by Andrew Pyper
“Now—”
“I looked back. There was definitely enough time for that. If I was really about to drown would I have taken the second or two or three or however long it took to stop and open my eyes? No. But that’s exactly why I did it. I looked because I knew there was enough time.”
“You were too young to remember all that. People forget the worst things, don’t they, over time. Or make other things up in their place.”
“But I remember now. Caroline reaching her hands up to me close enough that I could feel them brush across the bottom of my feet. And her scream that let the water in. Knew I could have saved her even then and all I did was watch her go.”
“There’s no—”
“I could have.”
“Really no need for—”
“I could have saved her.”
Holy Jesus then I’m in her arms. A blubber-faced child wiping my nose on her cardiganed shoulder that smells of bacon and almonds and bedpan. Everything inside me exploding off its hinges. A turning screw that rips up through organs and bone. For a moment. Then I’m pushing away, fingertips digging at my eyes, assembling myself with a pair of bruising gasps. If one were standing behind me it might have appeared only as an incoherent lunge forward that fell well short of an embrace. Nothing more than a momentary loss of balance on my part, legs fallen asleep from sitting too long on the edge of a too-small chair.
“God, I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“I’m afraid you’re wrong about that.”
Mrs. Arthurs not even considering something to say. I make an attempt—anything will do to throw a human sound into the room’s shattered space—but there’re no words left. Instead both of us turn our eyes to the dripping hair on the table. Watch it as though expecting it to move, and in the flickering light of the fire it almost does.
“Well, well, well,” she says after a long while before another while passes in silence. Then, just as I’m convinced she’s about to announce there’s no way, she’ll have nothing to do with dead little girls’ hair, it would be wrong to pretend something that wasn’t true before a court of law, she has no choice but to have me reported, she accepts.
“Just hand it over to the police in town, you say?”
“That’s right. They’ll take it from there.”
“Fine then, Mr. Crane. Though I won’t do it as a favor to you. I’ll do it as a favor to the wee ones. For we couldn’t leave the poor things’ hair just sitting there, could we?”
“No, I don’t think we could.”
She nods, and I down the still-scalding coffee in two gulps. When I place the cup back in its saucer on the table I notice that a small pool of green water has formed there from the slow but unstoppable drip that comes off the hair sticking out one end of the package.
I rise, unsteady as a marionette. But when I throw on my coat it’s noticeably lighter on my shoulders. “Incredibly sleepy all of a sudden,” I say, startled by an instant yawn.
“Know the feeling. First sign of old age.”
Rattle at the door handle before the latch pulls back and it swings open. Long enough for Mrs. Arthurs to get up herself and place a dry hand against my cheek, knuckles the size of chestnuts rolled across sharp stubble.
“Did you see her, then? The Lady? Did you see her for yourself?”
“I’ve seen her.”
“I knew you would. As soon as I laid eyes on you I knew you’d be one to understand.”
Turn to face her but the pale outdoor light has washed her away, an X-ray exposing vague bones within a membrane of skin.
“I’m very sorry about your daughter, Mrs. Arthurs,” I say and collect her briefly at the shoulders. Careful, hesitant, the way you would lift a crystal bowl up into your arms. And she gives herself over to my grasp, empties her lungs in a surrendering sigh.
“Well, bye now, then,” I say when there’s nothing left of her.
“Good-bye, Richard,” she says.
I’m stepping back up toward the trail. But before I make it the old woman calls after me.
“You know, I never believed you did it, what they said you might have done. I got an eye for these things, and I always thought you weren’t the kind.”
She means well by this, I know. But I keep walking, head down, without turning back.
FORTY-SIX
Helen Arthurs, widow of Duncan Arthurs, did exactly as she agreed she would do. The day after our meeting Goodwin called to tell me that significant new evidence had been discovered washed up on the shore of Lake St. Christopher by a permanent resident with “considerable credibility within the community” and would I consent to its being sent to Toronto for high-priority DNA testing or would a motion before Justice Goldfarb be required? With some obligatory grumbling, my consent was granted. The trial was adjourned, the jury advised to speak to no one regarding the substance of the case for the duration of their time away from court, etc., etc. Then we waited. Snow fell, melted, fell again, melted, and on the third falling stayed on the ground with a look of serious intentions about it. I spend the better part of my time lying in the honeymoon suite’s bed reading back issues of Elle and Vanity Fair borrowed from the Murdoch Public Library and gingerly drinking myself to sleep. In the mornings I write down what I remember of my dreams from the night before. In time I start to see all the characters as messengers.
On the fourth day I decide to go for a drive. The air bracing and loud as the sea in my ears, crashing in through the missing front windshield. Driving up into the wilder place where there are no longer any signs promising the arrival of another town so many miles down the road. Nothing but the narrow pavement cutting through the trees, working out a short-term lease with everything around it.
Stop for a lunch of tortilla chips and coffee at a gas station with a startling collection of international porn for sale alongside the cigarettes and spark plugs behind the counter. Head north again. The sun not so much lowering as fading away entirely.
Then I see it. Something up ahead in the road.
I slow well before I reach it and pull over onto the narrow gravel shoulder. A deer. Its hips knocked from their sockets, legs impossibly splayed out from each other. A spattering of blood followed by a smudged trail tracing its effort to pull itself off the road. But still alive: side rising and falling, tongue flicking out of its mouth, eyes looking up at me.
For a moment I take stock of the animal’s injuries, estimate where I would be on a map, how far from someplace large enough that it might have a vet. Decide the injuries are too severe, the someplace too far. Then I drag the deer over to the side of the road where I sit down beside it and lift its head to rest on my lap.
Three cars pass in the time it takes afternoon to become dusk, dusk to become night. Two blow past without a blink of brake lights but a monkey-faced woman in a 4×4 slows, glances over at the young man in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, rocking back and forth with a deer’s head in his lap. Then, without stopping, drives on.
Listen to it breathing in spasms that bounce my hand into the air from where it strokes the length of its neck. Lies still again, and I count the time in my head before its next breath.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four—
The foaming mouth clicks open wider and pulls another half-cup of life into its lungs.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five—
How long do we stay together? How long have I stroked its side, making a sound—shwee-sha—that I only now remember my own mother making to calm me into sleep? Can’t guess. Can’t guess the time it is now, how long the animal requires to die. But when it does, I know it. Something lifts away from its skin and passes through me before dispersing into the darkness.
When I finally get up my legs refuse to obey for a time, sandwiched between the deer’s weight and the piercing surface of the gravel shoulder. Then I step into the ditch, grab hold of its hind legs and pull. Even though
I’ve got the leverage of the decline on my side it’s harder than I would have expected. Not only the animal’s weight but the flexibility of its ligaments and joints resists movement, absorbing every effort to haul it down. But after a time I strike upon the method that works best: short, concentrated jerks in the same direction. Taking it two inches at a time results in slow progress through the high grass to where the drooping ferns and willows stand higher yet. After a while I turn to look into the forest and over the ground that glows blue from the patches of snow that survived the day’s sun. Another thirty feet or so to be out of view from the road. Grab hold of its legs again, two breaths and a pull that sends a numbing heat up my back. One. Two. Three.
Start digging with my fingernails, the pads beneath my thumbs. After a time I discover that the job goes quicker using a flat stone as a shovel, sending the soil up into a growing pile. Will myself to make the hole deeper, broader, eventually rolling into it myself to improve the angle and gage its size. When the earth begins to yield to the limestone beneath it I scrabble out on my knees and push the animal into its grave.
When I’m finished there’s a bulging mound left, but I can imagine returning next spring, next week, and not noticing that anything had ever been buried here. The sun coming up weak through the starved branches. Think of words to say but none come and I’m thankful for this, closing my eyes instead and conjuring wordless thoughts for myself, the dead animal and anything else I can think of. A random sequence of face and moment and voice that comes to form a single memory in my mind, a kind of godless prayer.
Later that morning a fax arrives with the DNA results. Two hair extractions from Mrs. Arthurs’ package matched with those found in the backseat of Thom Tripp’s Volvo, one of them in turn matching drops of Krystal McConnell’s blood found on the same. There was also an unexpected aspect to the lab’s findings. A third hair type bearing an unknown DNA identity found among the other two. Different from the others even by sight: long, straight and blonde.
“Isn’t that rather odd?” Goodwin asked me as he handed over a copy of the lab’s written report. I told him I was as surprised as anyone.
Marching up the broad steps to the Murdoch Prison for Men, its blunt facade now almost dignified with a front lawn rolling out before it white with cleansing snow. The failed rosebushes on each side of the door buried along with everything else except for a few pruned branches reaching up, gray and gnarled. It’s always the same with prisons. Right there at the gates of some forgotten place of grief and desperation a bored janitor or local do-gooder gets it into his head to plant something beautiful and it never grows.
Once inside I’m almost pleased to see that it’s the leprechaun guard behind the desk again, grinning out at me with small teeth held together by wads of tartar the color of caramel.
“Mr. Crane! Looks like you’ve been out and about,” he says, motioning his chin down to the torn, mud-caked bottom of my overcoat.
“Just the unavoidable filth to be found everywhere in your fair town, Flaherty.”
“Perhaps if your car had a windshield you could keep yourself a bit more tidy. Have a bit of trouble, did ya?”
“A fender bender.”
“Quite so! Quite so!” he nods, allowing himself an aprreciative smirk. “Here to see your man?”
“If he has to be mine, then yes.”
Without further command Flaherty takes me down the hall to Interview Room No. 1 to await the always unpredictable entrance of Thomas Tripp. Off goes my overcoat and the suit jacket follows a couple seconds later but I’m still dripping sweat down my sides, darkening through the white cotton of my shirt. Now that winter has come they’ve got it way too hot in here. By the time Tripp arrives I’ve got my tie loosened halfway down my chest and sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Seems to be feeling it himself, puffing his cheeks out in an effort to catch his breath (did they just yank him out from his morning workout?) and blowing tiny pearls of saliva out his mouth.
“Thom, I regret to say that I’m the bearer of bad tidings this morning,” I try for a fatalistic laugh but the empty echo it leaves in the room tells me to give it up. “As you know, a sample of hair was found at the edge of Lake St. Christopher a few days ago and it’s just come back from DNA testing in Toronto. Two match with Krystal and Ashley, and there’s a third nobody’s sure about. The point is, this means the girls are buried in that lake, that’s where they died, and they didn’t do it all on their own. This completes the story the Crown’s been telling. So much so, I’m afraid we have to reconsider our position in this trial. We need to take a serious look at this, you know, and maybe face up to something we’d hoped we wouldn’t have to face.”
Tripp’s not avoiding my eyes as he usually does, but he doesn’t seem to be listening to what I’m saying, either. Instead he takes me in with a politely restrained amusement, as though I’ve left a dried dollop of shaving cream under my nose. When he gets around to responding it’s with a teacherly superiority, an adult talking to a child about stealing another’s pencil crayons.
“She’s been talking to you too, hasn’t she?”
“Could you be somewhat more—”
“Because she knows who you are alright.”
“Mr. Tripp, please keep in mind that you’re the one accused of double murder. I would ask you to further keep in mind that I haven’t been accused of a thing.”
“You don’t have to be accused of anything to hear them. But you already know that, don’t you? And who could accuse you anyway? You’re the lawyer!”
Laughter. A hearty cocktail-party bellow, his rheumy eyes glistening from the force of it.
“Well thanks, Thom,” I say when he’s throat-cleared his way back to silence. “But I’m not much interested in your expert opinion on psychotic behavior in others. You are right about one thing, though: I’m the lawyer, and you’re the client. Can we stick with that for a moment without the yucks, please?”
A knowing trick of a smile at the frothy edges of Tripp’s lips that makes me want to give the side of his head a full swing with the back of my hand.
“Now, I’m going to give you the benefit of my legal advice. That’s part of my job,” I start again, keeping my voice low as possible. “I know when a hand has been forced. And in light of this new evidence, it is my obligation to advise you that the best course of action for you to take at this point—the only course of action—is to plead guilty.”
“To say that I—”
“It will have a positive implication on your sentence, maybe get you into a counseling program a little sooner. It’s expedient, Thom, but it’s also wise.”
“Say I killed them?”
“Strategically it’s the only option, and frankly—and I say this on a personal level—you’d be doing yourself a favor.”
Tripp considers this, or at least appears to consider it, his hand raised to support his chin.
“It’s going to require you to confess,” I go on. “But you don’t have to think of it in those terms if you don’t want to. All you have to do is stand up and say a few words. Admit to each of the elements of the offense in more or less specific terms.”
“What should I say?”
“That you took them to the lake after school, walked down to the water with them, did what you did.”
“What did I do?”
“Do you really not remember?”
“Sometimes. Certain things.”
“Like what?”
“Their faces,” he says. “How they smiled and everything would change. The way they could make you believe for a second that nothing could possibly be wrong with anything anywhere.”
“That’s fine, Thom. That’s nice. But what I’m asking is, now that we’ve come this far, don’t you remember anything of what happened at the lake that day?”
“Sometimes I’m sure I remember. Other times I’m sure I must be wrong.”
“That’s how it is, is it?”
“You think I did it.”
&nbs
p; “Jesus, Thom! Yes, I think you did it! Everyone in this town thinks you did it. You’re the only one who’s not so sure. I’m sorry you don’t remember, maybe some day it’ll all come back to you, but for Christ’s sake it’s time for you to admit it. And you know what else? I think you want to. I think you know that either you take a good look at what you did right now or you’re going to be alone with the voices in your head forever.”
With the last dozen of these words the most unfortunate thing occurs. My voice breaks. Dry sinuses suddenly melting into a stream of children’s glue. But whether out of good manners or the hearing of voices, Thom Tripp appears not to notice.
“I didn’t do it alone,” he says after I’ve wiped the heel of my hand across the tops of my cheeks.
“Give me a name then.”
Pulls his chin up and shows me something new in his eyes. The fear that’s been there all along but hidden by dreams, the distraction of riddles played upon himself.
“It was The Lady.”
“You saw her?”
“She told me things.”
“Like what?”
“Like she has them now. And that’s why they’ll never be found.”
“That’s not good enough, Thom.”
“What do you want then?”
“For you to tell me that you killed Ashley Flynn and Krystal McConnell. Because you did and you know it, even if you thought some dead lady was giving you directions from the Great Fucking Beyond.”
Cocks his head to the side and in a second the glimpse of fear drains away from his face. Half nods as though the most clever little joke has just been delivered to his ear.
“What’d you do?” he says.
“There’s no me in this. Do I have to explain again that this—”
“Who did you hurt?” His breath blown cold across the hot room. “Tell me her name.”
For a moment I see myself sitting here in the instant chill of Interview Room No. 1 and feel certain that this is how I will stay forever. Thinking her name and willing it to my lips but nothing ever coming out. That this is how it ends, me and Tripp caught in each other’s stares, perspiring and shadowless. We’re to be roommates together in the eternity of names.