Grimm Woods

by D. Melhoff

  Brynn didn’t respond; she was back in her own world of paperwork.

  “Hey,” he said louder. “Gately. Is there a roster around here?”

  “Um, check the cabinet.”

  Scott skirted the desk and yanked open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. His fingers flew over the tags: R for Roster, C for Campers, S for Sign-ups. No luck. New approach. His hands leapt to the front of the drawer and started with A.

  “ACC.—Payables.”

  “ACC.—Payroll.”

  “ACC.—Receivables.”

  “ADVRTSNG.”

  “AMORT Records.”

  “BEDDING.”

  “BKGRD CHKS.”

  “BUILDING MAINT.”

  “CREDIT CARD (VISA 4489).”

  He stopped and backtracked two folders. BKGRD CHKS? Jimmying it free, he found printouts of Wayne County court records inside. “RODDY SIMMONS: Small Claims,” the first paper read, detailing four counts of “Theft Under $5,000” and “Landlord/tenant dispute—dismissed.” The thefts were circled in red.

  Scott flipped through the pages, searching for Bruce Bergman, and watched the camp’s employees fan by. Every record had at least one entry circled in red. “Come on, come on. Where are you, Brucey?”

  “Huh?”

  “Found our background checks. This has to have something on him.”

  “Doubt it.” Brynn stretched her arms in the air and yawned. “Seems like an obvious place to start. It’s probably the first thing Charlotte checked.”

  “Yeah, you’d think. But as we both know, Charlotte’s judgment sucks Bruce’s big, hairy balls.” He flipped another page. “MAI ISHIMOTO: Bubbles Laundromat, F-1 visa status violation—Pending.” Another flip. “LANCE THOMPSON: Delinquent child support, show cause hearing 04/17. Bench warrant #97844.”

  God, everybody’s got dirt. No surprise when the nearest hiring pool is Detroit, though.

  He flipped to the back of the folder—past the rest of the counselors, past his own record (he knew that one well enough, it didn’t require additional scrutiny)—and frowned. Nothing. “Fuck.” He slammed the pages on the filing cabinet and spun around, running his hands over his buzz cut.

  “Told you.”

  “I can’t believe it. I cannot believe it. She’s got background checks on everyone but him.” Scott stormed past the desk and snatched the folder that Brynn was holding out of her hands.

  “Hey!”

  “We’re digging through shit,” he shouted. “Mountains and mountains of shit.”

  Brynn reached forward, but before she could grab the folder, Scott chucked it in the air. The flimsy cover smacked the fresco of fairy-tale characters in the dome roof and exploded, its papers raining down all over the room.

  “Are you mental?” Brynn hollered. “That took me an hour to sort!” She covered her face and stood, quivering, not even regarding the mess. Her whole body seemed ready to burst—with screams or sobs, it wasn’t clear.

  Scott whirled around and banged his fists on the wall. The shelves shook, and a picture frame fell to the floor and shattered. He brushed the glass aside with his foot, but he didn’t look down. He was staring at the ledge instead—Charlotte’s shrine of workplace awards and accolades from over the years—and felt a wrench of detestation. “How Crownheart got its happily ever after and the woman behind it,” Fast Company boasted in its bottom right corner. Happily ever after, he sneered, yeah fucking right. A lesser-known magazine sat beside it, its glossy cover showing a sea of children in yellow T-shirts, and along the bottom: “Fairy-tale camp profits! Small family breaks ten-year curse. More on page 26.”

  Small family? Scott bit his lip.

  He reached up and touched the magazine, remembering his last conversation with Charlotte: “Do you have kids?” he had asked. “No,” she replied.

  He took the issue off the shelf and flipped to page ten, twenty, twenty-five. Charlotte’s face peeked out from page twenty-six, and when he spread it open, the feature appeared, along with a photo of the camp’s owner standing in front of—

  “Holy shit.” Scott’s lips ghosted. The magazine tumbled out of his fingers and struck the floor. “No. No, no, no.”

  Brynn uncovered her face, appearing to register the terror in Scott’s voice. “What? What is it?”

  Stay right here and burn the midnight oil. She said stay right here and—

  ARE YOU LEARNING YOUR LESSONS?

  “Scott? For Christ’s sake, tell me. Please.”

  He didn’t say anything. He looked up—abject fear and hellish understanding hung on his face—and grabbed Brynn’s hand, pulling her out of the office and leaving the crumpled magazine flopped open amid the shards of broken glass. The centerfold showed the camp’s drawbridge welcoming the reader to Crownheart. Charlotte was posed in the grand entryway with an arm around a handsome African-American man, smiling, while the man’s hands rested on the shoulders of a little girl in front of them—a girl whose bronze complexion was a blended shade of both her mother’s and father’s.

  “What’s your name?” Scott heard the girl’s cute, confident voice echoing from his nightmare. “I’m Desiree.”

  ____

  Lance stirred, and a low moan escaped his muffled lips.

  An oil rag was stuffed halfway to his tonsils, and the right side of his face was pressed against a pile of mud and horse manure. A dull throb pulsed at the back of his head. When he tried adjusting himself, he could feel his ankles dragging something heavy across the gravel.

  “I wouldn’t make any sudden movements if I were you,” a voice said. “They spook easily.”

  The corral came into view: nothing but dirt and shadows at first, and then the sphere of rays from the barn’s lamppost. The mares that had been dozing in the pen were gone, but the two geldings remained—one on either side of him—frisking their black manes and shifting their sinewy weight from hoof to hoof. Alert, unnerved.

  He tried getting up, but the ropes tied around his ankles pulled taut. His hands were bound behind his back too.

  “Don’t make me say it twice.”

  That voice…

  Lance’s neural haze dissipated as a figure drew closer. At first, his migraine clouded his vision, but then the aura faded and the figure appeared entirely. It was Charlotte. She had both of the torches from the fort clutched in her hands.

  “Ch-Chrltte?” The rag stifled his breathing. “Hel…mm…stuck.”

  She turned her head, listening in different directions.

  “Chrltte!”

  Then she stared at him—

  And grinned.

  That’s when Lance Thompson knew. Suddenly, horrendously, he knew. The elusive Bruce Bergman wasn’t the one behind the murders. It’s her! She’s the twisted cunt responsible for tying me up in this stable. She’s the one who killed Chase and the others! Yet even now there wasn’t anything insane about the look on her face. No wild, untamed hair or whirling red-and-white barbershop-pole eyes—only the cool intransigence of someone in total control. The countenance of someone ready to kill.

  “Hush.” Charlotte put a finger to her lips and approached the pasture’s feeding trough. A pile of sticks and dead grass had been heaped in the steel basin, and when she dropped the torches inside, the flames roared up and devoured the grass in a gluttonous flash of heat before dimming to an amber singe.

  Lance gripped the cords around his wrists and pulled. No luck. They were tight enough that he was already starting to lose feeling in his fingertips.

  She’s behind everything, he thought. Everything! But the magnitude of that revelation was impossible to grasp. At that moment—in that stable yard—it was just the two of them, victim and torturer, sufferer and malefactor. Captive and executioner. You can beat her. He spied his surroundings. Get your hands free, Lance. Goddammit get them free!

  “I was afraid I hit you too hard,” Charlotte said. She picked up a pair of iron rods that were leaning against the fence and stuck them in the feeding trough, sto
king the fire. “All the others were alive until the bitter end. Hate to ruin a good streak.”

  Lance tried to ignore her, reefing on his restraints. His teeth clamped on the gag in his mouth, and the taste of motor oil rankled his taste buds.

  Stones. Find stones.

  He wiggled lower—Charlotte appeared to be too preoccupied with the trough to notice—and clawed at the dirt behind him, praying for a jagged rock or rusty nail somewhere in the mud.

  “And wait until you see what all the fuss is about,” Charlotte continued, calm and even. “You like attention, don’t you, Lance? Well let me tell you, you’re going to get it. Some of the most, in fact. I think the DA will try to cover you up first. He’ll lose sleep over it, no doubt, imagining what’ll happen when people Google your name and this pixelated stable turns up. It’ll get out, of course. There’s curiosity for this kind of thing. Kids on dares, teenagers at house parties, adults after the six o’clock news, then again at nine. They’ll all want to see what happened to you.” She paused, thought about it. “Or whatever’s left of you.”

  Lance stopped clawing. He choked on the oil rag as morbid memories flashed before his eyes: Chase and Kimberly hanging from the zip-line tower, cords rammed in their skulls, and then Ella burning in the kitchen, steam screeching out of her immense corpse while pounds of fat plopped off her bones like melting rubber.

  “The DA will try to cover you up first…Or whatever’s left of you.” His bladder teetered on the brink of spilling. What the fuck is she going to do? Help me, God help me get out of these ropes, please.

  He wrestled with the bonds, and the horses nickered on either side of him, their ears turning back, necks tensing.

  “Do you remember,” Charlotte asked, her attention focused on the fire, “why the miller’s daughter was locked up in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’? Think carefully.”

  Rumpelstiltskin?

  Lance’s mind raced to recall the details of the fairy tale, but his memory was unreachable. His brain had powered down every compartment and neuron that wasn’t hell-bent on freeing himself from the ropes.

  “Her father,” Charlotte answered rhetorically. Something had seeped into her voice now, something anticipatory—rehearsed, almost—as her pupils glimmered like glass inkwells full of black ink. “Yes, the girl’s father. He wanted to seem important, so he told the king that his daughter could weave gold. And then what? Then she was the one who had to deliver on the promise, or she was the one who would be executed. That leads to her own lies, of course. But see the difference? So acute—and critical. It wasn’t the girl’s fault that the men in her life pressured her into an impossible situation. And really, when you think about it, you can’t vilify people who have to lie to survive. Mm? If what they’re doing is wrong, you have to get to the root of it. You have to find the father and make him pay.”

  Charlotte looked over at Lance struggling on the dirt. He expected her to lash out—to run over and slap him, or offer another wicked grin—but she didn’t. She continued stoking the fire, relaxed, in control.

  “Too bad the girl in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ never saw her father again. How apt is that? He ran off, and she was forced to strike a deal with a devil of sorts. Makes you wonder how many stories like that are out there right now. Single mothers with drug addictions or gambling problems from scuzzy relationships. Loan-shark chum who can’t make rent, let alone retirement contributions, and rely on every penny of their child support checks to balance their bad habits with keeping the CPS ’Stiltskins away?”

  A crack echoed from the camp’s outlying birch trees. An owl hooted; a pack of wolves bayed to the moon.

  Charlotte stopped and listened. She tilted her ear toward the fort, then Storybook Square, holding a breath…and letting it out. She shoved the rods in the flames again—less patient than before—and withdrew a piece of paper from her cloak.

  “Does this look familiar?” Charlotte strode toward Lance and knelt down, thrusting the paper in his face. “Look at it. Look.”

  Lance obeyed.

  The burning trough illuminated a family court record with the date of a future hearing circled in red. A brief note was scribbled underneath: “Paternity confirmed 08/11. Payment bounced 04/12 and 05/14.”

  “This isn’t good, Mr. Thompson. Not good at all.”

  Lance felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach.

  “Does your cuddle buddy up at the fort know you have a son with a seventeen-year-old girl back home,” Charlotte asked, “or are you still denying it’s yours, despite the DNA results? Surely that can’t be the reason you missed your last two payments?” She crumpled the court slip and returned to the feeding trough, chucking it in the flames. The paper crinkled in the conflagration—ten seconds later, it was nothing but ash.

  That’s what this is about? Lance quivered. Missing child-support payments?

  Blood rushed to his brain as a wave of memories inundated his consciousness: his parents’ basement where he had sat, tears tumbling down his cheeks, after answering the telephone call from the girl he barely knew; the brown interior of his ’92 Ford Taurus where he had hesitated in the hospital parking lot, flicking the keys in the ignition and debating whether to go inside and ask for directions to the maternity ward; McDonald’s rendezvous points that suddenly smelled more like diapers and baby powder than French fries and quarter-pounders; the legal aid boardrooms where rows of nail marks were clawed into the wooden tables. Then he was sweating bullets in bank lines, dropping off envelopes without knocking, and sitting in his parents’ basement again with his cell phone wedged between his legs, its notification light blinking with a full inbox of desperate, unanswered messages from the mother of his own son.

  “Sad thing is”—Charlotte’s voice snapped Lance back to the stable—“I checked the girl’s file, too. Shame. She’s racked up a few charges of her own in the last couple months. All possession related, of course.” Charlotte lifted one of the iron rods out of the fire, examining the tip. “Are you feeling guilty yet, Lance? No? Well, how about when you hear that they’re taking the baby? I hope he gets a better life—I do—but you and I both know how the average foster story turns out.” She spun the glowing rod in her hands, watching it change color, and then picked up the second rod. “Rumpelstiltskin wouldn’t have given the child a better life. He would’ve eaten it. But the imp got his comeuppance.”

  Lance craned his head far enough that he could see the tips of the fort’s parapets over the stables. Help! Someone has to be on lookout, please! Help me! For God’s sake help!

  Charlotte squatted in front of him again, the ends of her rods radiating hellish warmth on his cheeks. “Let me ask you one more time: Do you know what happened to Rumpelstiltskin? And don’t say your mom told you the version where he flew out of the kitchen on a soup ladle.”

  Lance lashed his head side to side—gushing with sweat—and flexed every muscle in his body, trying to bust out of the ropes and lunge for the bitch’s neck.

  “When the girl guessed his name,” Charlotte said, “Rumpelstiltskin was so angry that he stuck his foot into the ground all the way up to his leg…” She snagged the rope that was tied to Lance’s right ankle with one of her rods, lifting it out of the dirt, and revealed that the other end was tied to the gelding on the right. “Then he grabbed his opposite leg…” She lifted the cord tied to Lance’s other foot, which trailed to the horse on the left. “…and pulled so hard that he ripped himself in two.”

  Lance’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. He thrashed like a two-hundred-pound catfish caught on a fisherman’s hook, and the ropes flailed as the horses snorted and pawed the ground on either side of him.

  “MMPH! MMMPPHHH! HEL…! HEL…!”

  “Hell?” Charlotte tsked. “Sorry, I’ve never been a fan of mixing religion and camp. But I suppose if God exists, I’m sure he’ll know where to send you in the next few minutes.”

  Lance rammed his body against the fence as far back as possible, noticing for the first time that
the tips of the red-hot rods were shaped like little crowns. Branding irons, he thought. They’re branding irons! The horses will take off and tear me in two!

  “It’s the difference between attrition and contrition, hmm?” Charlotte whispered in his ear. “Think about that when your groin snaps in half like a wishbone. Are you praying because you’re sorry, or because you’re afraid of going to hell?”

  Lance let out a high, throat-tearing shriek. Most of it soaked into the oil rag and vanished long before passing his pleading, blood-crusted lips.

  ____

  Scott erupted onto the roof where Lance had been doing push-ups and crunches less than thirty minutes prior. “Lance? Lance?”

  Brynn appeared in the doorway behind him. “He’s not here?” she asked, panting and clutching her sides.

  “Laaaance!” Scott bolted to the parapets and squinted at the camp for signs of movement.

  “Can you please tell me…” Brynn huffed. “…what the hell…is going on?”

  “It’s Charlotte. It’s been Charlotte the whole time.”

  “What—that doesn’t even…How do you—?”

  Scott ignored Brynn’s questions. He saw a faint twinkle down at the stables, and just when he thought it was a trick of the light, the twinkle burst and produced a mist of red glitter. Fire. He tore for the stairwell and then stopped, spotting an army surplus backpack lying in the shadows by the door. The fort’s remaining fireworks poked out of the top flap like assorted goods sticking out of a traveling bazaar merchant’s rucksack, and without wasting another moment, he grabbed the bag and flew past Brynn into the building.

  “Scott.” Her voice followed him in. “Stop and think. There’s no plan—”

  “There’s no time.”

  The steps spun around the turret—under the rotting joists and sagging beams—as Scott ran for the vestibule.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Brynn hollered as she raced to keep up. “Scott. She’s been in the fort. We’ve been with her every day—”

  “She couldn’t take on everyone at the same time,” he shouted without slowing down. “She needed to pick us off one by one. Trust me.”