Until Proven Innocent
Recently retired English professor Mac Faulk returns to Headley University
to teach one more creative writing class. Among the student stories,
he comes across an anonymous dark tale describing a heinous crime.
He thinks little of it--until the story starts to come true.
to teach one more creative writing class. Among the student stories,
he comes across an anonymous dark tale describing a heinous crime.
He thinks little of it--until the story starts to come true.
Chapter 1
With Jim Morrison meandering through “Riders on the Storm,” I hunkered down at my dining room table. Time to take on the first stack of student short stories. Tolstoy, my golden retriever roommate, strolled over for a vigorous head scratch. He made three clockwise turns, settled himself at my feet, and promptly fell asleep. He had his rituals; I had mine.
When I read student work, background music makes the experience feel less like a chore. My other paper-grading indulgence is a glass of wine, today a very nice cabernet sauvignon. I never drink more than one glass while reading student submissions. A second glass is my reward for getting through the pile. Besides, red wine is supposed to be good for you. I read that on Yahoo.
I studied the stack, puffed out a sigh. Thing was, I wasn’t even supposed to be doing this. I’d retired at sixty-two, after three decades teaching English at Headley University in Reymond—a small Northern California college town. Some years ago I’d managed to publish a couple of short stories, but I wanted to know once and for all if I had a novel in me. If I did, I hadn’t found it in the ten months since I’d retired.
My writer’s block was kicked to the curb when out of nowhere a former colleague, Kay Whitfield, decided to join her husband in Mississippi—two days before spring term started—and I was coerced by a panicked English Department chairman into taking over Kay’s Community Outreach creative writing class. Headley offered these noncredit classes to locals at a reduced cost, essentially a PR move. It could have been worse. I had only eight students. Besides, teaching this class counted as legitimate avoidance behavior. The alleged novel would have to wait.
As the Doors glided into the extended instrumental of “Light My Fire,” I rechecked the stories. All seven of the students who’d attended the first two classes were accounted for. But I had eight stories. The eighth one not only didn’t follow the manuscript format spelled out in the syllabus, and the writer hadn’t even put a name on it. I checked the roster again. Must be the work of Roger Cole, the one student who hadn’t shown up for either class and, therefore, hadn’t seen the syllabus.
We had an agreement. You don’t attend class; I don’t read your work. I shouldn’t even look at the thing. After all, rules are rules. I shook my head, then heard my brain screech to a halt.
Wait. Rules are rules? Where the hell did that come from? What happened to the rebel spirit I’d painted onto signs back in my civil rights and Vietnam War protest days? Had I really become some unbending old guardian of the rules?
I glanced down at Tolstoy. “So what do you think, buddy? Should I read it or not?”
Tolstoy looked up at me for a couple of seconds and laid his head back down next to my feet. Close enough to a nod. I decided to see what Mr. Cole had to offer.
With Jim Morrison meandering through “Riders on the Storm,” I hunkered down at my dining room table. Time to take on the first stack of student short stories. Tolstoy, my golden retriever roommate, strolled over for a vigorous head scratch. He made three clockwise turns, settled himself at my feet, and promptly fell asleep. He had his rituals; I had mine.
When I read student work, background music makes the experience feel less like a chore. My other paper-grading indulgence is a glass of wine, today a very nice cabernet sauvignon. I never drink more than one glass while reading student submissions. A second glass is my reward for getting through the pile. Besides, red wine is supposed to be good for you. I read that on Yahoo.
I studied the stack, puffed out a sigh. Thing was, I wasn’t even supposed to be doing this. I’d retired at sixty-two, after three decades teaching English at Headley University in Reymond—a small Northern California college town. Some years ago I’d managed to publish a couple of short stories, but I wanted to know once and for all if I had a novel in me. If I did, I hadn’t found it in the ten months since I’d retired.
My writer’s block was kicked to the curb when out of nowhere a former colleague, Kay Whitfield, decided to join her husband in Mississippi—two days before spring term started—and I was coerced by a panicked English Department chairman into taking over Kay’s Community Outreach creative writing class. Headley offered these noncredit classes to locals at a reduced cost, essentially a PR move. It could have been worse. I had only eight students. Besides, teaching this class counted as legitimate avoidance behavior. The alleged novel would have to wait.
As the Doors glided into the extended instrumental of “Light My Fire,” I rechecked the stories. All seven of the students who’d attended the first two classes were accounted for. But I had eight stories. The eighth one not only didn’t follow the manuscript format spelled out in the syllabus, and the writer hadn’t even put a name on it. I checked the roster again. Must be the work of Roger Cole, the one student who hadn’t shown up for either class and, therefore, hadn’t seen the syllabus.
We had an agreement. You don’t attend class; I don’t read your work. I shouldn’t even look at the thing. After all, rules are rules. I shook my head, then heard my brain screech to a halt.
Wait. Rules are rules? Where the hell did that come from? What happened to the rebel spirit I’d painted onto signs back in my civil rights and Vietnam War protest days? Had I really become some unbending old guardian of the rules?
I glanced down at Tolstoy. “So what do you think, buddy? Should I read it or not?”
Tolstoy looked up at me for a couple of seconds and laid his head back down next to my feet. Close enough to a nod. I decided to see what Mr. Cole had to offer.
###
The Cat Fancier
The Cat Fancier
His only contact with the elderly woman still festers in his memory. He and his mother are exiting a discount clothing store in the local mall, when they pass by the woman and her teenaged granddaughter. The girl recognizes him from math class and smiles a hello. He manages to return her greeting in spite of his own self-consciousness around girls in general and attractive ones in particular. The old woman scowls at both him and his mother, as she quickly whisks her granddaughter away. He hears the woman whisper too loudly, “They are not our kind.”
No matter that decades have passed since then. He will make her pay for this snub—for he is The Paladin. Like the brave knights of old, he is dedicated to hunting down miscreants and making them answer for their transgressions. Oh, he is quite aware that this image of a knight in shining armor has become a cliché. It is, nonetheless, an apt metaphor for his mission. Because one thing is indisputable: by humbling those unfeeling and mean-spirited individuals who deem themselves so far above others, he is, in a very real sense, making the world a better place for all.
The Paladin has kept track of the elderly widow over the years. Hers has become a highly predictable, increasingly uneventful existence. She now lives alone with her extremely spoiled, obese orange and black tabby, “Mr. Cuddles.” The cat has become the most important thing in her life. Her children have long ago moved away from the area, and she sees them, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren only on those holiday occasions when families are forced by tradition and guilt to come together in a pretense of celebration. She has no real friends, only acquaintances.
The Paladin studies her movements carefully, and one day when she is away at some pretentious charity event, he accesses her home through the bedroom window she always leaves open a crack to let in the evening air. He conceals a tiny, motion-sensitive video camera among the knickknacks in her living room and another above a cabinet in her kitchen. Now he will watch and record her movements and, soon, post streaming video via the Internet of her impending shame to the whole world.
Then, without even a modicum of warning, The Paladin strikes. All the old woman knows is that her beloved Mr. Cuddles has disappeared. Fearing the worst, the old woman looks everywhere for her missing soul mate. She forces herself to knock on the doors of her less worthy neighbors to ask if any of them have seen her precious Mr. Cuddles. No one acknowledges having noticed him recently. Many don’t even know who this strange, overdressed old woman is.
In spite of severe arthritis in her fingers, she painstakingly constructs flyers by hand on her personal lilac-colored stationery, and then, with a great physical effort, she manages to post them at various locations around the neighborhood.
No one responds to the phone number on the flyer, and it isn’t long before her grief gives way to panic. The foolish old woman keeps the cat’s food dish and water bowl full. She spends hours staring blankly out the front window, hoping to spot Mr. Cuddles waddling up the walkway. For a week she sleeps in front of that window. But despite her ill-advised diligence, Mr. Cuddles does not deign to return.
Distraught, the old woman eventually moves her vigil into the kitchen so she can stay within view of the cat door. She doesn’t want to miss even the initial second of the happy homecoming. When the food in the cat’s dish becomes stale after a couple of days, she replaces it with a fresh can of the pampered tabby’s favorite entrée.
It isn’t long before the old woman refuses to leave the house at all, hoping against hope that Mr. Cuddles will soon push his huge furry head through the cat door. She is determined he will not return to an empty house.
She no longer bothers to even get dressed, now spending her days in her thin cotton nightgown. Soon enough the old woman begins to exhaust her own supply of food. Still, she will not leave the house.
By now, she is neglecting her personal hygiene to the extent that her hair is a tangled white rat’s nest, her face is drawn and pale, and she is soon so emaciated she begins to resemble the cadaver she will soon become. The Paladin streams it all live on one of the more popular Internet sites. This elicits comments of disgust and revulsion regarding the content, but the number of views mounts exponentially.
Finally the old woman collapses, and The Paladin cleverly seizes the opportunity to return. Careful to avoid revealing himself to the cameras, he steps over the pathetic old woman on the kitchen floor, now too weak to crawl. The Paladin surreptitiously removes the cameras, as he deems the timing to be right for the “return” of Mr. Cuddles. Dispatching animals no longer holds the pleasure for him it once did.
The Paladin knows the old woman has been an occasional participant in the old folks’ senile gatherings at the local senior center, and he places an anonymous call to the center informing them that he is a concerned neighbor who is worried that Mrs. Lind may have suffered a stroke. A low-level employee rushes to her house and finds the old woman barely alive, prostrate on the kitchen floor.
After several days, the old woman returns home by ambulance from her stay in the hospital. She is still quite weak, but she has been declared out of immediate danger by the array of medical practitioners who have treated her. As a gesture of kindness, one of the paramedics retrieves the contents of the old woman’s overstuffed mailbox and places it all neatly on the kitchen table on his way out.
Among the junk mail and bills, the old woman is delighted to find a colorfully wrapped package addressed to her. There is no postmark and no return address. When she opens the package she lets out a surprisingly loud scream. The shocked ambulance driver rushes back inside to find the old woman once again collapsed on the floor, still clutching the open package. Inside is the freshly severed head of a huge orange and white tabby. Mr. Cuddles has come home at last.
The old woman is rushed back to the hospital, but she cannot be saved from a massive heart attack. The police soon discover the severed head of the cat is not what it seems. What they will never understand is that The Paladin himself is the accomplished artist who has carefully crafted this incredibly realistic facsimile of Mr. Cuddles’ visage, complete with authentic-looking fur, whiskers, and faux blood. Under other circumstances, this would likely be considered a gallery-worthy work of art. In this context, it can be appreciated more as an ingenious fabrication that is so realistic it directly causes the old woman’s fatal trauma.
The old hag will never know that her beloved Mr. Cuddles has been spared. Once the Paladin‘s plan has come to fruition, he releases the cat close to home where the fat tabby will easily be able to find his way back. But he will be much too late. This is a very clever touch of irony and another example of The Paladin’s extraordinary planning skills and his multitude of talents.
Once they discover the ruse, the police investigate further but are unable to unearth a single clue that would indicate foul play besides the faux head. In fact, everything has been done so skillfully that only two people have knowledge of the ingenious mastermind behind the old woman’s untimely demise—The Paladin and you!
No matter that decades have passed since then. He will make her pay for this snub—for he is The Paladin. Like the brave knights of old, he is dedicated to hunting down miscreants and making them answer for their transgressions. Oh, he is quite aware that this image of a knight in shining armor has become a cliché. It is, nonetheless, an apt metaphor for his mission. Because one thing is indisputable: by humbling those unfeeling and mean-spirited individuals who deem themselves so far above others, he is, in a very real sense, making the world a better place for all.
The Paladin has kept track of the elderly widow over the years. Hers has become a highly predictable, increasingly uneventful existence. She now lives alone with her extremely spoiled, obese orange and black tabby, “Mr. Cuddles.” The cat has become the most important thing in her life. Her children have long ago moved away from the area, and she sees them, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren only on those holiday occasions when families are forced by tradition and guilt to come together in a pretense of celebration. She has no real friends, only acquaintances.
The Paladin studies her movements carefully, and one day when she is away at some pretentious charity event, he accesses her home through the bedroom window she always leaves open a crack to let in the evening air. He conceals a tiny, motion-sensitive video camera among the knickknacks in her living room and another above a cabinet in her kitchen. Now he will watch and record her movements and, soon, post streaming video via the Internet of her impending shame to the whole world.
Then, without even a modicum of warning, The Paladin strikes. All the old woman knows is that her beloved Mr. Cuddles has disappeared. Fearing the worst, the old woman looks everywhere for her missing soul mate. She forces herself to knock on the doors of her less worthy neighbors to ask if any of them have seen her precious Mr. Cuddles. No one acknowledges having noticed him recently. Many don’t even know who this strange, overdressed old woman is.
In spite of severe arthritis in her fingers, she painstakingly constructs flyers by hand on her personal lilac-colored stationery, and then, with a great physical effort, she manages to post them at various locations around the neighborhood.
No one responds to the phone number on the flyer, and it isn’t long before her grief gives way to panic. The foolish old woman keeps the cat’s food dish and water bowl full. She spends hours staring blankly out the front window, hoping to spot Mr. Cuddles waddling up the walkway. For a week she sleeps in front of that window. But despite her ill-advised diligence, Mr. Cuddles does not deign to return.
Distraught, the old woman eventually moves her vigil into the kitchen so she can stay within view of the cat door. She doesn’t want to miss even the initial second of the happy homecoming. When the food in the cat’s dish becomes stale after a couple of days, she replaces it with a fresh can of the pampered tabby’s favorite entrée.
It isn’t long before the old woman refuses to leave the house at all, hoping against hope that Mr. Cuddles will soon push his huge furry head through the cat door. She is determined he will not return to an empty house.
She no longer bothers to even get dressed, now spending her days in her thin cotton nightgown. Soon enough the old woman begins to exhaust her own supply of food. Still, she will not leave the house.
By now, she is neglecting her personal hygiene to the extent that her hair is a tangled white rat’s nest, her face is drawn and pale, and she is soon so emaciated she begins to resemble the cadaver she will soon become. The Paladin streams it all live on one of the more popular Internet sites. This elicits comments of disgust and revulsion regarding the content, but the number of views mounts exponentially.
Finally the old woman collapses, and The Paladin cleverly seizes the opportunity to return. Careful to avoid revealing himself to the cameras, he steps over the pathetic old woman on the kitchen floor, now too weak to crawl. The Paladin surreptitiously removes the cameras, as he deems the timing to be right for the “return” of Mr. Cuddles. Dispatching animals no longer holds the pleasure for him it once did.
The Paladin knows the old woman has been an occasional participant in the old folks’ senile gatherings at the local senior center, and he places an anonymous call to the center informing them that he is a concerned neighbor who is worried that Mrs. Lind may have suffered a stroke. A low-level employee rushes to her house and finds the old woman barely alive, prostrate on the kitchen floor.
After several days, the old woman returns home by ambulance from her stay in the hospital. She is still quite weak, but she has been declared out of immediate danger by the array of medical practitioners who have treated her. As a gesture of kindness, one of the paramedics retrieves the contents of the old woman’s overstuffed mailbox and places it all neatly on the kitchen table on his way out.
Among the junk mail and bills, the old woman is delighted to find a colorfully wrapped package addressed to her. There is no postmark and no return address. When she opens the package she lets out a surprisingly loud scream. The shocked ambulance driver rushes back inside to find the old woman once again collapsed on the floor, still clutching the open package. Inside is the freshly severed head of a huge orange and white tabby. Mr. Cuddles has come home at last.
The old woman is rushed back to the hospital, but she cannot be saved from a massive heart attack. The police soon discover the severed head of the cat is not what it seems. What they will never understand is that The Paladin himself is the accomplished artist who has carefully crafted this incredibly realistic facsimile of Mr. Cuddles’ visage, complete with authentic-looking fur, whiskers, and faux blood. Under other circumstances, this would likely be considered a gallery-worthy work of art. In this context, it can be appreciated more as an ingenious fabrication that is so realistic it directly causes the old woman’s fatal trauma.
The old hag will never know that her beloved Mr. Cuddles has been spared. Once the Paladin‘s plan has come to fruition, he releases the cat close to home where the fat tabby will easily be able to find his way back. But he will be much too late. This is a very clever touch of irony and another example of The Paladin’s extraordinary planning skills and his multitude of talents.
Once they discover the ruse, the police investigate further but are unable to unearth a single clue that would indicate foul play besides the faux head. In fact, everything has been done so skillfully that only two people have knowledge of the ingenious mastermind behind the old woman’s untimely demise—The Paladin and you!
###
I tossed the story aside and pushed myself away from the table. Then I took a healthy swallow of cabernet. Christ! This was one sick piece of work. What kind of mind could even conceive of a story like that? Poe, maybe. But Poe’s narrators didn’t dwell on disgusting details this much. Plus, Poe was a hell of a lot better writer.
I paced, glass in hand and Tolstoy by my side. Maybe it was the work of the elusive Roger Cole. Then again, it could have been one of my other charges who felt the story might be too over-the-top for a class assignment. Hell, it could have been written by anybody. But why the bombastic Paladin persona? Apparently, he was aligning himself with the elite band of Charlemagne’s knights, although my first reaction to the name pegged him as a fan of Richard Boone in the old TV Western, Have Gun—Will Travel.
I sat back down, squared up the stack of stories, and rechecked my comments. I always made sure my notes on student work included praise as well as criticism. When I began teaching, fresh out of grad school, I tended to make a lot of smart-ass, sarcastic comments on student papers. It didn’t take me long to realize, however clever they might be, such comments can feel mean, even stomp out a creative flame. I’m still sarcastic and, sometimes, a bit of a smart-ass. It’s in my DNA. But I’m a hell of a lot kinder in my written comments. And these days I try my best to keep my sarcastic thoughts to myself. I think them but I don’t say them out loud.
In spite of its content, the Paladin’s story was comparatively well written, and the writer managed to draw me in quickly and hold me through to the end. I noted that in my comments. But I also mentioned that the arrogant tone and the artificially elevated diction were a bit off-putting and a more sophisticated writer would not have undermined the impact of the close by throwing in that last sentence.
But I had questions. Why the hell was he talking directly to me at the end? Was it some kind of challenge?
I paced, glass in hand and Tolstoy by my side. Maybe it was the work of the elusive Roger Cole. Then again, it could have been one of my other charges who felt the story might be too over-the-top for a class assignment. Hell, it could have been written by anybody. But why the bombastic Paladin persona? Apparently, he was aligning himself with the elite band of Charlemagne’s knights, although my first reaction to the name pegged him as a fan of Richard Boone in the old TV Western, Have Gun—Will Travel.
I sat back down, squared up the stack of stories, and rechecked my comments. I always made sure my notes on student work included praise as well as criticism. When I began teaching, fresh out of grad school, I tended to make a lot of smart-ass, sarcastic comments on student papers. It didn’t take me long to realize, however clever they might be, such comments can feel mean, even stomp out a creative flame. I’m still sarcastic and, sometimes, a bit of a smart-ass. It’s in my DNA. But I’m a hell of a lot kinder in my written comments. And these days I try my best to keep my sarcastic thoughts to myself. I think them but I don’t say them out loud.
In spite of its content, the Paladin’s story was comparatively well written, and the writer managed to draw me in quickly and hold me through to the end. I noted that in my comments. But I also mentioned that the arrogant tone and the artificially elevated diction were a bit off-putting and a more sophisticated writer would not have undermined the impact of the close by throwing in that last sentence.
But I had questions. Why the hell was he talking directly to me at the end? Was it some kind of challenge?