Just as Papa started for the front door it flung open, and Lester stood in the doorway with a shotgun. Papa managed to take his gun out of the back of his pants just as Lester blew a hole in his chest and sent him flopping across the room in a bloody heap.
Papa’s gun landed a few feet from Bumby, and Bumby snapped out of his trance and dove for it. Lester cursed and pumped his shotgun as Bumby, possessed of some preternatural surge of agility, managed to grab Papa’s gun, roll on the floor and avoid most of Lester’s next shot. A few pellets struck Bumby in the leg, but before Lester could pump and fire again, Bumby got off two shots, and one of them hit Lester in the stomach. Lester writhed on the floor and clutched his stomach, but the light in his eyes was already starting to fade.
Bumby looked at his hand holding the gun in a daze, then slowly lifted his head to look at Lester, gasping on the floor like a fish out of water. Papa lay dead beside him. Bumby stood and approached, his feet squishing into the fresh blood, and he kicked the shotgun away with his foot. He wiped the pistol with his shirt, wrapped Papa’s dead fingers around the handle, then let it fall beside him.
Bumby noticed Lester was trying to say something, and Bumby bent down, right next to Lester’s crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.
“I’m sorry,” Lester whispered. “He made me do it.”
They were the last words my poor Lester would ever say.
Sergeant Cohn approached the Hemingway house a few weeks later, stopping at the front entrance to admire the grandness of it all: the façade from a bygone era, the wraparound balcony caressed by fronds, the proud green shutters and paradisiacal setting. He waded through the tourists and went around to the back, following the garden path until he came to the caretaker’s house, which looked a little brighter these days. It had a fresh coat of paint, and flowers had been placed on the narrow balcony.
Sergeant Cohn knocked on the door, and a few moments later it opened and Bumby stood in the doorway, leaning on a crutch, pad in hand and pen behind his ear.
“Come on in, Sergeant. I was just finishing up a chapter.”
“How’s the writing coming these days?”
“Better than ever, better than ever. What can I say? This place has been an inspiration. Change is good for the soul.”
“There’ve been a lot of changes in your life, from what I hear around town. No more Hemingway impersonations, no more visits to Madame Gertrude, and I even hear you broke things off with your writing group. Jean-Paul says you never leave the house, except to take care of the estate.”
“I think a little solitude was just the change of pace I needed. And I won’t deny that living here, with all these memories, has been good for the muse.”
Sergeant Cohn smiled thinly. “Memories, eh? It was real good of you to take over Lester’s job. Some men might’ve been a little squeamish, living in a house where he watched his friend die.”
Bumby shrugged. “Old Lester wasn’t quite right in the head. I don’t hold it against him, you know?”
“It takes a big man to forgive someone who killed five of his close friends.”
Bumby spread his hands. “I’m not a very big man, so I don’t know what to say.”
The Sergeant grunted.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Nope, just stopping by. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, though.”
“Anything, Sergeant.”
“I know we discussed this already down at the station, and the DNA evidence is conclusive that Lester did all the killings. We found a pile of clothes with dried blood under his bed, for God’s sake.”
Bumby shook his head with appropriate disbelief.
“I was just wondering, since you’ve been here a while now, living what some might call another man’s life, if it’s given you any insight as to why he might’ve done it?”
“Sorry?”
“Lester’s motive. Why he killed your friends, went on a rampage against the Hemingway impersonators in town.”
“I wish I knew, Sarge, I wish I knew. Just went a little crazy in the end, I suppose.”
“The six of you weren’t involved in anything I should know about, were you now?”
“Nothing besides doing our best to honor a great man.”
The Sergeant glanced behind Bumby to the interior of the house, at the freshly-cleaned rug, the photos still on the mantle, Bumby’s new writing desk in the center of the room. His gaze returned to Bumby, and he gave him a long stare. “You take care of yourself, you hear?”
“Sure will, Sarge. I appreciate you stopping by.”
“If you do get any insight as to why he did it, be sure to let me know. It’ll help me sleep at night.”
“Of course,” Bumby murmured.
After Sergeant Cohn left, after the museum gates were closed and the old estate lay still and quiet in the night, Bumby moved the writing desk and then the rug aside, and descended into the basement, into his real writing room, the solitary desk surrounded by the secret relics of the man who was, in Bumby’s opinion, the greatest writer who has ever lived.
Bumby didn’t go to his chair and brand new computer. Instead he pulled Champ’s Ouija Board off the top of one of the bookshelves, and set it on the floor. He warmed up the planchette, then asked the question he always asked first.
“Are you there?”
I spelled out,—OF COURSE-
“Do you think Cohn suspects anything?”
-HE IS CLEVER—I said,—BUT HE WILL NEVER KNOW AND I WILL WATCH HIM-
Bumby swallowed. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, are you sure you’re not upset about your son?”
I enjoyed watching Bumby’s pathetic squirming.—OF COURSE NOT HE IS WITH ME NOW-
Bumby exhaled with relief. “Good. Because I didn’t have a choice, you know. I didn’t mean to.”
I let him stew in his own filthy guilt, and didn’t bother to tell him that it had worked out perfectly, because my son had cancer and was dying. In fact, I couldn’t have planned it better: my secret was safe, the counter ritual remained hidden within the bookshelves, some of those disgusting impersonators were disposed of in the process, and I had found the perfect successor, someone as obsessive as I once was.
Of course, even I shuddered to think at the things I would do to Bumby to avenge my son, once Bumby’s day arrived and I could reach him.
Bumby said, with a childlike nervousness, “Can I talk to him tonight? Please?”
-JUST FOR A MINUTE-
One day the fool might figure out that he can contact him directly from the grounds, and that I can’t intervene, which is how they reached him in the first place. A nasty little quirk in the ritual over which I have no control.
“Ernest?” Bumby said, and I faded into the background to watch.
-YES-
“Nice to hear you tonight.”
-HELP ME-
“I’m sorry, you know how much I love you, but I can’t yet. I haven’t figured out how.”
-YOU MUST-
“I’ll help you one day,” Bumby whispered. “I promise.”
-PLEASE-
“Now,” Bumby said, having to grit his teeth to block out the guilt, “let’s discuss that troublesome paragraph in chapter three again. I can’t seem to get it quite right.”
Hemingway’s ghost wailed, and the last doe-eyed tourists still standing outside the closed gates, trying to absorb the essence of the great man himself, mistook the spectral cry for the whisper of the breeze through the palms.
About the Author
In addition to writing, Layton Green was a practicing attorney for the better part of a decade. He has also traveled to more than fifty countries, and has been an intern for the United Nations, an ESL teacher in Central America, a bartender in London, a seller of cheap knives on the streets of Brixton, a door to door phone book deliverer, and the list goes downhill from there.
Layton is also the Kindle bestselling author of The Summoner, the first work in a globe-hopping suspense series whose protagonists investigate the world’s most bizarre and dangerous cults. See below for more information on The Summoner, and please visit Layton at www.laytongreen.com for a free sample and more. Look for The Immortalist, the next novel in the Dominic Grey series, coming soon.