Brad Parks - The Girl Next Door

I inhaled and let the breath out slowly. Compose Your Own Suicide Note. It had to be the worst creative writing assignment ever, even worse than Compose Your Own Obit.

I turned on that tiny little iPhone keyboard, opened up a new message, addressed it to Lunky, and began typing.

Dear Kevin,

It is most unfortunate that I find myself writing these words. As you know, being a reporter was everything to me. And now that I no longer have that, I find life isn’t worth living anymore.

Please tell Tina not to blame herself for what happened. She begged me to marry her many times, and perhaps if I had said yes, none of this would have happened.

But the fact is, I couldn’t marry Tina when I was in love with someone else. Her name was Nancy Marino. I never let on to anyone about my true love, but my heart burned for her every day. She wouldn’t have me, and I honored that choice. But

I put down the iPhone for a second and said, “Wait, what was that line you wanted me to use?”

“Something like, ‘If I can’t have you, no one could,’” McNabb said.

“Right, right, of course,” I said, then continued:

if I couldn’t have her, no one could. I can’t wait to join her where the angels soar.

And now it is time for me to go to a place that is deeply meaningful to me. Where Philip Roth began is where I will end. The man who gave the world Sabbath’s Theater will help set the stage for my final act.

Sincerely,

Carter

P.S. Please find my cat Deadline a good home, perhaps a farm in the country where he can continue to lead his active lifestyle.

I reviewed my effort, deciding that fertilizing day at the organic farm couldn’t have stunk worse. But, of course, that was the point. If nothing else, I hoped the fans of my writing would recognize I would never allow my last words to be so painfully trite. But even if they didn’t pick up on all the cliches, the purely comical line about Tina, or the nonsense about Nancy, the part about Deadline would throw it over the top. Deadline’s slothfulness is that legendary.

“You should be a little more direct about the Nancy thing,” said McNabb, who had been hovering over my shoulder the whole time. “You need to come out and say ‘I killed her.’”

“Nah, come on, think about it: the love-struck loser on Law amp; Order is never that straightforward,” I said. “If I really was that loony, I’d probably be too nuts to even realize what I had done.”

He grunted and continued to study my note, breathing hot exhaust in my ear-which wasn’t quite as painful as torture but had to be at least as annoying.

“What’s this Philip Roth thing?” he asked.

“It’s where you’re going to kill me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re going to kill me-excuse me, I’m going to commit suicide-outside the house where Philip Roth grew up. That’s why I wrote ‘Where Philip Roth started is where I will end.’ It’s a bit obscure, I know. But it’ll make sense when that’s where my body is found. Everyone who knows me knows I’m the biggest Roth fan there is. You want this to be believable? There’s got to be a Roth connection.”

“Roth, huh?” he said, and I could tell he was rolling it around in his head.

“You can scroll through my sent messages if you don’t believe me. Earlier today I was trying to convince Lunky that Portnoy’s Complaint was Roth’s greatest work.”

“That’s the one where that sick bastard whacks off with coleslaw or something like that?”

“Raw liver,” I corrected him, as if I were the most learned of Roth scholars.

McNabb breathed some more, mulling over whether to permit me my literary license. I took advantage of his indecision.

“You said you wanted this to be convincing, right? And you said you wanted it to distract people. Think about it: a frustrated writer commits suicide outside a famous writer’s childhood home? That’s nice, easy symbolism.”

“Okay,” he said. “Philip Roth’s house it is.”

I quickly hit the Send button on the message.

“Hey, I didn’t say to do that!” he said sharply.

“Sorry, I thought you-”

“You want to go in that trailer?” he shouted, grinding the gun into my head hard enough that it bent my neck forward and plowed my chin into my chest. “Is that what you want?”

“Just take it easy. Lunky goes home at six. Most of our reporters work ten to six. You know that. He won’t get this until tomorrow morning.”

“Never mind. Just give me the damn phone,” he barked.

I passed it back to McNabb, who promptly rolled down the window and tossed it outside. Even through my hazed windshield, I could see it sail over the weeds in the direction of the retention pond, where it would spend eternity stewing in toxicity.

“You won’t be needing that,” he said before I could offer comment. “Now let’s get moving.”

* * *

I reached forward with my arm and swiped a clean spot in my thoroughly fogged-over windshield, then started blasting the defroster so it would stay clear.

“How am I getting out of here?” I asked. “I’m not sure backing up is the best idea.”

“Drive down to the power transfer station and turn around,” he said. “Now, here are the rules: two hands on the steering wheel at all times, and keep them nice and high-ten o’clock and two o’clock. Nothing too crazy with the gas or the brake. If I don’t like what I see, I’m putting a slug in your kneecap, and I’m going to shoot first and ask questions later. So let’s not get cute.”

I eased the car back into Drive and began splashing my way forward. The road was waterlogged, and even at twenty miles per hour, we were tossing up spray like a powerboat under full throttle. The rain had slackened-it was now just a gentle drizzle-but the sky was still bruise blue, like it hadn’t yet released all its fury.

“You’re going to die tonight, Carter Ross,” he added. “You stick to the script, you die easy. You make it hard on me, I make it hard on you. That’s how it works.”

I didn’t know how this lunatic thought he’d get away with this. Except, of course, he had nearly pulled it off with Nancy.

“You know where you’re going?” he asked, when we made it back to the paved roadway.

“I told you, I’m a huge Roth fan,” I said.

Keeping my hands at the mandated position, observing all posted speed limits, and generally acting like I was taking my driver’s test all over again, I pointed us toward the turnpike-which was, as I suspected, trudging along well below the speed limit. The rain had all but stopped, though another line of storms was bearing down on us, putting on an impressive fireworks show in the distance.

Rolling along just above stall speed gave me time to start placing recent events in their proper order and to make sense of everything for the first time. As a newspaper reporter, I am trained to think in narratives. And narratives are best understood when you start at the beginning. So how had this started? Mrs. Alfaro said a man-who I now knew to be McNabb-began stalking Nancy on her paper route the Tuesday before she was killed. What event precipitated that? Peter Davidson of NLRB stopping by the diner on Monday.

But, of course, the diner probably hadn’t been his only stop that day. Davidson said he tried to investigate all aspects of an employee’s history. So the diner would have been a side stop, but if the complaint was primarily lodged against McNabb and the IFIW, that would have been Davidson’s main destination.

“It was the NLRB, wasn’t it?” I said. “The NLRB visited the State Street Grill on Monday. They came to you the same day, didn’t they?”

“Are we on the record, Mr. Eagle-Examiner reporter?” he taunted.