blue eyes so intent on the words in that thick paperback, he’d assumed she was intelligent. The last thing he wanted was a dumb pet.
“Please,” he said. “Have something to eat. The food’s not poisoned, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He speared a slice with the fork and slid the thin wet flesh into his mouth. It was gamey, but the soy sauce and the herbs really added flavor. He chewed, swallowed, smiled. “See?”
Did her throat swell with a bated gulp? With that leather leash bound so tight, it was so difficult to tell. Timothy took a step forward. He speared another slice and held it out to her, mere inches from her nostrils.
She stared at it.
Timothy was certain Lynette had an appetite. It had nothing to do with her size. She had been through an ordeal, and animals dealt with stress via sex and/or food. He was just trying to make her comfortable. He wanted this relationship to work. After Dwight and the puppy and—
She reached forward and with her teeth she sucked the meat off the fork. Timothy wanted to clap, but that would have meant putting down the plate. Instead, he took another step forward. Now maybe fourteen inches away from her.
“Thank you,” she muttered. Her lips gleamed with steak blood. “What is it?”
“You should know, silly. It’s your left hand. Silly, silly pet. Want some more?”
With his left hand, he loaded another slice onto the fork and brought it to her mouth. He almost made an airplane noise.
Briefly, their breaths intermingled. This, finally, was intimacy. Timothy felt warm inside. This was true love, an owner to his pet.
And then she forcefully chomped down on his left wrist. Timothy recoiled, but her jaw held fast. Her incisors pierced his paper-thin flesh and dug deep into his plump antebrachial vein. Blood squirted into her throat and almost made her gag but she held fast and squeezed tighter with her jaw. She wanted to hear his bones snap. She heard something shatter but that was just the ceramic plate with the pieces of her hand, her hand, her hand…
She opened her mouth briefly for air—she needed to breathe, she needed to throw up!—and that’s when Timothy stabbed the fork into one of those blue eyes that had attracted him so, stabbed her all the way into the soft tissue of her frontal lobe. Blue ran red. Blue ran red.
Timothy took a step back. He held his gnawed wrist to his chest. He would need a tourniquet. But first he took one last, long, disappointed look at Lynette. What a bad, bad pet she had turned out to be.
He found a first aid kit upstairs, in a bathroom attached to the master bedroom, and after dousing his wrist in fiery iodine, wrapped it tightly in toilet paper and then Ace bandages. It was a temporary solution, but it would have to suffice. While upstairs, Timothy wandered the halls. This wasn’t his house, but he knew the occupants wouldn’t be back for another twelve days (according to the information he’d gleaned at his father’s travel agency). He tested each of the three beds. The king-size in the master bedroom was the most comfortable—firm but not too stiff. Timothy wanted to take a nap. His left hand felt…well, felt nothing at all, and he knew that was not a good sign. Begrudgingly, he roused himself from the king-size bed and made his way back downstairs to the kitchen. It was time to go.
But first, the photographs.
He slid out an iPhone from his jeans pocket. Taking pictures was not his cup of tea, but Cain42 had posted strict requirements, and Timothy intended to meet them all. Of course, he hadn’t intended to meet them today—he’d hoped to have a lot more time with his pet—but c’est la vie. He ambled down the wooden stairs into the basement and aimed his smartphone’s camera at his expet. She lay crumpled in the corner. Her head lolled to the side like an infant’s. Timothy quickly snapped off a series of pictures and reviewed them on the camera’s LCD screen. They weren’t the most original photographs in the world—for one, the sixty-watt lighting in the basement dispersed in uneven patches and cast some unfortunate shadows across Lynette’s corpse—but they would have to do. Timothy slid his iPhone back into his jeans pocket, waved goodbye with his good hand to the one-eyed blonde in the corner and returned to the kitchen. Now it was time to go.
He dialed the gas stove. It activated with a hiss. He then opened the nearby microwave door, snagged six cans of Campbell’s soup from the pantry shelves and hefted them one by one onto the microwave’s glass plate. The microwave door closed with an agreeable click. Hiss, click. Such pleasant sounds a kitchen made. He set the timer for thirty minutes and hightailed it for the back door. He had no idea how long the metal cans would take to spark and ignite, and he didn’t want to take any chances.
As it turned out, he was able to make it all the way to the end of the residential block before the kitchen exploded. One of Cain42’s cardinal rules: the cleanest crime scene is a destroyed crime scene. Glass splattered onto the front lawn. Flames licked through the open windows at the house’s placid green exterior. Green became black. Soon everything on that plot of land—the master bedroom, the grass, the remains of Timothy’s pet—would be black.
Fire always painted in monochrome.
Timothy inconspicuously joined the gathering crowd come to watch the fireworks. There weren’t many people, really. Most of the suburban neighborhood’s occupants were at work. But there were enough to blend in, at least until the M7 bus arrived and Timothy was whisked far away from the blaze. The bus left the curb as the first of the fire engines showed up. Timothy hoped none of the firefighters got injured. Good people, firefighters.
He unrolled his earbuds, plugged them into his iPhone and listened to an album of Brahms lullabies as the Sullivan County bus traveled into the next town over. Once there, he transferred to a Trailways bus, which deposited him a few dozen miles east to New Paltz. By then it was dusk, dusk on his birthday. From the New Paltz terminal, Timothy used some cash from Lynette’s wallet, which he had in his other pocket, to pay for a cab home.
Another of Cain42’s rules: always hunt far from where you sleep.
Timothy’s house was not far from historic Huguenot Street, a minivillage of Colonial America located in the heart of New Paltz. When he was much younger, sometime between the cats and the goldfish, Timothy’s parents took him to Huguenot Street to tour rustic Locust Lawn and the nearby spacious Ellis House, with its spooky Queen Anne interior. All the while, folks dressed up in colonial drapery mingled to and fro. Many of them were students at the local university looking to earn a few extra bucks. Even at that young age, Timothy found the whole affair to be delightfully weird. He longed to live in the Ellis House, and often wondered how difficult it would be to break in, and steal a nap on that small, square, starched bed.
Timothy apparently had a thing for other people’s beds.
His own bed lay in a two-story American foursquare on a street lined with two-story American foursquares. All were squat, with faces made of brick and stucco. Most had cookie-cutter porticos bookending their front doors, which were various shades of white. Timothy only recognized his by rote. He offered the cabdriver a modest tip and hopped out onto the well-trimmed front lawn. Old, knee-high bushes bracketed the two short steps that led from lawn to landing. Timothy had several pets buried in the soil behind those bushes. He thought of them with fondness every time he opened his front door.
“There he is!” he heard his mother say, and this kept him from bounding up the stairs to his bedroom. Instead, he made his way into the den. Mother sat in her chair, predictably engrossed in her needlepoint. Today’s project was embroidering the smiley face of Christ Jesus onto a mauve cushion. She donated all of her needlepoint to the local Salvation Army, where she volunteered every Saturday from
