by R M Wild
But I couldn’t help myself. “I would never want Matt dead. He was one of my only friends in this God-forsaken state.”
Kendall put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m your friend, Rosie.”
I brushed it off. “Mettle was a good man, Warden, a better man than—”
I stopped myself. Insulting the warden would only add fuel to the fire. So to speak.
Mayweather gritted his teeth. “I am not the enemy here.”
Kendall squeezed my shoulder. He could feel me shaking. “Rosie, calm down. Do not say anything else. Your words can be used against you.”
Mayweather cracked his knuckles. “She’ll answer my questions or I will call the cops.”
“Go ahead and call them,” Kendall said. “In fact, please do. The only one I see who’s guilty of murder right now, is the one who allows a triple homicide to occur right beneath his nose in his own institution.”
I buried my face in my hands, my cheeks raw. I rocked back and forth, mumbling to myself.
Mayweather stood up and crossed himself. “What is she doing? Is she putting a curse on me?”
“Don’t say anything,” Kendall said to me.
“How did you do it? Did you send your spirit out and bewitch him? Did you sign the Devil’s book?”
“DO NOT answer him,” Kendall said.
“Excuse me, but I am not the police,” Mayweather said. He had retreated to the cabinet against the far wall for safety. “That woman’s answers are not admissible in court. If she’s innocent of witchcraft, she can talk to me freely.”
Kendall fumed and banged the desk hard enough to make the warden’s golden pens jump. “And what happens when you’re called as a witness, but you refuse to report what she said, huh? Then what? Then you’ll be charged with obstruction, so don’t you dare tell me what she can and cannot say. She will NOT answer your questions.”
Still, I rocked back and forth, hiding behind my hair. I couldn’t stop the rocking.
“Caesar,” I mumbled.
Mayweather stepped up to the desk. “What did she say?”
I looked up, my eyes on fire. “Caesar. It was Roman Caesar.”
Kendall grabbed my shoulder and tried to shake me out of my trance. “Do not say anything else, Rosie. I’m getting you out of here.”
I kept rocking, as worthless as a broken jill-in-the-box, but Kendall pulled me to my feet and put his tailored jacket over my shoulders as if he were draping me with a shock blanket.
“We’re not done with her!” Mayweather said. “She’s in cahoots with the devil, I tell you. The devil’s whore!”
As Kendall led me down the hall toward the exit, he pulled me close to his chest and draped his expensive jacket over my head to try to shield me from the security cameras.
His jacket smelled like a cash register.
In front of my feet, the exit sign glowed bright red, the color reaching toward my ankles.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Away from here,” Kendall said. “It’s not safe. When the cops arrive, they’re going to arrest you.”
He pushed open the doors and guided me through. The night had cooled and the stars were twinkling faintly between the links in the fence. The cool night was a balm to my stinging face, but I didn’t deserve it. Right now, my burning cheeks were the only connection I still had with Matt Mettle. He had suffered way worse than anything I could ever imagine and I had no right to seek relief.
I slapped my face to make it sting more.
“What are you doing? Stop it,” Kendall said. He opened his car door for me and guided me into the bucket of the passenger seat the same way the cops had helped Mettle climb into the backseat of their cruiser.
“Where are we going?”
“Someplace safe,” Kendall said. He ran around the hood of the Mercedes and climbed into the driver’s seat and reversed from the parking spot. He zipped past God, giving a blast of air that ruffled the tiny shrubs on the side of the guard booth.
“Where?”
“I promise you this very minute the warden is on the phone with the state police. The cops are going to get a quick warrant and they’re going to come after you. Despite his recent missteps, Mettle was one of their own. They’re not going to take this lightly. If you’ve never seen the wrath of an angry police force, brace yourself. They’re like fire ants on a picnic blanket. We need to get as far away from Dark Haven as possible.”
In the other lane, an ambulance roared past us.
“But what if Matt is still alive?”
“He’s not. I saw him fall to the floor. Phyllis and Dimitri didn’t last two minutes.”
I brushed the hair out of my face.
“I’m sorry for being so blunt. I saw the footage online. Nobody could have survived a blast like that.”
I sniffled, all the stress catching up with me. “Take me back to my inn. I want to be alone.”
“Can’t do it,” Kendall said. “They’ll arrest you.”
“I don’t care. Let them! I don’t care about anything anymore.”
“You can’t go to prison. If you’re right about Roman Caesar, then he’ll come after you. He’ll have easy access to you when you’re behind bars,” Kendall said. “But I have a place. A cabin. You’ll be safe.”
I closed my eyes. My face stung something fierce. The ride was so smooth, it felt as if I were floating, right through the groping tentacles of a fire.
I grabbed my handbag from the floor and pulled out my phone.
“Who are you calling?”
“Stanley Eldritch.”
“Don’t call anyone.”
“I need him to look after my inn while I’m gone.”
Kendall squeezed the wheel. “Okay, fine, but don’t tell him anything. Don’t tell him what happened and don’t tell him where you’re going. Can you trust him?”
“Yes,” I said.
I dialed the number at Eldritch’s apartment and he picked up on the third ring.
“Ayuh? Who’s this?”
“It’s me, Rosie. I need to ask you a favor.”
“Anything.”
I glanced at Kendall. “Can you look after the inn for a few days?”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
Kendall made a slicing motion across his throat as if to say, Cut off the conversation.
“No, nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Nothing at all.”
“Your voice is shaking, Red.”
“I’m fine. It’s just the wind. I’m in the car.”
“Whose car? Where are you going?”
Kendall squeezed the wheel, his eyes bulging like someone was squeezing the back of his head.
“I’m just—I need to get away for a little bit. I need to recharge my batteries. I need to go someplace to get away from all those nasty comments.”
“That’s probably a good idea. Be safe, Red. Get some rest. I’ll take care of your place.”
“I will. I’ll see you in a few days,” I said and hung up.
Kendall exhaled. “I swear. You’ve got me on pins and needles here. It is never a dull moment with you.”
We drove on, the white-blue headlights boring through the darkness of the highway, the ride as smooth and pothole free as a cruise on calm seas.
I was in good hands, I told myself. I could trust him.
I could.
31
Without the moon, the road and the surrounding forests were too dark to provide any clues about our destination. Every time we approached a road sign, we whipped by it so fast, the letters were a blur before I could wipe the tears from my eyes long enough to read it.
Grief sat heavy in my face, on my head, in my shoulders, and I felt like I was sinking deep into the rich upholstery. With every passing headlight, I caught glimpses of myself in the dark reflection in the windows. My face was as red as my hair, my eyes sunken as deep as if all the skin had burned off my cheeks.
“We need to stop so I can get a change of clothes,” I said.
>
“No time,” Kendall said.
I’d be stuck in the same jeans and sweater indefinitely. “Can we at least stop at a Walmart or something? I need a toothbrush.”
“Can’t do it.”
“I also need some lady things.”
Kendall sighed. “I’ve got some clothes at the cabin. Once we’re there, I can make a run for whatever else you need. But right now, we need to get you off the road. At any time, one of these passing cars could be a state trooper. If he runs my tags, we’re done for, me included for hiding you away.”
“You’re a good friend,” I mumbled, my eyes heavy. “Thank you.”
I wanted to sleep away the grief, to not wake up for weeks and weeks, not until the black ball of lead in my stomach had dissipated. I expected once we were at this cabin or wherever we were going, I’d have a good cry, but at the moment, I was numb and heavy.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Kendall said. “This mess has just begun.”
We had been on the road for over an hour. I thought maybe we were traveling north, but thanks to living under the smog in New York, my skills with celestial navigation were a bit rusty.
I closed my eyes and tried to let the rhythm of the road calm my heart.
It didn’t work.
The last time I remembered looking at the clock in the dashboard, the digits had been glowing 1:13 AM.
I stirred when my phone buzzed in my lap. I looked at its clock. The digits now read: 1:45.
I must have fallen asleep.
Kendall glanced at my lap. “I’m surprised you’re getting a signal out here.”
I picked up my phone.
“Put it down. Don’t answer it,” Kendall said.
I ignored him and swiped the screen alive.
My heart slid into my stomach.
“At some point, I’m going to need you to trust me,” Kendall said. “If you keep ignoring my advice, I don’t know how I’m going to get you through this. We’re standing on the banks of a major legal swamp and it’s going to get thick and cold and dirty. We’ll make it through together, not alone.”
“It’s just a text.”
“From whom?”
“I don’t know. Someone sent me a link.”
“Do not click it,” he said.
I clicked it.
“I swear to God, Rosie. You are going to give me a drinking problem.”
The link sent me to my own Facebook page. There was another video posted.
The caption read Dark Haven’s Finest Barbecue.
“Oh God.”
Kendall glanced at my screen. “Don’t watch it.”
“It’s already playing.”
“Then put it away.”
I couldn’t help but watch. But this time, the footage was not of the visitation room; instead, it was black and white video of a jail cell, one resembling solitary confinement.
In the video, Mettle was shirtless and dressed only in his boxers. He was on the floor doing pushups. The angle was high, so there must have been a camera mounted in the corner of his room.
“The leaker must have posted this,” I said. “I bet it was Caesar.”
“The same guard you blamed before?”
“Yes.”
“How would he have been able to get ahold of the footage?”
“I don’t know, but who else would have posted this?”
“If a guard was behind the executions, then how could he have planned them for the moment you were there? How could he have known you were going to show up?”
“I don’t know,” I said, still watching Mettle’s muscley back ripple as he did his pushups. He did over a hundred straight. I touched the screen, wishing he was real. The video made him feel alive, as if nothing bad had happened.
Already, below the video, the comments were piling up in real time.
They triggered an idea.
“The website,” I said.
“What?”
“Each time before I visited the prison, I had to submit my information to the state’s website. Someone who had access to that information could have passed it to Caesar.”
We looked at each other.
“God,” we said in unison.
“Hold on, was that an exclamation? Or a revelation?”
“Exasperation,” Kendall said.
On my screen, Mettle stood and flexed. He looked at his biceps, gripped his hands behind his back, and flexed his triceps even harder, hitting different poses as if he were showing off for the security camera.
The comments kept coming:
Boy, he’s hot!
I’d do him in a flash!
Talk about a super trooper.
Mettle then bent over the single bed. It looked as if he was resting on his elbows, but then I noticed that he was putting his nose to the thin mattress, maybe sniffing it.
He looked back to the camera, made sure his wide, V-shaped back was covering the view, and then he slid his hands under the mattress. From behind, it looked as if he was lathering himself with something. I remembered how sweaty he had looked in the visitation room.
The comments continued:
Is that oil?
You’re in prison!
This is not a bodybuilding competition.
What a vain jerk.
A moment later, the door opened. A guard came in and handed him a bundle of folded clothes. Mettle glanced up at the camera. It was black and white, the footage stuttering, but I could have sworn he gave me a wink.
The guard followed his gaze up to the camera.
His haircut was unmistakeable.
Roman Caesar.
Mettle followed Caesar out the door. The time stamp at the bottom of the video was today’s date, only a few hours ago, only minutes before Kendall and I had arrived in the visitation room.
32
Where’s the next video?
The comments kept coming.
Is this guy gonna go up in smoke too?
It was only a matter of time before the leaker posted the next video. Whoever was doing it had found their audience. On my page. My page had become witness to one of the worst ways a human being could die.
And the audience loved it.
Unable to stomach Mettle’s death again, I turned off my phone and shoved it into my purse.
“You okay?” Kendall asked.
I said nothing. I turned away to watch the woods.
The moon made its debut sometime around 3:00 a.m. The stars sharpened and brightened and the moon shadows in the woods changed their direction like a forest made of gnomons.
The only thing I could tell was that we had traveled far away from civilization. The farther we went, the thicker the trees. The prickers along the blank highway were rough and uncut, and the air, even filtered through the vents, was as crisp and clean as walking into a greenhouse.
At one point, we crossed a large field that had been divided down the middle with barbed wire. I wondered if we had crossed the Canadian border, if all the speed-limit signs would turn to kilometers.
“Where on earth are we going?”
“Sit tight, we’re almost there,” Kendall promised. “Do you not know where we are?”
“The Yukon?”
He laughed. “No, we’re still in Maine. We actually haven’t gone that far. The trip out always feels longer than the trip back.”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t spent that much time in Maine.”
“I figured. You couldn’t wait to get out of here.”
“I think everyone should leave their home state at some point in their lives.”
“Agreed,” Kendall said. “Do you remember Bobby Trickle?”
“The other ginger? How could I forget?”
“In junior high, I once asked Chris Clemens about you and he said, ‘Keep dreamin boy-o, she’s already betrothed to Bobby Trickle.’”
“Us red-heads have to stick together,” I said. “It’s an unspoken rule.”
“Is that so?”
&n
bsp; “Did you really ask about me? Back then, I had a mouth full of metal, glasses thicker than skyscraper windows, and shoulders that could hold an elephant.”
“I absolutely asked. I figured someone who was so into books might have a thing or two to show me about things that the rest of us take for granted.”
“I can’t tell if you’re complimenting me or yourself.”
He laughed. “So many things in life we take for fact, when in truth, we have no direct evidence. Take my heart for example,” Kendall said. “All the books and hundreds of years of medical research tell me I that have a heart, right? I probably do, given that I can feel something beating inside my chest. If I were a betting man, I’d bet good money that if you were to cut me open, you’d find a heart inside my ribs, but the reality is that I’ve gone my entire life believing I have a heart without actually knowing it for sure. It’s the same way with ninety-five percent of the things we think we know. Like gravity. A spherical earth, you name it. When you get down to it, believing the things you read is really an act of faith.”
I didn’t know if he was being incredibly profound or unfathomably stupid. “I never thought about it like that.”
“The people who claim to know the most are really the most trusting. Serious readers are the ultimate believers.”
I sighed and looked out the window. At some point in a woman’s life, a point that I was apparently on the verge of crossing, she stops reading arty books and watching arthouse films and she loses her patience for the arteests who spend their lives delving into the unknowable mysteries of the universe. At that point, she begins to crave nothing more than mindless entertainment. Maybe the turn comes about because she’s tired of all the suffering she’s seen. After thirty years of hard work and broken dreams, maybe all she wants are happy endings.
Whatever the case, her fascination with armchair philosophy gets sucked right out the window. As smart as Kendall might have been, I suddenly missed Mettle’s inane banter. Deeply.
“Did you grow up in Maine?” I asked to change the subject.
“Ayuh,” he said, putting on a fake Down East accent. “I moved to New York for a few years after high school, went to Columbia, got a great job with a great client, but then felt a hankering for the past and moved back to Maine for a simpler life.”