The Alamond Affair (Sneak peek 1)

“I met the girl in Alamond, ” I explained to the sheriff , a short pot-bellied man who wore a perpetual frown on his face like he was mad at the world for allowing his mother to mate with his godforsaken father. I have known men to bond over such commonalities, but I was beyond rédemption when it came to this particular man. He was a necessary evil in my story. Had my mother been any wiser, she would have locked herself in the house and ovulated in peace thirty-two years ago. This catastrophe could have been avoided.

“I was thirty, and she was twenty-five,” I continued, averting my eyes towards the middle-aged plump woman sitting next to the abominable creature, scribbling notes like her life depended on it. I liked her. Her disposition and her overall dress sense reminded me of the preacher’s wife who lived next door to us when I was a lad. I could imagine church bells ringing, announcing the coming of Christ whenever she opened her mouth to speak. The two of them sitting in front of me like that reminded me of a specific lesson in my Math class about balanced equations.

“It was a hot summer afternoon,” I ventured. The lovely woman continued her scribbling. “I had never known betrayal such as the one the pores of my own skin dealt me under that blazing sun. At first, she was a vision out of my peripheral, like a distant mirage slowly coming to life with each step I took. A slight shift of my head and behold the essence of my rapture.”

The sheriff looked like he was about ready to lose the six humans he had had for lunch that afternoon. The lines on his forehead doubled in size, if that were possible. He was furiously tapping his foot in irritation, itching to pass some snide remark about hastening things up but he was too cowardly to dare incur my wrath like that. I was never the poetic kind, but there was a lady in our midst. I needed to break down gently to her the gruesome details of the past two years of my life that led us to this very moment. Had I known earlier that the creature was so averse to poetry, I would have been sending him special lines on every birthday. By now he would have keeled over from sheer fury.

“For a man who had never been gifted anything in his life, let alone favorable odds,” I said curtly and felt the sheriff shift uncomfortably in his seat. Good. “I was to embrace this woman with every fibre of my being even if doing so would be the beginning of my end. But who was to say that I had lived at all before her?”

The lovely woman smiled and I swear I heard a choir belt a chorus in the distance. Caroline. I finally remembered her name. She motioned for me to continue and I did.

” If I were to pop off and keel to my end in that very instant,” I said ever so dramatically for the sheriff’s benefit, ” I wished for the stone that would house my being to read: herein lies a man who had lived his life to the fullest. For indeed, Chaminey was my beginning and my end. She was my everything. My home.”

The sheriff shifted noisily in his seat before growling at me. “I only need to know how your wife ended up dead in your living room, with a bullet straight to her skull.”

I looked at Caroline and begged her with my eyes to brace herself for what I was about to say. The lovely woman smiled nervously at me and held her pen at the ready.

” I killed her,” I stated simply.

Caroline gasped, pen hit the floor as her hands flew to cover her mouth. There was a triamphant smirk on the sheriff’s face, not a surprising sight. He had me right where he needed me, or so he thought.

He should have known better, the poor bugger. I was after all his son.

 

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