Your Life Is Mine

by Nathan Ripley

  “How the fuck did it end up out here?” I asked, watching the scope turn in the soft breeze, hanging from invisibly knotted fishing wire. For a second, I thought someone might answer me, from closer than I could handle without screaming. The rifle, or whatever had made the shot I’d heard after I brought Kindt and myself to the ground, wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  I heard a tiny spang noise and felt a sting in my arm at exactly the same moment. I’m not shot it would hurt more it would hurt more, I thought at least forty times as I turned to look at my right arm, moving it up to see the spot where I’d felt the bite. The camera started to slip off my arm as I reached under the strap—I set it down next to my boot, seeing a new, tiny hole in the strap. There was a corresponding bleeding hole in my arm just above my elbow: a tiny circle stopped by the object that had made it, a BB ball. I fell flat on my stomach and watched the trees where the shot must have come from. BB guns were close-range, so he must have been in the—

  “There,” I whispered, when I saw the dual glimmer of eyeglasses in the nearest tree stand, a double-vision visual echo of the glint off the scope. What happened next wasn’t me, it was panic and training I’d never wanted. It was Chuck, it was Crissy. I rose to one knee, pulled out the Ruger, and snapped off a shot at the spot where the glasses had been a second earlier. The explosion, a menacing and fatal version of the little BB whisper, filled the clearing, just before I screamed. Murderers don’t carry BB guns. Kids do. I lowered the gun and ran to the little thicket of trees, breathing hard enough to doubt the last sound I heard up there before I called Maitland. A laugh. Not a kid’s, a grown man’s delighted, charmed laugh, the kind of sound people make at dinner parties, not after they’ve been shot at.

  There was no one in the tree stand. No kid, nothing. I squeezed the BB out of the flesh of my arm, letting it drop into the grass. I walked through the forest in a straight line, looking for the round from my Ruger, finding it finally in the smooth branch of a manzanita tree. Chuck had known a lot about trees, for some reason that he’d never told me, and may have identified this particular one for me on one of our walks, years before. I put the Ruger in the holster and squeezed it like a crucifix. My heart started beating normally within a couple of minutes. I tried digging out the bullet with a pen and almost got it, then decided that more destruction would be necessary to cover up what had gone on here before the cops arrived. Shooting a gun that didn’t belong to me at what was probably a teenager with a sadistic streak wasn’t going to get any cops on my side, or off my back, if it came to that.

  I kicked at the thick tree branch until it broke off, disgorging my bullet. I pocketed it, then bashed the branch into smaller sections, rubbing each section against the bark of other trees, sanding off any traceable shape of a bullet hole. Drudging, stupid, probably useless work. But it cleared my head, and also let me listen, while plausibly occupied, for that laugh again, or the sound of a child’s gun.

  I didn’t hear anything.

  * * *

  “You’re not making a movie of this. Not now,” Maitland said, squatting on his haunches and looking into the tree above the hanging scope, from far enough away that he wouldn’t be yelled at by the technicians he’d promised were coming. He had big cyclist’s thighs that bulged out his uniform pants, constricting him.

  “This is my tourist camera. I don’t shoot anything serious with it.”

  “Right.” Maitland stared at the scope in the trees, squinting into the sunset, cutting glances at me.

  “It’s off, anyway.” I was dangling the camera from my arm—more precisely, it was hanging off the BB-shot portion of my arm, which was now beaming pain signals directly into my brain. But the hole was nicely concealed. The Ruger was holstered at the base of my spine.

  “You were right to call me first. Best we’ll be able to do tonight is tape this off, bag the scope at least, see what’s in the tall grass tomorrow.”

  “Really? Is that the best you personally can do? Because it’s maybe not the best the actual detective assigned to this case can do, and he’s my next call.”

  “Flashlights are great but not for this kind of bushwhacking, Ms. Potter. You can call Detective Pargiter right now, but I’m pretty sure he’s with his family, and his response would be to send me out in his stead. And, like you see, I’m already right here. Taking care of this.”

  “Are you?”

  “Fact stands, we need daylight to make this kind of search.”

  “And there wasn’t any daylight when my mother was murdered? Not then or any of the days since? Some sort of global warming localized long eclipse that disallows basic police work from happening?” My phone buzzed and I checked the text, as much for the time it would allow me to think of more clauses to add to my rant as to see who it was: Jaya.

  recording everything right

  I typed back

  f you for assuming I would, and yes, I am

  The lens-capped Pentax was indeed tracking audio from its sling. When the forensics team—just two men, neither of them booted-and-suited—turned up, Maitland waved me off a few feet, brashly, but with some pleading in his eyes. He’d earned one small point by finding a cartridge, a .45, nothing to do with the kind of rifle that would go with that scope. Whoever had been up here fucking with me had fired, probably into a tree, and left the oscillating scope to do the rest of the scaring.

  Just like in an on-camera interview, there’s a time to lean back, to surrender something so you can retain the subject for later. I got the sense that if I continued to chew Maitland out in front of these new arrivals, both older and stockier men who didn’t defer to him in any visible way, the mustached one in front even leaning forward to wipe a leaf off Maitland’s lapel, I’d lose any chance to squeeze information out of him. So I backed away, waited off to the side like a good distraught-but-distanced daughter.

  “You agree that this is strange, Officer?” I said, when Maitland made his reluctant way back over to me. I could tell by the puzzled look one of the two had shot him that he’d chatted to them longer than he needed to. I was glad I’d had a jacket with me in the car, because I was finally using it—not to ward off a chill, but tied around my waist to ensure that the holstered Ruger stayed invisible to Maitland.

  “I do, Ms. Potter. A little strange. It’s not that unusual for a weapon, or parts of a weapon, to be abandoned at a short distance from a crime scene, however. Perps panic.”

  “I heard someone up here. I heard a shot. And you’re not saying now that my mother was shot with a scoped rifle, are you?”

  “Heard’s not seen, Ms. Potter. I would need a little more.”

  I was tempted to show him the hole on my arm and the purpling bruise around it, but held off. That would put me two questions away from admitting that I’d sunk to a knee like the militia freak my parents had trained me to be and fired a lucky miss at what could have been a child. Or what could have been a man who was still in these trees, watching us.

  “This is the kind of thing that Chuck Varner meant when he talked about chaos, Officer. Most of his preaching was just garbage nonsense, boring down-the-middle male rage, but he cared about the chaos part. How chaos isn’t just random violence, but coincidence. That’s when life can feel most chaotic, when things that you aren’t controlling keep falling into place, one after the other, and you feel as though you’re being driven somewhere. Do you get me?” The dangling scope was the kind of Varner touch that Chuck would have thought was definitive: a piece of history that should have vanished turning up exactly where it shouldn’t be, right when the only living person likely to recognize it was near.

  “That’s not Vernon Reilly’s scope, Maitland. It’s Chuck Varner’s.” I was willing to risk this part of the truth to see if Maitland was capable of doing his job at all. If he even wanted to.

  “What?” Maitland grabbed my arm reflexively, and I stared at his hand until he let go. He’d gripped the uninjured one, thankfully. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  “I kno
w that scope. I was with my father when he bought it. I assume Crissy hid it somewhere after the day of the shootings.”

  “Where do you think she would have hidden it?” Maitland whispered, with an eye toward the forensics team.

  “How the hell would I know? I’ve spent a decade-plus trying to forget how she thinks,” I said, not about to reveal that I’d hidden evidence from investigators, even if I had been a teenager at the time.

  “If you’re right about it being Chuck Varner’s, that . . . that would be a strange thing,” Maitland said, rubbing the underside of his chin with his thumb, a nervous-thinking tic that I bet he hated.

  I decided to stop keeping my voice down.

  “This is a strange thing no matter where this scope comes from, isn’t it? You think my mother is killed in some random home invasion, but I show up and someone happens to threaten me with a gunshot and this obvious reference to Chuck Varner.” The forensics guys had turned to watch us. “That’s not normal, Officer. Whoever killed my mother was up here, he was—he was fucking with me, and he’s counting on you being too dumb or too stubbornly dedicated to closing this case to move on this.”

  “Move on what? On your vague suspicion that you’re being pranked?”

  “More people are going to be killed. Because you’re not doing your job.”

  “I’m not going to be condescended to by you, Ms. Potter,” Maitland said. He pulled out a notebook with a black vinyl cover and a tiny pen holstered in the binding and scrawled out some digits and a name. “You call Ron Pargiter,” he said, handing me the paper. “You tell him exactly what you think I overlooked, at your convenience. Just don’t think I’m going to entertain this type of treatment from someone I’m trying to help.”

  I held my hands up for a second and sighed, and then brushed them on my jean shorts. I looked down at my legs for the first time in a while: they were scraped up from my dive in the trailer. They looked like my legs used to when I ran around this forest on weekends, mostly chasing the kids who didn’t want to play with me at all, before Chuck told me I was too good to be playing with trash like them anyway. It was a lesson I took to heart, and by the time he was gone and I was old enough to start changing my mind, only the weirder, more aggressive boys wanted anything to do with me. One of them, Tommy Oliver, a black-haired boy a couple of years older who I’d had a crush on, had thrown a jar of pee on me right on this hill once, after inviting me up for a lemonade party with the other kids. I’d wiped the piss off, then broken the glass in Tommy’s hand by squeezing his fingers around it as hard as I could. No one would have thought an eight-year-old girl could have been that strong, not even me.

  And right now I decided to be strong enough to put up with this cop’s sulking in order to get what I needed.

  “Sorry. Sorry, Officer, I haven’t dumped the adrenaline from when I saw the—when I saw the light coming off the scope. Tell you the truth, it reminded me of when my father used to practice his stupid stealth drills up in these hills. He gave me the other half of a set of walkie-talkies, made me track him with binoculars from inside the trailer, and got me to guess where he was every five minutes. I thought it was really cool, then. Before he’d done anything. Seeing that flash off the scope, it took me there.”

  I watched Maitland relax as I bullshitted this apologies-for-my-hysteria act and understood that he wasn’t just resistant to the possibility that he’d been wrong and that there was more to Crissy’s death than a mishap with a meth head. He was diametrically opposed to entertaining anything I said as having any potential of truth. I was Chuck Varner’s fucked-up whacko daughter who moved on to become a liberal shithead Hollywood bitch, and those two factors ruled out his being able to do more than nod patiently when I talked.

  “I get it,” he said. He put a professional hand on my arm. “Not absolutely, but I see the idea. It’s hard. And that’s why it might be best if you get away from this for a while. Have some dinner, go to bed. We’ll run tests on this round and on the scope, see what we can find out.” He hooked his thumbs into his belt, gazing at the two techs finishing up their tape-off of the scene.

  “If you say so,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I will call Detective Pargiter, just so I can tell him what I told you, all right? I understand that this all sounds like speculation to you, but if this is someone’s idea of a prank, it’s a prank related to a mass shooting.” I looked into Maitland’s eyes, and, for the first time, saw a sharkish, predatory dullness in them, not just the disinterest of a bored cop.

  “You call him, sure. He won’t pick up until he’s on the clock again, so you might just want to get some sleep for now, Ms. Potter.”

  I made my way back down the hill, and it wasn’t until I actually saw Kindt that I realized why he had listened to me and called the cops instead of following me up the hill. I should have wondered, since it was out of keeping with the hovering watcher I remembered him as; he should have been sniffing around the cops and me the whole time we’d been up there. Even a normal person would have been hungry for the kind of out-of-the-ordinary spectacle my little find made.

  Kindt was stepping out of Crissy’s trailer, and I froze just out of his field of vision, counting on my stillness to keep me hidden, even though I was in the middle of an open field. He’d left at least forty-five minutes before, so he had no call to be there, unless he’d just finished a marathon bathroom break.

  But he was carrying a box: a little box, one I recognized. Blue, plastic, covered with Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe stickers. Mine, my childhood pencil box, from before Chuck had gone on his spree, a piece of my past that my mother had said was missing, had even hit me for losing, decades back. Mine.

  I stayed put, watching Kindt make his way back to his trailer. I ran then, hiding in my car and waiting until I saw him pull out in a yellow hatchback. Keeping my lights off until we hit the highway, I followed him.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  EMIL CHADWICK HIT the buzzer at his mother’s building and waited. She had extra keys, but he hadn’t proved himself worthy of one yet. “Not till I’ve trusted you for 730 days,” Jill Gudgeon had told him, her latest psychoanalyst/lover nodding in approval from across the too-goddamn-big-for-Manhattan living room. It was his dad’s bled-out divorce money that bought this place, Emil wanted to say. If she had any right to make rules about the apartment, it was a right mitigated by blood. That settlement wouldn’t have been so fat if Emil hadn’t been a minor during the divorce. Anything hers should be his, at least a bit, except for whatever her royalties had bought. And for at least a decade, that wasn’t much. Mom might be able to rent a studio in Queens with the income from her old books and a half-dozen feature articles a year, if she was lucky. But she was better than lucky—she was smart, and had divorced the right person. The buzzer made its assenting chime, a sort of new age tinkle that sounded like a heavenly cash register, and Emil went through the lobby and up.

  The loft was unlocked when Emil tried the knob. Jill Gudgeon was alone, typing furiously at the coffee table she was kneeling in front of. She held up a finger to pause Emil: she’d probably been typing for about as long as Emil had been riding the elevator. She always seemed to be intent on work whenever Emil arrived, but hadn’t published a book for almost two decades.

  “The cop texted me. Insists on using some weird third-party Chinese service, so the messages come through garbled as hell.”

  “One second, honey.”

  Emil let her have the second, walking to the kitchen and giving a light kick to the cabinet that concealed Jill’s boyfriend’s beer fridge. He opened a Brooklyn Lager and waited. Jill finally closed the laptop and smiled her concealed-triumph smile, the one that let everyone know she’d just unknotted a great human mystery by correctly arranging syllables in a sentence.

  “So,” she said. “A cop. I never had much luck with them, myself.”

  “Gotta start with cops. Look for an easy one and pump. All he wanted from me is to get Blanche Po
tter in touch with him, and he’d keep me up to date from there.”

  Jill Gudgeon stood up and walked toward Emil. She was almost a foot shorter than him and slim, wearing her usual off-white layers, different shades of eggshell above cream slacks. People, usually young woman students and writers, recognized her from her decades-old author picture all the time when Emil was with her, especially if they were anywhere near Columbia or NYU. She always took Emil’s arm then, but never introduced him, leaving these women to think of him as perhaps her lover, perhaps her son. His face wasn’t recognizable, yet.

  “You didn’t tell me how it went with Blanche. The important talk, Emil. You skipped over it entirely, which is a pretty certain clue, I’m afraid.” Jill reached past Emil and picked a tiny apple off the kitchen counter. He knew that she’d just be holding on to it as a prop for at least a few minutes, would never take a bite in the middle of an interrogation like this. It infuriated him.

  “She didn’t go for it, Mom.”

  “Go for what?”

  “Working with me, going down to Stilford as a duo. She’s there right now on her own. Just took the information and ran with it.”

  Jill tsk’d, then surprised him by starting on the apple. She finished the whole thing in about six elegant bites, then gestured at him with the core. “ ‘The information.’ Her dead mother, Emil. God, I can already tell how badly you went wrong with this. How totally off-base your approach must have been.”