At Rope's End

by Edward Kay

  “Fantastic sunset, isn’t it?”

  “Were you watching me?”

  “Not watching. Observing. I observe everything. I’m very, very good at it. Don’t ever forget that, little brother,” she said in a mock-menacing tone.

  Verraday smiled. “You must be pretty good at it to be able to afford this place.”

  “I like to think so. And I observe that you’ve got something on your mind.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Sorry, trade secret. Come on in.”

  Penny wheeled herself easily through the wide foyer into the open-concept main floor. There was a spacious living room with a large fireplace and a low bar area that separated it from the kitchen beyond. In one corner of the living room was a small shrine with a stone Buddha, a hand-painted Tibetan prayer on parchment, and beneath it, a photo of the Dalai Lama. In another corner, water splashed across beach stones in a fountain, bathing the room in gentle white noise. Penny’s home was an oasis of calm and sanity. Verraday knew his house would never be like this.

  “Do you still meditate?” he asked.

  “Every day. Would you like to try it with me?”

  “Sure. We could do that sometime, I guess.”

  “Did you ever listen to that meditation link I sent you?”

  “Not yet. But I will.”

  Penny smiled knowingly. She could always read him, and he knew it. “You look like you need a glass of wine. I’ve got a Walla Walla Cab or a Willamette Pinot Noir.”

  “You going to have some?”

  “No, but be my guest.”

  “I’ll have the Cab, please,”

  She rolled over to the mostly empty wine rack, where she kept a couple of bottles on hand for the benefit of her guests. She pulled out the Cabernet and handed it to her brother.

  “I’ll let you do the honors. There’s a corkscrew in the cutlery drawer.”

  Verraday examined the label. “Wow. 2008 Leonetti Cellars. This is a spectacular bottle of wine. Not cheap, either. You sure it’s okay if I open it?”

  “I’m never going to drink it, so knock yourself out. I’ve got one of those Coravin argon gas gizmos that will preserve whatever you don’t drink—and I won’t let you drink it all, since you’re driving.”

  He uncorked the wine and poured some into one of the large crystal wine glasses. He swirled it around, savoring the deep garnet color and the earthy, fruity notes on the nose. It was so full of sensual nuances that revealed themselves only gradually that he closed his eyes and inhaled it without actually bringing the wine to his lips. At last, he took a sip.

  “My God, that’s unbelievable,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want some?”

  “Positive. There’s a bottle of elderflower pressé in the fridge. You can pour me one of those with some ice while I check on the dinner.”

  “Whatever floats your boat.”

  “It’s delicious. You should try it instead of the wine.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” he replied.

  Over dinner, as she always did, Penny gently probed his affairs like the protective older sister that she was.

  Finally, she said, “So listen, I’m curious. If you didn’t have a hot date lined up for our usual dinner night, why did you ask to see me now instead of next week? I know you. Something’s up.”

  Verraday nodded. His expression became serious. “Yeah. You’re right. Something’s up.”

  Penny looked alarmed. “What? It’s not something with your health, is it?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. It’s about Robson.”

  Penny’s face tightened. “Robson? What about him?” The words came out of her like they’d been stuck in her throat.

  Verraday looked his sister straight in the eye. “He’s dead.”

  Penny didn’t say anything at first. Just took a long breath.

  “Dead. You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “The coroner says it was a gun-cleaning accident.”

  “I wonder if it really was an accident.”

  “No idea. I found out through a contact of mine in the Seattle PD.”

  “Whoa, back up. You have a contact in the Seattle PD? Someone you’re actually on speaking terms with?”

  “Long story for another time. Anyway, my contact didn’t know Robson. Just heard about it through one of the older guys who had worked with Robson back in the day.”

  “I never figured him for the suicide type,” Penny said.

  “Me neither. Seemed like too much of a self-absorbed asshole from what I can remember. But that was thirty years ago.”

  “There are lots of reasons why even narcissistic people commit suicide. Maybe his health was failing and he couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “I fucking hope so,” said Verraday.

  Verraday was a little surprised when Penny let his comment go and didn’t gently chide him with some compassionate quote from the Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh.

  “I used to fantasize about killing Robson,” said Penny. “But being in a wheelchair limited the possibilities. Sometimes I would imagine hiring a hit man, but they have a bad habit of testifying against their former employers when they need to cop a plea bargain. And it also took away the pleasure of the hunt. So I always imagined stalking him with my car, waiting for him to step off a curb, cross a street, then bam, run the bastard down and blame it on faulty hand controls.”

  “How come you never told me that?”

  “I try to save that kind of shit for my counsellors. And I was sort of ashamed of having that amount of hate in my heart. When I discovered Buddhism, the monks told me that the only way I would ever be free of my pain is if I forgave Robson. So I tried. I did loving kindness meditations for him, you know, envisioning his pain and whatever made him the way he was, and wishing happiness for him.”

  “And?”

  “It never worked. Every time I pictured his face, I felt like I was going to puke. What about you?”

  “I always had it in my mind that someday, when I figured out how to kill him without getting caught, I really would go murder the son of a bitch. I didn’t want you to know, because then you’d either have to rat me out or be an accessory after the fact.”

  She nodded, then looked at him with sudden curiosity. “Did you do it? You could tell me, you know. I’d be cool with it. It’d be our secret.”

  Verraday shook his head. “No. Though part of me wishes I had. I feel like the old bastard cheated me out of the opportunity.”

  “Did you tell Dad about Robson yet?”

  “No. I don’t even know how to tell him. I’m not sure how to process this myself,” said Verraday.

  Penny paused to consider it. “I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  “We should go visit Robson’s grave.”

  Verraday looked at her incredulously. “Are you fucking kidding me? Why would we visit his grave?”

  “Ritual is how humans mark significant life events. And this is a significant life event. Problematic people, people who have caused us grief and suffering, are in some ways the most difficult for us to let go of in death. Robson’s never going to pick up the phone and tell us he’s sorry. He will never take responsibility for what he did now.”

  “And I’ll never have a chance to kill him myself.”

  “That too. Seeing his grave, being present at it, will help us let it go. Do you know where he lived?”

  “My source says Everett.”

  “There can’t be too many cemeteries in Everett. And there’s bound to be an obituary online in one of the papers that will give us the details.”

  Penny rolled over to her desk, picked up her tablet, and tapped in a search.

  “Bull’s-eye,” she said. “There it is. The funeral was two days ago. ‘Donations may be made to Saint John the Baptist Church. Visitation to be held at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park.’”

  “You seriously want to do this?” Verraday asked.


  “Yes. Right now. I just need to use the bathroom before we go. It’ll take a while to get there even this late in the evening.”

  * * *

  Verraday waited on the driveway for Penny as she set the alarm system, then emerged from the doorway. She rolled herself toward him.

  Verraday clicked his remote and the lights of his car flashed.

  “Actually, I’d rather we not take your car,” said Penny.

  “Why? I’ve only had two glasses of wine,” protested Verraday. “That’s nothing. I’m not even a third of the way to the legal limit.”

  “I know. But remember I told you I’ve got that new personal mobility device? I want you to try it out with me.”

  Verraday cocked his head and looked at her quizzically. “We’re going to drive to Everett in an electric buggy?”

  “Did I say it was an electric buggy?”

  Penny reached into her purse, pulled out a remote and clicked it. The garage door began to creak. As it swung upward, the ceiling light activated automatically, revealing a carmine-red Porsche Boxster GTS with a blue handicap parking tag in the window.

  “Well? What do you think?” asked Penny.

  “I’d say it beats hell out of those buggies at Walmart.”

  “They make high-performance hand controls for these nowadays. Comes from racing paddle technology. It’s actually faster than using your feet.”

  “Who knew?”

  “Not the kid in the Mustang who wanted to drag race me on the way back from getting the groceries this afternoon. You should have seen the look on his face when I left him behind at the lights like he was standing still.”

  “And what do the Tibetan monks say about your new ride?”

  “They say that attachment to material objects causes us to remain wandering in samsara, bound to birth and rebirth. But that the color suits me.”

  * * *

  With Penny at the controls, the Boxster made it up the coast to Everett in considerably less than the thirty-four minutes that Google maps recommended budgeting for the trip. With the aid of her GPS, they were soon at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, cruising the lanes that ran past the headstones. At last they spotted a mound of freshly dug earth. Verraday got out and checked the headstone, then nodded to Penny and waved her over.

  “It’s him,” he called quietly.

  Penny turned the car off then deftly pulled her wheelchair out from behind the seat and set it up beside her on the pavement. In one neat motion, she slid out of the driver’s seat of the Porsche and into the chair. Then she wheeled herself up to the grave beside Verraday.

  For a long moment, neither one spoke. They just stared at the gravesite and tombstone. Then Penny broke the silence.

  “David Robson, because of you I will never get to see my beautiful, sweet mother laugh ever again, or hold her close and tell her that I love her. I have not been able to do so for the last thirty years. Because of you, I will never get to see my parents’ golden anniversary. You took away my freedom and my childhood. You caused me to suffer terrible physical and emotional pain. You put me in this wheelchair. You wounded my father to his core. He was never the same after you took my mother’s life. And now you’ve taken your own life. You acknowledged none of the terrible things you’ve done. I want to forgive you. But I can’t. And you’ve done that to me too.”

  She closed her eyes. The night was still, and in the darkness, Verraday could hear her breathing in the formalized way she’d learned through meditation: in through her nose to a count of five, holding it for a couple of seconds, then releasing it through her mouth to a count of five.

  Verraday checked to make sure Penny’s eyes really were shut. Then he turned his back to her slightly and undid his fly. Penny’s eyes snapped open as she heard a tinkling sound on the freshly turned earth, like a sudden shower on a summer afternoon.

  “Jamie, what are you doing?”

  “Do you disapprove?” he asked.

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. “Not if it helps give you closure.”

  In another ten seconds, he was done. He zipped up his fly, then looked around at Penny.

  “Okay, I’ve done what I’ve come here to do. We can leave.”

  “Well, good for you. But I’m not done yet,” said Penny. “There’s one last thing on my agenda.”

  Penny reached into her purse and took out a small, delicate vial with Japanese lettering on it. She began sprinkling the contents on Robson’s grave.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a Japanese Kobyo vase. It’s said to hold the nectar of compassion for Kannon, the god of forgiveness.”

  “Kannon? That’s an ironic name for a god of forgiveness. So what’s that liquid? Some kind of Buddhist holy water?”

  “No,” replied Penny, sprinkling out the last of the liquid. “It’s urine. Mine. I told you I needed to use the bathroom before we came here.”

  Verraday thought he’d heard wrong until Penny began to laugh. It was a laugh that built in momentum from somewhere deep inside her until her ribs shook.

  Verraday began to laugh along with her now too, almost uncontrollably, a conspiratorial kind of laugh they hadn’t shared since they were children keeping a mischievous secret together. Their laughter echoed off the tombstones and through the graveyard, and it subsided only when they finally had to catch their breath. Even in the dim light, Verraday could see tears glistening on Penny’s face, running down toward her broad, toothy smile. He tasted a salty tear on his own lip and felt another one rolling down his cheek. He wiped it away, still laughing.

  CHAPTER 21

  By the time Verraday had gotten home from his outing with Penny, he was too tired to do any work on the midterm or any reading for his next paper. He checked his e-mails and saw from the addresses that it was mostly the usual stuff: half a dozen or so from his students, which he decided to put off reading until the morning.

  One e-mail caught his eye, however. The subject line promised that new preview material had been added on the Bettie Page MoMA exhibit website. Verraday opened it and saw a color picture of Bettie wearing a leopard-print bikini, striking a claws-out cat pose. It was pure kitsch, not the sort of thing that excited him. Just like the serial killers, he realized, he had a specific range of things that turned him on and things that did not. This did not. However, there were three new thumbnail photos of Bettie.

  Like the shots in the previous e-mail, the thumbnails were ones he had never seen before and were taken with much greater artistry than the standard Bettie photos. He clicked on the first one, which showed Bettie from the midriff down, wearing knee-high, black leather boots, seamed stockings, and a cinched corset that peeked into frame. The next shot was of Bettie’s chin and teeth, smiling seductively as she bit into a leather whip. The final photo was a view of Bettie from behind, lying on a bed, wearing nothing but a black bustier, fishnet tights, and stiletto heels.

  He remembered when he had felt passionate enough about a woman to create photographs like these. With Nikki. He had taken the time to learn about exposure, depth of field, and lighting. He’d even made his own prints so that no eyes other than his own would ever see the erotic images he created of her. He’d kept them despite his conflicted feelings. The photos of Nikki were the most artistic thing he had ever created, technically accomplished and, he had to admit, extremely erotic. But he could never look at them without being reminded of his own naiveté, his misplaced belief back when he’d clicked the shutter that he’d found the love of his life.

  That last thumbnail on the web page of the MoMA exhibit had triggered a memory of one of those photos. He knew he shouldn’t take out the images of Nikki to check, but his curiosity got the better of him. The last time he’d looked at the photos of her was four years earlier, when he’d bought this house and was packing up his apartment. At the time, he had thrown them into the garbage as part of the past that he was casting off. Then at the last minute, he had retrieved them, not quite able to break the connection.
He took a key out of his desk now, went over to his filing cabinet, and unlocked it. He pulled the drawer out and at the very back, filed behind mortgage information and tax records, he found the folder containing the photos of Nikki.

  He took one of them out. It was black and white, Verraday’s favored photographic medium. In it, Nikki was lying on her belly atop a duvet on Verraday’s sleigh bed, grinning that seductive Cheshire-cat grin at him. One of her long legs was stretched out behind her on the bed. The other was chambered above her, a stiletto pump dangling seductively off the end of her toes. His memory had been correct. The outfit Nikki was wearing was virtually identical to the costume that Bettie Page was modeling in the last thumbnail photo. He supposed that he had seen that picture of Bettie years earlier, had forgotten it on a conscious level, yet unwittingly recreated it when he had bought the lingerie for Nikki that she was wearing in the photo that he now held in his hand.

  Gazing at it now, he grudgingly understood how Kyle Davis had been so unable to resist Rachel Friesen. He had an impulse to toss this photo and all the other Nikki photos into the wastebasket but then felt a pang of regret and placed them back in his filing cabinet. He still had more in common with Kyle Davis than he cared to admit.

  CHAPTER 22

  As Verraday and Maclean walked through the Science Quadrangle past the Drumheller Fountain, he noticed that the first dead leaves of the season had fallen into the water. He watched them swirling about on the surface, some caught in eddies, moving together, others alone, traveling in erratic trajectories. He wondered whether, if you tracked it all long enough, a pattern would emerge, some master Newtonian clockwork, or if it was all just chaos, the random influences of a fickle universe.

  “So we didn’t find anything interesting in Helen Dale’s apartment,” said Maclean. “Not yet at least. There were no signs of any struggle, no blood, no disturbance, not even a magazine out of place. And no cell phone or datebook.”

  “Which is exactly what I’d expect from our killer,” said Verraday. “He won’t leave a trace of himself any place that he’s not able to control.”