In the Vines

by Shannon Kirk

  Oh and also, in a subtle and weak woman way, I’ll direct Man Voice to stage his teams in the barn, outside my house. Because surely they’ll respect how traumatized I am and how intrusive such tragedy is. They’ll want, yes, because they’re good fools, right, to respect the sanctity of my home. Which is not a workplace for law enforcement, paramedics, and firefighters. It is not a police station or firehouse. It might be a hospital and a morgue, though, but these fools don’t need to learn that.

  They can drink their Dunkin’ Donuts boxes of coffee in the barn, because I’m not some fucking host. And they can jibber-jabber all they want on their walkie-friggin’-talkies and cell phones in barn stalls. My side room of medical equipment, just stuff for home health care, a private business, you understand, don’t you, Man Voice?

  Just as long as I keep the lot of these fools outside my house long enough to get in touch with my flaming bitch of a lawyer, who will fix everything. She’ll fix it, all right. I’m a Vandonbeer.

  “Fuck all these fools.”

  —A line Aunty scrawls over and over in a notepad as she watches detectives in her yard from her kitchen’s bay window

  It is five days later now, and my walls of staying emotionless and fending off the coming insanity and PTSD from what I just did and went through are starting to crumble. I know I’m sliding, but I keep fighting and acting. I need to pull this off.

  Obviously, I had to cancel the annual Mighty Mary Trust gala. This bitch ruined everything. So many patrons let down, but what can I do? Stay on track. Survive. At all costs, no jail.

  I’m about to drive Kent’s Jeep back to Kent’s house.

  Diversion—this is the lesson I chose to take from some of the theories reported about the infamous JonBenét Ramsey case. Keep them looking outside the house, act distraught, pull it off, long enough to hide the evidence in the house. Also, have and use your connections, your power. And this is exactly, exactly what I’ve been doing for five days. Now it’s time to deal with Kent’s Jeep, which I’ll enter soon. Time to deal with his house too. I’m dressed head to toe in black, my hair wrapped tight in a black scarf, like the tightest of turbans, black sunglasses on—at night. Black gloves, no fingerprints.

  The fire investigators and detectives confirmed the burn pattern matched my story of Johanna smoking in bed. They tweezer-bagged several of Johanna’s dress fibers along the path, her hair, cast her footprints, and mine, just as I said shit went down. They interviewed family members and friends, hospital workers, charity people, and everyone told the constant story that Johanna and I are the closest sisters ever. My drama acting came in quite handy, to prove how distraught I was in losing my sister. Doctors treated me on-site. No surgery could save my eye. They gave me stitches and a patch, antibiotics, and pain meds.

  I absolutely leveraged the fuck out of the Vandonbeers’ ugly power. Whatever dark secrets we’ve held, some for more than a century, over powerful people in politics and law enforcement, well, I pulled on them through my most expensive, well-connected Stokes & Crane LLP lawyer to send the clear message that the investigation was to start and end on my story of what happened. Yes, indeed, that is how things work for those interweaved in the establishment, the 0.01 percent of the top 1 percent—a constant chess game that plays out over, in my case, a couple of centuries. Did Judge McAdams really want his medal-decorated great-great-great-grandfather’s brass statue in a well-known Boston park dishonored with the documented proof (which the Vandonbeers hold in a safe in Rye) of him raping ten slave girls and impregnating eight (which DNA testing on the bloodline would prove) before moving north to fight the right side of the Civil War? Fuck him, fuck the judge. Fuck everyone. Did Commissioner Ryan really want it leaked that he fixed a mob trial in the mob’s favor, because Johnny Bighead, the consigliere of the Boston mob, held some illicit pictures of Ryan paying four different human-trafficking victims to dress as men, wear strap-on dildos, and gang fuck him in the ass at a Southie motel? Commissioner Ryan’s detectives and police might be honest, sure, ignorant of the affairs of their commander, but they’d follow commands from the top.

  Does it really matter how I made the soup? I made the fucking soup.

  They never found Johanna’s body, found only her burned dress and one of her shoes (the other one washed up later, and in a stroke of amazing luck, I found it after investigators left one evening; I plan to throw it in the dirty hole of her burned cottage, as an offering). They never recovered her slip, the one I used to rip her hair out of her head and scatter the strands; the slip likely got tangled somewhere on the seafloor, obscured in rocks and underwater seagrass, undetectable.

  In a miracle in parts, and thanks to the high tide, no investigator discovered my path through the middle beach nor through Manny’s lawn or in the secret trail. They never did look in my oven in the critical first hours, because again, why would they? So I had time to collect it all, throw the stash in the secret wine room, and cook a turkey to obscure any oven remnants. They never found my false bookcase, nor my wine room, and no family members who know of it—only Mop and Philipp—had cause to mention it. David, my old sperm-donor boyfriend, might have known about my wine room, but he surely said nothing, for he, as the state’s attorney, was part of the web of connections doing my bidding, hidden among the layers of plausible deniability. Oh, no, he wouldn’t say a word; he wouldn’t get tangled in my mess, not with the announcement I know he has coming, the one where he confirms that, yes, he is running for president next term after all. Good for fucking you, David. Good for you, Commissioner Ryan. Judge, you too. Good for you. I got what I wanted. I got cover. I got dirt on all you motherfuckers, and when the time is right, when I’m cleared for good, Judge, your family statue is coming down for “repairs” that take a literal forever; and Ryan, you will “retire early to spend more time with family.” Eventually, all your dirty truths will come out too. Bite me.

  They never looked in my attic, either; I was soon cleared. I pulled off the greatest diversion ever. They never did search my home, top to bottom, like they did in the Ramsey case.

  Probably the greatest stroke of luck or fluke, or whatever you want to call it, was that no hounds were brought in on the search. Perhaps a combination of a complete lack of available dogs and just plain incompetence and investigative apathy—the investigators concluded from pretty much hour one that Johanna did indeed launch herself into the ocean, given the not-so-subtle leaning of Commissioner Ryan, who’d been approached by my Stokes & Crane lawyer—but they did not bring in the dogs. And even without incompetence or apathy, bribery or extortion, they really couldn’t use dogs, anyway. Every police hound in the tristate area was tracking that gunman of the church shooting in Boston and his two hostages, the eight- and ten-year-old daughters of a sitting senator, who died from several high-velocity bullets (three of which I’d held in my hand and plunked in an evidence bag myself). So that international-headline-grabbing active investigation, as horrible as it all is, saved me. Continues to save me. Those girls are still adrift with the gunman. But that’s another story altogether.

  About a day into the investigation, there was a three-hour stretch, after medics treated me and detectives questioned me for hours, in which, in the earliest of dawn, all these dipshits left me alone. Cops took a coffee break with the press, whom they quarantined to the Haddock Point parking lot.

  That’s when I pulled the bloody towels and balls of duct tape from the oven and shoved the evidence with Cate and Kent in the wine room. I then checked Cate’s pulse to find it beating, but her still unconscious. I checked her vitals and upgraded her prognosis, which was concerning. So I duct-taped her mouth in case she awoke while I baked a turkey for the detectives. I also tied her arms and legs and locked her back in the wine room. I thanked myself for putting a swivel lock outside the bookcase.

  Why did I do that in the first place?

  Ah, I remember why. As part of my single-woman security system. I figured I could trap an intruder in here and hold h
im until the cops came. What a strange premonition. Perhaps delusion. Perhaps paranoia. I never got over my father’s murder.

  Also during this three-hour time period, I ascended to my lovely sister, who was still unconscious, her pulse and breath a little steadier, but still weak. I dressed her in a comfy pair of cotton pajamas and settled her into the attic bed with Frette linens. From my barn, I dragged in a feeding line and saline drip. I began my nursing care of my sister that day, treating her in coma.

  And now, five days after the fire, I’m forced to attend to the now starving Cate Dranal, who just awoke. Just now.

  Her eyes bleary, her trying to speak or scream under the duct tape in the basement, in my cold, limestone wine room.

  I rip the tape from her mouth.

  Her eyes sag in lethargy, but she’s working that ugly mouth of hers.

  “My house. They’ll find you,” she gurgles. I think that’s what the bitch says.

  I jam a half vial of pentobarbital in her neck, sending the bitch to death or coma—either will do at this point. And it’s sweet justice, giving her what she gave to my precious Johanna.

  It’s midnight, no one is around, no more media awake, no cops, so I slink within my known shadows, all the dark spots I’ve cultivated over the years in my lawn, enter my barn, and drag another feeding line and saline drip into the wine room. This is the treatment she’ll get, this swine. I don’t change her into comfy cotton pajamas. Don’t place her in a bed or settle a blanket atop her. Her blue-on-blue gown is disgusting and soiled, as are her awful yellow underwear. She stinks, she’s swine. The superglue in her head wound is beginning to peel away from the grease layer formed on her skin. I stitch her face with fishing line and a sewing needle. She looks like a bloated zombie. Or a murder doll.

  I don’t care.

  I am an animal. I am a nurse.

  And I’m slipping. I feel it. But before I do, cleanup phase II: Kent’s Jeep and house.

  Maybe I’ll move zombie doll to the barn once all the hubbub dies down. For now, she’ll be treated in the basement, on the floor, slumped on the body of her dead husband, and without any covers. Fuck her. Fuck this bitch.

  What day is it?

  I need to check Johanna’s vitals before I drive over to Kent’s house and drain the tub.

  Check Johanna’s vitals. Rotate her in the bed so she doesn’t get bedsores.

  Oh, Johanna. We’ll go away, away, way, way, when you wake, my love. And we’ll drink tea, and I’ll tell you what happens in books, in books, in the books I read. My lovely love, ly, love.

  I’ve left Kent’s Jeep in his garage. Drained and marinated his porcelain tub in bleach. Checked Cate’s and Kent’s email accounts, and indeed, Cate did email Saint Jerome’s and Mass General that she and Kent took off to help refugees in Greece. I don’t see any frantic emails from friends or family members looking for them, and I recall Kent saying they had none, anyway. The neighborhood, I sense, based on the front porch over there, is rallying around Vicky’s tragic allergic death.

  I stare out the window; time passes.

  I return my gaze to the computer desk and note a list on a chirpy, pretitled THINGS TO DO notepad. Beside each handwritten item, Cate, I presume, checkmarked each of her completed things to do and slashed it dead with a deep pencil cross off:

  • Auto–Bill Pay

  • Sell van, cash

  • Lawn guy, schedule

  • Stop mail/newspapers

  • Work emails/Greece

  • House timers lights/thermometer on Nest

  • Nest cameras

  • Greece ticket

  • Passport

  • Purse (V)

  • L&K

  This list is simple for me to decode. Cate, so insane but also still an insane professional, had to do an “escape to Greece and disappear” to-do list. A list of items that would button up her house and allow for minimal questions from anyone. A list that allowed her to come back if she felt the heat was off. A list that was so demented, the last two items literally spelled out her admitted crimes: “Purse (V),” of course, meant she had to burn or discard the purse with the peanuts that killed V, or Vicky. And “L&K,” which she never got a chance to cross out, was of course, to deal with L (me, Liv) and K (Kent).

  Beside the THINGS TO DO crazy-demented escape/murder/obstruct justice/cover up major crimes list is a computer printout of her ticket to Greece, my taunting mistress letter I left in her ugly minivan, and my hospital ID. I grab and pocket my mistress note and ID. I pocket also the Greece ticket, which I’ll burn. Back on her computer, I find her bank account, which I will seed once funds are depleted for the auto–bill pay through a labyrinth of shell companies and a money-laundered name in Greece. Nobody will suspect anything at all because the mortgage will be paid and the utilities will be paid, and all the money-grubbers won’t have cause to complain.

  I find all the damn Nest cameras in the house, put them in a bag. I’ll sledgehammer the cameras tomorrow and scatter the pieces in the ocean. I hack into her Nest account (using her pass code written and pinned on her bulletin board) and delete all the video of me on the property. I note the earliest date of the videos is today, so there’s no video of her murdering Kent, which I would have, of course, saved. I’m done here.

  Given all she has set up for this house to run on her preset commands and her notices to work, nobody should be looking for Cate or Kent. And there’s no other trace to spark anyone to come crawling to me for answers. So if anyone does come around here looking for Cate, they’ll conclude she disappeared, or tried to disappear. And big deal with that. I used gloves while in this house. I know forensics.

  I’m a ghost.

  I’m smoke.

  I’m smog in this house.

  Vapor.

  Gone.

  On my way out now, I stall in Kent and Cate’s back mudroom. And here I’m fingering the sleeve of Kent’s navy jogging jacket. I taste my tears before I know they’re rolling. I reach into his pocket and extract the wrappers of and a few unopened mini Three Musketeers. I’ll eat them in my long walk home on country roads and backstreets.

  Here come the voices in my head again—they’ll win this time. They’ll talk to me the whole walk home.

  Nobody loves you anymore. You are unloved and worthless. You don’t even know your own name—that is how worthless you are.

  What is my name? Where did I come from? How did I get here? Who am I?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MOP

  Present time

  My mother blinked when I first saw her in the rocker in Aunty’s attic yesterday. After shaking my weak muscles back to life, I sat and stalled.

  “Mwop,” she slurred.

  “Mama,” I croaked, not believing. I don’t believe in such things, I reminded myself.

  “Here, to mwe,” she said, lifting her arm slow.

  When I didn’t move, she braced her hands on the rocker’s arms, pushing hard to lift herself. Popover slid to the floor.

  I do not believe my mother is here. I do not believe my mother is alive. I must be delusional.

  I scampered on my knees over to what I told myself was grief’s illusion, couldn’t possibly be my mother, and cowered next to her in the chair, telling myself she was mere vapor, a floater in my eye. But as my disbelieving vapor felt solid to touch, I next allowed only that whoever this solid vapor was, she was simply my companion, a companion. Acceptance and emergence, for me, has been like Chutes and Ladders, up, down, way up, way down. There’s no magic lift to the top. And so my battle with sanity began once again, only this time it braided with a physical battle to the death.

  My mother’s eyes flew open wide, looking behind me.

  I turned to see who had entered, buckling in fright.

  My mother and I shivered together, me on the floor, her in the chair, shaking in the presence of the woman at the door with a bloody hatchet.

  One day later, I’m still thinking of my mother as my companio
n as I shiver on the ground, watching a woman in all black point a nail gun at a woman with a hatchet. In a hurricane. Outside. At the burned-out basement cottage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  AUNTY

  One year and some months ago, Christmas Eve . . .

  I’m up, alarm clock, stop, I know. I slam your button, you shut up. Up up up I get, slip to my slippers, sip my bedside cup, and first, I must, because I must, I must, seriously I must, first I must check Johanna Banana, Johanna Love, on my rounds.

  Her saline’s fine, her food line good, empty her catheter; we rotate arms, legs, and knees. All the joints. Must move all the joints. Her cognitive prognosis is still critical, and I can’t truly evaluate. She hasn’t “emerged” since that night. That night forever ago, or last night, I don’t know. She’s still breathing on her own, thank God. Stealing a ventilation tube would be difficult, ordering one suspicious. Agh! I need coffee! Early-morning Johanna care, check!

  Popover’s automatic feeder worked again, check! I clean out his litter box, check!

  He scowl-meows at me as I leave, him there curled on Johanna’s feet.

  “Screw you, too, Popover! Kiss, kiss!”

  Now down, down, down to the kitchen, I get my coffee, eat a cinnamon muffin in peace.

  Hello, there, morning sun! Nice yellow shine you leave on the December snow! It’s a white Christmas. Woo!

  Next on to the bitch, rounds continue, in the barn, in the barn, and nobody knows what’s behind my locks.

  I whistle in the thistle, and I stop at the rock. Oh wow! That rhymes. So funny. I whistle in the thistle, and I stop at the rock. Ba, da, da da da, dadada, I stop at the rock. It’s a song! I whistle, wee-woo, in the thistle . . .