Transgressions
Page 1
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TTA Press
www.ttapress.com
Copyright ©2007 by TTA Press
First published in 2007
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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CRIMEWAVE NINE
TRANSGRESSIONS
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BLUE MORPHO by Shelley Costa
THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT WIND by Mick Scully
THE RAINBOW KILLER by Gary W. Shockley
STEALING FROM GARBO by Ron Savage
DOGWOOD by Susan Overcash Walker
LAST STOP ON DOWLING STREET by Scott William Carter
YOU WILL BE WEARING GREEN by Daniel Bennett
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Ian R. Faulkner
THINKING OF ALICE by Robert Weston
THE GOLD WATCH by Kevin Prufer
WORK IN PROGRESS by Scott Nicholson
THE FROZEN LAKE by John Shirley
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ISSN 1463 1350 * ISBN 978-0-9553683-0-1 l * © 2007 Crimewave on behalf of all contributors * Published in the UK by TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB * Further information, discussion forum, online subscriptions and back issues on www.ttapress.com, and in the contributors section of this issue * Subscribe now to four issues for just 22 pounds UK * 26 pounds Europe * 30 pounds RoW, by cheque payable to TTA Press or credit card and sent to the above address or online at the website * Thanks to Peter Tennant for proofreading and editorial assistance * Edited by Andy Cox * Set in Warnock Pro * Printed in the UK by Cambridge University Press
CONTENTS
BLUE MORPHO by Shelley Costa
THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT WIND by Mick Scully
THE RAINBOW KILLER by Gary W. Shockley
STEALING FROM GARBO by Ron Savage
DOGWOOD by Susan Overcash Walker
LAST STOP ON DOWLING STREET by Scott William Carter
YOU WILL BE WEARING GREEN by Daniel Bennett
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Ian R. Faulkner
THINKING OF ALICE by Robert Weston
THE GOLD WATCH by Kevin Prufer
WORK IN PROGRESS by Scott Nicholson
THE FROZEN LAKE by John Shirley
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BLUE MORPHO by Shelley Costa
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Shelley Costa's ‘Black Heart and Cabin Girl’ was nominated for the 2004 Edgar Award by Mystery Writers of America. Her short stories have appeared in Crimewave, The Georgia Review and The World's Finest Mystery & Crime Stories. She's on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she teaches creative writing.
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Mo McCallum didn't hold it against the lake that it was so deep it took two divers to bring up her daughter's body on the day of the regatta. Amy's little foot—she was just eighteen months old—was caught on a stick that had actually threaded itself through the slats in one of her clear jelly shoes, the divers pointed out. The other shoe was nowhere to be found. And so a stick coated in soft algae, in the deep, black part of this Canadian lake was all that stood between Mo McCallum and her little girl. Depending on how you looked at it, one of the neighbors tried telling her, that stick was what kept Amy from drifting away from them all.
How Mo McCallum looked at it was this: her child was dead.
There was no father to share her grief—she was raising Amy alone—and no parents of her own, anymore, to wrap her up until she could forget the sight of those divers, whenever that might be. It was late afternoon by the time they found Amy two hundred feet off the southeast point of the Wellers’ island. By then, power boats from elsewhere on the lake had come in, rumbling in a watchful circle, like some strange factory ready to process the child back to life.
Steve Beck stood offshore in waist-high water the whole time, shouting to the divers, hurling curses into the air, and Mo stood shaking on the rocks in the heat, wondering who he was, the crazy man screaming in the shallows, when she had just yesterday been making wedding plans with him. He had sailed the race in his Invitation, which was all he could afford on this lake where dinghies were just so many playthings, and he had lost the race becalmed off the southeast point of the island, on the far side of the final marker.
Rick Wakeman had rowed out to the divers, who were lifting the body, all the colors of her gone, all the yellow of her hair, her romper, gone, only lake water streaming off her everywhere. Steve was swimming out to the boat then, his cries bursting every time he took a breath, and Mo despised him forever, watching love, too, stream back into the lake off her little girl's body, disappearing into silver ripples as they lifted her into the boat to Rick. Steve, who had suddenly decided to race, too, when he had told her he was watching Amy. Where was he? Where was she? Where in God's name were any of them?
She rounded on the other cottagers. “Didn't you see her? Didn't any of you see her? You were all right here.” Mo started shrieking, ripping her nails down her own face, wanting only to take out her eyes, that had somehow failed. She was off her feet, then, her back arched, lifted into others’ arms, crying to the sky that looked very far away. "Didn't any of you see her?"
And although heads were shaking—some, because they had to answer, and some, because the world was unbearable—no one said a thing. But in the early afternoon of the annual regatta in 2000, when Amy McCallum walked into the lake in her yellow romper, someone saw.
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Lately there had been this dream, and Polly Talbot blushed just to think about it—a 68-year-old woman with long white hair and a wheelchair full of MS now, in the arms of a young man, their heads near a pillow. She had known this particular young man from the time he had arrived as a teenager for summers on the lake, and for years she had paid him for odd jobs around her island—repairing her dock, taking down dead trees, ramping all the entrances after she had her diagnosis. She was a practical woman. He was a capable young man. He was average and slender, with thick, gray blond hair and a quick grace. Soon he started taking jobs from other cottagers. I've got to consolidate my position, he told her, and he'd smile that smile, with his lips together, like it would give away too much to show his teeth.
When the dream started, all these years later, Polly realized she had spent years distracted by him when he was working around her place, stripped to the waist, clearing brush, chopping firewood. She liked it that he could keep up when she talked about the Italian Renaissance and wild orchids and Walt Whitman, all her special subjects. She suspected he had only a passing understanding of many things, but even that was charming.
Without telling him, she decided to leave him the cottage, because beside herself, no one had been the island's caretaker as much as this young man. He had studied commerce at McGill and now called himself a venture capitalist, so she believed he had a good head for property. Perhaps a cottage here would even consolidate his position.
Earlier that afternoon on the day of the regatta, Polly had wheeled herself out to the scrubby end of her island to watch the race as the sailors came through Wendigo Pass, the narrow channel between her place and the Wellers'. When she got there, she saw her young man's Laser rocking gently out in Wendigo Pass, the sail luffing. There he was, crouching, looking up the lake toward the finish line, and then in the other direction. She watched him sheet in and sail closer to the boulders snaking out from the Weller side, where he leaned over, jabbing again and again with a paddle, until he finally brough
t something up against the side of the boat.
Her hands flew to her open mouth when she realized what he had brought on board—it was the yellow romper that made it clear, even before she saw arms and legs—but she knew there was no one better to get help quickly than her young man. Polly saw him cover the little girl with his silver windbreaker to keep her warm where she lay out of sight at his feet. Dear God, let him get help in time, Polly thought, as she backed up her chair in the exquisite sunlight, turning for home, where she'd wait for news.
Hours later, she caught sight of him outside where she had wheeled to watch the race. He was studying the dirt path, scuffing at something with his bare feet. Pebbles, twigs, pine needles—still taking care of her, even on race day when it all meant so much to him, even at 32 when he was no longer a kid who needed a job. She knew he would come, because she had no phone.
And now he had.
She wheeled herself back farther into the great room of her cottage and reached for a book. The sun was low enough in the sky that it hit the water and reflected white ripples high on Polly's walls, and she watched him run softly up the ramp and try the glass double doors, almost as if he expected them to be locked. They looked at each other through the glass, and Polly smiled.
He came inside.
Just then she remembered the dream, the feel of him taking her into his arms, and spoke up just to cover her blush. “Why are you still wearing your racing gloves?” She said still. They both heard it. And she suddenly knew as she watched him roam around the room, touching her things with a freedom she had never seen, that so much depended on the word still.
She tried to work it out, but she was thinking how golden brown his eyes were, how wide his cheekbones, and how her father really should have bought the rocky island off the mainland, seventy-two years ago, instead of this one. He didn't because he he'd just plain miss good old dirt too much, he always said, the kind of good old dirt that preserves what were now his daughter's wheelchair tracks all those years later.
But what had she missed?
She should have taken Mo McCallum up on her offer to ferry her over in the blasted chair, bustled by strong arms and good-natured complaints up the hill to the decks. Someone would have called her the commodore, because her father had been, and someone else might have handed her the air horn to signal the start of the race. She could have joined them in the fake jeers at the skippers who couldn't keep their dinghies behind the invisible start line, the sound of the sails luffing in a sweet agony of anticipation.
There would be the usual commentary from Tom Fellows who owns the solar energy supply shop in Bracebridge, who always yells, I've seen better Skippers in the Barbie Dream House! and everybody laughs because they've waited for it all year. And there's Mary Dineen, who makes cream puffs every year for all the losers, although everyone shares. And Noah Trask, who cheers wildly for any kid in a Sunfish because he likes to see kids and the most basic boat in the whole wide world win.
She could have reached for the child Amy, who might even have crawled up with the butterfly book, remembering how Polly had given it to her because children remember these things, and Polly could have kept her safe from the baby jaguars that eat Blue Morpho butterflies. But listen, Mo McCallum had stopped reading when Amy went very still, sometimes if it flutters its blue wings very hard and catches the sunlight just right, it blinds the baby jaguar just long enough to get away! Amy's tiny finger tapped at the picture of the cat. Amy, said Mo, smoothing a hand over the wild yellow hair, the baby jaguar is just a baby. But even Blue Morphos get tired, and who is to say that the sun is just where you need it to be to manage those blinding flashes of blue no matter how hard you flutter in the warmth of the jaguar's breath? Make no mistake, she wished she could tell Amy. There in her silent cottage, with the reflected white ripples high on her walls, Polly felt his arm slip around her shoulders, the rough suede palm of the racing glove brushing against her light shirt, and she had no more dazzling blue in her to blind him. Oh, make no mistake, Amy, even if your mother tells you that the baby jaguar is just a baby. The baby jaguar—he nearly held her in his arms as she saw the bed pillow move in—is still a jaguar.
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Two years later Steve Beck was sitting in his tent, waiting out the blowing snow, waiting out the dark that never really seemed to leave, even when the sun was a ragged blot in a milky sky. Beside him Carl Longo was curled on his side, asleep in his bag. Or was it Dean Cooper? Who had crawled in with him four hours ago? Cooper, Longo, Behrman, Henck, he'd climbed with them all, climbed down with them all, pulled each of them off mountains. Together they were called the Death Posse in mountaineering circles, who thought each of the five was a man just looking for a slightly more interesting way of killing himself.
Over shared flasks they all laughed kind of quietly about it. But none of them said otherwise. Cooper, he knew, had lost all of his mother's money in a hydrofoil scheme. Henck's brother was a paraplegic ever since an accident when Henck was drunk behind the wheel. About the others, Longo and Behrman, he couldn't say. What'll it take? they joked with each other, but only when they were climbing alone and not working as paid guides, because no one else would understand. What'll it be, boys? Forgotten crampons? A misjudged weather condition?
For himself, Steve Beck knew, but never offered to the others, it was the pursuit of the sweet crevasse. Something he had never seen before, beautiful in the shimmering daylight, deep in the profound night, cooling forever that gnarled overgrown thing that used to be his heart—a place to remind him of Mo McCallum.
And Amy.
He stirred, unzipped the tent door just enough to peer out at the snow that was white even in the dark, at the occasional star that stared back, even through the blow. He heard crunching, saw a headlight bobbling back toward where he knew the other tent must be—Behrman out for a pee. He rezipped the tent, the cold hardening around him like memory, and he could see the day in June two summers ago when he and the McCallums and Polly Talbot had met at the landing where he kept his little houseboat, since he couldn't afford a cottage.
The clouds were sleek in the early summer sky, the blue intense. He had just wheeled Polly onto the deck of his houseboat when Mo pulled up in her Subaru, Amy in her car seat in the back, a finger curled sleepily over her nose in the long drive from Toronto. He nearly jumped over Polly to kiss Mo and she laughed as his fingers swept over her eyes and nose and mouth, telling himself she was actually back, done with the business in town having to do with what they called the McCallum millions. Hey, Squirt, he said to Amy, who pulled her thumb out of her mouth and offered it to him.
While he loaded Polly's bags, and seagulls circled overhead, Mo sat right down on the dock with Amy in her lap, opening the little cardboard butterfly book that Polly had gravely presented. Amy's eyes were big and one of her soft little arms danced, the strands of many-colored bracelets catching the sunlight that was very nearly total.
He listened to Mo read that the Queen Alexandra's Birdwing butterfly is the biggest in the world, and the Zebra Longwing butterfly feeds on the nectar of passion flowers—So do I, said Steve, heaving a carton of canned goods on board, and Mo tried to trip him—and then there's the Peacock butterfly that hisses when it's scared, and Amy lurched, thumb in her mouth, at Polly, who cried, Oh, he'd never hiss at you, not you. Mo pointed to the next page: Here's the Blue Morpho, Amy, and look at this, the Blue Morpho butterfly is eaten by baby jaguars. That's what it says.
It had been pointless, finally, to try to reconstruct the tragedy, and they never—never—got past the first senseless five minutes after Rick Wakeman rowed Amy's little body to shore. All of the stupid, inadequate words were still clattering in his brain, which was no longer anything but an empty tin box.
Wakeman, Wakeman, I told you to tell her I was racing.
I did, goddamn it. Mo—
No, no, I don't remember—
You were standing right there. I told you Beck was racing.
Oh, my God, oh, my God.
Didn't you hear me?
I didn't hear you. Didn't you know I didn't hear you?
Mo, for the love of God—
Go away. Get out. You were supposed to be watching Amy.
Beck, maybe you'd better—
There is a kind of goneness that is so sudden and complete it was as if the child and the woman were pulled through a rift in the sky, just over the horizon, and the only thing left was for him to hurl all the rest in after them. His houseboat, his outfitting job in Cariboo, his furniture, his truck, his fucking tin box brain—and the Invitation, oh, yes. The Invitation went first. And even then all he had left was a gaping guilt that no altitude could refine out of him. He had turned his back on Amy and Mo that day just to play with the rich kids. That was what happened. Mo saw it plain. So did Rick Wakeman and the others. So, in fact, did he.
One thing remained.
One thing didn't get hurled through that low rift in the sky. He had found it, forgotten, on his houseboat, three days after Amy drowned, coming out of his stupor when Noah Trask had kindly come aboard just to clear away the empties and tell him that Mo had left for good. Half under his berth was the butterfly book Polly Talbot had given Amy when they all arrived on the lake just a few weeks ago.
He kept it, sewed it into his Osprey pack with a nylon patch cut from his old pack. He made the stitches small and ran the tent-sealing wax stick over them, hard, holding it like a knife, wishing he was carving out his own godforsaken heart. From then on he carried Amy everywhere with him, as small and present on his back as she used to be, and sometimes at night, cold in his tent before the goose down kicked in, he'd rest his hand on the small bulge in his pack, where he'd settled it by his head.
Steve could just make out Carl Longo at his side, rustling, and he knew daybreak was coming. He laced up his boots, unzipped the tent flap just enough to push his pack through to the outside. Hat, gloves, he set next to Longo. Those, somebody could bring down without too much trouble, and somebody could use. At ten thousand feet, at daybreak, the snow as far as he could see was rose-colored, like the mountain was bleeding into itself.