Little Comfort

by Edwin Hill

“Maybe,” Lila said. “That was at least part of it.”

  Hester kicked at an outcrop of icy granite. “Gabe was still Cheryl’s responsibility, not yours. So what happened? He showed up one day and never left?”

  “That’s about right. But he would have left after the summer. Sam wasn’t happy about that either.”

  “Why not let him stay?”

  Lila paused. “Things got weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Just weird, okay?” Lila walked away, up the front steps of the cabin, and through a screenless screen door that looked like it was about to fall off its hinges. Hester gave her a moment and then followed. The cabin was built from brown-stained pine. It had a pitched roof, windows covered in thick-gauge screens, and a brick chimney that ran up one side. Hester stepped carefully up the rotting stairs, to where Lila stood in the cabin’s single room. The air here was raw. Remnants of many teenage gatherings—beer bottles, cigarette butts, condom wrappers—littered the floor. Someone had spray-painted Tina N Tyson 4eva on a wall. There were twigs and branches piled up in the corner and ashes in the fireplace.

  “Kids find this place every summer no matter what I do to keep them away,” Lila said. “And they all think they’re the first to discover it. It leads to no good. We were no different.”

  “You got in trouble?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How?”

  When Lila didn’t answer, Hester took a tentative step forward. The wide planks bowed beneath her weight. In part, she felt as though she’d spent the day climbing a mountain and now, here at the top, didn’t know what to do besides head back down. “Why did you hire me?” she asked. “It wasn’t about selling this property. And it wasn’t really about the body either, was it? Why now?”

  “Because I needed to know,” Lila said.

  “What?”

  “That none of it mattered.”

  “None of what?”

  Lila laid the rifle on the floor and sat beside it. “I told you things got weird and that Sam and I had an argument. It was over Gabe.”

  “In what way?”

  “In a sexual way.”

  “Did he have a crush on you?”

  “It was a little more than that,” Lila said without looking Hester in the eye.

  And to Hester the whole story suddenly snapped together. She could have lived it herself. She remembered being that age, being young and vulnerable and alone and having no one to look out for her. She remembered wanting to be wanted. “You slept with Gabe,” she said.

  Lila exhaled. “Yep,” she said. “But it didn’t mean anything.”

  “You were an adult. You were the adult.”

  “I wasn’t that much older than he was,” Lila said.

  “Twenty-three is a lot older than fourteen.” Hester was surprised by the anger that seeped into her voice, and watched as Lila’s face blanched, from shame or rage, Hester couldn’t tell.

  “What does it matter now?” Lila asked.

  “It clearly matters to you. I bet it matters to Gabe too. Do you have any idea what it’s like to grow up alone?”

  “Gabe was a mistake,” Lila said. “I can’t believe what a colossal mistake I made, one I’ve regretted ever since. I wanted to see … I wanted to see if I could undo anything or apologize or make it better.”

  “Even Sam knew what you were doing was wrong. That’s what the fight was about, wasn’t it? He wanted to get Gabe away from you. He wanted to get him as far away from you as possible.”

  Lila seemed stunned at first and then laughed without smiling. “You’re a real fucking bitch. Don’t try to make Sam into a hero. That’s about as wrong as you can get. Sam doesn’t do anything for anyone but himself.”

  “He looks out for Gabe, from what I can see,” Hester said. “They’ve managed to stick together. That couldn’t have been easy.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think you heard me before,” Lila said. “I told you we had an argument, and the argument was over Gabe.”

  “Did they sleep together too?”

  “Not that I know of, but they might as well have. They were as tight as can be, and Sam didn’t like that Gabe turned to me. He didn’t want to lose control.”

  “I watch out for my best friend. I have since I’ve known her. That’s what friends do. They were two kids stuck living with a pedophile.”

  “I am not a pedophile! Jesus. What is wrong with you?” A strand of spittle flew from Lila’s mouth. Hester glanced at the rifle, and Lila followed her gaze. “I have half a mind to shoot you in the fucking head,” she said, and Hester felt herself back into the wall and raise her arms in the air.

  “Oh, don’t worry, you Goddamned moron. Tell anyone you want about this. No one will believe you. And if they do, what the fuck can they do about it anyway? Here’s something you should know about Sam. Before he came to live with me, he lived with our grandmother over in Tamworth till he was twelve. She died, and it was a week before anyone found her. She was at the dinner table, facedown in a plateful of spaghetti. It was July and the house stank.”

  “So?” Hester said.

  “He was old enough to use the phone,” Lila said. “He knew the neighbors and could have told any one of them. But he came and went all week long, taking money from her wallet, visiting friends down the street, acting like nothing had happened. Think about that the next time you see him. He took what he needed from the situation. Sam will look right through you. He’ll look right into your soul. He’ll uncover your dreams, your demons, and your very core. And he’ll use all of it to get whatever he wants.”

  “What did he know about you?” Hester asked.

  “That I wanted to go! I wanted to leave this place so much.” Lila looked around the cabin. “It didn’t work out that well, did it?”

  All Hester wanted at this point was to drive away from this town without looking back. She wished she’d never met Lila or any of these people. She had to get out of these woods, and back to the truck to pick up Waffles, but as she watched, Lila stopped and cocked her head to the side.

  “What?” Hester snapped.

  Lila stood and picked up the rifle. She stepped toward the door.

  A blast of wood splintered into the cabin. A pinprick of light streamed through the wall. Hester felt a splatter of warmth across her face, and Lila gripped her shoulder where a rosette of red burst from her coat. “Get down,” she shouted.

  CHAPTER 10

  Wood splintered into the cabin again. Lila tackled Hester, and then groaned as her wounded shoulder hit the floor. This time Hester heard the crack of a rifle shot. “Who the hell is that?” she said. “They’re shooting at us!”

  “We’re here!” Lila shouted. She rolled onto her back and tried to open her rifle’s chamber, but her right arm didn’t seem to be working. “Hunters,” she said. “They don’t know we’re in here.” She fumbled with a box of bullets. They scattered across the floor.

  “You’re bleeding,” Hester said, having her doubts whether it was a hunter.

  “Thanks for the memo.” Lila winced. “Jesus, that hurts. Help me. But stay down.”

  Hester wriggled across the floor. She gathered up a fistful of bullets and jammed them into her pocket.

  “Open the chamber,” Lila said as another bullet cracked through the cabin.

  Hester snapped the rifle open and slid a bullet in.

  “The other way,” Lila said, and Hester took the bullet out and flipped it around.

  “Shoot it!” Lila said. “Into the roof.”

  The closest Hester had ever come to a rifle was a water gun, but she aimed the barrel toward the sky. It felt terrifying and empowering and exhilarating. She squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

  “You fucking flatlander,” Lila mumbled.

  She slid the safety, and this time when Hester squeezed the trigger she felt the blast all the way down the side of her body. A hole in the roof opened up and debris rained down around them. Then she slid a second bullet into the cham
ber and pulled the trigger again.

  Lila touched her arm. “Listen,” she said.

  Hester closed her eyes and lay there for a moment. She heard herself breathe. She heard Lila breathe. Then she heard the sound of footsteps in the snow as whoever had shot at them retreated through the woods. “Are you okay?” she asked Lila.

  “It’s a flesh wound,” Lila said. Hester heard her sit up. She opened her eyes to see the other woman tightening a belt around her shoulder.

  “It’ll stop the bleeding till we can get out of here,” Lila said, as though she was putting a Band-Aid on a cut finger.

  “Who was that?” Hester asked.

  “Probably some kids, by the way they took off.” Lila held the tourniquet in her teeth and tied it off. “I told you it was the last week of deer season.”

  “Do hunters usually shoot at houses with people in them?”

  “Sure,” Lila said. “If the house is a wreck, and it has deer standing in front of it.”

  “I didn’t see any deer,” Hester said. Her rational side told her to stay put, but the pissed-off side was too angry to listen. That hadn’t been a hunter or a teenager shooting at them. She grabbed a fistful of bullets from the floor and barely heard Lila shout after her as she ran from the cabin. She stood in the clearing. She listened, but all she heard was the cracking of ice as the lake froze. She loaded another bullet and swung the barrel toward where the shots had come from. She ran into the trees. The sound of her feet crunching into the hard snow rang through the forest. She swept branches from in front of her. She stopped. She spun around. She ran farther into the trees till she found a patch of trampled snow and three spent shell casings. A single set of footprints led in from a copse of evergreens and then straight out toward the road. She took a few steps toward the trees, and then finally paid attention to the voice telling her to get away from here. To stay safe. To remember that the first time she’d ever shot a rifle had been about two minutes earlier, and whoever had shot at her probably had years of practice.

  Somewhere, off in the distance, she heard the slamming of a car door and the screech of tires on an icy dirt road.

  She put the rifle down and picked up one of the casings. The heat from the blast had melted the snow, which had refrozen in a slick of ice. Lila struggled down the cabin stairs and limped across the snow toward her. “It was a hunter,” Lila said. “I know you’re not used to it, but this kind of thing happens all the time around here.”

  “We should call the police.”

  “And tell them what? They’ll say we shouldn’t have been out here in the first place.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Hester said. “I’m calling them even if you don’t. And we should get you to the hospital anyway. Don’t hospitals have to report gunshot wounds?”

  “I’m not going to the hospital,” Lila said. “The bullet barely grazed me. The bleeding already stopped, and I don’t have the money for an emergency room visit anyway.”

  Hester closed her eyes and leaned her head against the trunk of a tree. New Hampshire suddenly felt like a very different world from the one she was used to. She was cold and tired and ready to get home. But whatever Lila claimed, that hadn’t been a deer hunter shooting at them. “Cheryl Jenkins called you this morning and told you I’d come around. What else did she say?”

  “Not much,” Lila said. “That you were asking about Gabe and that you’d talked to him in Boston. She wanted to know why I’d hired you.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t tell her anything except that it was none of her business,” Lila said. “We’re not exactly on the best of terms. She hates my guts.”

  Five minutes earlier, all Hester had wanted was to walk away from this whole mess and pretend she’d never met any of these people. Now she wanted to find a way to tie this whole story together and figure out who’d shot at her and why. She suspected that if she’d been out on that road a few moments earlier, she’d have seen a teal-colored hatchback skidding away, and Bobby Englewood at the wheel.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Wendy wants the house filled with uniforms for the photographer,” Felicia said to Sam as he sped into the parking lot at the VA in West Roxbury. “Remember I told you who was supposed to take care of this? Wendy’s co-chair, Twig. She never does a fucking thing. So now it’s up to us. We need to make sure they know to come.”

  They hurried through the cold and into the building, where they stopped by the front desk, and Felicia told the receptionist that Wendy Richards had sent them. It amazed Sam to see the change in attitude as soon as Wendy’s name was dropped. The receptionist called him “sir,” and soon the hospital administrator appeared, a slender black woman in her mid-forties named Dymond, who seemed to know Felicia well. Sam listened as the two of them caught up. Dymond told Felicia that she’d posted flyers around the hospital about the benefit and had mentioned it to most of the staff.

  “You’re coming, right?” Felicia asked.

  “I wouldn’t miss it!” Dymond said. “And I’ll gather up as many of the guys as I can. Let’s see who we can get to commit today. We can head to the library. Then maybe we can stop by some of the group sessions.”

  She led them down the wide, tiled hallway, through a doorway, and up a set of stairs into a large, open space lined with bookshelves. A group of mostly men sat at tables around the room, and a librarian staffed the circulation desk. Dymond introduced them, and Felicia spoke about the Crocus Party and the importance of education, and encouraged as many of the veterans as possible to attend, but Sam could tell that the party would be a hard sell to this group. “They don’t seem too interested,” he mumbled.

  “Let’s try talking to them one on one,” Dymond said.

  She led them around the room and introduced them to some of the soldiers. Finally, she stopped by a computer terminal where an enormous black man had squeezed himself into a chair. He had to have been six foot eight and weighed three hundred pounds. “This is Jamie Williams,” Dymond said. “He goes to UMass Boston. He’s studying video game programming.”

  Jamie seemed to have trouble focusing, and when Sam asked him what he was doing, it took a moment for him to answer. “I have a math test,” he said.

  “Jamie has a head injury,” Dymond said, as though she was saying he had curly hair. “He was serving with the Marines last year in Afghanistan and was shot. We’re lucky to have him.”

  Sam held up a fist. “Semper fi!” he said.

  “Hoorah,” Jamie said, loud enough that the librarian shushed him. “You in the Marines?”

  Sam shook his head. “But I know lots of guys who were.”

  He glanced around Jamie’s terminal and saw a video game before Jamie managed to minimize the screen. “I’m pretty good at math,” Sam said with a smile. “Why don’t the two of you head off and I’ll stay here.”

  “Are you sure?” Felicia asked.

  “Absolutely,” Sam said, and then waited till the two women had left the library before taking a seat. “Arab Assault?” he asked.

  Jamie nodded.

  “Move over,” Sam said, and for the next half hour they two of them sat side-by-side blowing away turban-wearing men with machine guns while ignoring the glares from the librarian. After Jamie won the third game, Sam nodded toward a poster on the wall for the Crocus Party. “You’re coming, right?” he asked.

  “No, man. Not with this.” Jamie touched a scar on the side of his head that stood out against the dark skin beneath his buzz cut.

  “Come. I’ll look out for you.”

  “Maybe,” Jamie said.

  “I’ll pick you up. Where do you live?” But when Jamie fidgeted and glanced toward the exit, Sam apologized. “Too much, right? I do that sometimes. Come on too strong. But see, I’m trying to impress the woman who’s throwing the party, and if I bring you, well, she’ll be impressed!” Jamie really was the type of soldier Wendy wanted to see at the party. “Help a guy out, would you? Plus, there’ll be free boo
ze. Great food. All that stuff.”

  “Okay,” Jamie said.

  “You mean, okay, you’ll come?”

  “I mean, okay, I’m gonna think about it.”

  “And bring some friends?” Sam asked. “And wear your uniform and all off your medals?”

  Jamie started up the game again. “Don’t press your luck,” he said, pausing between each word. But he smiled in a way that told Sam he’d won.

  *

  Gabe glanced at the time on his laptop. It was five p.m. and he had a meeting at five-thirty with some marketing folks who lived in California and who couldn’t tell a line of JavaScript from Groovy, which was good for him. It kept him employed and allowed him to call some of the shots. His clients didn’t care whether he’d graduated from high school, what he looked like, or how he dressed. Most of the time, as long as he got the job done, they didn’t even want to talk to him, which was exactly how Gabe preferred it. Clients paid him via a bank account he’d set up long ago in San Francisco, and all correspondence was done electronically. According to the IRS, Gabe (and they did know him by his real name) was a resident of California, and the little mail he received went to a PO box there and was forwarded on a monthly basis. That was how Gabe had managed to stay invisible all these years. That and not talking to people.

  Since there was still plenty of time to make the call, he opened Hester’s Facebook page again. He downloaded the photo of her on the beach and saved it in a folder called “2014 TAX RETURN,” in case Sam went snooping. And then he scrutinized every bit of the photo—her gingham bathing suit, the straw hat that sat on the back of her head, the way her nails were painted gold—for any clue to who she might be, till a Slack message popped up on his screen. WHERE ARE YOU??? one of the marketing people had written. It was almost six o’clock.

  Gabe’s clients were always ready to criticize and not understand, and these ones were among the worst. They never bothered to remember that Gabe lived on the East Coast and that five-thirty was technically after the close of business. Today, he didn’t want to deal with the swagger (besides, good luck replacing him). He slammed his laptop shut and left the house. He thought he might grab a burrito for dinner, or at least that’s what he told himself he was doing. He headed toward the taqueria in Porter Square even though the one in Davis was closer, and then kept on walking till he came to her house. It was already dark. The truck was parked in the driveway, but lights on the third floor of the house weren’t on, and he wondered if she was even home. Multi-family homes lined the quiet street. He imagined heading off to work in the morning and seeing her standing on the stoop, wearing an apron, waving. Would she want to stay here in Somerville or move out to the suburbs? The Somerville schools weren’t all that great. Or at least that’s what he’d heard, and they’d both want more for the girl. They’d want more for their children too.