From Away

by David Carkeet

  After Betsy left, Denny sat on the cubby bed for some time. He didn’t know which angered him more—that Sarah had killed Homer precisely when he had found peace, or that she had exploited his guilt over the years in some sort of sick mock romance. Denny was sure that was what she had done. If she didn’t do it outright, with words of malice, then she did it cunningly, with the knowledge that Homer was a helpless soul. She might not have known the full story, but she didn’t need to. All she needed to know was that Homer suffered from guilt, and to look at his face was to know that.

  One phone call was all it would take, and the wheels of justice would grind her to a pulp—and her skinny mate with her. Denny pulled out his cell phone and turned it on. He looked at Nick’s number on his contacts list. He would explain that he was a fake Homer, and then he would have to say that the real one was dead.

  He snapped the phone shut. There was justice, yes, but there was mercy, too—for Nick, for Betsy. Mercy required that they never learn of Homer’s death—that they go on thinking he was alive. Altruistic impersonation. This odd pairing of words leaped into Denny’s head as if deeply rooted there, like some remembered moral guideline from childhood. Denny had fooled people into thinking he was Homer in person, face to face. Certainly he could fool them from a distance. Only two people besides him knew the truth, and they weren’t likely to go public with it. Homer lives!

  But a sudden thought struck him. If Homer’s body were found and identified, it would undo everything. Denny could prevent that from happening if he found it and removed all of Homer’s identification. But no—the body would still be recognizable as Homer’s. Denny felt a push, an almost physical sensation, to the logical remedy: he could plant his own ID on the body so that it would be taken for the corpse of Dennis Braintree. That way there would be no grief. Who cared about Dennis Braintree? Just as Denny had been Homer in life, Homer could be him in death.

  Only two people knew where Homer’s body was. Denny opened his cell phone. It would be an enjoyable phone call on many levels—waking them up, surprising them with the news that he was no longer in the house, extorting the location of the body with the threat of exposure. But it wouldn’t work. All they had to do was wait for him at the site and pounce, and this time Better Lance would not prevail. He snapped the phone shut.

  What had the golden couple said when they returned to the house? “I hope I never have to do that again.” Do what? Bury him? Burn his body? There had been other words. Sarah had called Denny a “dipshit,” but that wasn’t helpful. She had mentioned her ex-boss at the radio station with a laugh. “I’d like to put Prescott in Prescott.” What could that mean? Was Prescott a town? A forest?

  Denny backtracked a bit. What car had she used? Certainly not hers—he hadn’t found a trace of damage when he had inspected it. Probably not Lance’s either, since, according to Lance, she had been the driver. If she had somehow used the Rambler, she and Lance would have wanted to dispose of the car as well. How would they have done it? If they stuck it somewhere in the woods, eventually it would be found. A “pond dump”? What kind of term was that, and how did it even occur to him? Sparky hunkered into view, protesting his innocence from disposing of wrecks by parking them on pond ice. “My pond-dumpin’ days are over,” he had said to Nick. In many ways, Sarah had Sparky’s brain. She had borrowed his pistol-of-urine idea. She could just as easily have borrowed this idea, too.

  Denny opened his cell phone again, this time to set the alarm. He chose 3:30 A.M. Surely the front desk would be empty at that hour. If Betsy left her computer on, he could go online and call up a map of Vermont. And if she didn’t, surely he would find a map of the state in the lobby brochure display. And surely—yes, he felt for his keys in his pocket—surely, Marge’s car was still at her sister’s house. Before dawn, he expected to be driving that car north to an ice-covered lake that was surely named Prescott.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  LAKE PRESCOTT WAS A TEARDROP BELOW THE HIGHWAY, WITH its bulbous end in Vermont and its northern reach tapering into Canada. When it came into view in the early light, the dull, metallic sheen on its surface certainly looked like ice, but how thick was it? Working in his favor was a mountain to his right as he approached the lake. It would block the sun’s rays from reaching much of the southern shore until well into the spring. That area, he guessed, would be the slowest to thaw.

  All the way from Marge’s sister’s driveway he had visualized the identity switch. He would remove Homer’s wallet from his pocket and stuff his own in its place, he would grab any other papers he saw that Homer would be likely to have on his person, and he would get out of there. Whatever else of Homer’s remained in the car would be seen as stolen property. If the body was found, the interpretation would be that this unpredictable Braintree character had made off with Homer’s car and possessions and had been killed and left here.

  Not just killed, but killed by Sarah. This crucial addition had struck Denny mightily on the highway. It changed his mission from a preventive one to forestall grief in case Homer’s body was found to a bold initiative with discovery of the body as a key element. If Nick could find the body not by chance but because Denny had directed him to it with a letter mailed or left somewhere before he died, a letter confessing to his imposture and expressing his fear that Sarah intended him harm, there was a chance of justice after all. Denny could say he suspected Sarah had tried to run him over and he feared she might try again. He could also say he had heard her making phone calls inquiring about the ice thickness on Lake Prescott.

  This plan unfortunately gave Lance a free pass, but Denny worried that introducing another level of complication at this stage could put Nick off the whole idea. There were some loose ends, of course, but Nick could deal with those. How had Sparky put it about a problem that would puzzle the police? Their job to explain it, not his job. His job was to present them with a pair of unassailable givens: Dennis Braintree was the name of the hapless fool in the car on the ice—or at the lake bottom if Nick didn’t get to it in time—and Sarah was the party who had turned the living fool into a dead one.

  The highway, still well above the lake, curved to the east. Denny knew from the map that a Camp Road would deliver him to the lake. It finally appeared, and soon he was angling downward. The road was well maintained for some distance, with shuttered cabins sprinkled along it, but it gradually lost respectability, and he weaved to avoid holes, fallen limbs, and small banks of snow. Much gear shifting was required, and he filled the woods with grinds and engine whines. The cabins thinned, then disappeared entirely as he drove more deeply into the mountain’s shadow. Pines below blocked a clear view of the lake, but then the road dropped steeply, and an opening revealed a beach and a large, round cove.

  Denny stopped the car and stared at the lake through the windshield. There was no car on the ice and no obvious hole where a car might have sunk. He got out and put on the winter boots he had grabbed from under Betsy’s front desk before leaving— Homer’s fringed “pussy boots.” He slogged through the mud and slush on the beach, looking for tire tracks, but he saw nothing. At the edge of the lake, he took stock. It certainly was a hidden cove. A car deposited not far from shore would be visible just from this beach and from the opposite shore only with binoculars. The ice that stretched out before him was actually water on ice, and that was the source of the dull sheen he had seen from above. How deep was that surface water, and how thick was the ice below it? He had no idea. At his feet, cold, dark water rhythmically lapped through a gap between the ice edge and the shore.

  He slumped with disappointment. There was no body here, and without a body there could be no justice. But there could still be mercy—he could be Homer from a distance and hope that Homer’s body was never found.

  He heard a strange sound. It was so unexpected that his mind achieved recognition in stages, like a steam engine chugging up to full motive power. The sound was a horn—not a car horn, but a musical instrument, a solo horn playing in t
he wilderness. It was Homer, and he was playing his waltz.

  Denny threw his arms out with excitement. Then he became still. He turned his head, trying to pinpoint the origin of the sound, but it had stopped. It had come to him so faintly that he began to fear that, like so much else in his world, it had existed only in his head. Then it returned, the same tune. Was Homer on the mountaintop? Was he on the road? Denny turned his head. The sound wasn’t coming from above. It came from farther down the lake.

  Denny hurried along the shore in that direction. The cleared beach gave way to thick, impassable woods. He couldn’t possibly reach Homer on foot. He had another idea, hurried to the car, and drove back up the hill. When he reached the spot where he had begun to drop down to the lake, he saw what he had hoped for—another road, one he hadn’t seen before, that followed the shore but from high up. He took it, and when he cleared a ridge, he saw a second cove, a larger one. In the middle of it sat Homer’s beige Rambler.

  Denny’s thought, as the road took him down, was that Homer was playing on the shore in some kind of celebration. Then he realized that Homer could still be in the car, trapped, playing as an alarm. But why wasn’t he blasting? Why play beautifully?

  When Denny reached the lake, he got out and ran to its edge. He saw two sets of tire tracks. One stopped short of the shore—Lance’s or Sarah’s car—and the other went all the way to the edge of the lake—the Rambler. Denny cupped his hands and hollered at the car, some two hundred feet away. Homer couldn’t hear him over his playing, so Denny waited for a lull. When it came, he yelled Homer’s name.

  There was a pause, then two toots of the horn, as if he was repeating the syllables of his name.

  “It’s Denny!” Denny shouted.

  After another pause, Homer resumed playing his waltz.

  Denny looked down, and a problem that had only half-registered now hit him with full force. The land was separated from the ice by a border of water that was at least a foot wide. Not only that, but where the ice began, it looked dangerously thin. He could bridge the gap with a step to the ice, yes, but wouldn’t he immediately crash through it? How to get out where it was thicker? Sarah and Lance had driven the Rambler out there, and that would have been just a little over 24 hours ago. The ice could not have melted that much already. How had they solved the problem?

  He examined the tire tracks approaching the edge of the lake and saw that they stopped a few feet short of it. From there to the water, instead of tire tracks, two big grooves pressed deeply into the mud. Denny could see the objects that had made them as vividly as if they were still in place: boards to traverse this watery patch and the thin ice. Sarah and Lance had anticipated this thawing at the shore, and they had brought their own boards. The quality of their preparation gave him a chill.

  They would have been long boards, needing to be tied to the top of Sarah’s car—one more exertion that he hoped they weren’t up to at the end of their labors. He looked around wildly but saw nothing. He ran along the edge of the lake to the woods, and he spotted the two boards, chucked into a snow patch in the forest. He grabbed the end of one of them and began to drag it through the mud. The lumber was strangely thick—some ancient part of the barn, he guessed. When he reached the water, he laid the board on the beach at the water’s edge, pointing to the lake. He planted a foot on each side of it, bent down, grasped it, and heaved it forward. It landed on the ice, splashing the surface water aside. Still straddling it, he slid it a few feet at a time until only a foot of its length rested on land and most of it lay on the ice.

  Homer tooted again—the same two-note sequence as before, but really saying, “Where are you?” Denny cupped his hands over his mouth and sang in response, “Coming!” He tried to sing it, but his voice quavered terribly.

  He took one step onto the board, his eye fixed on its other end. A second step. It held. He hurried to the end of the board, where he tested the depth of the surface water with his boot. It was about two inches deep. He took another step and put his full weight directly on the ice. He looked back at shore. If he broke through here, he could scramble to safety. He looked at the Rambler. If he broke through there . . .

  Homer played his waltz, and Denny found himself sloshing forward. He could feel the cold through Homer’s boots, but they kept the water out. He walked a straight line, hoping that since the ice had supported the car, it would support his mere one-sixth-of-a-ton of weight. With each step, he punctuated Homer’s melody with his own small moans of fear. These grew quite loud when he reached the car and saw that a semi-circle of open water lay just beyond it. Why had the ice thawed there? He had no idea, but it was clear that Sarah and Lance had brought the car out as close to it as they dared.

  Denny knocked on the trunk.

  Calmly, Homer said, “Get the stuff out of the back seat.” Denny went around to the side of the car, and from this perspective he could see that it was tilted forward, sitting unevenly on the ice. He opened the back door and immediately saw the situation. Homer, locked in the truck, had kicked the seat loose, but he had freed it only a few inches because it pressed hard against boxes and crates that in turn pressed against the front seats. It was a logjam, and Homer hadn’t been able to dislodge any of it. Still, those few inches had created a gap big enough for the horn to be heard, because the windows were rolled down. Why? To speed up the car’s sinking. They had planned that, too.

  Now powered by rage, Denny began hurling stuff onto the ice. When he slid a small metal file cabinet out, the car shifted a few inches. He visualized the car dropping before his eyes and taking him and Homer into the hole with it. Homer, impatient now, made the job harder by kicking the back seat and pinning the remaining objects against the front seat. Denny snapped at him to stop doing that, and he heard a muffled “Sorry” from the trunk.

  A minute later, Denny gave Homer permission to have at it. The seat flew forward and Homer began to emerge, clumsily inching out feet first. Denny helped by pulling on his ankles, and Homer finally tumbled out the door and onto the ice, the French horn still in his grasp. From his knees, he surveyed his surroundings, blinking against the light.

  “Jesus Christ!” he yelled. He struggled to his feet. “Go! Go!”

  Denny went. Homer followed, stiffly at first, but then he picked up speed. Neither said a word all the way to shore. When they reached land, Homer dropped the horn in the mud and stumbled halfway to the woods. He fell to his knees, then onto his hands, and screamed several times—inarticulate cries, finally issuing into the repeated cry of “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

  It was clear that Homer had had no idea where he was. There was much else that he didn’t know. Denny drove and simply listened as Homer spoke. He had pulled off Homer’s wet shoes and socks after helping him into the car, and Homer slowly rubbed his bare feet under the heater fan as he narrated his incomplete version of events:

  He remembered parking the Rambler, all packed for his trip to Austin, at the bottom of Warren Boren’s muddy driveway on his way out of town. This was about 9 o’clock at night. He entered Warren Boren’s driveway on foot, carrying the horn in its case. He thought he remembered a car driving up the road as he stepped into the driveway, but he paid no attention to it. Before he had gotten very far up the hill, he heard the roar of an engine behind him, and he turned and saw the approaching car in time to jump away. He definitely remembered jumping, horn case in hand, but he remembered nothing else until he came to in the trunk of the Rambler. He didn’t know right away that it was the Rambler, and he certainly didn’t know it was sitting on thawing lake ice. The engine was running, but the car didn’t move—a situation that persisted for hours, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure because he kept falling asleep. Even now, he said, he felt woozy. With those words he stared ahead through the windshield.

  Denny waited. Finally, he said, “What then?”

  Homer resumed his tale as if Denny had thrown a switch to turn him back on. He said he tried kicking in the back seat, and when t
hat didn’t work, he didn’t panic, thanks to meditation techniques that Millie had taught him. At some point the car engine stopped—out of gas, Homer guessed. He fished around to see what else was in the trunk and tried prying his way out with a tire-changing tool. Warren Boren’s horn, in its case, was in there as well, making the space even more confined and getting in his way with every move he made. Then, instead of cursing it, he took it out and blasted notes in the hopes that someone would hear him. When no one came, he settled into playing it.

  “I dabble in just about every kind of instrument,” he said in a dull, disconnected tone. “There were some things I never quite worked out in ‘Amelia’s Waltz,’ and I absorbed myself in trying to solve them.”

  Denny wanted to scream. How could it not occur to Homer that Sarah had tried to kill him? On her return to the farm—earlier than Homer had predicted—she must have seen the Rambler pull out of Homer’s driveway and go up the road. She would have seen Homer as he got out and carried the horn up Warren Boren’s driveway, and, certain that it was Denny, she had commandeered the Rambler and tried to run him down with it. Homer must have struck his head on something when he jumped. Somehow Sarah had gotten his unconscious body into the trunk. Denny again wondered when Lance had come into the picture. Had he been in Sarah’s car with her and witnessed the attack? Denny’s guess was that Sarah had called him after the fact.

  “Homer,” Denny said, “someone tried to kill you.” He would introduce the idea by stages. “They tried to run you down.”

  “No, no,” Homer said almost good-naturedly. “I think it was a car theft gone bad. I left my keys in the car, and when they stole it they must have thought Warren’s driveway was the main road. The curve in the road there fools people all the time. They ran into me and thought they killed me, and they decided to cover it all up.”