LILY, a novel by Gary Arms
Chapter 1
The last novel I wrote, THE HEAD, came out fast. I wrote the entire thing in two months. It was like riding a roller coaster every morning. This one is not coming out fast. The slowest novel I ever wrote, POSY, took me thirty years to finish. You never know. Here is my new version of LILY, Chapter 1. Three little girls discover a murderer is living in their neighborhood.
LILY, a novel by Gary Arms
Chapter 1/ The Big Rock
Trooper Joe Molto was on the guy’s tail, going a hundred miles per hour, when he got an idea. He came up beside the guy. He could see the robber, see him plain. A heavyset guy. The robber was wearing a black ski mask and a wife beater undershirt.
Just a month ago, Joe had successfully completed a driving course for cops. He’d learned how to nudge another car off the road without doing much damage to his own vehicle. He decided to give it a try. Joe was that kind of guy, he enjoyed adrenalin.
He got up even with the car he was chasing, his siren whooping, and was just about to execute the maneuver and veer into the driver’s side of the guy’s car, when he saw something that changed the situation completely. Beside the robber was a young woman. A hostage, not a girlfriend. He realized she was a hostage in a flash. That happened to him sometimes. Thinking with my gut, he called it.
Joe hesitated and did not veer into the other car. If he did, the other car would be jolted onto the shoulder of the highway and would probably flip, roll. If that happened, he might kill the hostage. He was just about to take his foot off the gas and fall back behind the other car when he realized something important. While he had been distracted, scoping out the hostage and choosing not to execute the maneuver, the robber had raised his right hand. It contained a pistol.
The robber fired through his open window. Joe felt a shock. His foot came off the gas pedal. He felt the shock through his entire body. Everything changed in that moment. Everything.
Joe reached up with his right hand and found blood. A lot of blood. He clamped his fingers over the wound in his neck, trying to stop the flow of blood. His car slowed.
Behind him, a dozen other troopers were pursuing the robber. Their cars one by one flowed past him, going a hundred miles per hour. Joe slowed, slowed more, pulled over to the shoulder, came to a complete stop. With his right hand clamped over his neck, he tried to use his radio to call for help. He could not speak. His voice was disabled.
Joe thought, I’m dying. This is it.
The other cars were ahead of him now, moving rapidly out of sight, sirens screaming.
Joe decided he was not dying, at least not dying real quick. He wasn’t passing out either.
I’m not going to just sit here and die.
He pulled back out into the highway, driving with one hand on the wheel and one hand on his neck. He followed the sirens.
There was a wooded area up ahead, beside an exit. All the troopers and their cars were collected there. The car the robber had been driving was there too. The driver’s door was open. The robber was gone. The troopers were clustered around the robber’s car, looking inside.
The robber had shot the woman he kidnapped in the head and fled before the troopers arrived.
Joe climbed out of his car, holding his throat. He couldn’t talk. It took a moment before any of the other troopers turned around and saw him.
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Joe remembered the butterfly tattoo. The heavyset guy who had shot him had been wearing a ski mask and a wife beater undershirt. His left shoulder was visible. It displayed a tattoo about the size of a man’s hand. a black butterfly with its wings outspread.
They never caught the guy who robbed the convenience store, shot Joe in the throat, and murdered the hostage. He had been wearing surgical gloves, so no fingerprints. The car, a copper brown Malibu, had been stolen earlier in the day. The security cameras in the convenience store didn’t reveal much. The robber entered the convenience store with his gun out, wearing the ski mask. The butterfly tattoo was visible on his shoulder. The hostage, Debbie Thorp, was behind the counter. A model employee, Debbie Thorp had worked for the store for two years and three months when the robber came through the door, holding his pistol. She gave him all the money in the cash register, no problem, but for some reason he’d made her come with him, pushed her in front of him as he left the store, made her get into his car.
There wasn’t much in the till, less than two hundred dollars. The store had been robbed before, so store policy was never to keep too much cash in the till. The clerk had done what she was trained to do, handed the money over to the robber right away. She did not scream, did not protest or delay, did everything right. He still kidnapped her. He shot a highway patrol in the throat, stopped his car at the edge of the woods beside the offramp, shot and killed the hostage, a single mom with a kid, shot her in the head, killing her instantly, and then he disappeared into the woods.
He never got caught. That failure was an embarrassment to all the law enforcement in the area.
Joe did not recover from his injury the way wounded law officers do in the movies. Getting shot changed him, took something out of him. The doctors patched him up. His wound healed. He learned to talk again but afterward never had much to say. He started drinking every night. His wife left him. He quit the highway patrol and lived on his pension. People said he took anti-depressants.
After his wife left him, Joe improved in at least one way. He quit drinking. He moved into the house where he had grown up. His parents were dead, so that house was his inheritance. When the house across the street became available, he bought it and rented it out. Joe lived alone in his house with his dog. People in the neighborhood said it was best not to bother him.
“Joe Molto ain’t a talker,” they said. “But he’s a good guy.”
Years passed.
“It’s coming back.” On a warm June afternoon, Lily was gently wiggling a loose tooth. It was right in the front of her mouth, an upper tooth.
Joe Molto owned their house, which was directly across the street from his house. Joe was their landlord, so they had to pay him rent every month. He was a retired highway patrolman, a tall broad-shouldered man with white hair.
When Lily’s mom went to work every day, Grandma Grace supervised her. Grandma lived with them and took care of Lily but, on certain days, Grandma had to go see one of her doctors. She had a lot of doctors. On those occasions, Lily walked across the street to Joe’s house and let him supervise her.
Joe looked at the girl for a moment. “Who’s coming back?”
“The Big Rock.” Lily wiggled her loose tooth; it was still too tightly attached to yank on. “It’s coming back. All us kids are talking about it.”
Joe was sitting in the shade on his porch swing, and Lily was sitting beside him. She was the kind of girl who had remarkably long red hair.
Lily liked to dance in her front yard. These dances were spontaneous and involved holding out her arms and twirling until she fell over. A minute ago, she had been twirling and falling over in Joe’s front yard, but now she had tired of that activity, and was sitting on the porch swing beside him.
Joe felt the girl needed more friends her own age. So far as he could tell, she didn’t have any except that tomboy June Mae who lived in the house behind Joe.
Lily said, “Did I tell you my mom is going to marry Larry at the end of the summer, in August? I have to be in the wedding. I get to wear a beautiful bride’s maid’s dress. Did I tell you?”
“Only about a hundred times.”
Lily wiggled her tooth. “Well, it’s coming back. The Big Rock. I thought you might like to know.”
The Big Rock was famous in their neighborhood. At least, it had been famous until it had been buried.
“How do you know about the Big Rock? You’ve never even seen it.” The Big Rock had been buried the year before Lily and her mom and grandmother had moved into the neighborhood.
“Everybody knows about it. There’s even a picture of it at my school.”
The Big Rock was a huge boulder that had sat like the statue of an elderly elephant on one corner of the park at the end of Park Street, which was the street where Lily and Joe lived. Big Rock Park had filled an entire city block and contained slides and swings and a merry-go-round, but the Big Rock had been its main attraction. Kids loved it.
Neighborhood girls had said if you kissed a boy while sitting on top of the Big Rock, you would get to marry him. Boys believed if they were able to stand erect on top of the elephant’s spine and wave their fists in the air, they might someday become a sports hero. All the neighborhood children believed if you could stand on top of the Big Rock and leap to the ground seven feet below without turning an ankle or breaking a bone, you would never again be afraid to do anything.
Adults claimed the Big Rock was a huge boulder that had been pushed into their neighborhood thousands of years ago by a glacier. They said the Big Rock, the part above ground, was just the tip of the boulder.
Kids believed the Big Rock was not merely an enormous boulder. It had a living presence. They sat on top of it and whispered secrets to it. Generations of kids loved it. And then, one day, the town in its wisdom decided it needed to use the entire square block that contained the Big Rock for a brand-new elementary school, a very large and very modern school that would replace two old schools that had gotten rickety and old-fashioned.
The park’s swings and slides and the merry-go-round were removed to make room for the new school. The Big Rock also had to go. The town needed its location to build a parking lot for the teachers who would teach in the new school.
Workmen with enormous machines attempted to remove the Big Rock. They dug a deep muddy pit all around it. The workmen had to fence off the pit because the local mothers were terrified their small children would fall into it and drown in the mud and water that had accumulated at its bottom.
Once the pit was dug, everyone could see the Big Rock, all of it. It dwarfed the backhoes that dug it out with their big buckets. It was magnificent, ancient. If you stood there on the other side of the fence and looked at it, you felt small and insignificant.
At first, the town planned to bring in a crane tall enough to haul the Big Rock out of its pit, load it onto a truck bed, and cart it away to a new home, outside the town limits. Unfortunately, once it was dug out, it was simply too enormous to move. No truck bed could have contained an object so huge. It would have crushed the truck.
The town contemplated breaking the Big Rock into smaller pieces with dynamite, but the danger and expense of this operation was determined to be too much. Instead, the Big Rock was turned on its side and buried in the muddy pit. A parking lot was built over it and a sidewalk with a strip of grass beside it.
If you were new to the neighborhood, you would not know it had ever contained a Big Rock, but sooner or later someone would tell you about it and point out the location of its grave. It was as if the founder of the town was buried there.
Lily said of course she knew everything about the Big Rock. She said all the kids at her school (Lily attended the new school) knew about it because there was a framed photograph of it hanging on the wall beside the classroom for the Third Grade, Mrs. Alabaster’s room. Besides, her mother had told her about it. Long ago, her mom had kissed a boy with red hair in the shade of the Big Rock. And sure enough, Lily’s mom had married that boy right after high school. Lily said her dad was long gone. He now lived with his new family in Arkansas, and Lily hardly ever saw him. However, she did inherit his red hair.
Lily wiggled her tooth again.
Joe said, “You keep pulling at that, it’s gonna bleed.”
“I could show it to you if you want. The Big Rock.”
Joe rubbed his chin. “I guess Otway could use a walk.”
Otway was the name of Joe’s dog, a mutt who was at least 16 years old. Otway was a heavyset, short-legged dog who walked slowly and liked to stop frequently to pee.
Joe put Otway on his leash and the three of them walked to the new school. They arrived at a sidewalk that ran beside a strip of lawn.
“See?” Lily pointed.
In the middle of the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the teachers’ parking lot was a bit of rock about the size of a dinner platter. It was indeed possible to believe this patch of rock was a bit of the side of the Big Rock, and that the buried boulder was slowly emerging from its grave.
“Kids say if you sit on it and close your eyes and hold your fingers like this,” Lily laced her fingers together, “one of them will come true.”
“Only one?”
“If you want all three to come true, you have to come here at night, at midnight.”
“You’ve done that?”
She shook her head. “Not yet.”
“What would you wish for?”
Lily shot Joe a look that suggested she sometimes suspected he was a bit stupid. “If you tell people what you are going to wish for, it won’t come true. You won’t get any of your wishes. Don’t you know that?”
That night, at five minutes before midnight, wearing her pajamas, Lily slipped out of her house. Her mother and grandmother were sound asleep in their bedrooms.
Wearing flipflops, Lily walked quickly down the sidewalk to her school, walked through pools of light cast by the streetlights, to the Big Rock, to the patch of it the size of a dinner platter, the bit of it that revealed it was slowly rising from its tomb.
No cars drove by. The entire town seemed to be sound asleep. She took off her flipflops so she could feel the Big Rock with her bare toes.
Standing barefoot on top of the cold, hard surface of the Big Rock, Lily felt afraid suddenly, a moment of panic, as if she was standing on top of something enormous and alive, a living thing much too ancient and inhuman to care about little girls. For a moment, she nearly fled, leaving her flipflops behind, but then she hardened herself.
“Do it, you big chicken.”
Lily squatted down, arranged her hands and fingers in the proper positions, and wished for three things.
“Number One, the Disney Channel.” Despite the fact that all the girls in Lily’s grade got cable TV and the Disney Channel (it came with basic cable), Lily did not have cable. She was the only girl in her class who could not watch the Disney Channel. All her schoolmates had seen The High School Musical starring Zac Efron. Some of them had seen this movie so many times they could recite all the dialogue. They had also seen the TV show Hannah Montana, starring Miley Cyrus. All the girls wanted to dress exactly like Miley Cyrus.
Lily’s mom said they could not afford cable. If Lily desperately needed to watch Hannah Montana, she could go over to June Mae’s house. Not only did June Mae get the Disney Channel, she had a pillow with Zac Efron’s face on it.
To calm herself, Lily breathed in and out three times. “My Number Two Wish, a girl my age will move into the house where the accountant Mr. Simpson used to live, a nice girl, not one like June Mae, a smart funny nice girl who will be my best friend.”
Lily breathed in and out through her nose and thought about her third wish. It seemed darker than her first two wishes. Maybe she should wish for something else. Then, she decided to do it. Probably it would not even come true.
“Number Three, that Mom never ever marry Larry.”
Having done all this, having achieved her mission without anyone noticing, Lily slipped her feet back into her flipflops and ran home. She ran all the way as if pursued by wolves.
Back inside her own room, Lily slipped her feet out of her flipflops and lay down on her bed, on top of the sheet, closed her eyes, and tried to fall asleep. Her heart was beating so wildly, she thought she could hear it. She feared she might have a heart attack. She might vomit.