystal played a spy hired to infiltrate a secret facility. It wasn’t publishable, but I liked it so much I asked if she’d be interested in doing a novel. Guess what her answer was?

By this time, Regions of Passion had already come out on Smashwords. It wasn’t doing especially well; in fact, no one was reading it at all. So when I took the idea for Crystal Grader to the little production company that exists inside my head, well… Let’s just say they looked at me for a long, long time before answering. But they green-lit it, and that’s the important thing. Except for one caveat: Tag, they said, you’ve already written one flop. If this new novel flops, please don’t expect us to green-light any more.

Talk about pressure. You might remember from my first afterword that writing Regions of Passion felt a lot like pitching in a baseball game. Not so with Crystal. With Crystal, it was two strikes and you’re out.

And I may as well tell you right now: No one at the studio had high hopes for Crystal Grader. They did not pay attention to us at all (me and the cast and crew) as we worked on it. On the day shooting wrapped, we held a very quiet, subdued party. After that, I sat alone on a sound stage, drinking Coke Light. The novel was done.

And it flopped. Christ, did it ever.

I was prepared