by Hank Early
“I wouldn’t put it past Harden.”
“Wouldn’t put what past him?”
“Killing.”
“You think he killed the man in my yard?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” she repeated.
“I wouldn’t put it past Jeb Walsh, either,” I said.
Zachariah nodded and murmured something I could just make out. It sounded like “Birds of a feather …”
“Go on,” Harriet said, her voice steady, determined.
I tried to remember where I’d left off.
“You were going back to the school,” she said. “A second trip.”
“Oh, right. Well, this time I witnessed something disturbing. Very disturbing.” I told her about the kid who was supposed to meet Sister to have sex with her.
“Sister?”
“That’s right. Do you know who that could be?”
“It’s got to be Savanna.”
I nodded. “That’s what I’m beginning to think, too.”
“How much did Rufus tell you about her?”
“Not enough.”
“Not surprising. He never wanted to hear the truth about her.”
“The truth?”
She nodded. “Finish your story. I’ll tell you then.”
“Well, the rest may be familiar to you. See, it turns out I was set up. The kid had an earpiece and was being fed lines from somewhere. He got the jump on me and knocked me off the flat rock near the waterfall, the same one where you jumped.”
“Yeah. But you got lucky. You landed on the ledge.”
“That’s right. And I don’t need to tell you that once you’re on that ledge, there’s no way out, at least from that side.”
“You made the jump?”
“I did. But I wasn’t the first, was I?”
“No.”
“What happened to you?” I nodded at the wheelchair. “Where did it happen?”
“I got lost in the cave. Did you come through the crack?”
“Yeah. I had to turn sideways and suck in my gut.”
She nodded. “Exactly. Somewhere after that, I fell into a pit. Landed on my neck. Couldn’t feel my legs. Haven’t felt them since.”
“But how did you get out of the pit?”
She held up her arm and pointed at her bicep. “Used these to drag myself out.”
Zachariah jumped in. “When I found her, she was pulling herself through the woods with her hands, grabbing roots and clawing the ground.”
She pulled up her sleeves to reveal deep scars running from her elbows to her wrists. “I was bleeding pretty bad when Zachariah found me.” She reached out and patted her friend’s shoulder. “This man is a fucking prince. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t care I was a lesbian. He kept my secret. He fed me. He wiped my ass and bathed me when I was too weak to do it myself, for God’s sake.” She pointed at the bookshelves along the wall. “He brought me every last one of those. Those books have become my life.”
I looked at Zachariah, who lowered his eyes, obviously uncomfortable with the praise. He mumbled something under his breath. It sounded like “Friendship goes both ways.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t get past the determination it had taken for Harriet to get through that cave, how easy it would have been for her to just lie there and die.
“Everybody thought you were dead,” I said.
She nodded. “I was fine with that. All I ever wanted was to be myself. To live unashamed of who I was.” She paused, screwing up her face as if to keep from weeping. “You ever read Joyce?”
“A long time ago. Don’t remember much.”
She nodded. “My favorite line in all of Joyce applies to my situation, well, maybe to all situations. I can quote it: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’ I didn’t discover that until fifteen years ago, but when I did, it immediately became my favorite line. This world around us wants to hold us down, not from success. Success is fine with the powers that be. The world wants to keep us from being who we are. I’ve flown over the gorge. I broke my back, but my spirit remains intact. Am I making sense, Mr. Marcus?”
“More than you’ll ever know.”
“Good. Now, I need to tell you about my twin sister.”
53
Rufus woke to his blindness, and had never been more thankful for the dark. The shadow girl had plagued him for hours, her presence so close to his face, like the regret that had crowded around his heart.
“Gotta piss,” he said.
He waited for the sounds of the men shuffling out of their room. They never complained, never grumbled. They came silently as ghosts and untied him without fuss. But not this time. This time, there were no footsteps creaking, no doors swinging open. He was alone.
Rufus pulled against his restraints until he felt like he might pop a blood vessel in his forehead. He stopped, breathing deeply, trying to think. His hands and feet were bound, so his options were pretty limited.
He rocked the chair back in frustration. The wooden legs creaked, and an idea came to him. His feet were tied to the legs of the chair. If he could somehow break the chair, he might be able to disentangle himself from the ropes. But how could he break it when he could barely move? He leaned forward, placing all of his weight onto his feet. Nudging himself forward with a great effort, he managed to get the chair legs off the ground. He was standing on his own two feet now. Well, standing wasn’t the right way to put it. He was still sitting, but the chair legs were in the air behind him and he had some limited mobility now. Very limited mobility. He moved one foot forward about half an inch, all the ropes would allow, and then slid the other foot up, closing the small gap. His legs ached from the pain of holding his body in such a contorted position, and he let the chair legs touch the floor again. He relaxed.
The problem was knowing where he was going. He needed to move toward something solid enough to break the chair. If he could get close enough, he thought he might be able to generate enough force to slingshot himself forward and crack the chair apart.
When his eyes had been opened during the visit from the shadow girl, he’d seen a stone fireplace to the right of the bookshelf. It was a good ten feet away from where he sat. If he could work his way over, get his chair turned around properly, he might be able to crack the chair against the stone hearth.
He took several deep breaths and leaned forward again, feeling the ache in both of his legs. This time, he managed to move his feet only an almost imperceptible amount before he shifted his weight back to the chair legs. He groaned as every muscle in his thighs and calves caught fire. He’d have to rest.
Rufus did really need to piss. He called out again. “I gotta go, assholes! Somebody going to untie me or not?”
But there was no response. He settled in, leaning his head back, and thought about the shadow girl, and how she had begun and how he had stopped her at least for a little while.
* * *
As the torture of the shadow girl had begun to take over his life so many years ago, the pleasure with Savanna intensified. Though, looking back on it now, Rufus had a hard time seeing it as pleasure. There was the thrill of anticipation, sure, and there were the lost moments of head-exploding orgasms, but afterward there was always the inversion of the orgasm, a lingering meaninglessness, a kind of fervent disappointment that haunted him. It was as if he’d finally discovered the secret of human relations, and at its core was a hollowness so profound he could hardly bear it.
Worse still, he had found himself craving more of her as soon as the hollow feelings subsided. In that way, Savanna became a kind of drug for him. After weeks of nightly sex with her in her family’s barn, he began to feel guilty, to think he was somehow flawed, that he could only connect to a woman sexually instead of on a deeper, healthier level.
At work, he was doing better, at least on the s
urface. He wasn’t sure how, but both Harden and Deloach knew about his encounters with Savanna. Deloach claimed he “had the look of a new man.” Harden said he had a “sixth sense about these things.”
They both started patting his back again, and to his surprise, both men asked him for details of the encounters, pressing him to push her to do wilder and wilder things. He never felt comfortable doing that, thank God, but eventually Savanna seemed to grow bored with their sex and told him she wanted to “spice things up a bit.”
Rufus, having no previous experience, thought this might be fairly normal and went along with some of the violence she introduced, but he drew the line when she said she wanted him to harass Harriet.
“It turns me on,” she told him. “To see that bitch suffer.”
He shook his head, more than determined not to give in. He’d realized by this point that there was something deeply wrong with Savanna. Maybe there was something wrong with him, too. He wasn’t sure about anything except that Savanna was, in some fundamental way, broken.
“I’ll make you hurt her,” she said. “I can make you do anything.”
“No,” Rufus said. He realized he wanted her to leave him alone.
“Oh, you’ll see,” she said. “I’m not like other girls, Rufus. I eat men. Or I control them. Which kind do you want to be?”
“Neither.”
“Neither is not a choice.” She reached for him and leaned in to kiss his face.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Not a choice either,” she said as she grabbed his balls, squeezing just hard enough.
And to Rufus’s disappointment, she was right again. He didn’t seem to have a choice. Once again, he found himself in bonds, tied down by chains he couldn’t even see.
54
Harriet drank some whiskey and closed her eyes. She seemed almost to pray, her face tensing and then relaxing before she opened her eyes again, and within them was pure determined calm, as if her very survival depended on not giving in to the emotions she felt. I had to guess it was something she’d had a lot of practice with.
“Savanna wasn’t like me,” she said. “I understood that from the beginning, and by the beginning, I mean the very beginning. Even as a small child, I understood she was a different kind of creature from me. She knew how to make the world work in her favor. We were twins, but you would never have known it. I was ugly and meek. She was beautiful and strong.”
As she spoke, I glanced at the bottle of whiskey on the table, now half empty between us. Zachariah still hadn’t partaken, and I envied his self-control. Somehow I envied Harriet too, a ridiculous emotion for me to feel toward a woman who was condemned to a wheelchair, but it didn’t matter. That was just one limitation, and it seemed incongruous to the rest of her, which was anything but broken. She was self-assured, smart, kind. She was a woman who needed very little in her life, and that seemed the highest compliment I could think of.
“I remember vividly when we were nine years old. We were outside, playing in the backyard. There was a cellar door there. Stone steps dug into the ground led to the base of the house and to the door that in all of my later memories remained locked. But not on that summer day. Savanna dared me to go open it. She was always daring me to do things, and even at that early age I’d developed a sort of sixth sense about her dares. They never worked out well for me. Somehow she always managed to make me feel like a loser if I didn’t do them, and if I did … well, that was sometimes even worse.
“‘We’re not supposed to open the cellar door,’ I told her.
“‘That’s because it’s where they keep the other kids,’ she said. I swear, she could be so convincing. She had this way of always making her lies sound like the other things she said. There was no way to tell the difference. And if you questioned her, she’d get so angry. Maybe it was her being my twin, but I loved her. I needed her to love me back, and sometimes she gave me just enough of that love to make me think she was normal, that we were normal.
“I asked her what she meant by the ‘other kids.’ Her answer still haunts me.”
Harriet picked up the bottle, studying it, before handing it to me. I took a sip and put it back on the table. Zachariah cleared his throat. A quick glance told me he knew what was coming, that he’d heard this story before.
“She said the other kids were the ones our mother and father had murdered. She said they kept their bodies in the cellar.
“Of course, I immediately said she was wrong, that she was lying to me.
“‘Go see for yourself,’ she said.
“‘I don’t want to,’ I told her.
“‘You have to. If you don’t, you’ll never go with me.’
“I asked her what she was talking about, and she said they were going to kill us when we turned ten too, and that I had to see if for myself. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have the courage to leave with her, to run away.” Harriet shook her head and laughed ruefully. “I was nine. I was gullible. I went to the cellar and opened the door.”
“What happened?” I said.
“I felt her push me and slam the door behind me. It was so dark inside that cellar, I panicked. I’d never been down there before, and I didn’t know where anything was. I knocked over a tool cabinet almost as soon as I tried to move. It fell, blocking my path back to the door. Outside, I heard something else fall. It sounded like an avalanche. I worked my way over to the cabinet, cutting open my heel on a screwdriver. I tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Something on the other side was stopping it. I pushed and pushed, but I couldn’t move it.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What was the sound?”
“That’s what I find most chilling now. Sometime or another, she’d discovered that the heavy cinder blocks that lined the steps were loose. She just gave them a good shove and down they went, essentially locking me in. All told, I was there for four days. My parents grilled her on my whereabouts, but she never told them anything. Search parties looked for me day and night. All the while, Savanna knew exactly where I was. I yelled and screamed and pounded on the stone walls, but no one ever heard me. If it hadn’t been for my father going down to the cellar to find another flashlight, I would have died there.”
“But you told your parents what happened when you got out, right?”
She nodded. “I did.”
“And?”
“They refused to believe she’d done it on purpose.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Me either. Well, I do because I know her. She was more believable when she lied than when she told the truth. And she could cry on demand. When I told my father what had happened, he called her into the room, and she immediately fell onto the floor and began to cry. She confessed it all, except the part that she’d done it on purpose. Instead, she made up a story about me begging her to stand guard outside the door while I went inside to see what was there. She said she stood on the rocks and knocked them loose by accident. She tried to move them to help me, but they were too heavy. She said she was too scared to tell anyone because she thought I was dead and it was her fault.”
“They bought that?”
“Every bit of it. That’s not all. A few days later, she elaborated on her original story, telling my parents I’d wanted to go in there to do ‘dirty things’ to myself. I didn’t even know what masturbation was. But she did. I think I might know why.”
“Was she abused?” It would, perhaps, be the only thing that could explain such vile behavior. Maybe she was simply acting out on her own victimhood at the hands of a monster.
“I think it’s a possibility, but I’m not sure. I am sure she knew things I didn’t. And she was sadistic. A few months later, after a period in which she’d been nicer to me than she had been in a long time, she quietly took me aside, my hand in hers, and told me she was actually glad I was still alive. Her exact words were, ‘It’s more fun to have you around, because once you’re dead, you can’t suffer anymore.’”
“Psycho
path?” I said. I was no expert but had dealt with one or two people over my career as a private investigator who I thought might fit the bill. Neither of them held a candle to what Harriet was telling me about Savanna. And Rufus had been in love with her? Jesus.
“I’ve read a little on the topic.” She gestured to her books again. “If you put a gun to my head and asked what’s wrong with Savanna, that would be my answer.” She shrugged. “It hardly matters what you call it. Her actions were evil. They didn’t get better with age, either.”
Harriet went on to tell me about their teen years, during which Savanna discovered a compelling power over boys at their school.
“They’d do anything for her, including break the law. In return, she’d have sex with them. She used it as a bargaining chip, or to get close enough to someone so she could hurt them. I watched as she went through boy after boy, literally tearing them down, reducing them to nothing more than rubble.
“I was sixteen when I had my first sexual encounter. It wouldn’t be until years later that I would understand she’d orchestrated it. She’d long suspected—probably even before I did—that I was gay. Turned out, she found another girl at our school who was gay too. She paid her to come on to me in our barn. Then she spied on us while we …”
Harriet shook her head, and I saw how painful these memories were to her.
“My sexuality became a new toy for her. She tortured me over it endlessly. Anytime I didn’t do what she wanted me to do, she threatened to tell our father. It was the only thing I dreaded more than her torture. If that doesn’t tell you the agony gay teens go through, I don’t know what will. I was literally more willing to be tortured by a psychopath than let my father know I was a lesbian.”