by Dana Cameron
When we’d gotten in, tied up, and locked the gun in his truck, Erik called the police. It was just a few moments before they were there and I took the time to be seized by a fresh set of nervous shakes.
Erik and I went over our story—I couldn’t believe I was going to lie to the police and said so. Erik reminded me that I was telling the truth, just a highly abbreviated version: Erik caught the guy on his boat, explaining why his truck was there as well as the car that the guy drove. He and I were there looking for a necklace I’d lost on our last trip out; I was frantic when I’d found I’d lost it. We surprised the stranger, there was a scuffle, and we tied him up.
When Ernie saw the cops, he immediately started screaming again, but in a different pitch, saying that we were going to kill him, that we were torturing him…
Erik took my hand and squeezed it. I could feel my teeth grinding together, I was trying so hard to keep my mouth shut.
I knew the cop who came, Officer Lovell, because I’d met him during the to-do out at the Chandler house a couple years back. He stared at Ernie in amazement.
“You’re gonna have to do a little better than that, mister. Erik Reynolds is a business owner, got kids in the Sunday school here. Hell, I eat at his place once or twice a month, special night out for me and my wife. He always looks after us. And Mrs…. er, Professor Fielding, everyone knows her.”
I looked up, startled. Who the hell knew me?
“She does these programs about archaeology and history and stuff here at the schools for the kids, does some of her archaeology work, right here in town. And she’s a teacher, up someplace in Maine, there. Very respectable person.”
Respectable was news to me. I’d always thought of myself as politely invisible at best.
“So you’re going to have to come up with a better story than that they were torturing you out on a boat, threatening your life and all.”
“Officer Lovell. I admit, I had the shotgun, but it was never loaded. I just wanted to make sure the guy wasn’t going to try anything.” Erik asked permission and then showed Lovell that the shotgun was indeed unloaded; he must have removed the shells about the same time he locked the gun back up in his truck. “I didn’t want him to get any ideas about rushing us…and with Emma here…” he trailed off, shrugging, obviously playing the knight protecting the damsel in distress.
“You got your paperwork?”
I felt my stomach turn over as Erik dug out the license and ID. Torture was exactly what we’d done, even if there had been no actual violence beyond the slap that I’d seen. Just the threat of it had been enough, and I was sickened by what I had said, what I had been playing at. I looked over and Erik was nodding sorrowfully, as if he was shocked and hurt by the crazy allegations against us. I don’t know how he did it; I felt the urge to confess the truth, that it was largely as Ernie had said just then. I stuck my hand in my pocket and turned away, a whisker away from admitting everything….
Then I felt the picture of Brian jab me under the fingernail. A sharp pain, and cold anger flooded me. He had threatened Brian, and that negated everything else.
Didn’t it?
I spoke aloud, maybe trying to convince myself. “Look, whatever he might have tried to do tonight—which was bad enough—whatever he was planning to do, he also knows the guy who I think shot Nolan, down at the gym.”
I thought I saw a flash of determination on Erik’s face, really the first look of true emotion I’d seen since he’d mentioned Raylene and the kids. But it was very dark and I was very tired.
The questioning seemed to go on forever, but Lovell assured me that they would find out as much as they could, and finally took Ernie away. That’s when I started feeling sick again, my body rebelling at this new self-knowledge. And still, part of me gloried in it, the stepping outside of the bounds, the violence of it, and the realization that I didn’t crumble in the face of it.
Nolan and Temple would be proud of me, I thought with horror. I must be losing my mind.
Erik put his hand on my shoulder: I jumped. “Whoa, there. Why don’t you come back to the place with me. We can check on Raylene and the little ones, have a drink.”
“I better get home and make sure everything’s okay there,” I said. “Thanks anyway, Erik.” I almost apologized to him for the way I was, the way I’d been on the boat. Then I remembered that not only had Erik instigated things, he’d played along with it and more than surpassed me. I don’t know what he said to the guy while I was away. What could make a man crumble like that? Erik looked like a stranger to me now, and I wondered why he was so good at this sort of thing…don’t be coy, Emma. Interrogation is not “this sort of thing.”
“Brian is home, isn’t he?” Erik said. “Not on one of his trips?”
“No, he’s home. Just working late a lot lately. Project will be over soon. He’s working late to avoid actually traveling, doing phone meetings instead.”
“Okay, how about this? We’ll go back to your place, make sure everything’s fine, batten down the hatches. Then you’ll come back, and we’ll talk about what’s going on, get rip-roaring pissed. Raylene will give you a lift home. And I’ll tell you my special hangover remedy for the morning. What do you say?”
Not a word about why he and Raylene might be involved in this. Not a single syllable about the fact that it was their acquaintance with me that had endangered his wife, threatened his family and his business. After the way that Marty and Dora had asked me to stay away—and rightly, as much as I hated to admit it—Erik was willing to take me closer into the heart of his family. I could barely look at him.
And yet, the thought of spending even a few hours alone in the house, even with the cats, even with a phone call to Brian, was repugnant. I couldn’t face it. Again, weakness. Not so different from the amoral weakness I’d just been rejoicing in. What was right? Was I weak to be afraid of being alone or weak to embrace violence to solve a problem?
All I knew was that I was running out of ways to deal with this all on my own. “Thank you, Erik. I think I will, if you don’t mind.”
“Good. Settled then.”
Easy for him to say.
We drove back to the house; I checked the alarm, the doors, counted the cats by rattling the food dish.
I called Brian’s office; he’d already left, so I talked Erik into staying and having a drink, rather than going back. I didn’t want to call Brian’s cell, he’d drive off the road when he heard the news. And I decided I didn’t want him to come home to find the house empty.
He glanced at his watch. “Just one quick one. I’ll call Raylene and let her know.”
He called, and I found the whiskey and a couple of glasses. “You want ice?”
Erik scowled at me like I should know better. I did, but wasn’t the sort to impose my religious beliefs on others. I slid a glass toward him, and he picked it up, glanced at the color appreciatively, and tilted it toward me.
“Getting the bad guys.”
I raised my eyebrows at him, frowned, clinked. The burn at the back of my throat was exactly what I needed; the smoke and peat took me away for just a moment…
Not far enough. Not long enough.
We drank in silence. Finally, Erik cleared his thoat, looked away, embarrassed. “You know, you did real good tonight. You kept your head.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Look, I know your type, I know what you’re like—”
“My type?”
“You know what I mean. Girls.” He shrugged. “Women. You keep your head in a situation, maybe, but you worry, pick over every little thing afterwards. I’m telling you: Don’t worry.”
I tried very hard not to slam my glass as I set it down. “Erik, what we did tonight…”
He waved his hand. “What I did. You didn’t do nothing. Didn’t lie, didn’t hurt anyone.”
“You know that’s not true. I’m every bit as involved—”
“That’s the worrying I’m talking about. Look, if ther
e was a coyote taking your sheep, you wouldn’t just sit there, would you?”
“This is different. What I did tonight, it really scares me. It’s like…I don’t actually remember picking up the hammer, but I know damn well that it didn’t magically fly into my hand, you know what I mean? Something in me saw it and took it for a very specific purpose. I don’t know how far I would have gone to get Ernie to tell us anything.”
The sound of crickets filled the kitchen while Erik considered. “You kept yourself pretty cool. You didn’t rush me, you didn’t try and do anything yourself.”
But there was this feeling, I thought, this feeling that I’d been reduced to a predator myself. I wasn’t sure how upset I was by it, either, not once I remembered Brian’s picture. For a minute there, back on the boat, I really hated how weak I was, that I felt constrained when dealing with Ernie. And then, I saw the hammer, and when I took it, I knew it wasn’t for dramatic effect.
I took another sip of whiskey, and began to wonder what I was capable of. If Ernie hadn’t talked, would I have gone further?
I said to Erik, “I guess…I think of myself as a pretty decent person—” I cut myself off when I heard how patronizing that sounded.
Oddly, Erik wasn’t angry. “I’m not a decent person? I shouldn’t protect my family?” He swirled the whiskey around in the bottom of the glass and glanced at me.
“No, no, of course you should. And I should too, I know, it’s just…I guess I’m surprised by how fast I…by how…shallow everything is.” I groped for the words. “Civilization, no, culture…doesn’t seem to really go that deep.” I shrugged and swallowed. “Maybe not as deep as I thought, in me, anyway.”
“Guess it depends on what your culture is,” Erik said. “Lotta folks would say that guy got off easy.”
“Maybe I think we should have just handed him over to the police.”
Now Erik was annoyed. “That’s exactly what we did. I don’t understand your problem, Emma. I don’t like what we did either, I don’t go out of my way to get into shit like that, but if it comes to me, to my home, my family, I’ll do that and a hell of a lot more. Bet your last dollar on it.”
“I know,” I said, and sighed. “I also know that if we hadn’t…waited before we called the cops, we might not have had as much to find the real Tony with.” I looked up at him. “Thank you, Erik. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for that—”
He scowled again. “Don’t be grateful; it’ll just fester. We found ourselves in a jam, we helped ourselves out of it, that’s all. Cooperation, if you don’t want to think of it as teamwork.”
“No, it was teamwork. Look. I’m in it as much as you, I accept that and I’ll deal with it, you don’t have ever to worry about that.”
He nodded and shrugged. “Like I said, don’t worry. It’s not worth it.”
It was my turn to be impatient. “Okay, okay, and just so we’re clear, I’m in it more, because it was my fault that the son of a bitch was there at all, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am for that—”
“Don’t be sorry, just fix the situation.”
“For God’s sake, Erik—!” Suddenly I had to laugh. “Okay, what am I allowed to be? Not sorry, not grateful, not worried?”
“Be happy.” He grinned roguishly, and finished his drink. The smile stayed on his face, but left his eyes. “Just be ready, too.”
Brian came home a few minutes after Erik left; I poured him a whiskey and decided I needed another finger or two for myself. I told him that everything was okay, that the police had the guy, told him what had happened. After his initial shock, Brian sort of hunched back in his chair, one arm across his chest, the other arm tight into him, fist against his lips. I told him about the discussion with Erik, how I didn’t like what Erik was saying but couldn’t deny that he was right about some things. To me, that seemed almost as important as the evening’s events.
Brian loosened up enough to shrug. “Any animal will try to protect its mate,” he said.
“You know, that really bothers me. What is it with guys and animal analogies?” It didn’t matter that I’d been struck by the same thought earlier.
“Well, what do you think we are, Em? Monkeys with car keys.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not that simple.”
“Sure, it is.”
I shook my head. “The important thing is that we try to be more than that. It’s important to me, anyway.”
“Absolutely, but you shouldn’t underestimate the urge to stay alive, to protect what’s yours. It’s not always a bad thing.”
But what if you go there and you don’t come back? I asked myself. Something in me had found the anger I felt on the boat exhilarating. It was so vastly different from what I was used to, what I thought I knew about myself, that it scared me almost as much as anything that had happened so far.
“Where did Erik learn to do all that stuff anyway?” I asked aloud.
“Who knows? We don’t know much about him and Raylene before they got here. Maybe he just had a rough past.”
“I don’t want to be comfortable thinking like Erik.” I hunched up on my chair, hugging my knees. “I like him, but it’s too close to the edge of somewhere I don’t want to go.”
Brian thought a minute, nodded, then reached for my hand with both of his. “If there was anything I could have done to prevent you having to go through that, I would have. As it was, I wasn’t there, and I hate that. We couldn’t have predicted it. But you did great, and more than that, you got us one more step toward ending all of this. Finding out who’s behind this. We know someone is out there, and you and Erik got us that much closer to finding him. I’m so proud of you.”
I reached for him. “I’m…I was really scared.”
He took my hand. “I know. I would have been, too. I’m scared now, but I think we’re almost through this. It’s a really good break. C’mere.”
As he hugged me, we rocked back and forth on the chair, and I was a little comforted. At the same time, I was still troubled by what I’d seen in myself that night, and couldn’t decide whether something I had cherished had been taken away or I was just blessed with an unwanted degree of self-awareness.
Chapter 16
CONCENTRATION CAME A LITTLE EASIER THE NEXT day, Saturday, and after calling Raylene to make sure she was okay, I went to campus to catch up on some work. Denial, mixed with a slight degree of relief that at least one of the octopus’s tentacles was cut off, made a potent mixture, and I spent the morning actually finishing up the work on the Chandler house survey. Things had to be getting better, I kept telling myself, and maybe I let a little part of myself believe it.
I took my lunch and my book and headed for my sanctuary. After I’d taken the job at Caldwell College five years ago, it had taken me a while to realize that my office wasn’t the sanctuary—even with the door shut and a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging—and neither was the lab or the library. You were still in circulation there, so to speak, and so I’d found refuge a ways off campus. Now that the college—the museum and the department—had been subject to such violation, I needed my gravestone more than usual. Unlike after seeing Chuck, I now felt like I could afford to go.
At the edge of campus, the old center of Caldwell, Maine began, and like so many New England towns settled a couple hundred years ago, there was a town green and a town hall, with an old white clapboarded church nearby. In this case, the old white clapboarded church had burnt down and was replaced in the 1890s by a stone church, which looked a bit gloomy when it was leafless winter, but was cheered by flowering trees in spring and summer and positively glorious when the leaves changed in fall.
Better still, to my purposes, it was usually empty, especially at this time of day. The trees drooped with their leaves—willows from the nineteenth century and oaks from long before that—and I sought out my gravestone in the oldest part of the cemetery.
“Belinda Aamons, beloved wife, Jan’y 12, 1730. ‘Many a woman shows how capable sh
e is, but you excel them all,’” was on my gravestone, as I thought of it. Not that I’d ever lean against it while I was eating, but I always pulled up a space along the stone wall that was directly opposite. Old enough to be interesting, no tree roots to make me uncomfortable, and yet shielded from the entrance of the burial ground by other stones and trees, this was my favorite spot. Belinda’s stone was all alone—no sign anywhere of Mr. Aamons, who’d thought enough of his wife to erect an expensive engraved stone for her—and I could watch the birds looking for worms, I could watch the street traffic and the low apartment houses on the other side if I wanted, or I could read my book. “The grave is a fine and private place,” even if there was no one here I wanted to embrace. I just wanted my lunch and my solitude, for the moment. Maybe someday, the solitude of the graveyard would be enough for me…. It occurred to me that when you’ve lost everything else, you’ve still got the graveyard. It was an oddly comforting thought.
Morbidity, Emma. It’s unbecoming in you, and since you’re incapable of writing good poetry, let’s have a stop to it.
It wasn’t all that morbid, I reasoned, just stock in trade for archaeologists, who, at least on a practical level, are more conversant with the rituals of death than most people. I’d participated in more than one discussion where friends picked out their choice of final celebration. The argument over burial in a Viking ship versus being set to sea in a burning boat—both with appropriate grave goods—was a time-honored one, as was the choice of what would go on a headstone: an abbreviated curriculum vitae in Latin? An imitation of an American Puritan skull and crossbones with hourglass? Instructions on how to access and use the solar-powered CD-ROM that was sealed in the casket, which would provide details of the deceased’s life? I myself was still undecided. Politically, I approved of cremation, but part of me wanted to leave something behind for future generations of researchers. A small stone, a few grave goods…just thinking how much fun that would be for someone down the road made me grin.