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  “A place for everything and everything in its place,” she would repeat over and over.

  I tended to agree with that now for her.

  I stared at the mug for a moment longer, savoring the victory.

  Then I walked through the house again, looking in all four bedrooms, in my study, in her private room. Then I went down the narrow flight of stairs and into the wine cellar, making sure that I covered everything.

  I had come to love the wine cellar and actually stood for a short time with one hand on the wine racks and just smiled at all the wine I had bought Salina that now she would never drink.

  Then, as if I did the action every day, I took some slug bait from a trap in a back corner and spread it into the small wall heater. Then I turned on the wall heater.

  It started to crackle. Perfect.

  It worked.

  I had managed to do at least that much this year.

  I caught myself and made myself stay in perfect character for the play.

  I continued my search.

  No one.

  The house had a feel of emptiness to it, and now that I was looking around again, I could see faint signs of dust in certain places.

  The cleaning services were clearly not doing a good job.

  I moved into the kitchen area and looked out over the living room. A very empty place, even though it was full of very expensive furniture.

  I talked in the direction of my shirt pocket. “Jimmy, no one home.”

  “Be right there, buddy,” he said and hung up.

  I stood there on the edge of the living room staring around at the empty house with all the perfect furniture that had never felt like a home to me.

  The play needed to continue.

  Every detail needed to be perfect if this was to work. So I headed down the hall to make the motion of checking for her car. I had to stay on stage. That’s what kept me grounded.

  It was the only thing that mattered.

  As I expected, her car was still parked there.

  I went back to the dark granite kitchen counter as Jimmy came through the front door and moved over beside me.

  He had a very worried look on his face.

  I gave him a thumbs up and pointed to the mug.

  “So where are they?” I asked him, indicating the empty room, continuing the script we had set up.

  “Damn,” Jimmy said. “I was so hoping that this year you would remember.”

  “Remember what?” I asked.

  Jimmy started into his part of the script.

  “Three years ago Salina and Percy figured out that you were going to kick her down the road. So they tried to poison you with slug bait.”

  I shook my head. I needed to pretend I had no memory of any of that. “What happened?”

  “You managed to fight them off and get outside and call me and I managed to get you to a hospital. You were in a coma for almost four months.”

  I said nothing since I had no lines in this play and Jimmy went on talking, telling me a fantastic story that I knew wasn’t possible.

  Yet part of me wanted to believe it was possible, because it was such a nice story. A lot better than the truth I wanted to believe.

  And a ton better than the real truth.

  “When Salina and Percy realized you were going to live and they were going to be arrested, they made a run for Mexico. They didn’t make it. She’s still in jail in California for some crime they did down there and will be for another ten years before coming back up here to face charges for trying to kill you.”

  Jimmy could really tell a wild story and he had this one very well practiced after the years of telling it to me.

  Again I said nothing, staying in the part of a person who couldn’t remember anything that happened.

  “When you woke up,” Jimmy said, “you had only half your stomach left and no memory of anything. You were convinced instead that you and Salina were divorced and that she’s completely gone. You just won’t seem to believe anything else.”

  I would have never thought it would have been possible for Salina to try to kill me. I would have never thought the perfect woman in the perfect house with the perfect life had that sort of thing in her. Yet, in the real world, she got rid of everything that wasn’t perfect or fixed it, so getting rid of me would have seemed logical to her.

  It sure made for a great story for Jimmy to feed me to keep me on stage and solidly in this play.

  Jimmy just went on telling me the story that he told me every year at this point. “You’ve kept this house perfect, just as Salina would have wanted it, even though you never come here except today. Every year, on this day, you come back here to tell her you are kicking her out. And I come with you to help.”

  I honestly loved this play. It was so real.

  And Jimmy made his part of the story very convincing.

  “And it happens like this every year?” I asked.

  “Every damn year,” Jimmy said, answering my question.

  He was standing beside me, looking very worried.

  “I think I’m going to be all right. The memories of the last few years seem to be coming back.”

  “Seriously?” Jimmy asked, his square face set in frown lines.

  “Yup, I think I remember now,” I said. “At least most of it. Still some foggy places.”

  Jimmy’s large brown eyes just looked even more worried.

  “So what do you remember?” Jimmy asked. “Everything. Run me through it.”

  And so the second act of our little play started.

  ACT TWO

  “I don’t remember Salina serving me the slug bait,” I said.

  Again, this was just like being in a courtroom defending a client. My beliefs needed to be distant from my actions. I could never allow any belief but the belief I needed that day in court to come to the surface.

  And that’s the way I was playing this.

  “I do remember a doctor telling me that the kind of coma I had gone into can cause some brain damage, especially to memory.”

  Jimmy nodded, staying on his part of the script and I could feel all this becoming solid and very real.

  I smiled at my friend. “I remember you and I were planning on coming here later in the week to catch Salina and Percy doing the bed-sheet mambo and kick them out. But it never happened. Right?”

  Jimmy nodded and said nothing.

  I looked around the perfectly decorated big house.

  And just like I was supposed to do in this part of the story, I did not mention to my best friend that Salina and Percy were behind the shelves in the wine cellar. That was the script. So I went along with the game he and I were playing to bring me back to the world.

  We had tried this same game for the last couple years. Same game every year. Same script. We were getting better at it.

  This very well might be the year.

  “I have no memory of Salina being in jail however. Didn’t she and Percy just vanish?”

  “They did.” Jimmy shrugged. “I’ve thought that they were better off gone from the start.”

  “But I do like the story of her being in jail,” I said and Jimmy smiled.

  If I really had memory issues.

  As I did every year at this point in our little play, I asked the question once more. “Any idea where they are?”

  Jimmy shook his head.

  I looked around. “So why do I keep this place?”

  Jimmy shrugged and said his lines perfectly. “Maybe it’s because you think Salina and Percy might return if you keep it.”

  “That’s just flat silly,” I said, smiling at my friend and getting a smile in return.

  I knew for a fact that they had never left.

  “So you are making progress,” Jimmy said.

  “Real progress,” I said.

  I picked up the mug and put it back in the cabinet.

  A place for everything and everything in its place.

  Jimmy just nodded and smiled.


  Salina and Percy were drinking wine naked the day I walked in on them, four days before I drank the slug poison to cover for me killing them, making people believe they had tried to kill me instead. She loved her wine cellar so much. She and her lover are now happy together down there.

  A place for everything and everything in its place.

  The wine cellar is a little smaller than it was originally designed, but I doubt anyone will notice.

  “That’s a hell of a story you tell me every year,” I said to Jimmy, pretending I now remembered how much of a story it really was.

  “I’ll do anything to help,” he said.

  “Oh, you do help,” I said.

  And thus started the third act of our little play as we walked out into the afternoon sunshine.

  ACT THREE

  Salina and Percy were sitting there, in my car, Percy behind the steering wheel.

  Right on schedule, as they always were. Salina did not believe in being late for anything.

  I was now in perfect courtroom mode. I was deep in the belief of the case, knew what I had to believe and had tossed out all other beliefs. The ability to do that, stay completely submerged into the play in the courtroom, was why I had won so many cases.

  After a moment Salina and Percy got out and started up the walk toward the front door, neither saying a word to the other.

  Clearly the sex was going bad between them and poor old Percy was starting to understand what kind of woman he had gotten hooked up with.

  Jimmy and I stepped to one side and let them pass, then followed them back into the house.

  We had done the same thing every year, but this year I hoped things would be different.

  I made myself stop and not think that way. I needed to stay solidly on the script.

  “So how come we just don’t sell this place?” Percy asked. “We could sure use the money.”

  I was stunned. They had gone through most of my money and insurance in just three years. That was a lot of money.

  I pushed that thought down as well and got back into my belief system.

  Salina turned to him and gave him that nasty look she used to give me. “And have someone discover the bodies in the wine cellar?”

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  Jimmy laughed.

  Of course Salina and Percy didn’t hear me. They just headed for the wine cellar.

  Percy pulled the door open and said, “Wow, that’s a smell.”

  Jimmy glanced at me and smiled. He knew at that moment that I had managed to get the slug bait on the heater and turn it on.

  “It’s in your head,” Salina said, pushing past him and going down the stairs. “The bodies can’t smell, you fool. We wrapped them up too tightly in layers of plastic and they are behind a very solid wall, remember?”

  “How could I ever forget,” Percy said, following her.

  They went down the narrow stairs to check on where they had buried me and Jimmy behind the wine racks after killing us three years ago today.

  I turned to my best friend. “I seemed to have left the door to the wine cellar open in my check of the house.”

  “Better close it,” he said. “You know there are expensive bottles of wine down there you wouldn’t want stolen.”

  So as if I was still playing the game of looking for Salina and her lover, I moved to the wine cellar door, pushed it closed, and locked it.

  Everything in its place.

  Then I turned off the lights and went to the breaker box and flipped the breaker switch, leaving the breaker for the heater down there on.

  Jimmy just cheered beside me.

  “Holy crap, we did it!” he shouted, jumping up and down in his excitement.

  Actually, I was pretty stunned as well.

  I could feel myself smiling and smiling.

  The two people who had killed Jimmy and me were now locked with our bodies in the wine cellar in the dark.

  And they were breathing very poison air.

  A moment later I could hear Percy banging on the door shouting to be let out. His voice did not sound like he was much in control.

  Behind him I heard Salina coughing. Then she said, “Idiot! Why did you pull the door closed behind you?”

  “I didn’t,” Percy said, his voice a couple octaves higher than normal.

  Salina coughed a few more times, then said, “Break it down, you fool.”

  The door pounded hard, but I remembered that when we had that wine cellar built, Salina wanted the best material and the best locks since we were going to have a lot of expensive wine down there.

  She had said that many, many times to me during construction and in the arguments leading up to construction.

  So the door held and then after a moment there was a loud crashing sound as two bodies tumbled back down the stairs.

  And then it was silent.

  “I’ll be,” Jimmy said, laughing. “We did it! We actually did it!”

  I could feel this immense sense of satisfaction. Three years of practicing the scripts to make sure I felt connected to the real world. Three years of returning here to this house I hated on the day she had killed me and my best friend. We had caught her making love to Percy, but we didn’t expect the gun she had bought and had in the drawer beside her.

  And I didn’t know about her trips to the gun range to learn how to use the thing.

  Three years waiting for revenge.

  And now it was here.

  Outside I could hear the faint sounds of a siren headed this way.

  “She got off a 911 call,” Jimmy said, suddenly looking worried again.

  “They won’t be alive by the time the police find them,” I said, smiling at my best friend.

  “I hope you are right,” he said.

  “I am,” I said. “Head back to your waiting spot for a minute, would you? We need to start the play over just one more time. I want to make sure they find our bodies as well.”

  He looked puzzled, but just nodded and then vanished.

  A moment later his voice came over my phone inside my suit coat. “I’m here if you need me.”

  I said in the general direction of my pocket, “Listen and enjoy.”

  I put myself back in the courtroom, back in the belief that I was alive and could actually move physical objects without thinking about it.

  I believed it more than I had ever believed in a case.

  I was here to look for Salina and Percy in bed together.

  I looked around the home I hated, then moved over to the front door and opened it and left it standing open for Jimmy to come in. Just in case I had trouble when I found Salina and Percy in bed together.

  Staying solidly in my belief of where and when I was, I went back through the house, looking for Salina and her boyfriend. Making sure that with every thought, every belief, I would find them alive and making love.

  Of course, I didn’t find them.

  As I finished my search of the back bedrooms, I heard a call from the front door. “Police! Anyone here?”

  I had heard no sounds at all from the wine cellar in almost five minutes. So on the way toward the front I clicked back on the breaker lights for the wine cellar.

  Then focusing as hard as I could to stay in the act of our little play and not get caught for murdering my wife and her lover and putting their bodies behind the wine racks, I went forward to greet the police.

  I had to play this one perfectly. Just like a summary statement in front of a jury.

  I had done it a thousand times. Once more, with flourish this time.

  “Hello,” I said and two young cops both turned to me.

  Wow, they were making patrol officers young these days. Both looked like they were right out of college, if that. One even had a face of pimples.

  I pointed at the door just off the kitchen. “My wife and her boyfriend are dead down there in the wine cellar.”

  They both just looked at me, clearly stunned and trying to process what I had just s
aid. Then the one with the bad skin said, “Did you do it?”

  What a stupid question for a policeman to ask, but I was glad he did. He played right into my plan perfectly.

  “Of course I did,” I said. “I killed them. But there are two bodies behind one of the wine racks that she killed. Make sure you take care of those as well.”

  Then, while they stood there stunned, I walked for the last time out the front door of the house Salina built and I had come to hate.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” one cop said behind me and turned to follow.

  But I was gone.

  “Where did he go?” the one cop asked.

  Quickly they went in different directions around the house, looking for me while calling in for backup.

  But they would never find me, at least this part of me. I hoped they found my body down there behind the wine rack.

  But this part of me was back in my reality. I was off stage, out of the belief that I had needed to touch the few things I had needed to touch. I knew and believed now that I was only a ghost.

  And beside me, Jimmy was laughing.

  “Well played,” he said. “Who knew you could act like that.”

  “I’m a trial lawyer, remember,” I said. “I can believe anything if I really need to.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Who would have thought as a ghost I would need a lawyer.”

  Laughing, we turned and walked down Bryant Street.

  I had no idea where we were going, but anywhere was better than staying in that home with that woman.

  When the girl next door... the girl haunting your dreams for years... comes to you for help, you know things may change.

  Just maybe you might get a dream to come true.

  But sometimes dreams share a dark side with death.

  CLICKING STICKS

  ONE

  Annie.

  Five simple letters that strike fear into me like I am an American Flag and Betsy Ross is a serial killer coming at me with scissors. Annie. That simple, traditional name brings images to my mind of slightly too large breasts, narrow hips, and a smile as cold as a hooker’s zipper.

  Annie, the cheerleader, the president of my senior class, the smart girl who is destined to become “something” or “someone” if she can keep those tight little red cheerleader panties up long enough to not let her loser boyfriend get her pregnant.