They Did Bad Things

by Lauren A. Forry

  Oliver’s phone buzzed. All of her messages suddenly came through, at least one every half hour since 4 p.m. yesterday when he hadn’t returned to the house as usual.

  Traffic bad?

  Long line @ shop?

  If @ shop get extra bottle. It is the weekend!

  Why aren’t u answering?

  Are u ok?

  Useless. Your dad never this bad.

  Do u hate me? Is that it?

  Like your sister now? Never talk to me again?

  I don’t need u. No one does.

  He should delete the lot. But he couldn’t. Many times his sister—half-sister—had begged him to leave Mum to her fate. What was the word his sister had used? Codependent. Enabling. Easy enough for her to get away, though. She didn’t need their mother. She had a dad who adored her. A dad with money. Last time Oliver got the nerve to look up his dad, the old coot was on a fishing trawler somewhere near Alaska.

  “It’s not here,” Lorna said.

  “Huh?”

  “Hollis’s notepad.”

  But Oliver wasn’t listening. Mum had texted, so Mum had his attention. Callum had noticed, back in the day, the effect Mum had on him, after another phone call left Oliver scrambling to get home. Callum said it was good to love your parents, but you had to set boundaries. You couldn’t let them get away with disrupting your life, especially when it was hurting you. He’d had that look, one where Oliver could tell he was speaking from experience, but Oliver couldn’t remember if he’d said anything else. Oliver had never taken Callum’s advice.

  When he looked up again, Lorna was gone. Ellie, too, was nowhere to be seen.

  “Shit.” He hurried into the hall. “Lorna? Lorna!”

  He turned and bumped right into her.

  “Ow!” Lorna rubbed her shoulder. “Calm down. I’m taking a look in Maeve’s room. If your theory’s right and she killed Hollis, she might have hid his notepad there.”

  “Don’t you mean our theory?” Oliver asked, but Lorna didn’t answer, already caught up in her search.

  Flashes of Caldwell Street returned to him as he observed the mess in Maeve’s room. Her belongings had expanded to fit the available space like scum on the surface of a pond. Clothes scattered on the floor and furniture. Various face washes and lotions and cotton balls littering the bathroom. Papers scattered on the floor. Her suitcase closed but not zipped, the sleeves of shirts and legs of jeans sticking out like tongues. Oliver picked up the loose papers while Lorna made her way across the room to the desk.

  “Credit card statements? Who brings those on a romantic holiday?”

  “It could be what was in her envelope last night. The blackmail.”

  He flipped through the pages. “None of these are in Maeve’s name. And they’re all maxed out. Cash advances.” He whistled. “Well, we wanted to know how Maeve could afford an evil plan like this. Mystery solved! She decides to use this as her ‘evidence’ that she’s being blackmailed, too, but like everything Maeve does, it’s backfired ’cause now we know she had the funds to book this place. What else did you think you could hide, Maeve?”

  Oliver tossed the statements on the bed and picked through the suitcase while Lorna looked at a paperback book on the desk: a shirtless, longhaired, chiseled man in a kilt embracing a buxom woman in a tight-fitting green dress. Oliver was ready to make a joke about Maeve’s large cotton panties when he found a lacy red bra and panties.

  “Oh, sick.” His lip curled. “These are Maeve’s? I do not want that image in my head.”

  Lorna rolled her eyes and turned a page in the book. A cream envelope fluttered from the pages to the floor by Oliver’s knee. The creases and skin oil stains showed that it had been read and re-folded multiple times.

  “What a surprise. Another envelope. Let’s see what this pathetic riddle says. ‘My dearest M Doll . . .’” His voice slowed as he realized what he was reading. “‘I can’t wait to finally meet you in person. I feel like we know each other more intimately than any two other people on earth, but it won’t be until I can entwine my legs with yours and taste . . .’ Nope.” Oliver dropped the letter onto the suitcase. “I’m not reading any more of that.”

  Lorna picked it up and skimmed to the end. “It’s signed ‘Yours Forever, Tom.’”

  “Who’s Tom?”

  “The online boyfriend she said lured her here. Shit.” Lorna ran a hand through her hair. “All these body lotions. The lingerie. You pack all this for a dirty weekend, not for murder.”

  “She could’ve staged it.”

  Lorna raised an eyebrow. “You mean Maeve would’ve anticipated that we would suspect her and search her room? Maeve? A woman who couldn’t even predict it was going to rain when the sky went black and the wind picked up?”

  “You have a point. What website did she say she met him on?”

  “I’m not sure. SingleMingle, I think?”

  Oliver pulled up the website on his phone, dismissing the notifications that asked him to download the app. “And his username. It was Kit something?”

  “Kit_Snow0273.”

  A few seconds later he had found it. Oliver showed Lorna the photo on his phone: a balding white man with a beer gut and the kind of smile that could make up for a less than attractive body. The kind of smile Oliver had perfected in his teens. But there was something off about the picture. The resolution was a little too clear, the lighting a little too perfect, for a candid selfie down the pub. He dropped the photo in Google. The image appeared multiple times. The fictional Kit_Snow0273 was part of a group shot of middle aged men in a stock photo, raising pints in a generic pub.

  “She was telling the truth,” Lorna said. “Someone catfished her.”

  “I’ll concede a ‘maybe.’ Happen to see Hollis’s notepad anywhere?”

  He tapped the phone against his palm as Lorna shifted a few more of Maeve’s belongings but soon quit. They both knew it wouldn’t be here.

  “So . . .” he drawled. “You’re saying I was wrong?”

  “I’ll also give you a ‘maybe.’ We did find the twine in her pocket, and it does look like that was what was used to strangle MacLeod.” Lorna bit on her fingernail. “What if MacLeod is somehow connected to Callum? Unlike Caskie, he’s old enough to have known him. Maybe he was behind this? He’s the one who catfished Maeve? She finds out he tricked us and strangles him?”

  Oliver nudged the suitcase with his toe. He needed a drink to sort this all out. Puzzles were Hollis’s thing, not his.

  “Another maybe,” he said.

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  He remembered Maeve following each of them around the house, trying to impress them with a new outfit, a good exam score. Offering free beer or food. Telling them about how she almost bumped into Noel Gallagher at the grocery store. Any scrap she could offer she waved in front of them, even though none of it ever helped.

  “If it’s true,” he said, “I don’t understand why she wouldn’t tell us. We’ve all been wondering how we got played. If she found out who it was—and not only found out but killed him?—she’d want the credit. Maeve’s always been worried about status. And what better way for her to raise our esteem of her than by saving us? It just doesn’t make sense that she wouldn’t have told us.”

  “No, you’re right,” Lorna said. “She would’ve told us. She would’ve woken the whole house to tell us. So then why did she kill him?”

  “Maybe the better question is, how did that twine end up in her pocket?” Oliver asked.

  “She was always a deep sleeper. What if someone snuck into her room this morning and planted it there? She was the last one up.”

  Wind struck the house, and Oliver stood up straight, cocking his ear toward the hall. “Was that a door?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  He held up his hand, listened.

  “What do you—”

  “Footsteps.” He listened to the movement of someone below.

  “Maeve,” Lorna
said. “If it’s not her . . . She’s on her own down there. Whoever locked us in will have a key to the cellar, and we left her alone. Shit. We’ve left her alone.”

  Oliver took Lorna’s arm and held her back. “Where’s Ellie?”

  Maeve

  During the day, the flat was hers. She’d pop open the curtains, put her books on the coffee table and her shows on the TV, move the potted plants to where she liked them best. She’d make a coffee and breakfast, sit down at the table with a paper, and pretend this was her life. Pretend every morning was a Sunday morning, and that this was the one day a week she needn’t go to her artsy job in the West End, or the BBC Studios, or the National Theatre. She often pretended that she had a little dog—a terrier mix rescued from Battersea Dogs Home—that slept by her leg while she ate her eggs and toast. She’d speak to him some days—Duncan, she called him—comment on articles in the paper, pretending she knew the people involved. Some mornings she got so entrenched in her daydream, she would offer him scraps from the table and become confused when he didn’t take them. On these days, she burst into tears and had to scrub her face an extra five minutes before heading down to the unemployment office.

  Whenever she had an appointment, she always came with a detailed list of the places she’d applied to or had interviewed with. Sometimes she really would have applied to one or two of them. She never had an interview. Afterward, she’d run errands, do a little cleaning, and watch her imagined life drip away as she restored Max’s flat to its original state. One by one he and his family would return, bringing reality with them. When the kids got home from their after-school clubs, they commandeered the television to watch their programs and eat their snacks on their sofa. Max’s wife was the next to return. She’d talk to Maeve about her day as she changed clothes and removed her jewelry, helped Maeve set the table. Unless he was working late, Max usually arrived home in time for dinner, the kids screaming his name, the conversation shifting away from Maeve as if they’d exhausted everything they had to say to her. Like they’d filled their daily quota of being kind to the strange spinster auntie who had taken over their spare room.

  That was why Maeve disappeared to her room after dinner—to spare them the pain of having to tolerate her for the rest of the evening. To let them pretend it was only the four of them, the happy family, no fifth wheel. And Maeve would turn on her little television and eat a bag or two of M&M’s and pretend the sounds echoing throughout the rest of the flat were only neighbors.

  It was on one of these nights, when she had already retired to the spare room—eating some stale Pringles she’d found under her bed and watching reruns of The Simpsons—that she got the text.

  See you soon.

  She sat in bed, the phone in one hand, a Pringle in the other, and wondered if it was too late to back out. Her thumb hovered over the phone, ready to reply. To decline. But her hand shook. So she got out of bed and opened her desk drawer. There on top was the picture she kept of Callum. The picture of the two of them, smiling, his arm around her shoulders at some party. The last time a man had touched her with kindness. She typed a reply.

  Ok

  That simple two-letter response had led her to a cold dirt floor a thousand kilometers from home.

  Grit coated her tongue. She tried to spit it out, even licked the back of her hand, but as the taste of dirt retreated, fear advanced.

  “I can’t see. I can’t see!”

  She remembered reading something online about a man who got hit in the head by a falling sign and lost his vision. What if she would never see again? Her last image would be Oliver at the staircase. And not even Oliver in his prime. Middle-aged Oliver.

  “Oh god.”

  Tears fell, and she punched herself in the thigh.

  “Stop. Fucking. Crying.”

  She brushed the dirt from her fingers, then wiped the tears from her eyes. Shapes emerged from the darkness. She hadn’t lost her vision. The cellar was simply that dark. Grasping the wooden railing, she made her way up the stairs one by one, her right ankle smarting with each step. The door at the top was locked, but she found the light switch. She pressed it. Nothing happened.

  The darkness crowded in around her. Panic crept in at the edges of her mind. How had that old man, MacLeod, died? How had the murder weapon ended up in her pocket? Maybe she had done it in some psychotic state. Perhaps she’d been sleepwalking. Run into him while she slept. But no. Oliver said he could only have been dead for at most three hours, and she’d been up longer than that. But Oliver was hardly a coroner. He could’ve been wrong about the time of death.

  “No. Stop it.”

  She gripped her hair and pulled on it to stop her racing thoughts.

  “You didn’t strangle that old man. You didn’t strangle anyone. It was Ellie. It must’ve been Ellie.”

  Oliver had been too surprised when he saw the body. And it was Ellie who had the signal jammer. Ellie who, with a smile, had pushed her down the stairs. She must’ve put the twine in Maeve’s pocket.

  “But they’ll never believe you. They’ll kill you before you get the chance to explain. Ellie will make sure of it, and Oliver will follow her lead. Lorna won’t be able to stop them.”

  She pulled harder on her hair.

  “They’re going to kill you, Maeve. Let you die like Callum. One less problem to worry about. They’re going to kill you and let you die. Kill you and let you die. Kill you. Let you die.”

  She squeezed her eyes so tight, she saw bursts of color as thoughts beat in her head like a drum, building to a crescendo until finally she shouted, “No!”

  She stood in the darkness and dropped her hands to her side.

  “No. Maybe you deserve to die, but you’re not going to let them do it. And you’re not going to wait for them to do it. You’re a good person. People like you. You can achieve whatever you set your mind to. So, Maeve Okafor, you can either bang on that door until they let you out, or sit on that step until they come for you, or you can find your own damn way out. Who votes for option number three?”

  Maeve raised her own hand.

  “All right. Get moving then.”

  She used the railing to guide her back down.

  “Torch, torch, there must be a torch,” she sing-songed, pretending her heart wasn’t racing. “Or maybe even a candle.”

  With arms straight out in front of her, she walked until she collided with a metal shelf. Like a blind woman, she ran her hands over every object she found. She imagined cutting her hand on broken glass or some misplaced gardening equipment. Severing a tendon. Hitting an artery. Slicing off a finger. She could feel every injury before it happened. See blood dripping down her arm despite the darkness that squeezed her tighter and tighter. Her pawing became more frantic. A plastic bottle fell onto her hand as her palms pounded the shelf, encountering a mix of round and sharp edges, bits of metal and plastic. A glass or ceramic object shattered to the floor. A heavy piece of metal hit her in the foot.

  “Please, a torch. Please, something. Please please.”

  She slammed her hands on the shelf. An eerie green glow entered the room, and the numbers 04:19 stared back at her. Maeve grabbed the digital clock before the Indiglo light faded. It couldn’t project far but created what seemed like a world of sight in the pitch-black cellar.

  As the light died, she pressed the Indiglo button again and pointed the glowing display at the shelves. It cast everything it touched in a strange aquamarine glow, like she was seeing in night vision. Even with the rain, she could hear the high little buzz made when the light was active and listened to it fade away with the light. She held the button down, hoping she wouldn’t drain the battery, and made her way through the shelves. At the end of the row, she tripped over a camping lantern. Fuel sloshed inside when she shook it, and she searched the shelf for something to light it with.

  “Why did I quit smoking?”

  Her luck turned. Among a roll of cord and some loose nails sat a small box of matches. Unable to s
trike a match and hold the clock at the same time, she sat cross-legged on the dirt floor with the lantern in front of her and the alarm clock beside her. She hit the button and struck a match. It didn’t light the first or second time, and the clock’s whine petered out as the green glow faded. She slammed her fist on the Indiglo button and struck the match again. It lit on the fifth try, but the short matchstick burned quickly. The flame bit her fingertips, and she yipped and dropped it into the lantern, where it burned to nothing without lighting the tallow.

  Maeve pulled the lantern closer and tried again.

  “Always give up too easily. That’s what Max says. Now’s your time to show him.”

  She pressed the Indiglo button and struck another match. It lit on the first try.

  “Ha!”

  She stuck the matchstick inside the lantern and held it to the wick.

  “Come on, come on.”

  The flame grabbed hold.

  “Tada!”

  Maeve shook out the match and experimented with the wick, turning the flame up and down before setting it at a good height and stuffing the matchbox in her pocket. Her field of vision expanded, and with no one to mock her, she danced in triumphant circles despite her ankle.

  “I have the power of flame! I am the Master of Darkness. I am . . . Jesus fucking Christ on a bike!” Maeve grabbed the shelf to steady herself.

  Her brain told her it was nothing. Only a shadow on the wall. A shadow that resembled a person.

  “Hello?”

  Wind battered the window.

  “My name’s Maeve. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I don’t want to be down here at all, actually. They put me down here and I—”

  A faint smell of orange, cedar, and balsam seeped into the room.

  “Drakkar Noir?”

  She stopped rambling. That smell took her back to a dark cinema watching Stargate and being utterly confused by both the film and Callum trying to hold her hand when she was reaching for the popcorn.