The Killing Club Read online

  “Death has come to your little town, Sheriff, ” from the movie Halloween.

  When that got old, we started coming up with ingenious ways to kill people we didn’t like—which was pretty much everybody we knew.

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  The Killing Club met in an old brick warehouse out on the east edge of Gloria, near some abandoned docks, that for a while had been Ben’s father’s movie theater.In the late eighties, Mr.Tymosz, who’d gotten run out of business by the cineplex, leased the building to the Pine Barrens Players, a local community theater that did too many plays (like The Iceman Cometh) that nobody in Gloria much wanted to see.“The Iceman Cometh and Wenteth” reported The Gloria Gazette. The building, still labeled Pine Barrens Playhouse, had stood empty ever since, with a faded FOR LEASE sign on it.I used to be sure that Garth had let Pudge’s friend Ben into the club (when he failed to fit the profile—he played football, he didn’t read mysteries and his idea of humor was a loud fart) only because he had a key to the padlock on the empty playhouse.We rode our bikes out there at night and held our meetings on the empty stage, sitting in old canvas director’s chairs.When new members were initiated, they got a copy of Ben’s key so they had access to the theater.Connie made the keys at his dad’s hardware store.

  The real irony of the Killing Club was that by our final year, the in-crowd at Hart High (many of whom we’d imagined murdering) was knocking on our door, wanting to join us because we wouldn’t let them do it.

  We did let in Barclay Ober the first year, though he was part of the in-crowd and nobody really liked him, because he had a very nice car.I think he was there for the pot and a girl named Amanda.But he didn’t stay long.We were sophomores and he was already a senior, already dating my sister, Gina, whom he knocked up and then married the summer after they graduated.Gina had absolutely no interest in the Killing Club.

  We invited three other girls to join in one swoop.Debbie Deklerk, 2 5

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  my best friend, because she had the first nose stud in Gloria.Amanda Kean, because she was beautiful and the guys all wanted to sleep with her, and some of them did.Wendy, I don’t remember why.I stayed secretary the whole time.Garth stayed president.

  In the beginning, the Killing Club was mostly just an excuse to hang out, drink the Lambrusco that Pudge would steal for us from Dante’s, listen on a huge boom box to Echo & the Bunneymen.As mainstream as we got was Stevie Nicks and John Mellencamp.We’d smoke Lyall’s dope and bitch about how much we hated Hart High School, our homes and our lives.

  But Garth kept the murder theme going: We had to write down our homicides in a spiral notebook that he called the Death Book and that I kept hidden in my closet at home.Each fall we’d start another one.We voted on who was most likely to get away with these imaginary murders.

  Every month we gave a Best Murder prize (a six-pack of beer or a rock album or a bag of pot).Garth won seven times; his were the most intricate and imaginative crimes.Next was Debbie—maybe just because she had more entries than anybody else; she appeared to want to murder everybody she knew.Then Connie; he always had the best “backup” plans, as he called them, sometimes two levels deep (the cover story to cover the cover story).I didn’t win that often, but I was the best at finding the flaws in other people’s crimes.It was Garth who first suggested, “Why don’t you go to cop school? Then you can arrest people instead of just bossing them around.”

  The Killing Club fell apart in the winter of our senior year when Lyall Hillier committed suicide.He was reported missing the day after that football game for the state championship where Ben had scored a touch-down that almost won the game and where Pudge had lost his pants.

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  Lyall had been at the game with Garth.He was always with Garth.

  Well, not at the game—not in the stadium stands where (Pudge had been right) I was looking for Garth—but in the parking lot, where Lyall and he were sliding blue sheets of paper under the windshield wipers of everybody’s cars.The printout called on the people of Gloria to sign a petition condemning something the government was doing.Trash cans were stuffed with hundreds of these blue sheets.

  That night was the last time I saw Lyall.Sometime before dawn, he had left a note in his coat on the docks near Pine Barrens Playhouse, saying that he was going into the river and hoped his parents would forgive him.Deep Port River is fast and cold even in summer, and at this time of year there was already a border of thin ice spreading out from the embankment.Lyall had torn the ice apart jumping in.They said he couldn’t have survived in that water for very long.They never found him.

  We were even more freaked because our first year Barclay had actually “killed” somebody in the Death Book by passing off the homicide as a drowning.According to Garth, Barclay had just lifted the idea from his favorite movie, Chinatown, which he’d admitted to liking for the men’s clothes, not the mystery.

  We wondered if Barclay’s “murder” had actually given Lyall the idea of how to kill himself.But finally we decided he had been thinking about suicide for a long time—because of odd things he’d said and done.In any case, Lyall’s good-bye note; his mother’s terrible crying at the memorial service; Garth and Ben hurrying Keith Connor, who started vomiting during the last prayer, over to the riverbank in the cemetery; and then back at Hart High, the dead boy’s daily absence from our lives—it all made the Killing Club too real.

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  Overnight, imagining murder stopped being fun.There were no more meetings.Before long, we were graduating from Hart High, headed into the future, losing touch along the way.Barclay, who had infuriated his mother by marrying my sister, flunked out of Princeton.Garth built an antiapartheid shack on Etten Green, moved into it, got arrested, went to Princeton, hated it, transferred to NYU, went into television.He never came home to Gloria.Or so I thought.

  Like many of the others, I never left.Keith Connor was ordained a Catholic priest and moved up the church ladder at Immaculate Conception after Father Cooke died to become the youngest priest to run a church that size in his diocese.Amanda got married for a living and moved up to the top of her own ladder as the wife of the CEO of Kind Lady.Others stuck closer to home: Debbie worked in her dad’s bar, Ben sold insurance for his wife’s father, Pudge worked in his family’s restaurant.And I finished up at Rutgers and joined the Gloria Police Department, where my dad had been a cop.Joe Ferrara never made detective, never wanted to.He was a uniform, thirty-three years, till some punk robbing a convenience store put him in a wheelchair.So promotion to detective, passing him by, was a hard bar for me to clear.I’d flunked the exam twice before my dad told me I wasn’t doing him any favors.

  I lived at home.It’s what good Italian girls do until they get married, but that wasn’t why I was still there.My dad’s wife had left him; I didn’t want to do it to him too.Not to a guy who was in a wheelchair because he’d jumped in front of a couple of strangers to stop some crackhead from unloading an automatic at them.Dad watched a lot of movies on TV and I watched with him.

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  . . .

  IN THE ATTIC “junk” room on the top floor of my house, I finally found the Death Books tossed behind the box I’d thought they’d be in, one labeled “HART HIGH STUFF,” with old programs and term papers.The attic was a mess; every time I went up there I vowed to clean it out.Dino’s old junk was thrown everywhere; Clay had played up there for days on end when he was younger, and now Joe Jr.periodically ransacked the place for anything he thought he could sell on eBay.

  There were three notebooks, different colors, for sophomore, junior and senior years.As secretary, I’d kept the records.As a “saver,” I’d carted them to the attic when I left for college.In the final book, I’d taped the printout I’d given everybody of the complete list of names of the club members, along with
their phone numbers.My phone number was the same.The names were:

  Jamie Ferrara, Secretary

  Garth McBride, President

  Lyall Hillier, Vice President

  Pudge Salerno, Treasurer

  Ben Tymosz

  Barclay Ober

  Amanda Kean

  Shawn Tarrini

  Debbie Deklerk

  Wendy Schumacher

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  Jeremy Zumwald

  Keith Connor

  I didn’t know what had happened to Wendy and Jeremy.Like Garth, they’d moved away.Nobody had mentioned them for years.Of the six of us still living in town, when I called them with the news about Ben, none could tell me where Wendy and Jeremy had gone, or whether they were married or not.I wasn’t married.Garth wasn’t.Debbie and of course Father Connie weren’t.Barclay had married my sister.Shawn Tarrini had married Amanda, the prettiest girl in the club, after her first husband had suddenly died of a heart attack.Shawn himself had died in a car crash two summers ago, heading back to Gloria on the Atlantic City Expressway.Amanda was on her third husband now.

  Three of the Killing Club dead before they turned thirty.Twenty-five percent.That was out of the norm.Wasn’t it?

  On the red cover of the original Death Book, decals of skulls, draw-ings of bloody daggers and the black-stenciled words “THE KILLING CLUB”

  had faded.I’d taped my copy of the old Yale lock key to the back of the cover.Carefully I turned brittle pages, looking for Ben’s first entry.I found it scrawled in pencil, no more than five words to a line.It was pretty much as Pudge had described it:

  MR. PAYTON

  I make it look like an accident. A house fire. I go over to his house and hit him over the back of the head with a baseball bat. Then I throw him down the basement steps and he breaks his neck. Or maybe I rig a wire at the top of the steps so he trips and breaks his 3 0

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  neck. I’m not even there. I’m somewhere with an alibie. Then I soak everything in gasoline and set the house on fire. The police figure it’s an accident.

  Ben Tymosz

  The anonymous comments (I recognized my own handwriting on the longest one) were not complimentary: “Stupid.” “Ditto.” “Give me a break.”

  But now it was the way Ben had died.

  AFTER GETTING GARTH’S NUMBER from Pudge, I sat by my bay window in the blue armchair.Downstairs I could hear Dad’s TV, the easygoing lecture of The History Channel.For twenty minutes, I sat looking at the phone in my lap, sipping a glass of wine.Below me in the front hall my mom’s family’s grandfather clock bonged ten times.She had left the clock behind, along with everything else.

  “This is dumb,” I finally concluded, and dialed the Manhattan number Pudge had given me.A machine picked up quickly.A brisk woman’s voice.“Ashley and Garth.Leave a message.” The machine clicked off, wasting no time.It could have meant Ashley and Garth should leave a message, or Ashley and Garth wanted you to leave a message.“Ashley”

  sounded like she didn’t care one way or the other.

  I talked quickly, as if she might cut me off.“This is a message for Garth McBride.Garth, this is Jamie Ferrara.From Gloria? Pudge Salerno gave me your phone number.He thought I should call you.I don’t know if you remember Ben Tymosz.But he died today in a fire.Like I said, 3 1

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  Pudge thought you’d want to know.” I couldn’t think of anything to add so I mumbled, “Thanks,” and punched END.

  The phone rang the minute I set it back in the cradle.Was Garth just standing there in his doubtless chic Sixty-eighth Street apartment beside his answering machine? But it was Rod calling me, asking how things had gone with Pudge.We talked a while and then he said he had something new on the death of Ben Tymosz.“Gert called in from the morgue.She talked to his doctor.The guy had pancreatic cancer.She says it was pretty bad.Maybe that’s what he wanted to talk to you about tomorrow, you think?”

  “Oh, God.Did Megan know?”

  “She said no.Said she had no idea.I called this Doctor Tischman.He says he didn’t tell anybody but Ben and that Ben didn’t want anybody to know about it.He said there wasn’t much they were going to be able to do for him.”

  “Any chance it could be suicide? Depressed about it? Insurance?”

  “It’s too crazy a way to try.No, makes no sense.Throw yourself down the stairs? You couldn’t even count on breaking your leg.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s crazier.”

  Rod patiently listened to me read him Ben’s first entry from the Death Book, in which, a decade ago, Ben had “murdered” his geometry teacher in a basement house fire.

  There was a pause while Rod thought over what I’d told him.Then he rejected my request to open an investigation.“I still say accident.So see you tomorrow.Eight okay?”

  “Eight’s fine.Don’t buy me any sticky buns!”

  “Love you lots.”

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  “Love you too.”

  Rod and I meet most mornings at Broad Street Bakery.I have a black coffee and an egg-white omelet.He has sticky buns and two cappuccinos.

  I gain weight.Rod keeps using the same worn-out hole on an old belt.

  Life, as Pudge pointed out, just isn’t fair.

  I WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the kitchen, pulled a strip of pasta off the Dante’s lasagna that I’d brought home with me and ate it as I walked down the narrow side hall to the front room.My dad was there asleep in his wheelchair, already in the pajamas and plaid robe that the nurse helped him put on after she helped him bathe.His hands rested on top of the remote control in his lap.They were hands I loved, familiar hands.

  They had liver spots on them now, and two of the fingers were crooked with arthritis.

  As I walked in, he came immediately and fully awake.It had never been possible to slip out of the house past my father the cop.“You okay?”

  “Fine, Dad.”

  “So how was the Ironworks? You sing Rod ‘Happy Birthday’?”

  “We didn’t go.Maybe you heard on the news? Ben Tymosz?”

  “Yeah, what a shame.You can’t mess with electricity like that.” He pointed at our Christmas tree.Like always it was a thick fat tree of crowded long-needle pine boughs.It had been in place in front of the window since December first and would stay there until the sixth of January.The tree had every ornament we’d ever owned on it, but each year my father threw out all the strings of electric lights and bought new ones at the after-Christmas sale at Solly’s Drugs.“You want something else to eat, Pumpkin?”

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  “I’m fine, Dad.Let me ask you something?”

  “Sure.One second.” Not tall but big-backed and strong-armed, he wheeled into the little entryway, checked his quartz watch against the grandfather clock there.His hair was thick and bright white, wavy—

  giving me hope I’d go white too in another thirty years or so.“Dino back?” he asked.

  “You kidding?”

  My baby brother, Dino, and I still live where we grew up, where my dad grew up, on the corner of Fourteenth and Dock Streets, the bad end of town, only two blocks from the river but still out of the reach of the gentrifiers.We’re at the end of the row of long, thin 1870s four-story clapboards, with a bay on each floor, so we get three sides of light.I live there because I don’t want to leave my dad.Dino lives there because it’s free.He works at Jonesy’s Marina during the day and at night he plays rhythm guitar with a heavy metal cover band at the retro rock clubs in Atlantic City when they can get the work.Dino is always in trouble with Dad, who has no patience with his way of living hand to mouth—our hands, his mouth.

  “Dino doesn’t sleep, Dad, you know that.”

  “Your mother didn’t sleep.I slept like a log.”

  It’s been twenty-three years.He hasn’t stopped talking about her.

  Th
ere is a studio photo of her four decades old in the curio cabinet still.

  “Bella DiMauro at the Poseidon Lounge, Atlantic City.Nitely.

  ” Dino

  probably figures he’ll run into her some night.I figure she’s long gone.

  “Shoot,” my father said.“Ask away.”

  I sank into the big sloppy black leather couch, Dad’s extravagance that I hated and he can’t sit in anymore, and pulled his wheelchair closer.

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  “What do you think the odds are, you could write up an accurate description of how you’d die over a decade later?”

  “Slim.” He sipped from the one little glass of grappa he lets himself have every night.It’s a ritual he likes me to share when I’m around.We clink the glasses and he says, “Tomorrow.One day at a time.”

  And I say, “We’re doing great, Dad.”

  “So,” he asked, “who wrote this accurate description? Ben Tymosz?” I nodded.“Why’d he write it up, how he would die? And how come you know about it?”

  My dad was a cop and he asked questions, which had been a drag when I was growing up, but had probably been good training.

  I told him a little bit about the Killing Club (which I’d never really talked about to him before), then I showed him Ben’s entry in the Death Book.“You kids,” he said.“Too much time on your hands.”

  We talked it through, but in the end my father agreed with Rod’s view that Ben’s death was a freak accident.The parallels with the Death Book were finally just a coincidence (albeit an unusual one).And as he headed for bed, he left me with his old warning.“Don’t let your imagination run away with you.” When I was little, he would tell me that. So often, there was a time when I was scared of my imagination, as if it could grab me out of my bed, cart me off some place from which I couldn’t find my way home.As if it had been imagination that had taken my mother away.Because why else would a mother leave her kids behind?