Northern Exposure

by Michael Kilian

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  Northern Exposure

  Michael Kilian

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For my Canadian brother Warren,

  for Laurali Appleby of Abbotsford, British Columbia,

  and for Felicity.

  I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought,

  And cozy women dead that by my side

  Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not

  Remembering how in my youth I cried.

  —Stanley Kunitz

  1

  The two young men in the rusting old Buick spoke little in the darkness, their faces barely outlined in the dashboard lights. The driver, bouncing the big car up the rutted mountain road uncomfortably fast, was particularly grim. He wanted this done with; this grimy business had become the only profession left to him, but he was not really happy in it. His companion, three years his junior but his functional superior, seemed unhappy only about the rough ride; blasé about what was to come, if not actually looking forward to it. He gripped the top of the dashboard, enduring their jarring, jouncing progress up the slope with clenched teeth and occasional profanity, uttered in French, but with the sangfroid, as he must view it, of a veteran going into battle.

  Down to their left, far, far down the mountain slope, was California Highway One, and just beyond, the cliffs that fell to the breaking surf of the Pacific Ocean. Far behind them now, its lights occasionally flickering in the rearview mirror, was the faded little town of Davenport, a one-time whale-watching resort with a small organic-food restaurant, a lonely, usually fogbound Coast Guard station, and a defunct cement plant. The two men in the ramshackle Buick had little to fear from witnesses.

  There was a thump from the rear of the car.

  “Merde,” said the other.

  “I did not tie her well enough,” said his driver. “Maybe they are suffocating back there.”

  “Only a few minutes more,” said the other. “Bientôt.”

  After a steep turn, they were there, too soon for the driver. He pulled the car to a grinding stop in a clearing that suddenly appeared on their right, then killed the engine and sat behind the wheel a moment, breathing in sighs. There was another thump from the trunk.

  “Pour la Patrie,” said the other.

  “Bien,” said the driver. He sighed again and opened the door.

  From the back seat, the other man pulled forth a pump shotgun, and hurried to the rear, demanding the keys from the driver and opening the trunk. The woman, bound and gagged, sat straight up, her dark hair a wild tangle, her eyes both angry and terrified. The man, utterly drunk, was snoring. Lifting and pulling them out one by one, the young men dragged each up the trail. They could hear the Pacific waves breaking distantly against the rocks.

  They set the drunken man up against a tree. He briefly opened his bleary eyes, but it was a pointless residual function. An instant later, the youth fired his shotgun directly at the man’s head.

  “Now the woman,” he said, pulling the slide on the shotgun. The ejected shell fell with a “ping” onto the ground. The new shell rammed home with a decisive click. They had left the woman kneeling, watching everything, her eyes bulging.

  “Her clothes,” said the driver. “N’oublie pas le script.”

  “More than the script,” said the other. “It is not enough to look like the others. It must be like the others.”

  “Alain, no.”

  “Mais oui. Certainement.”

  “Merde.”

  “Regarde.”

  The younger man set down his shotgun and stepped in front of the woman, unbuckling his belt and slipping off his trousers. Then he knelt and pulled off her skirt and underwear. She began thrashing about, but he quieted her by striking her twice in the jaw. He flung himself onto her, and into her, and in a very short time was done.

  “A rape,” he said, standing, and pulling up his trousers. When he picked up his shotgun, the driver looked away. He could hear her faint, muffled scream just before the explosive gunshot.

  “Eh, voilà,” said the younger man, amidst the echoes and trailing smoke.

  “Maintenant, let’s go.”

  “No, no, no. In the trunk. Get her purse.”

  The driver did so. The younger man dumped the contents onto the ground by her body, then dropped it into the dirt.

  “Now,” said the driver.

  “No, Maurice. One more thing. You forget.”

  He put the shotgun to the dead woman’s face and fired two times, quickly. Two other rapid shots did the same to the man.

  “Now,” said the driver. “Plus vite!”

  “Plus vite,” said the other.

  In two hours, they were north of San Francisco and speeding toward Canada.

  2

  Felicity Stuart. Showers opened his eyes to the nighttime gloom of his living room, then said her name again, this time aloud. His voice sounded absurdly loud in the nearly absolute silence. “Felicity Stuart.”

  He sat up, running his hands over his eyes and face, little dispelling the alcoholic fog. Was he drunk? Affirmative. Dennis Tobias Showers, the supremely cool and competent master diplomat who had not been drunk in years, who never indulged himself beyond two or three glasses of wine at embassy receptions, was smashed, bombed, stinko. He had sat up drinking gin into the night, finally falling asleep fully dressed on his living room couch. In the dim light, he could see a half-full glass on the teakwood coffee table in front of him. He took a sip, tasting warm gin slightly diluted with melted ice.

  Why drunk? Unhappiness. Why unhappiness? At forty, he was considered one of the fastest-rising stars in the American foreign service. In a short time, he was going to be posted to the extremely important job of deputy chief of mission at the United States embassy in Ottawa. The next promotion would certainly be to ambassadorial rank. Showers had money. He and Marie-Claire lived beyond their income, but their income was substantial, manifest ostentatiously enough in this Georgetown house and their blue Mercedes sedan. His wife had been described in Dossier magazine as one of the beauties of Washington. Though her features were a trifle Gallic, Showers agreed. She was the daughter of a baron—a Belgian baron, to be sure, but a nobleman, nevertheless. The Dennis Showers who had fled his family’s home in New York’s Westchester County at the age of eighteen—with only a hundred dollars in his pocket and no prospect even of a job in the New York City to which he was bound—had traveled far indeed.

  Unhappiness. Felicity Stuart.

  Showers clicked on a lamp, looking immediately to the French-style telephone on the antique desk by the window. That was the telephone in his dream, all right. The same white and gold phone. His. In the dream, it had rung many times before he had stirred from his stupor and stumbled over to it. In the dream, he had heard a voice that was only vaguely familiar, a woman saying his name, and then her own. Felicity. Felicity Stuart. She kept saying it and he kept repeating it in the interrogative, almost mindlessly. Then her voice became urgent. She said she was in serious trouble and needed his help. Felicity Stuart was reaching out to him across nearly twenty years, and his only response was to repeat her name again and again. She told him she was calling from far away, and said again that she needed his help. At once there was silence and the dream was ended, leaving him to this reeling
, rude awakening on his couch.

  It was not a dream. It could not have been.

  He sipped the warm gin, afraid to try to stand yet. He was disgusted with himself for his drunken condition. Showers intensely disliked being other than himself, the self that it had taken him twenty years to become.

  His head was beginning to ache. He had an extraordinary number of important things to attend to in the day that would arrive shortly. Showers was presently assigned as a desk officer in the State Department’s Northern Europe section, having served consecutive tours as a political-affairs specialist in Belgium and France. This Washington post was a transitory one, a place to rest before taking on the new duties in Canada. But lately they had been keeping him annoyingly busy, both the Seventh Floor at State and the White House, in preparation for the forthcoming summit in Bonn. The only thing pleasing about the high-level attention he was receiving was that it irritated Arthur Jordine, his immediate superior. Jordine had done him more than a little dirty. Showers had found out from the Seventh Floor that Jordine had tried to block his posting to Ottawa.

  Jordine. A second reason for unhappiness. Showers leaned back and sipped more gin, closing his eyes. It was early June, well in advance of the tropical sog that envelops the capital in mid and late summer, but the air outside was as still and stagnant as in August. The only sound he could hear was the faint humming of the refrigerator in the distant kitchen.

  The sudden ringing of the telephone was explosive, shattering, startling him so that he spilled some of the gin. Could it be Felicity Stuart calling again, hoping to find him more sober? With a trembling hand, he set down his glass and went clumsily to the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Allo, Dennis? It is Marie-Claire.” His wife spoke the liquid, musical French of the Belgians, and the accent carried over into her English. It was one of the nicest things about her.

  “Where in hell are you?”

  “Still in New York. I said to you that I might stay over.”

  He looked at his watch, a gold Rolex Marie-Claire had given him after her father had been particularly generous to them one Christmas. “It’s almost five in the morning,” he said. “Why bother calling now?”

  “Do not be so bellicose, mon cher. I tried you twice before but there was no answer.”

  “I went to a reception at the Irish embassy.”

  He had. It was a very nice party. It was where he had started his serious drinking.

  “I called again quite late, but I am not sure that I connected with our number. The man who answered was incoherent, then he hung up. Was that you?”

  “It was me,” said Showers, remembering none of it. “I was asleep.”

  “Bien. So, Dennis. I am in New York. I will take an early shuttle in the morning, and be home in time for luncheon.”

  “What hotel are you in? The Plaza?”

  “Non. I am with friends. The Cellinis, from the United Nations? You remember?”

  Showers had never heard of them. He wondered if any such people really existed, wondered with whom she might actually be staying, whether she was in New York at all. He imagined her sitting on the edge of a bed with soft, fluffy pillows and bedcover, wearing a frilly borrowed robe and looking out through windows at the East River. He imagined her again, sitting completely naked, her blonde hair long and loose, and her tanned, tawny body held and stroked by another man, a man running his finger along the crevice of her buttocks as she spoke, waiting impatiently for the conversation to end. At times he hated Marie-Claire.

  “Would you like me to pick you up at National?” he said, meanly and intentionally prolonging this.

  “Non, non, Dennis. You have so much to do. I will take a taxi. Now, it is so late. I must go back to sleep. I love you, mon cher. I will see you in the evening. Au revoir.”

  “Good-bye.”

  She hung up before he did. Unhappiness. Another reason was Marie-Claire.

  He went to the nearest bathroom, washed his hands and face in the marble basin, then stared bleakly at the view of himself presented by the mirrored wall. His white shirt and gray flannels looked like dirty laundry. His striped guards’ tie was stained, wrinkled, and pulled askew. Though freshly washed, his face was red and puffy, his hazel eyes quite bloodshot, his jaw covered with stubble, his graying sandy hair in matted disarray. Showers was always dressed and groomed just so, as perfect and patrician as his carefully cultivated speech and manners. Showers was much the archetypical State Department man. At the moment he looked like some degenerate Southern congressman.

  It was too late to go to bed, too early to do anything else. He decided to make a night of it, and have another drink. He went to the kitchen and, using fresh ice and a clean glass, made himself a wonderfully large martini.

  Unhappiness. Marie-Claire. He had known for a long time that she was cheating on him, but had presumed she did so idly, in the cultural fashion of continental Europe and diplomatic Washington. What he was coming to fear was that she was doing it compulsively and recklessly, wantonly and ruthlessly. He had come to feel uneasy talking to any man they knew well, having no idea whether Marie-Claire had not long before been sitting on his face.

  Showers was an oddity in his profession. He was reflexively monogamous, in Marie-Claire’s terms, chaste. He had lost his virginity early and easily, and been something of a ladies’ man for a number of years. But, since taking his vows with Marie-Claire at the cathedral in Lille, he had not slept with another woman. There had been a high-born lady in Mexico City once, but that had involved little more than some groping in a formal garden, with no consummation. Marie-Claire’s sexual conduct was the opposite.

  Losing his virginity. Felicity Stuart. That had never been a dream, though the memory of it was now quite dreamlike, the reality of that night as far removed from him as the planet Saturn or the Kalahari. Yet he could recall Felicity’s soft, small, slender body so well, with such exactitude—the cool feel of her, the tenderness of her small breasts, the revelations of an appendicitis scar and a mole visible in the moonlight. He had expected her to cry afterward, as he had been told girls did, but she had not. As it later dawned upon him, it had not been her virginity that was lost that long-ago night.

  Felicity Stuart had just now telephoned him. She had reached out to him not from the past, through the mist of some dream, but from a place quite real and in the present, however distant. A hundred times in his life he had thought of calling Felicity, of somehow finding her and reaching out to her, but always presumed it to be an impossibility. Now she had found him, and he had been dead drunk.

  He swore loudly, at himself and at his luck, then took his drink and went down the long hall to his study at the rear of the house. After a lengthy search, he unearthed his high school senior yearbook and, from the rear of a desk drawer, an old dog-eared photograph. Felicity was wearing Bermuda shorts and a dark sweater, sitting crosslegged on a lawn before an old white house, smiling with those so memorably perfect teeth. She looked about seventeen at the time. That would have been in 1959. Not everyone in Braddock High School agreed with him in those days of bosom worship, but Showers had thought Felicity an extraordinary beauty, the quintessence of a type, of WASP New England, three centuries of it. She was the best-groomed person he had ever known, immaculate auburn hair curling neatly at the base of her neck, skin always clean and flawless and tight against the delicate bones of her face, bright green eyes full of intelligence and health. She had a small, perfect nose; thin, curving lips; those beautiful teeth; and a small, delicately pointed chin. Her slender body was well suited for the conservative plaid skirts, demure blouses, and the cashmere sweaters she favored. Felicity seldom wore any jewelry except for an old family ring which he had never seen her without. He had asked to have it once, but she had refused him.

  Showers drank some more, and opened the musty old yearbook. To his chagrin, not having looked at it in some ten years, he was surprised to find it full of pictures of children, including himself. Matu
rity back then was simply a matter of a driver’s license, drinking and smoking, losing one’s virginity. He had fancied himself a sort of Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald character at the time, yet there, in the photo above his name, was this mere boy.

  He turned the pages. There were many pictures of Felicity. She had been a varsity cheerleader and thus an aristocrat in that juvenile American society. More grudgingly, Showers had been accepted into that peerage himself, as one of the “rich kids” from the village of Braddock Wells and as editor of the high school newspaper. Yet he and Felicity were essentially loners, too moody, bookish, driven, and self-absorbed to be fully a part of that world of proms and pep rallies, ritual and caste. He often thought she had become a cheerleader solely for the purpose of proving that she could, for she otherwise conducted herself as superior to such adolescent silliness.

  Turning more pages, he came upon the only photograph that showed the two of them together. French Club, a passing interest of his then that now was paying enormous dividends; a passion for her. For all those three centuries of Yankee ancestors, she had some French in her, and some Celtic Scots, enough to lead her to a fascination with Catholicism that resulted ultimately in her conversion. When they had first met, she had been reading best-selling romances and the mordant likes of Thomas Hardy. Her French classes introduced her to Molière, de Maupassant, Balzac, and Voltaire, and thereafter she had read little else. She had planned after college to become a translator at the United Nations. It occurred to Showers that she probably would have done very well in the foreign service, although a woman had slim prospect of that in the 1950s.

  How well had she done? What had she done? Felicity and Showers had grown up on the margin between the middle and upper classes, a wide margin in that high-blown region of New York’s Westchester County, but an uncomfortable situation for both of them. Felicity’s parents had divorced when she was ten years old, and her home was with her mother, who lived in the rural countryside just outside the town of Braddock Heights, near the border with Putnam County. Felicity’s father had been a doctor, her mother an artist, both descended from soldiers in the American revolution. But alone, her mother could provide her with little. She might have been a debutante, or gone to Vassar. Her mother could only do her best, and that meant public high school and then a state teachers’ college. There was no system of public colleges and universities other than that in those days. Lacking tuition for anything better, she had had no other choice.