The Wicked Hour

by Alice Blanchard

  “Oh really? This is friendship? This professional, tiptoey politeness?”

  He looked at her with such careful eyes, her stomach jumped. “I’m your boss. You work for me. And you know what, Natalie? You were right to create a distance between us. Your instincts were correct.”

  Fear flickered in her heart. Her lips parted, but she said nothing.

  “We should keep our focus on the job, where it belongs. Don’t you think?”

  “Okay, so I pushed you away. I’m sorry. Can’t we get back to the way it was?”

  He rubbed his face and said tiredly, “Natalie.”

  “What?” she said, equally exasperated.

  He crossed his arms. “You need to learn to trust yourself.”

  “What do you mean by that? Trust myself?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said firmly, forcing her to figure it out.

  Her ears grew hot. She thought about it for a moment. “Okay. It’s true, I guess, that I don’t trust myself anymore. I don’t trust my judgment. Because, I mean, how could Grace have fooled me all those years? Why didn’t I suspect something?”

  He nodded patiently. “But that’s not the whole truth. We all slip up sometimes. You have good instincts, Natalie. You’re an excellent detective. You can trust that.”

  “Right. Got it.”

  “Not everyone catches everything. Not every case gets solved. That’s just life.”

  She pretended to suck it up, even though she felt a rock-hard disappointment in her gut. She should’ve known there was something wrong with Grace.

  “And besides,” he said, “you solved one of the biggest cases upstate New York has ever seen.”

  “Oh God. I’m so sick of hearing about the Crow Killer, Luke.”

  “I’m just saying…”

  “Saying what? Win some, lose some?”

  He looked away, his expression hardening.

  Natalie wanted to cry.

  She got up to leave, and it was as if he saw her vulnerability, and it made him want to protect her, because he leaned forward and said, “Natalie?”

  She stood motionless. The room grew still.

  “If Brandon has a beef with you, that’s his problem. If he can’t act like a mature, responsible adult and work things out, then let it go. Ignore him.”

  She nodded, tears tremoring in the corners of her eyes.

  “My door is always open. And no matter what … I’ve got your back.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Don’t hope. You can count on it.”

  “Thanks.” She walked swiftly away from him.

  4

  Natalie drove home chasing the three-quarter moon. The car radio prickled with static, so she turned it off and listened to the crackling hum of the asphalt underneath her tires as she drove past old farmsteads and orchards. Finally, she was home.

  The old house needed a lot of work. The gray paint was peeling off the siding in flakes as big as maple leaves. You couldn’t tell what color it had once been—white or green or yellow—who knew? The windows were drafty and the window frames were warped. She needed to replace them with updated energy-efficient windows. The house bled heat. She couldn’t stand the thought of going through another winter hopping from electric heater to the stove, crouching over inefficient heating vents and warming her hands on the toaster, for fuck’s sake.

  Moonlight invaded the interior of the big drafty house. She dropped her stuff on the living-room sofa and thought about moving across town to one of the nicer neighborhoods where it wasn’t so isolated. She’d been thinking about renovating and selling this one. At the very least it would keep her busy, now that Halloween season was over and done with. Max Callahan, an old friend of hers from her high school days, had been advising her that she should probably work with a contractor, but she wanted to do it herself. It was liberating to think that no one would be able to stop her. She could strip off that fugly, faded-fucking-flowery wallpaper, replaster the ceiling, and repaint the walls. She could flip this house and relocate to a vastly more modern residence with up-to-date fixtures and a dishwasher that actually worked.

  But deep down, Natalie understood why she’d probably never leave Wildwood Road. The house contained countless little mysteries, shiny beads of memory, dust particles of daydreams. The sun slanted down hard in the morning, highlighting the kitchen’s cubbyholes for knickknacks and the little hideaway ironing board. The refrigerator magnets that once held Natalie’s homework now displayed Ellie’s postcards. Out back, past Deborah’s overgrown garden, was the pet cemetery for the girls’ goldfish, hamsters, and guinea pigs. In the living room, the old pine shelving her father had put up one long-ago summer still contained her and Grace’s and Willow’s favorite childhood books. Natalie cherished these memories and couldn’t imagine her life without these daily reminders.

  Now she wandered into the kitchen, thinking she should eat. She opened the cupboards—Kashi cookies, cinnamon Pop-Tarts, instant cocoa with baby marshmallows, Snapple iced tea. She didn’t want anything. Just water. She fetched a glass from the cupboard and dropped it. It shattered on the worn tiled floor.

  “Oh, shit.”

  She got the dustpan and broom from the narrow closet and swept everything up, then realized she’d broken one of her mother’s prized possessions—it was probably a collector’s item by now—those cheap Fred Flintstone jelly glasses Deborah inherited from her mother, Grandma Lilith, who used to save money in the early 1960s by purchasing Welch’s grape jelly and using the jars as drinking glasses. There were only a dozen left—Pebbles, Bamm-Bamm, Dino the dinosaur, Fred, Betty Rubble. Scratch that. Now there were eleven.

  Natalie burst into tears.

  Everything she touched broke.

  She cleaned it up, tossed it out, then went upstairs to bed. She got undressed, put on her extra-large T-shirt, slipped under the covers, and closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, ghosts came to life.

  Natalie, Grace, and Willow—the three of them hanging out in the backyard, swinging, and riding their bikes. Sometimes they had friends over, Daisy and Bunny and Lindsey and Bella and Adam and Bobby and Max.

  Natalie’s mental exhaustion was beginning to supersede her physical exhaustion. She didn’t know if she would be getting any sleep tonight. She had to get up early in the morning, since she’d volunteered for the annual cleanup—another ploy to keep herself busy. The festivities had been going on for the entire month of October, and now thousands upon thousands of tourists would be packing their bags, and tomorrow’s mass exodus meant that they would be leaving behind block after block of litter in their wake. Tons of it. In some areas, the trash would be so thick you’d have to wade through it. Mountains of trash bags would pile up on every corner. Recovery could take days. One year, it took an entire week. Natalie had signed up to help with the voluntary efforts, and the longer it took them to clean up, the busier she would be.

  Oh God. Not another sleepless night.

  She lay awake, staring at the green glow of the digital clock, impatient for dawn.

  5

  NOVEMBER 1, THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN

  At 6:00 A.M., Natalie reached out and smacked off her alarm clock before it had a chance to blast in her ear. Still fuzzy from back-to-back shifts, she got out of bed, took a long hot shower, made a fresh pot of coffee, and grabbed a Pop-Tart. It was supposed to be her day off, but Natalie had signed up for the annual post-Halloween cleanup, and she didn’t want to be late.

  The job was voluntary, but it came with a lot of rules. You were supposed to dress down for the occasion, so she put on a worn pair of jeans, a paint-spotted T-shirt, a hoodie with holes in the elbows, and a ratty pair of sneakers—items of clothing she didn’t mind throwing away. After eight hours of handling garbage, the smell would weave itself so thoroughly into the fabric that you couldn’t salvage them. They’d have to be tossed.

  Cleanup began at dawn and carried on until midnight, with crews working in shifts. It took a lot of manpower to
remove the tons of rubbish left behind. Sometimes it took three or four days, but every single one of the volunteers agreed they would tough it out until the streets of Burning Lake were swept clean and businesses could reopen.

  Not wanting to be late, Natalie loaded up the dishwasher, put on her mandatory orange safety vest over her hoodie, scooped up her keys, and drove into town, where she signed an attendance sheet and joined a hundred other volunteers.

  Dozens of bright-eyed young members of several nonprofit organizations had shown up, along with plenty of local volunteers, including public works employees and off-duty police officers. Vans transported the volunteers to their assigned locations. Tons of trash filled the streets this morning. In places, huge overflowing piles of broken lawn chairs, overturned garbage cans, and large pieces of debris were blocking traffic, and the vans occasionally had to turn around and find another route in.

  Natalie was assigned to a three-block section of Sarah Hutchins Drive, which looked like a hurricane had blown through. She was handed a pair of puncture-resistant gloves and a surgical mask for the dust before she got out of the van. She stood for a moment with her five-man crew, scanning the commercial district. On every corner, mountains of bulging Hefty bags waited to be picked up in front of the elegant Victorian buildings. The sidewalks and alleys were blanketed with fast-food wrappers, foam cups, discarded Halloween masks, sagging pumpkins, hand-painted signs, rumpled coupons, parking tickets, soggy french fries, and half-eaten turkey legs. It was as if the town was lying flat on its ass and clasping its hungover head.

  One of the volunteers on Natalie’s crew, a middle-aged man, had been assigned the task of shoveling trash into a wheeled garbage can. She listened to his raspy breathing as she got to work picking up beer bottles and filling one heavy-duty trash bag after another, until they were almost too heavy to carry. She dragged them over to the nearest corner and stacked them on the curb. Their goal was to empty these three blocks by three o’clock this afternoon, then move on to the next location. After they were done, a dump truck would swing by to collect the piles of trash. Once the dump trucks had carted the garbage away, a street sweeper would pass through.

  It was a picture-perfect Monday morning. November 1. There was a frosty chill in the air. Church bells tolled, and pigeons scurried out of their way, flapping clumsily toward the rooftops. All the businesses in town were shuttered this morning, and very few people were out walking around besides the volunteers. NO PARKING signs covered the meters. No more activity. No more hustle and bustle.

  It worried Natalie, because she welcomed the chaos. She coped with Grace’s death by keeping busy. She’d volunteered for as much overtime as she could handle. It kept her from thinking. It exhausted her. She slept like a baby. Every night this month there had been drama. Sirens. Partying. People smoking weed in the cemeteries. Shoplifting. Drunk driving. Speeding. Jaywalking. Crowds of rowdy teenagers. But all good things had to come to an end.

  Natalie wondered how she was going to fill her time going forward—maybe get started right away on renovating her house. She wanted to knock down a few walls. She didn’t need so many cramped, boxy little rooms. She longed for plenty of space and lots of sun. Maybe buy the kind of plants you couldn’t kill. Open up the place and let it breathe.

  “Natalie?” Rainie Sandhill came out of the shop across the street. Everybody liked Rainie, the owner of Heal Thyself, a New Age boutique. She was a slender blond businesswoman with a wry smile and a big heart. “The party’s over, huh?” she said, crossing her arms and surveying the lay of the land.

  Natalie smiled. “Yeah, it’s dead as a doornail around here.” She couldn’t prevent the prickles from rising on the back of her neck. Rainie’s daughter, Angela, had been marginally involved in the tragic events of last April, but Rainie refused to hold anything against anyone—not India or Berkley, not Lindsey or Daisy or Bunny. Not even Grace. She never mentioned the horrible events of last spring and made it a point to talk about pretty much anything else besides the homicides and their reverberating echoes.

  “How much tonnage of trash do you estimate we had this year?” Rainie asked, smiling at Natalie. “Maybe two-hundred-plus?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” Natalie said honestly.

  “They say that’s how you measure the success of the season. By the amount of trash that’s left behind.”

  “Makes sense.” Natalie wiped the sweat off her brow. “It looks pretty successful from where I’m standing.”

  Rainie laughed. “I don’t get it, Natalie. Every year you’re out here.”

  She shrugged. “It reminds me of my father. He’d take me to the soup kitchen whenever he volunteered. He used to say that love moves in two directions.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet.”

  Officer Joey Lockhart was a funny guy with a long nose who liked to eat meatball subs for lunch. On those rare occasions when Natalie had gone with him on a ride-along, Joey would tear off one end of his sub and give it to her. He was generous and funny. He taught her how to keep her gloveless hands warm in the winter by folding her thumb under the rest of her fingers, like pigs in a blanket. “See that?” he’d say, showing her how it worked. “That’ll keep ’em nice and toasty, so you can keep walking the beat without getting frostbite. Pro tip.”

  Now Natalie tossed another beer bottle into the trash bag.

  “Well, anyway,” Rainie said. “You guys are the unsung heroes of Halloween, if you ask me. Here you are, raking, sweeping, and hauling all this trash off to the landfills.” She squinted down the street, where several front-end loaders and garbage trucks rumbled in the distance.

  A cool breeze sent ribbons of glitter confetti snaking across the asphalt, and a shiver shot across Natalie’s scalp. Traffic would have to be diverted, which meant more cops working triple shifts this week. She was grateful for the opportunity not to think. Hard work and no play didn’t make Natalie a dull girl. It made her sleepy and blank, which was exactly what she wanted.

  “Last year, it took five whole days to clean up this mess,” Rainie said, biting her thumbnail and eyeing Natalie with concern in her pale hazel eyes.

  “It’ll be back to normal soon,” Natalie reassured her.

  “I hope so. Would you like a cup of coffee, Natalie?”

  “No, thanks. Maybe later.”

  Dr. Swinton had advised Natalie to find somebody she could trust. Maybe Rainie was that person? After all, Natalie didn’t have a whole lot of female friends. Most of her friends were guys. Maybe that was fucked up.

  Rainie leaned forward and spoke to the rasping middle-aged man with the shovel. “Hello? Sir? Would you like some coffee?”

  “Oh,” he said, resting his shovel on the ground. “Thanks, Rainie.”

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “Oh, yes. Please.”

  “Coming right up.” Rainie hurried across the street and ducked into her shop.

  Natalie spent the next couple of hours raking up refuse and tossing overstuffed trash bags into a big pile for the dump trucks to cart away. At ten o’clock, bells tolled all over town. The middle-aged man’s breathing had grown increasingly ragged, and she finally urged him to go home. Trickles of sweat ran down her back. The sun was high in the sky. She picked up a crumpled brochure that said, “Looking for a wicked good time?”

  “Detective?”

  She glanced up and spotted a thirtysomething public works employee waving at her from an alley about a block and a half away. A nerdy-looking guy in coveralls. She set down her rake, took off her gloves, and went to see what he wanted. “Hello, there. What’s up?”

  He pointed into the alley behind him with a greasy thumb and said, “Something’s down there. In the dumpster.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “At first I thought it was a mannequin. Just the arm part, because it was sticking out of the side door, you know? But when I pulled on the hand, I realized it was attached to a body.” He grimaced and swallowed hard.

&
nbsp; A tickle of nausea flared at the back of her throat. “Stay here,” she told him, heading into the alley to investigate. It was narrow and littered with paper trash caught up in little whirlwinds of air. Matted patches of dead leaves had collected in the brick corners.

  An eerie quiet pressed against her ears. Her hands were trembling. The sheer scope and horror of the events of last spring still paralyzed her sometimes. But as a detective, she couldn’t let past events interfere with the task at hand. All her training kicked in at once.

  The forest-green dumpster was a standard front loader with several welded steel forklift pockets on either side. The air around it was cloyingly sweet. On the left flank of the dumpster was a black ribbed sliding door, where people could toss in their trash. There was also a top access lid, but it was five feet or more above the ground and difficult for some to reach. Huddled around the dumpster like sleeping drunks were all the other trash bags that wouldn’t fit inside. The dumpster was full to overflowing.

  A distant door slapped shut, jarring her. Natalie bit her tongue and could taste the salty warm blood in her mouth. She had a flash of Grace lying in her casket. It was so surreal, to stand there looking at the dead. Where was her laugh? The glint in her eyes? Her joy? Her wry amusement? All gone. It was like staring at an old photograph and wishing it to life. There were only echoes of emotions left, concentric rings of memories billowing outward beyond your grasp.

  “Check the side pocket,” the public works employee said from the mouth of the alley.

  Steeling herself, Natalie tugged on the black plastic handle, but the side door wouldn’t budge. It was stuck a quarter of the way open. The air smelled putrid. There was too much trash jamming up the mechanism. She had to wiggle the plastic door, both pushing it open and pulling out stray pieces of trash, mostly flattened cardboard containers. Finally, the door slid all the way open, and the stench of rotting vegetables hit her. She could see a slender arm wedged in between the jammed-together trash—a female arm with grayish skin and delicate, purple-tipped fingers. Natalie felt for a pulse, but of course there was none. The victim was dead.