The Right Side

by Spencer Quinn

  B.J. nodded. “Like a dream. That’s what I said—are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

  “And what was Mia’s answer?”

  “To the dream thing? It made her cry, so I didn’t ask again.”

  A van with the words Bellville Growers Supply and Services painted on the panel door pulled into the circle, the driver tapping the horn. Goody awoke and was on her feet in an instant. The driver glanced out, a man of about LeAnne’s age who looked like a younger, less-content version of Fred McCutcheon. His gaze went to B.J., LeAnne, Goody, and back to LeAnne.

  “You won’t tell?” B.J. said.

  “No.”

  B.J. ran around the van and jumped in. The van drove off. Goody ambled over to where the van had stood, then squatted, and pissed right there.

  Fred McCutcheon was just descending the front steps of the funeral home, a golf club bag over his shoulder and one of those white flowers in his blazer lapel, when LeAnne drove up. She got out of the car, told Goody, “This’ll be quick,” and approached him. Goody, left in the car, started making a murmuring sound in her throat, low in volume but in no way positive.

  McCutcheon paused on the bottom step. “You’re back,” he said.

  “I’ve got kind of an odd question.”

  “Do you?”

  LeAnne started to sense a change in his attitude. Was he late for his tee time? Something else? Who cared? “Yeah, I do. It’s about Marci. Simply put—I told you it was odd—did you actually see her body?”

  McCutcheon gazed down at her. “Yes, odd for sure. Plus rude and impertinent and nasty. And the same words apply to your behavior in general. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t take to being pumped, and I really don’t take to strangers coming up here and accosting my granddaughter.”

  “Accosting?”

  “My son just called me. I don’t know what you said to B.J.—she just turned nine, for heaven’s sake—but whatever it was, she doesn’t want to talk about it, and that’s not how we operate in this family. You had no right.”

  “I don’t care how you operate,” LeAnne said, imagining McCutcheon’s son starting in on B.J. just from the sight of the bad side. “All I want to know is did you see Marci’s body, yes or no?”

  McCutcheon had one of those naturally sympathetic faces, but all that was gone now. “Contemptible,” he said. He stepped carefully around her and walked toward his car.

  “Answer me, you asshole!”

  McCutcheon got in his car and drove away. The whole town seemed to go silent, except for Goody, front paws against the passenger-side window and barking her head off.

  Back in cabin six at Shady Grove, LeAnne’s head was pounding, the pain makers behind the crater back at full strength. Where were her pills? She searched around, couldn’t find them. Didn’t she have pills? Ibuprofen, at least? Hadn’t she picked up ibuprofen somewhere along the way? She sat down on the bed, trying to hold all the pieces of her life together in her mind. The trashed, post-pill-search interior of the cabin was a pretty good material rendering of what was going on inside.

  “Christ, help me.”

  There was nothing to be done until dark. She lay down. Goody stood by the door, watching with her coal-black eyes.

  She awoke. She was full of pain and drugs for pain, different parts of her body hooked to different machines.

  “Or maybe the same machine.”

  “What’s that, sweetheart? I didn’t quite catch it.”

  The light was dim. Maybe because her eyes were closed. She opened them. In fact, opened only one. The other eye didn’t seem to want to open. The light was still dim. Was something pressing on the uncooperative eye? She tried to raise a hand to explore, but her hands would not be raised. A figure loomed closer. Her mother? Yes. Her mother was leaning over her.

  “What the fuck? I told them no. No! No! No! How can they do this to me?”

  “It’s all right. Don’t fuss. Just try to relax. We’ll get through this.”

  “You, maybe.”

  Coal-black night, starless and moonless, but not raining. LeAnne turned on the bedside light. Goody was still standing by the door, still watching her—or possibly just facing in the right direction and in one of her trances. LeAnne went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face; her scars shone like war paint in the mirror. Behind her, Goody slurped up water from the toilet bowl.

  “There’s no barking tonight,” LeAnne said. She took the flashlight out of the desk drawer. “No noise, no fucking up.”

  They left the cabin, headed up the white crushed-stone path, got into the car. LeAnne drove south, turning onto a dirt lane that ran by the cemetery. After a hundred yards or so, she pulled over and parked under a tall tree. LeAnne switched on the flashlight, popped the trunk, and took out the long-handled spade she’d bought at the camping store in Arizona. Then they walked to Marci’s grave, Goody unleashed and silent on LeAnne’s right.

  LeAnne shone the light on the round bronze marker, the flowers—some of them new—and Marci’s stone. Daughter, Mother, Patriot. She gave all. LeAnne turned to Goody. “We have to know for absolute sure.” She propped up the flashlight on a tree root and got it properly aligned. Not only Marci, maybe not Marci at all: LeAnne had to know even just one thing for absolute sure. Dread was all around, the night heavy with it, moving right through her, like she was immaterial. She tipped over Marci’s stone, rolled up the strip of newly-laid sod, and began digging.

  LeAnne wasn’t close to being at full strength, but the soil had been freshly dug and didn’t resist the spade at all, almost like the earth itself wanted to cooperate. She found the right kind of rhythm—scoop, turn, dump; easy, like marching—and the hole deepened. Goody sat at the edge, her eyes gold in the reflection from the flashlight.

  “We have to know? I fuckin’ said we?”

  LeAnne dug. Six feet under was what you heard, but at a depth of no more than two feet the spade struck something hard. She bent down, brushed away dirt, and saw she’d come to the outer casket, made of fiberglass, plain white. LeAnne cleared around the sides, then bent again and raised the lid. Inside was the coffin, also white, but made of wood, with carved flowers at one end. Dust swirled in the flashlight beam. LeAnne’s hands got unsteady and even though the inner coffin wasn’t locked or fastened shut in any way—what would be the point?—it took her some time to get a good grip under the lid and raise it.

  And there was Marci, with a nice haircut and wearing a pretty summer dress. Her eyes were closed and her face was frozen in an expression of nothing. Therefore what? Did her final facial expression even matter? Not to Marci. She didn’t care. Where she’d gone, you got to not care, with the bonus of a nice ’do and fine duds. LeAnne knelt in the dirt.

  “Wake fuckin’ up.”

  She leaned forward to kiss that frozen face. Before she could do that, Marci’s lips moved. Just the tiniest bit, but LeAnne saw clearly, possibly with her bad eye. She closed the good one. Yes, for absolute sure, a sight for the bad eye alone. Then came Marci’s voice.

  “What if something happens to me?”

  “I know,” LeAnne said.

  Goody bit down hard on the back of LeAnne’s jacket collar and pulled her away. She got going on a low, menacing, dangerous growl that didn’t stop until LeAnne had the hole filled in, the sod relaid, the stone standing back in place, and the flowers properly arrayed. All as before except for the night air, which now smelled faintly of death; maybe not so faint to Goody. As for the realm where you got to not care: it didn’t exist.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  LeAnne awoke to the deathly graveyard smell. She opened her eyes and found herself on her bed, dressed in last night’s dirty clothes. Cabin six was full of late-morning light, and Goody lay with her back to the door. LeAnne took a hot shower, scrubbing off the smell. But then, drying herself, she realized that one small part was already dead, so maybe the smell came from her. How was she supposed to go on like that? She wiped steam off the mirror an
d studied that dead part, her fake eye. Perhaps it was just some trick of the light, or leftover mist on the mirror, but the fake eye did not seem completely dead. How could that be possible? LeAnne had no clue, but the fake eye had changed overnight and was no longer the polar opposite of the good eye. Much less lively, yes, and also different in other ways: more grounded? more mature? Somehow the fake was stepping up.

  “I’m going crazy.” She went into the bedroom. Goody lay supine, all four paws in the air. “I can’t think. Help me think.” Goody began wriggling around on her back, mouth open, tongue hanging out. A plan began taking shape in LeAnne’s mind.

  “A map of the town?” said Dot, opening a drawer in her office. She handed LeAnne a glossy tourist brochure. LeAnne unfolded it and found a multicolor souvenir–style map with no indication of scale, elevation, topography.

  “I’m looking for something more detailed,” LeAnne said.

  “Is this for the search? The sheriff must have good maps.”

  “You’d think.”

  “Ha! Problems with authority, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “Don’t worry about it—I’m the same way myself.” Dot rose, went into the back room, returned with a large three-ring binder. “They resurveyed the town ten years ago, just before they upped the tax rate.”

  LeAnne sat down, started paging through. Goody stood beside her, on the right.

  “Dog’s comin’ around, huh?”

  “Don’t know about that. But she does have a name now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Goody.”

  “Cool,” said Dot. “One of those ironic names. Should we stop looking for takers?”

  LeAnne turned to glance down at Goody, who’d begun gnawing at the rug, but not in a sneaky way. “I’ll think about it.” She followed the bike trail from page to page, studying the slope down to the swamp, the swamp itself, and the country on the other side—hilly at first and later, well beyond the town limits, rising up into mountains with steep grades, ten degrees or more—and tried to picture how the terrain would look in life, tried to commit it all to memory, like a prospective battlefield. “What’s out here?” LeAnne said. “To the east.”

  “National forest,” said Dot. “Beautiful country—cross-country skiing in the winter, mountain biking in summer, hunting in the fall.”

  “Hunters wear camo,” LeAnne said.

  “Uh, sure, sometimes.”

  “Or it could be some sort of retired veteran. Or a dream.”

  Dot tilted her head to one side. “You’re losing me, the teensiest bit.”

  “I’m just babbling.”

  “You don’t strike me as the babbling kind,” Dot said. “Get enough sleep last night?”

  “All I needed,” LeAnne said.

  “I’ve got extra sleeping pills, if you’re interested,” Dot went on. “No charge.”

  Sleeping pills: something to remember. As for Dot’s maps—and LeAnne had memorized hundreds, maybe even thousands of maps—her mind had retained the look of their small, tidy hand-lettering, and that was about all.

  “Can I borrow these?”

  LeAnne drove east out of town, found an overgrown and rutted track marked “former logging road 31N” on the map, and followed it up into some wooded hills. “Or a dream—can’t forget that possibility,” she said, glancing over at the dog. Goody was asleep on the passenger seat, the toy dog under one of her paws. “But if Mia believed it was real . . .” That was as far as LeAnne could take it. Her brain just wouldn’t do the work.

  LeAnne rounded a bend and came to a spot with a lookout on the left. She stopped the car. Beyond the edge of the lookout, the ground sloped down, lightly treed, all the way to the swamp. On the far side of the swamp, at the foot of the upland that rose to the bike trail, tiny Day-Glo dots were moving around. That would be the search party, about two miles away.

  “Up and at ’em.” LeAnne opened the door. “Let’s see what you can do.” Goody’s eyelids rose. She yawned, got out of the car, stretched, and then just stood there. “How come you’re not sniffing around? You’re here to sniff around.” Goody stayed how she was, if not in one of her trances, then in some sort of neutral state. LeAnne reached inside for the toy, brought it to Goody, held it a few inches from her nose. Goody turned away. “What the hell? I need you to perform.” Goody crossed over to the other side of the track and sat in a patch of sunshine by the nearest tree.

  LeAnne studied the swamp. There was open water, glinting in the sun; there were boggy parts, low and brown; and also strips of solid ground, green, with bushes tall enough to cast shadows. Could you somehow thread your way right through the swamp on the solid bits? Not that LeAnne saw, but she’d need binoculars to be sure. And where were they? She thought all the way back to January seventeenth and the ride in from the abandoned gas pumps to the five-building compound and that crowded dwelling where the addition of Katie and her had made sixteen people; way too many for the space. LeAnne also remembered the two chickens, and all the civilian feet shod in homey, woven slippers or sandals. And then that hairy hand, out from under the burqa. LeAnne tried to get back to the problem of the binoculars, but her mind was stuck on the hairy hand. Time passed. She finally grew aware she was letting her body slump horribly, like some undisciplined loser.

  LeAnne straightened right up. “It doesn’t fucking matter.” What mattered was . . .

  She tried to frame the issue, at first getting nowhere, and then finally realizing—or remembering—that the issue was Mia. Mia had been parted from her black armband either on the far slope or in the swamp itself. Had she tried to get across? If she’d tried and failed, the Day-Glo dots would find what remained. If she’d succeeded, she would have ended up on this old logging road. LeAnne moved onto it, checked the other side: rough, upsloping country, dense with trees, mostly evergreens, and thick undergrowth. So why go up there when you had this easy road? LeAnne began walking along it, heading north. She saw no signs of anyone’s recent presence: no footprints, no tire tread marks, no bits of paper or plastic: perhaps one of those places where nature was still in charge, a creepy place to be for an eight-year-old girl at night. LeAnne’s daddy had had no patience with night fears: Gonna fold up on account of you don’t see so good?

  Don’t see so good? “Daddy was way ahead of the game, big girl,” LeAnne said aloud. But then she realized she wasn’t sensing Goody at her side. She looked back down the logging road. The dog hadn’t budged, still sat in the patch of sunshine near the car. “Hey!”

  Goody turned her head slowly, even insolently, the kind of move that would have ended with her doing push-ups by the dozen in some alternate world.

  “Get the hell over here!”

  The dog stood up, stretched, and came down the logging road, in no hurry. Just before reaching LeAnne, she paused, one forepaw raised. At that moment her demeanor changed, suddenly all business. She went into a brisk trot, right past LeAnne and on down the road. LeAnne hurried after her, was just about to catch up, maybe fifty yards or so farther on, when Goody suddenly darted to her right, sprang high over a rotting stump without the slightest seeming effort, and disappeared in the trees. LeAnne broke into a run—huffing and puffing almost at once, so pathetic—and came to the stump. No sign of Goody. All LeAnne saw were tree trunks, shadows, rocks, the ground slanting up sharply. She grabbed a branch, swung herself forward, scrambled into the woods.

  Had she run up grades as steep as this, as wooded and rough? Yes, many times. But not now. It wasn’t a case of the mind still knowing how and the body not delivering: both parts were impaired. She filed that thought away for future reference, which she’d probably forget when the time came. That was pretty funny in a way, and LeAnne was smiling as she squeezed between two big rocks, their tops touching as though they’d rolled into each other, and reached a small clearing, a quarter of an acre or a little less, almost flat. Goody was sniffing her way around the forested edges of the clearing, in a quick trot, her
tail standing straight up.

  LeAnne called to her in a low voice. “Goody?”

  There was a moment of deep silence, and then Max Skelly stepped out of the woods, smoking a cigarette, binoculars around his neck. He grinned, like this was a pleasant surprise. “LeAnne, right? Marci’s friend from the army?”

  Her pulse, which has sped up a bit, ramped back down. “That’s right.”

  “The sheriff banished you, too?”

  LeAnne nodded.

  “Don’t know what he’s expecting to achieve,” Max said. He reached into the pouch pocket of his hoodie, which read Skelly Lumber across the front, and held out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”

  “No.”

  “You’d think he’d want all hands on deck at a time like this—especially folks like you, who know their way around in rough country.”

  “What makes you think I know my way around in rough country?” LeAnne said.

  “I didn’t hear you coming. The dog neither. That’s a sure sign.”

  LeAnne realized that Goody was back beside her, pressing against her right leg. “What are you doing up here?” she said.

  “Same as you, I expect.” Max took a drag on the cigarette. “If there’s anything to this whole armband idea, then maybe Mia made it up to the road.”

  “Right,” said LeAnne. “But you’re not on the road.”

  “Already walked it twice—not even three miles long, start to finish, state highway on both ends. State highways with traffic—meaning she would have been seen, most likely.”

  LeAnne nodded. It made sense, especially if you knew about the road and its limits, which she should have learned from the map, but somehow had not.

  “So I moseyed on up here,” Max went on. “It’s the only open spot you could get to at night, especially for a kid. And it’s really a dead end.” He jerked his head at the forest rising behind him. “The next two miles or so are pretty much impassable.”

  “You know the terrain.”