Fragile Grave

Fragile Grave

by Don Stancavish
Fragile Grave

Fragile Grave

by Don Stancavish

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Overview

After twenty years of journalistic drudgery, Max Kavich's career has finally taken off-he's landed a high-profile feature-writing job at the Star-Herald, New Jersey's largest newspaper. He sifts through the human wreckage of plane crashes, car wrecks, and homicides to find stories of courage and compassion.

But his life begins to mimic the chaos and danger he writes about when he receives an anonymous letter in the mail. He has five days to find and kill Benjamin Bremer, a former high school classmate. If he doesn't, Max's wife, Michelle, and their twin sons will be killed. Bremer, the 1985 class valedictorian and now a hugely successful investment banker, is almost amused when Max shares the threat with him.

Max, however, is far from amused when his family is kidnapped and a policeman is murdered in his backyard. As he is plunged further into a world of darkness, his guile and courage are pitted against the unimaginable terror that awaits him.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781450278683
Publisher: iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date: 03/15/2011
Pages: 192
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.44(d)

Read an Excerpt

Fragile Grave


By Don Stancavish

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Don Stancavish
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7868-3


Chapter One

A friend of mine once told me that it doesn't much matter whether life kicks you in the ass, or whether you do the kicking. Either way is okay. The only thing you need to watch out for, he said, is that you don't hurt anyone.

In my case, that's where things get a little complicated.

My name is Max Kavich. I'm forty-two years old. I live in a pleasant little borough called Kimball, in the central New Jersey suburbs, with my wife and our twin sons.

And until I shoved the snub-nosed muzzle of a gun against the head of another man and pulled the trigger, I thought I had conquered all the bad stuff life had thrown at me. I thought I had been the one doing all of the kicking.

My job as a general assignment reporter at The Star-Herald, the state's largest newspaper, had begun to blossom. After years of writing crime briefs from police blotters that ended up as filler in the back pages of the local section, I had recently been promoted to features writer, a position that gave me the freedom to write about the human side of any tragedy that befell people in our readership area. That was when my editor, Ralph Dennison, a gruff, pocked-faced man with a streak of undying cynicism and a white mustache yellowed along its bottom from a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, began calling me his "ORC."

One night, after I'd filed a story about a young girl whose mother and father had been arrested for running a statewide drug ring, Ralph summoned me over to his desk. It was heaped with stacks of old editions of the paper, their edges curled and yellowing, along with a pile of Styrofoam plates from the meaty dinners he ate from the company cafeteria each night and several empty Diet Coke cans. I wondered, for a moment, if Ralph was saving up his aluminum for a trip to the local landfill, and then thought better of it; Ralph was a messy guy, plain and simple, and he cared about nothing much beyond making sure every word of every story he edited was the best piece of American journalism it could be. There was something of a jaded crusader in him, but recycling wasn't part of the mission.

After I'd come over to where he sat, Ralph turned around in his swivel chair. His tie was covered with flecks of ancient grease from too many dinners eaten with his eyes focused on a computer screen instead of the food he shoveled into his mouth.

"You know, you're becoming my go-to guy," he said. "You have a flair for sifting through the wreckage and finding the shards of humanity. Do you know that?" I'd never heard Ralph Dennison compliment anyone before – not me or the six other reporters under his supervision – and I didn't know how to take what he said, didn't know whether or not the words carried the taint of sarcasm and contempt he generally used to communicate with others in the newsroom.

Before I could think of a response, my editor hacked out a dry cough and spun back around in his chair. Right before he was about to pull up the next story on his computer screen to edit, he turned his neck and said: "We're in a fucked-up business, Max. You have figured that out, right? Tragedy, misfortune, failure, sorrow, people making mindlessly stupendous mistakes, often in the public eye. They're all our stock and trade. And if the media isn't covering death or scandal, then we're writing about impending death and scandal and musing aloud on the TV or the Internet or in the papers about when bad things will happen or why they haven't happened yet."

I shook my head in agreement.

"So you want in?" he said. "You wanna be an O.R.C?"

"A what?"

"An O.R.C – it's an acronym. It's been floating around the editor's desk for years. I don't even know who came up with it, but it's short for a reporter who can render order from chaos. Get it?"

"Got it," I said.

"So what do you say, Max?"

I never hesitated in my answer.

From that night on, I wrote stories that ran alongside the front-page breaking news of the day, whether it was a plane crash, a bank robbery, a murder, or a lurid auto wreck on the Turnpike at rush hour. If I've learned anything in my twenty years in journalism, besides what my editor said to me that night, it's that people are always getting themselves in trouble. And newspapers will always write about the trouble people get into. And that's why readers will always read the paper. They're interested in the trouble other people get themselves in.

So I wrote about lost lives, the tiny mistakes in judgment we make that can turn catastrophic, passions of the heart gone awry, all under the heading of what Ralph referred to as "the ever-sickening human condition."

People loved it. They wrote letters to the editor saying as much. And when I walked out of my performance review that spring, I was whistling about the 15 percent pay raise I'd been awarded.

But this isn't a story about other people's troubles. It's a story about my own.

It was too good to last, of course. All of the great things in this world are. I was kicking life in the ass, but I was about to learn that life doesn't have to sit there taking it. Life can start kicking back. And it doesn't have to stop – ever, even when you're on the ground and there's dirt and blood all over and your arms are over your head in the best duck-and-cover position you can manage and you're moving your tongue around your mouth to try and figure out if you still have any of your front teeth left. Life is relentless; it doesn't have to stop kicking.

It can start with something simple and innocent like a letter in the mail – a piece of paper with a few words on it – and end with something as complex and disturbing like a murder.

Some, it is said, are natural murderers. They take one life, acquire a taste for it, and continue on. Others – pushed beyond their psychological limits by a spouse, a boss, a neighbor, a bully, or mistake – could never have dreamed they were capable of killing another human being. Yet within the shadowy recesses of the human heart, resentments fester, rage grows, and animalistic urges replace rationality. The details are often gruesome. People kill with guns, knives, piano wire, chemicals found under the sink, bathtubs filled with water, hot or icy, that later turns gray and fetid. Neck ties, power tools, and frozen meat have all been used as instruments of death.

This story is not only about murder. It is about whether one is morally justified in ending the life of someone who has killed many and plans to continue doing so. Circumstances – malevolent yet plausible – propelled me to do what I did. And what happened to me could happen to anyone.

By becoming a murderer, I realize that I'm part of an exclusive club, one that others appear eager to join. Looking from the inside out, however, I would advise against it. There is no glory in taking another life, despite what our morbid and cynical world tries to pump into us. And always remember: A starlet can decry her fame, and become convinced that people are no longer listening to her screams of anguish. Then she can swallow a handful of pills and drink a bottle of wine and close her eyes forever.

Chapter Two

The letter arrived on the first of June, a late-spring day suitable for framing. A cobalt sky climbed as high as you could see and a breeze soft and warm lifted the petals of the wood lilies Michelle and I had planted along the front of the house in the week after Easter. The lilies were my wife's idea. She was the home-improvement spouse, always seeing an opportunity to beautify a corner of our property whereas I am content to do nothing much beyond keeping the grass mowed. Michelle was the striver – remember that. On the other hand, I was always trying to simplify. More flowerbeds, more mulch and trees – it was my wife's grand plan to beautify our landscaping, and though she would never admit it, to make our yard the most immaculate and admired on the block. For me, it was all a load of crap that just meant more work and more money spent at the Home Depot. Fuck the Jones, I say. Keeping up with them is the worst thing that's happened to the American home front in the past half-century.

Still, I liked pushing the lawn mower. I liked working up a sweat in the warm air and listening to the hypnotic drone of the simple engine. And I liked the sound of the blades whirring underneath like an upside-down helicopter and the way the machine shot out the grass in a predictable trajectory.

A thunderstorm had passed through the night before, a malignant night rider, and left the lawn damp that morning; I had to wait until the sun dried it before I could power the push mower through the thick fescue.

On that day, ashen clouds drifted across the horizon in a procession so unhurried as to seem rehearsed, and I thought we might be in for another downpour, which would have postponed my escapist grass-cutting. But the sky was playing games; the horizon stayed wide and clear and open.

Around the time I'd finished cutting the grass, Michelle and the kids rolled up in the minivan from their weekly trip to Shop-Rite. The boys were tired. Jake sighed, his small shoulder bones collapsing into his body. He went over to the television, clicked it on and sunk into a couch cushion. Derek followed his mother around the kitchen, watching her empty the plastic bags and put away their contents – yogurt and milk and eggs in the refrigerator, cans of fruit and tomatoes and beans in the pantry, boxes of cereal and a package of oatmeal in the cabinet to the right of the sink.

When she finished with the groceries, Michelle walked down the driveway to get the mail.

"Nice job on the lawn," she said when she came back. "Did you happen to look at the flowers at the Home Depot, or that decorative stones we were considering a couple weeks ago?"

I told her I hadn't. I hadn't even needed to go and get gas for the mower. She gave me a disapproving nod and began ticking through the mail. She stopped and studied one of the letters, then handed it to me. It was addressed to me and had no return address.

I tore a corner off the top and ran my finger down the envelope's length and extracted a single page, cream-colored bond with Arial font.

YOU HAVE FIVE DAYS TO MURDER BENJAMIN BREMER. IF YOU DON'T, YOU AND YOUR FAMILY WILL DIE.

Michelle abandoned the rest of the mail on the counter and began making tuna salad for lunch. Somewhere that was both far off and near, I could hear cartoon voices coming from the television and the sound of Derek humming. He did this, we learned, as a way to shut out the world. An occupational therapist worked with him once a week, but he wasn't getting better. He was growing more distant, enclosed in a world of his own making.

I thought about the implications of the letter and I went away again. I tried to bring myself back. But a warping of space left me solitary and afraid. I thought: all in the mind, always there and nowhere else. I moved closer to Michelle, and then to Jake, who was still on the couch, to feel a physical presence, to get me away from the solitude and the darkness whipping around me, closing in fast.

I walked out of the kitchen and into the living room and then back to the kitchen. When I got to the counter where Michelle was chopping up celery into tiny bits, I braced myself the counter. Michelle looked up at me. I saw concern in her eyes, in the way her forehead wrinkled and her eyebrows arched.

I felt sweat form into hot little beads on the back of my neck and roll down the length of my back. And I knew my face had taken on a pall of torment.

"I need to talk to you, Michelle," I said.

My wife looked up at me. She saw me, but didn't see me. She'd missed the anguish, the pain in my expression. I thought your spouse was supposed to know more about you than you did. So how could she not see me freaking out? How could she not know how much I was trying to hold in?

"Sure," she said. "Just a sec, hon. Let me finish up with the tuna salad."

"No problem," I said. "Take your time." Then I went outside, walked around to the side of the yard, laid down and began punching holes into the ground with my fist. By the time I'd finished, my knuckles were stained red and green and felt like they'd been stung by black wasps caught unaware dangling upside down in their nest.

Chapter Three

"Who would send this to you?" Michelle asked. "And who is Ben Bremer?"

We were in the bedroom upstairs. Night fell like a shroud, but the sky was star-filled and we'd opened the windows upstairs to let in the cool evening air. Off in the distance I could see the glow of the recreation lights at the town park and hear the catcalls from a pickup baseball game. Derek and Jake were asleep in the bedroom next to ours and I focused and listened closely for their faint sleep-breathing.

I lay sprawled on our bed, resting on two thick pillows propped up against the headboard. Michelle crisscrossed the room, taking thick piles of clean and folded clothes from a laundry basket and putting the piles into drawers and into the shelves of our closet. I sunk my head farther into the pillows, gave up on listening for our children breathing. It felt safe there, with my head mashed into between those pillows. I began to think that they were warding off the swirling cascade of thoughts I'd been having since I'd opened the letter.

"Think, Max," Michelle said. "Was it someone you wrote about? Could it be some psychopath you wrote about, some criminal-type who went to jail and now he's out and has some kind of grudge against you?"

"I don't think that's the case," I said.

"So who is Ben Bremer?"

Michelle spit the name from her mouth like something unwanted and dangerous.

On the TV, Forrest Gump played. Gump had become a shrimp boat captain and had taken on his commanding officer from Vietnam, Lieutenant Dan, as first mate. Forrest and Dan were talking about destiny and then the lieutenant, haggard and sulky, a double-amputee who believed he should have died in the jungles of Southeast Asia, jumped off the boat and into the water, splashing and laughing as he swam on his back. Gump's voiceover was about how his friend had made peace that day with himself and with God.

Michelle went into the closet with some of my white t-shirts and came back out without them. The laundry basket emptied, she sat down on one corner of our bed and studied my face and the pillows that bracketed my head.

"You look tired," she said, "and worried."

"I am."

"Tired or worried?"

"Both."

She edged closer to me. "So who's Ben Bremer?" This time the name, as it came from Michelle, didn't appear to carry the acrid taste.

"He's a guy I went to high school with."

"A guy you went to high school with? Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? My God, you know him?"

I looked over at her, saw the worry and wan of her face. "I guess you could say that."

"What do you mean 'you guess'? You better start spilling, Max, because you're creeping me out with all this silence."

The movie went off and a commercial came on for household cleaner. We both watched it, feigning interest. When the commercial ended, Michelle looked back at me.

"So are you going to tell me?"

I pressed one of the pillows closer to my head.

"When?"

"Tomorrow," I said.

"Tomorrow?"

"Yes," I said. "Tomorrow I will tell you."

"Screw you, Max Kavich," Michelle said. "Why do you have to be so difficult?" She grabbed the pillow from her side of the bed and stormed out of the room. The next morning we went to mass and the priest spoke of a broken culture that has turned its back on God.

On the way home we'd stopped at the bakery and bought a dozen rolls. Derek and Jake ran upstairs to play and Michelle and I sat at the kitchen table. Michelle brewed a fresh pot of coffee. She took butter out of the refrigerator and set the rolls out on the table with the butter and a knife. When the coffee was ready, she filled up a mug and put it in front of me. The coffee was dark and steaming and I knew it would be a while before I could take a sip.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from Fragile Grave by Don Stancavish Copyright © 2011 by Don Stancavish. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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