Cracked

by Barbra Leslie

  I threw myself down and pushed my arm under the couch. It was a mid-century modern-looking thing, and fairly low to the ground. I couldn’t see anything and with the sound of Fred’s breathing growing more and more labored and panicked, I shoved the gun under the couch to fish around for anything. Fred was dying. I had to get the inhaler. I had to get a phone. I had to get an ambulance, and the police. I had to get everybody.

  I felt the barrel of the gun slide against something and as I used the gun to slide the plastic inhaler in Fred’s direction I heard something behind me. At the same second I saw Fred grab the inhaler and suck on it, something sharp and heavy landed on my bad ankle. I screamed, thanked God for the crack – I would have blacked out from the pain without it – and flipped myself over with my good leg.

  Jeanette was on her knees behind me, one eye socket a mess of gore, blood down her face. For the first time since this all began, I felt a moment of real pity for her. She hadn’t had a chance. She had been raised in that house. Her body had probably been sold to who knows how many men.

  But when she raised the fireplace poker to hit me again, I shot her with the AK-47. I was just relieved I had known how to fire it.

  The blast sent her across the room, with her head and shoulders in the huge fireplace. I gagged and turned over in case I vomited. Fred pulled the gun from me, gently.

  He was still trying to breathe properly, but his color was back.

  “Get him, Fred.”

  I wanted to say, don’t kill him. Don’t have that to live with for the rest of your life, like I do. Like Darren does. Find a phone, call for help, lock the doors, hold onto the gun. No more killing. But I didn’t.

  Fred ran outside to find Chandler while I lay on the floor and watched Jeanette burn. I couldn’t move. I wanted to pull her out of the fire and ask her for forgiveness. I crawled closer but I knew that if I found the strength to drag her out, there was the danger of sparks or fire catching something, and we could all go up. So I left her where she was, closed my eyes, and said a prayer. I hoped somebody was listening to me.

  Someone came in the back door. I grabbed the gun and pulled myself back behind the couch. My jeans had been cut by the fireplace poker and I looked at the wound. If my leg had been able to support some of my weight before, I doubted it would now.

  Fred called out before he entered the room. “He’s gone,” he said. “It’s me.” He walked in, carrying an axe, covered in melting snow. “The car is gone.” He stared at Jeanette. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Fred ran up the stairs, I knew to look for Luke. I watched Jeanette burn. I felt nothing.

  Minutes later Fred came back down and said something about Luke sleeping. Drugged but sleeping. He didn’t want to carry him down and see this, he said. He disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a fire extinguisher. “Under the sink,” he said. He sprayed in the direction of the fire, and Jeanette, and kept spraying. He was crying. There was white foam everywhere, and the smell of burnt hair, and worse. Fred sat down on the couch so that I was at his feet, and he patted my head. I put my head on his knee, and we sat like that for a long time.

  I heard sirens in the distance and I let myself close my eyes. Finally.

  33

  I got out of the hospital a couple of weeks later.

  I needed surgery to pin my leg back together again. My ankle and tibia were shattered by the fall down the stairs at the old house, and then Jeanette’s attack. The doctors said I might always have a degree of hearing loss in my right ear, but in the grand scheme of things I wasn’t going to worry about it. However, apparently the stitches Chandler-slash-Michael had given me were of professional quality. He wasn’t lying about his time in the Army medical corps.

  I was in a wheelchair when Laurence took me from the hospital. I didn’t quite have the strength to move well on crutches.

  Skipper and Marie had flown back with Matty. They were worried that I wouldn’t want to come to their house, but they needn’t have bothered. I was happy to be alive, and I felt like something at the house had saved me. I was just relieved that they were in Toronto when hell was unleashed at their house.

  It could have been much worse. In my bad moments – which were far more than my good ones – I tried to remember that.

  Darren was still in the hospital, and the doctors said he probably would be until at least New Year. But he was up, and every day he was able to walk for a few minutes. The arrow had, as I had suspected, punctured his lung, but the ambulance had reached him in time to save it. His back was wonky – it didn’t hurt, he said, but he couldn’t feel parts of it. The doctors said that with the injuries he had received, numbness was a blessing.

  He was in shock, they said, when the ambulance had reached him, lying on the ground in front of the old house. Had it been twenty years ago, he wouldn’t have made it.

  “Remind me to donate to medical research,” Darren said to me in the hospital the day I was released.

  “Donate some cash to medical research, why don’t you,” I replied, and he tried to laugh.

  I hadn’t talked to Gene, who was still at his mother’s, recuperating. When I got back to Ontario, I would go up and see him. I wasn’t ready yet to tell him what I’d been through. Laurence had managed to track down his mother’s information from the hospital, and phoned to inform them that I was in hospital in Maine, recovering from some injuries.

  I told the Maine State Troopers everything, nearly every detail. I didn’t tell them about Lowell, but Darren did. It was decided that there weren’t grounds to prosecute; in the extraordinary events that unfolded, our claims of self-defence were widely believed.

  In the local Maine news, I was identified as “a private investigator from a prominent local family.” The state licensing board wanted to know all about that, but I assured them that I had never represented myself as an investigator, private or public. I was a private citizen, and planned to stay that way. As private as possible.

  Amelia French sent me flowers in the hospital, and a nice note. It was Miller, of course, who had shot her. She had finally remembered, though the damage he had done to her meant that she was relearning how to walk. She said she wanted to have lunch if I ever found myself back in Southern California. She felt bad that she hadn’t seen Miller for what he was, and blamed herself for what had happened.

  She’d have to join the club on that one. And no offense to her, but I planned to never go near Southern California, ever again.

  Chandler York, aka Michael Vernon Smith, has not been found. The FBI put him on their Most Wanted list. Thorough searches of his home in Orange County and the cabin in the Maine woods uncovered a quagmire of banking details which were going to take a while to unravel. But in the meantime, the authorities froze all assets they could find.

  No one could figure out where Dave had come from. Fred paid his fees in cash and swore he couldn’t remember his last name, if he ever knew it. In security footage of everywhere we knew he had been – the motel in Palm Springs, the hospital in Toronto – it was apparent that he had been ever mindful to avoid showing his face to a camera. Like Jeanette, Dave had been recommended to Fred by the man he knew as Chandler York, his trusted friend and lawyer. The very fact of him being recommended by Chandler York – aka Michael Vernon Smith – meant law enforcement officers seemed to be of the consensus that whoever he was, he must have something to do with the Family.

  But I didn’t believe it, and neither did Fred. I remembered he said he and Dominic had grown up in foster care together. Maybe it had been with Michael Vernon Smith? Maybe he hadn’t been in on Dominic’s murder and split or changed allegiances after that point. Police said no such person as Dominic Pastore had ever lived at Michael Vernon Smith’s home, The Orchard, at least through Social Services. But that didn’t prove much to me.

  All I knew was he had saved Gene’s life. Had waited patiently with me at the hospital. And when he had had a chance to kill me, kill my br
other, he hadn’t.

  Skip and Marie managed to get their floors redone before the whole family descended upon them for Christmas and New Year. Miller’s blood had soaked into the wood so deeply, and Marie didn’t want to cover blood stains with a rug. Skip got the house alarmed, with motion detectors everywhere. I didn’t tell him that I doubted anyone in Maine would try to go near the Cleary house uninvited anytime soon.

  With Michael Vernon Smith still at large – and in the police’s opinion, Dave as well – Fred and I were subtly advised to hire top-notch security for all of our loved ones. Luckily, we had the money to. But with his assets frozen – at least, the ones we knew about – and no other known Family members that I had heard of, I thought Chandler was probably in a small town somewhere, hanging out a shingle as a country lawyer. Until, perhaps, some wealthy people started disappearing. The Feds would be watching.

  And so would I. As long as I lived, so would I.

  And the twins? Well, they saw their first white Christmas. Along with their father, they spent a couple of hours every day between Christmas and New Year at the hospital with Darren, and we managed to spring him for New Year’s Eve. Fred was considering where to take the boys, and where the healthiest place for them would be, after their ordeal.

  Maine was high on the list, but Darren and I were campaigning for Toronto.

  At Christmas, Laurence informed me that he had reserved a spot for me at a very posh and remote rehab facility on the east coast of Canada. A university pal of his owned the place. I was supposed to go for ninety days, and I decided to do it. I owed it to the people who loved me.

  I would go eventually. I knew I wasn’t through with the rock. I had to keep my promise to myself, and say my goodbyes to Ginger and Jack in my own way, and that involved me in my apartment, with a few days’ worth of crack. I craved crack every single time I felt sad, which was more often than not.

  And yes. At the cabin in Maine, while Fred wasn’t looking and before the authorities arrived, I managed to grab the huge amount of crack Chandler had given me.

  At Christmas, we decided that we would have Ginger’s ashes flown to Maine. We would bury her at home, not in the waters off Orange County. Very little good had happened to her there. Wherever Fred and the twins wound up, he was going to take them back to California to see their friends. And to pack up, sell the house, cut ties. And to convince Marta and Rosen to come with them, wherever they decided to go. I told him that I wanted Marta to live with me, if he couldn’t make use of her. I would bring her whole family and pay them whatever they wanted. I had the money now, and you don’t get cooking – and love – like that every day.

  The boys were safe, and my siblings were alive.

  All except Ginger.

  She continued to talk to me in my sleep, and I continued to listen.

  Jack? Well, it would be a long time before I’d be able to think about Jack without more pain than I could possibly bear. Drug-free, at least.

  I had done things that changed me. But because of it, some people were dead who should be dead, and some alive who deserved to be.

  And now, I knew what I was capable of.

  So did Chandler York. Or Michael Vernon Smith. And one day, I would find him.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Into the second week of January, and I was still recuperating at Skipper and Marie’s. I had underestimated how painful and ungainly my leg was going to be while healing. And while I had been prescribed a few Percocet, Marie doled them out in what I told her, only half-jokingly, was a very stingy manner. I knew it was with love. I knew they were helping me, and they loved me, but they were also my jailers – I hadn’t managed more than a couple of very quick hits of crack, and the lengths to which I had gone to do that made it nearly – nearly – not worth it.

  I fantasized about the day when I could lock my apartment door behind me again, and have D-Man on speed dial. Just those few days. Then rehab. Even Laurence agreed that I couldn’t go to rehab as banged up as I now was.

  And we all wanted to be near family still, one way or another.

  But Marie’s cooking was heaven, the boys were still here. I watched them snowshoeing outside and Marie made snow angels with them. They weren’t going back to school right away; it was decided that for the rest of the academic year the boys would be homeschooled, and mostly just given lots of love and outdoor exercise. Luke was taking longer to come around, which wasn’t a surprise. He had spent time alone with Jeanette and Chandler, without his twin. The night at the apartment, the night Jack died, would have been even more traumatic for him. He was separated from his Matty, possibly forever, as far as he knew. He wasn’t doing much talking to anybody but Matty, but I felt confident that would change.

  Darren, Fred and Laurence met up in Toronto to sort out some legal stuff for me around Jack’s will, get some clothes from my apartment, and do the paperwork to get a continuance on my court appearance – I was to appear by video monitor and had nice statements from Paul Belliveau and a doctor in Maine about the inadmissibility of me travelling yet. I was campaigning for them to be looking for somewhere for Fred and the boys to live, though Skipper and Marie were still pushing hard for Maine.

  I was lying in bed one morning, debating whether I was going to start my day with an awkward, surreptitious hit of crack in my closet – the only place I could go during the day; with so many of us in the house, the bathrooms were occupied a lot. Marie knocked briefly and came in, with coffee and a stack of letters.

  “Mail call,” she said.

  I had been getting the weirdest mail since everything about Michael Vernon Smith had been all over the news for the better part of a week. Most of it was delivered to several different spellings of my name, to General Delivery, Downs Falls, Maine. The postmaster knew where I was – everyone knew where I was; my dreams of privacy for the moment had been thoroughly quashed – and they were forwarded. I had people asking me to find their pet rabbit and people asking me to find someone to kill their husband. Those letters I passed to the police, though sometimes after I read them I didn’t really want to.

  I sat up in bed and took the coffee Marie passed me. The first letter I opened was in one of those old air mail envelopes you hardly see anymore, and was typed on what looked like an actual typewriter. I looked at the postmark, which was so smudged as to be indiscernible, and American stamps had been stuck on at some points in its journey, over whatever was underneath. I unfolded a thin sheet of onion-skin paper.

  Danny,

  Unlike you, I’m somewhere warm, finally swimming in my boxers.

  I want you to know how very sorry I am about your losses. I was too late, and I’ll always have to live with that. I hope you have decided not to do anything further about our common friend. That’s my job, and you have done and seen far more than you should ever have had to.

  But should you need to reach me in an emergency – if you need help, if he finds you before I find him – call me at the number below, and ask for me by my Palm Springs married name.

  Be happy. And please, be careful.

  Dave. Swimming in his boxers. And the Palm Springs married name? The bartender at the pool that Darren was flirting with. Doug? Dave introduced himself as Doug Douglas.

  And our common friend had to be the man I had known as Chandler York.

  I knew it. For half a second I wanted to call Darren, call Detective Paul, call the FBI, and whoever else had doubts about Dave. But this I would keep to myself. Even from Darren.

  Especially from Darren. I was going to be doing my best to make sure he never had to go through anything bad, ever again. He had killed a man, and lost his sister. He should play his music, be a fantastic uncle, and have his own family one day soon. This life wasn’t for him.

  I read the letter again and again, something like hope growing in my chest, and resolve. I memorized the number until I knew it as well as I knew the names of my siblings, or the look on Jack’s face when he died. It wrapped itself around the pain an
d love I would always carry for my sister and lodged itself there.

  I watched the boys playing outside and decided I would go out today. I was going to go into town. The roads were fairly clear, and I would phone and see if one of Downs Mills’ two taxis could come and get me. Skip had mentioned there’s a tattoo shop now. I was going to tattoo the number, maybe high up on my thigh, in some kind of a design so only I could read the numbers. The way my life was turning out, I knew that in future someone could do something to addle my brain, and I wasn’t taking any chances with this memory. And if I liked the tattoo artist’s work, maybe I would have something designed for Ginger, and for Jack.

  Perhaps I would cover my body with them.

  I reached into the drawer beside my bed and opened my hollowed-out copy of Anna Karenina. It had been my hardback edition when I was in high school, and it was still here. I took out my pipe, and my crack, and my lighter, and put them in my PJ pocket. I hopped into the bathroom in the hallway, not bothering with the crutches, holding Dave’s letter, folded back inside the envelope. I stood over the toilet, reading it one last time before I burned it and flushed. I watched the ashes disappear.

  Then I allowed myself a tiny bit of crack, right there in the bathroom. Marie would probably smell something, but I would say I had burned a particularly nasty letter from some crazy. If she didn’t believe me, so be it.

  I’m far from perfect. The people who love me know that.