Cape Cod Noir (Akashic Noir)

by David L. Ulin

  He let out a loud exhalation. For the first time in days, he felt himself relax and the knots in his shoulder blades ease up. He still had to dispose of his bloodstained coat, and to be safe he should wait until his scratches were fully healed before heading home, but they were already much better. He had murdered a woman, but he would be a surgeon someday and would have the opportunity to save more than enough lives to make up for this.

  He turned off the TV set and thought about what he had been through. He was honest with himself for the first time in weeks. He knew why that girl had fought him. He could feel the subtle shift in his features, and knew she had seen her death shining brightly in his eyes, even if it was only for a flash. That was why she had fought him, because she was fighting for her life, but she didn’t have a chance. At a conscious level he had only been planning to rob her, but on another level he had been planning more. The thrill he had gotten from robbing the strip club dancer in Connecticut hadn’t been enough. He didn’t realize that at the time, only now.

  He thought about Rachel. During the day he had been fantasizing about her. It was too early to play out his fantasies now, he’d have to wait a few months, and he’d have to learn how to steal a car so he could drive back here anonymously, but once he did, it would be easy enough. He would pull up to her sandwich shop a little after closing time and lure her into the stolen car. She was clearly attracted enough to him where it wouldn’t be hard to do that, and he’d drive her someplace where no one would be able to hear her scream. He felt himself getting excited, and forced himself to take a deep breath and try to relax since it would be months before he’d be able to do this and see the fear shining brightly in her eyes as she saw her death shining just as brightly in his own.

  It was twenty past six. Michael didn’t feel like being with other people but he did feel like drinking, so he left his room to head out to the liquor store. Like every other day around this hour it was bitterly cold, with an almost impenetrable darkness as clouds hid the moon and stars. When he got to the liquor store, he rushed inside to escape the cold. He was ten feet into the store before he realized something was wrong. The feral-looking guy from the day before was standing in front of him pointing a gun at the clerk, his eyes every bit as hyped up and twitchy as they had been before. At first he turned to Michael with a blank hostility, but as recognition hit him, an all too familiar look flashed in his eyes.

  Michael wanted to run, but before he could move, he felt a bullet slam into his skull. In that flash before the gunshot, he had seen his death shining in this other man’s eyes, and before the darkness enveloped him, Michael knew what this ferallooking man was feeling. An overwhelming Godlike power over him. For the brief last moment that he was still alive he envied this man.

  TWENTY-EIGHT SCENES

  FOR NEGLECTED GUESTS

  BY JEDEDIAH BERRY

  Yarmouth

  For Emily

  1.

  In the illustration of the crime scene, the full moon is high and small over the sea, shining through a halo of cloud. The dark water reflects a thin, crooked finger of light. In the foreground, the beach is littered with black stones, bits of shell, seaweed, sea glass.

  The body lies facedown in the sand, wedged between two large, thumb-shaped rocks. The hair is long and stringy; it obscures the face and spreads across the ground like the head of a mop. One slender arm is draped over a rock, and the other is hidden by the fabric covering most of the body. A mourning dress? A costume? It clings to the flesh of the corpse, all ragged black folds. The bare feet stick out from beneath it, toes angled toward the water. They appear carefully poised, like the feet of a dancer.

  And then there’s the dog. Black and round, a mutt with stubby legs and floppy ears, it’s not the kind of dog you’d expect to discover a corpse, at least not in any official capacity. The dog holds itself rigid, something like pride in its stance, snout aimed at the body.

  Not just at the body, but at the exposed right forearm which, upon closer inspection, reveals a tattoo along the length of its inner side. The flowing, ornamental script is impossible to decipher at this angle. A clue? Yes, this could be a clue.

  The dog’s paw prints are visible in the sand. Hours ago, there may have been other prints to read—the victim’s, the killer’s—but if they were here, the sea has washed them away.

  2.

  The Untoward Specter, cloaked all in black crepe, sits weeping in the gazebo. “Is it time for a game of pies?” it asks.

  The Three Widows of North Varnish clutch their bosoms. “But we do not know how to play,” they cry.

  Lord Lumpish leans from the balcony and heaves a great sigh. “I do not permit games to be played upon the greensward,” he says.

  From a distance comes the squeak and shuffle of a handcar. The Three Widows of North Varnish put their hands over their ears, but the Untoward Specter looks up and stops weeping. It sways from side to side, as though mesmerized by the sound. “I should like very much to teach you how to play a game of pies,” it says.

  3.

  I should like very much to knock that woman over the head, thinks Carl. He’s playing the part of all three widows, a thin rustling dress on each hand and one draped over his face. But this woman Alex—loud, hysterical Alex from no-one-seems-toknow-where—is upstaging all three of him. And she the newcomer, her first show with the troupe, her first time onstage anywhere, as far as he knows. Correction: she’s the kind of woman who has been onstage her whole life.

  The widows aren’t easy to operate. A lot of string-pulling to move their little arms, to make them titter and swoon. In his best elderly treble, Carl says, “That terrible sound! Is it the handcar of the Hands of the Orphans?”

  But before the line is fully out of Carl’s mouth, before he can even get Widow Number Three to point to the horizon, Alex calls from the gazebo, “I am certain the Hands of the Orphans will want to play a game of pies!”

  Carl is about to throw the damned widows off his hands, but then he hears Ted cooing his approval from the front row. Ted, whose mess this whole thing is. Ted, who spends maybe five percent of his time in the real world.

  “Everyone!” cries the Untoward Specter, louder than before. “Everyone must play or no one at all!”

  Now Ted is clapping with quiet glee. Yes, thinks Carl, right over the head, with something blunt and very heavy.

  4.

  Aggie’s hands hurt. Not from the hour spent pulling bent nails out of a broken panel of the set (gray sky, black clouds, a distant tower), but from the role she has landed without meaning to. Ted had stopped her on the first day of rehearsals, while she was carrying lumber into the theater. “Your hands,” he’d said. “Those are the hands of the Hands of the Orphans.”

  His own fingers were decked with enormous iron rings, weird totems that clacked and gleamed when he gestured. The rings, and the beard, and the ratty tennis shoes: for a moment she mistook him for a crazy person who’d wandered into the theater. Then he showed her the puppets he’d made for the play he’d written, the play she was building sets for. Onto her hands he slipped a pair of black felt gloves. At the end of each finger was a grasping, desperate little child’s hand.

  At first Aggie thought they were terrible. All those sprouting pale nubs, like an animal they’d keep in a tank at the science aquarium. But now she feels, somehow, that the hands need her, and she can’t go anywhere without them. On break from rehearsal, while the others go to a sandwich shop, she takes her bagged lunch to a bench by the shore and sets the Hands of the Orphans beside her.

  “Do you think Carl likes me?” she asks the hands. She sips coffee from her thermos and nods. “Mmm, yes, he does have very nice eyes.”

  5.

  Lord Lumpish stands with hands clasped behind his back, admiring the tapestries. The Untoward Specter appears at dusk. It glides down the hall, rustling as it swoons.

  “I have a craving for sea air,” the Untoward Specter says, “and the Hands of the Orphans have of
fered to arrange an excursion.”

  Lord Lumpish fiddles with his cuff links. “I fear that none of us are ready for a game of pies,” he says.

  6.

  In his usual booth at Jack’s Outback, Ted sits with his grilled cheese, bacon, and tomato on white bread, his fruit cup in a bowl. Because fruit cup in a cup just isn’t enough fruit cup.

  He’s nervous about Neglected Guests. Something is lacking in the third act. The Three Widows of North Varnish have a secret he can’t quite get at. He, who made them with his own two hands.

  No, what’s really bothering him is that he can’t place what’s bothering him. It makes him grumpy, having to worry about all these other people. And yet every summer, another script dashed off, more puppets, more rehearsals. Actors! They’re the very opposite of cats, always wanting you to know what they think.

  There’s one last grape in his bowl. He tries to get it onto his fork, but the grape rolls and rolls, eluding him.

  “Get you your check?” asks Ellie.

  “No!” Ted says, much louder than he’d intended, and he and Ellie both are startled.

  7.

  Perry climbs onto the deck of the Murasaki and holds up a paper bag full of egg sandwiches. “Egg sandwiches!” he says. He made them himself.

  The other guys working the restoration job set down their hammers and chisels and brushes. They shuffle over and take the wrapped packages from the bag, muttering thanks.

  “I get to wear a beard in this play I’m in,” Perry says. “I’m like some kind of king, you know? I have my own greensward.”

  The others pass around a bottle of ketchup.

  “The guy who wrote it is crazy, just crazy. He’s directing too. You know who he is. That poster, with all the kids and how they died? It’s hilarious.”

  One of them says between mouthfuls, “Yeah, dead kids, funny,” and the others chuckle.

  “Everyone in the play is awesome and we all get along great,” Perry says. “I mean, I don’t like them better than I like you guys or anything.”

  They’re all chewing, looking at their feet or at the water or at other boats.

  “Though there is this one girl,” he says.

  This gets their attention for a moment, but Perry knows how that will go: the whistles, the ugly winks and uglier questions.

  “Anyway,” he says, “the show’s this weekend. You should all come! Wait till you see the part about the pies.”

  For a moment the others think maybe he brought pies in addition to the sandwiches, but then they figure out that he’s still talking about the play, and they shake their heads and wipe their mouths on their shirtsleeves and get back to work.

  8.

  Aggie, at home, has to take off the Hands of the Orphans so she can answer the phone. It’s Jared. He sounds like he’s trying to swallow something.

  “I have bad news,” Jared says. It’s about Otto, the dog. Their dog, though he lives with Jared now.

  Aggie tries to keep to the facts. “What does the vet say?”

  “I have to bring him back on Tuesday. But it doesn’t look good.”

  “What does that mean, doesn’t look good?”

  Jared’s voice goes hard. “Look, I thought you might want to know. So you can make time to see him, if it comes to that.”

  “Comes to what, Jared?”

  “I shouldn’t have called,” he says, and then there’s another voice in the background—Honey? it says, or is Aggie imagining things?—and then the line goes dead.

  9.

  At the bar, Carl takes his beer onto the deck and finds Alex alone, staring out over the pond. He touches her shoulder and says, “Listen, I feel like things are all wrong between us. Maybe we can talk this out.”

  “Things are all wrong between us?”

  “Come on.”

  She brings her face to within a few inches of his and says, “Take your hand off my shoulder, Carl.”

  He pulls away as though he’s been burned. “It’s Perry, isn’t it?”

  She doesn’t answer, but he swears he can feel some kind of heat coming off her. And something else, like maybe she enjoys this.

  “Poor, simple Perry,” he says. “That your kind of guy?”

  He grabs her shoulder again and moves to kiss her, but Alex hits him in the gut and knocks his beer off the railing. In the moment that he flails for it, she heads for the door. Plop! goes the mug into the water, and Alex is gone too.

  10.

  They take five, so Aggie brings her tools out to the truck. The sets are done, and she’ll need her own things if she’s going to finish those cabinets Ted wants for his place. She tosses the bag onto the floor of the cab, then climbs into the passenger seat and gets her cigarettes and lighter out of the glove box.

  “Just one,” she says to the Hands of the Orphans, which are nestled on her lap.

  The window is still spotted with Otto’s dried slobber, though it’s been months since he’s ridden in her truck. She keeps the window cracked while she smokes.

  “The thing about Carl,” she says, “is that we’re both people who work with our hands.”

  11.

  En route to the shore, Lord Lumpish operates the handcar while the Untoward Specter acts as lookout. The Three Widows of North Varnish sit at the back, knitting scarves for their cats.

  “I am not certain that fewer than three terrible things will happen to us today,” says the Untoward Specter.

  “Are there any more cabbage sandwiches?” the widows want to know.

  “If we must play a game of pies,” says Lord Lumpish, “I would like to be the baker. But who will be the pies?”

  “The Hands of the Orphans will be the pies!” announces the Untoward Specter. “But where have they gone?”

  “Here they are,” say the widows, who have accidentally knitted them into their scarves.

  The Hands of the Orphans squirm in the yarn as the handcar rolls into a tunnel.

  12.

  Rehearsal runs late, and Carl misses the last ferry back to the Vineyard. Aggie offers to put him up at her place.

  “Nothing special, but it’s cozy,” she says, and there’s something about the way she chooses these words. Like she herself is figuring out what she has to offer.

  He follows her pickup out of town and onto a winding road off Route 2. The cottage looks like an Arts and Crafts throwback; she probably built the place herself. She leads him inside—front door isn’t locked—and he stands in the kitchen while she goes through the house, turning on lights in every room. “Open a bottle?” she calls.

  There’s a little rack on the counter. None of the wines look good, but he settles on a Malbec that can’t be terrible. He’s rummaging through drawers, looking for a corkscrew, when he hears a man’s voice on the answering machine in the next room. Then hears, after a minute, the sound of Aggie weeping.

  He sets the bottle down and walks into what probably used to be a dining room but is now a woodworking studio. Tools everywhere, and buckets of stain, and on a table a set of finished cabinets.

  “Hey,” he says. “Hey, what happened?”

  She’s sitting on the floor by the phone, rubbing her eyes with her fists. “Wednesday’s going to be my last day with Otto before he dies.”

  Those cabinets are beautiful. Maybe he ought to hire her sometime.

  “God, I’m so sorry,” he says, and kneels beside her. “Who’s Otto?”

  Then Aggie has her arms around him, and her mouth is against his, and she’s moving her lips and nibbling.

  He pushes her away. “I don’t think—”

  She appears to wither a little, but she doesn’t start crying again. “You can take the bedroom,” she says, nodding toward the hall. “We’ll take the couch.”

  “We?”

  She looks startled, and her hand goes defensively to her pocket. Sticking out from it are five pale little hands.

  13.

  Perry drives out to Truro, to pick up Alex before rehearsal. She’
s staying at her uncle’s place for the summer. The house is on a dirt road off another dirt road, at the top of a hill overlooking a salt marsh.

  When she answers the door, she isn’t wearing pants.

  “Wow, hi,” Perry greets her.

  “I’ll be just a minute,” she says.

  He follows her inside and closes the door behind him. He tries not to look at her thighs, but she snaps the elastic of her blue underpants as she goes into the bedroom. There are sounds of drawers opening and closing. “Hey,” she calls out to him, “if you were going to kill Carl, how would you do it?”

  Alex is a year or two older than Perry, maybe twenty-eight, and he wants to be able to keep up with her. But he just laughs and can’t think of what to say.

  “Something sharp, maybe?” she says. “Right through the eye? Or something weird. Some kind of poisonous sea creature on his chair.”

  Perry says, “Hey, do you think Carl and Aggie—”

  “Nope,” she cuts him off. “No way.”

  There’s some kind of altar set up on the kitchen table, looking out of place here. Perry bends down for a closer look: candles, a glass skull full of clear liquid, round tarot cards, old photos, bits of fur, scraps of paper with names and phrases written on them, and something that looks like a narwhal tusk. He reaches out to touch it but Alex says, “Don’t touch that.”

  She’s standing right behind him, dressed in the black pants and shirt that will disappear beneath the Untoward Specter costume.

  “Are you some kind of witch?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  He can’t tell if she’s serious.

  “I’m working on a spell,” she says. “That’s the real reason I’m here. It’ll make me forget everyone and everything I never want to think about again.”