The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

“I appreciate—”

  “Mr. Krug, people have things. That they want to protect. That they don’t want other people to know about. That shouldn’t be a privilege.”

  Martin pauses to try and air out the room. He looks out the window again, just to avoid seeing the guy in the mirrored wall.

  “So as to avoid confusion,” he says, and hears himself switch over to cop mode, “why don’t you tell me what you’re really saying, nice and simple.”

  “It’s two in the morning.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Maybe the problem is you don’t listen good,” the guy says, and straightens up. He rolls his neck and rakes his mustache with his fingers and steps a little closer. If they were anywhere else, not a tiny attic room full of exercise equipment, he’d need to consider it an aggressive play.

  “Things were stable around here,” the guy says. “People were happy.”

  “Are you holding me accountable for something?”

  “I don’t think I am.”

  “Tell me what your wife’s friend wants.”

  “She wants justice. She feels like she’s been harassed.”

  “It’s a homicide investigation.”

  “Yeah, and she lost her parents.”

  “She didn’t even like her parents.”

  The guy can’t help but laugh, too shocked to reply. He makes to leave. He says under his breath, “Just leave us all alone.”

  Martin sits on the bench again. Something’s wrong, he knows it. A barely noticeable shift in tone, but just enough to notice. Not for the first time he wonders if he got it all wrong somehow.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.” The guy stops in the doorway. “It’s about the girlfriend, Moira’s girlfriend?”

  The innkeeper twists the corner of his mouth a little. As if he’s looking at the world’s biggest idiot.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Martin smiles tightly.

  “Fine. I’m ashamed of myself. Now what?”

  * * *

  At some point in the early hours, Leela wakes up in the darkest dark, the blackest night, absolutely freezing despite a blanket that suffocates her legs and torso. She’s drunk. Ultra drunk. Her head’s a swimming pool filled with electrified Jell-O. She really needs to pee.

  All is silent. There’s no moonlight left. This is not her living room in Madbury. What room is this? Did she hook up with somebody? On her chest and the floor are papers like fallen leaves. The manuscript, the party, Rob’s party, his parents’ house, his parents’ office—she must have fallen asleep. Shit.

  Her mouth tastes like the rodent apocalypse.

  She lurches out of her wool tomb, stumbles around the room, tries to find the light switch but can’t find the light switch because there is no light switch, so, hallway, and where’s the bathroom? Must pee, then depart immediately, post-peeing. But first pee.

  She lurches down the hallway, finds the bathroom door, opens the door, closes it behind her. No lock on the door? No light switch? Not even a motion sensor? Bladder exploding.

  She tries to rip her jeans down but sways and stumbles, because her jeans are too tight and they bunch at the knee. Double shit! She tilts against the wall, falls over. Somehow gets herself back up to a squatting position over the toilet and wrenches her pants down to her ankles, along with her underwear. Finally: great relief and satisfaction. Until a headache of tidal proportions breaks through a distant seawall behind her eyeballs and begins to approach.

  She must flee, but first a wave of terror: what if someone yanks open the unlocked door? She grips the doorknob and holds it, straining to finish, alive with fear only. She closes her eyes.

  Twenty minutes later, she’s awake. Must’ve nodded off? Shit shit shit. She reaches down to pull up her underwear. It’s missing. What happened to her underwear? Where are her jeans? The dark’s too dark, she can’t see, she paws the ground. She can’t even see her hands. Finally she feels them, her jeans, so screw it, no underwear, she yanks on her pants and stumbles out, down the hardwood floor in the hallway with one hand against the wall. Then she trips over something and falls with a smack that’s the sound of her knee hitting something hard. So painful! Her knee is on fire. It feels sticky. Her head bongs with alarms. Are the alarms outside her head? Are they music, is everyone still partying? Is everyone gone? What time is it?

  She’s never been this drunk in her entire life.

  Leela sees a chink of moonlight through an open door. Her arms are freezing. She follows the light on her hands and knees, until she crawls back into the big warm chair, pulls up the blanket, tells herself to set the alarm on her phone, set two alarms just in case, that way she’ll be out of there before anyone else wakes up. She should definitely drink a ton of water. Is there any water? She can’t bear the idea of leaving the chair, not when she’s warm again. Her head is suffused with an aura of suffering, of tidal waves approaching that will hurt, and nausea. But if she sleeps, maybe they’ll pass her by.

  Three hours later, a man’s voice: “Excuse me.”

  Louder, a second later: “Excuse me.”

  Leela cracks open her eyes. Sour light. Trippy pulses. Abysmal headache. She squashes her face into the cushion, to garlic-press the pain out through the back of her skull.

  “Honey, I’m sorry,” the voice says, “but if you don’t mind.”

  “I’m sleeping,” she blurts out. What is this bullshit? She will homicide this guy once her head quits splitting apart. What sort of rapist just breaks into your cabin and starts talking shit?

  “I appreciate that,” the voice says, a deep voice, slightly chuckling. “But I need my shorts.”

  The chuckle pulls her out of the abyss, gradually. She turns, rolling onto her side, and recognizes that her left knee burns for some reason. Like someone hit it with a hammer. She opens her eyes again. Bookshelves, file boxes. Is she not in Madbury? Did the chatty rapist kidnap her?

  OH SHIT.

  She rolls the rest of the way around and squints, which exacerbates the throbbing in her head. At the same time she feels cold air on her legs. Because there’s no blanket. She looks down. Blanket’s on the floor. She must’ve kicked it off. Her legs are bare for some reason, and one’s bloody, scabbed darkly with dried blood.

  The floor, also, has a trail of dried blood.

  But where are her jeans?

  A figure shifts, out of the light. A man looms over her, in a white undershirt and a blue bathrobe, with silver hair. She sees his face—it’s Rob, but in his fifties.

  “Sir, excuse me,” says Leela, as formally as she can. “I think I’m hungover.”

  “And you might’ve bumped your knee,” the man says gently. “Look, you can go back to sleep. I just need my work shorts. I have to be at a job site in ten minutes.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she says.

  “But the shorts.”

  “What shorts?”

  But her mind is too crippled by pain to figure out what he’s complaining about. Her headache is the kind people use surgery to relieve. Still, she should go, let the man sort out his clothing problems. So she reaches down for her car keys and touches, and looks down, and finds canvas shorts—she’s wearing canvas shorts covered in paint splatters.

  She catapults herself to a standing position. The headache claims her on a visceral level. She almost collapses.

  “Are you okay?” asks Mr. Miller.

  “Excuse me,” she whispers, and races out.

  Doorway. Hallway. Dried blood on the floor. She’s about to be sick. Where is the bathroom? First door: guest room. Second door: a closet full of linens, and on the floor are dark blue jeans that look just like hers. Which is weird? And underwear, that look like hers—that are hers. Plus a laundry hamper, with someone’s T-shirt on top, that appears to be wet. And it takes only a brief sparkling moment to piece together a chain of events that should be beyond human understanding if it didn’t ring so many bells, before she tear
s off the shorts, yanks on her jeans as fast as possible, feels her keys in one pocket, and stuffs her underwear into another. Grabs the T-shirt, balls it up—this is not happening—and tries to hide the shirt when she hustles back, ignores the blood, holds down the vomit, hands the man his shorts, the man who is Rob Miller’s father, the shorts that are Mr. Miller’s shorts, shorts that she must’ve grabbed from the floor of his family’s linen closet, out of their laundry basket, thinking at four in the morning that his shorts were her jeans, thinking that the closet was a bathroom, after she’d squatted over his laundry hamper and pissed all over someone’s T-shirt.

  The pissy shirt that’s in her hands.

  The father who’s now rolling his eyes.

  Leela dashes away without a word, out the nearest door. Outdoors. Cold air. A sour yellow sun hangs above the ocean, surrounded by storm clouds. She stumbles down a perfectly mowed lawn toward her car, throws the balled-up shirt in the backseat, twists the key in the ignition. It turns over, thank god. The clock says 7:12. She reverses quickly down the driveway and heads for town.

  She who pissed on their laundry, Rob Miller’s laundry.

  She who wore his dad’s shorts to bed, nestled in his crappy novel.

  She who bled up and down their hallway, and for the sake of what? Nothing had been gained, no connections made; her story was no further along. Ocean-smelling wind passes through the car and turns her stomach. She can’t help but reconsider her future. In which the reconstitution of any sort of pride does not seem possible. Public life, ever again: impossible. She’s going to be sick. She rolls down the window. Her stomach doesn’t explode somehow. At a stoplight below the neighborhood, she laughs miserably: it’s too insane. She wants to cry. The light changes. She turns away from the sun and heads west, toward mountains, toward Madbury.

  And while turning she passes a dirty red sedan with a surfboard strapped to the roof. The car’s driven by a beautiful young woman, a perfectly designed young woman. The kind of young woman possessed of a sort of physical beauty that’s algorithmic, it’s so precise, and goes beyond just appearances: it suggests who she is inside, someone good.

  And to the woman’s sideways expression, which contains hasty recognition and a quick smile, the start of “Hey, Leela,” and then a look of bewilderment, even pain, she is stone-faced as her final measure of protection. Eyes forward. Mouth closed. Inwardly warping. A young woman with nothing left to protect, only the impulse to protect.

  * * *

  By late afternoon, when he’s wearing nothing more than boxer shorts, with four Motrin in his bloodstream, Martin can’t find a single comfortable position in order to use his laptop. The best he can do is perch the computer on his lap, in bed, with sweat dripping off his forehead, and from there he faces with a stupid expression on his face so many headlines like “Incest America” and “The Demise of the Great American Sweetheart.” Idiotic websites, idiotic articles, in which “Emily Portis” becomes the starting point for all kinds of slow-witted sound and fury. Martin clicks and clicks, he can’t stop clicking. How many publications can the internet contain? In videos, smug man after smug man addresses a camera. Martin can hardly listen to them. He can’t believe that they exist. Everything, everywhere, focuses on the girl, though how exactly the nude pictures of her surfaced online still remains unknown, days later, though copies flourish for anyone who knows where to search, and people talk about that like it’s somehow allowable in this day and age, no matter the girl being sixteen. He’s full of rage.

  That morning, Suzanne had refused to get out of his car. He’d picked her up at her house. She smelled drunk. At least he got her to agree to go. They rode to the meeting in silence. The church was on the town’s center square, immense and gray. He’d parked. Lights were on in the basement. Nearly a dozen people stood around outside. Coffee drinkers, cigarette smokers, in casual catch-up. It was Martin’s regular meeting in Claymore, of a mix typical to meetings anyplace. Upper-crust drunks. Bottom-rung drunks. The wholesome middle who’d lost custody of their kids.

  “They look nice,” Nick’s mother said, as if surprised.

  “They are,” he said gently. “So are you.”

  He’d started to get out. She laughed. “I’m not going in there.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “You think I’m crazy? Half of those guys I went to high school with.”

  “I’ll be there with you.”

  “If you think I’m going to join a cult, you’re crazier than I thought.”

  For fifteen minutes he coaxed, he listened. It only made things worse. “Who the hell do you think you are anyway? You kissed me, and now we’re here?” She piled it on, eventually shouting, “Who gave you the right to play god anyway? You’re such an asshole.”

  People heard the noise, stared for a second, looked away. It had happened a thousand times before, to each of them.

  Nick’s mom finally said icily, “Why do you get to make me feel this way?” Then wouldn’t say anything else or budge. So he drove her home. Parked in the driveway. She slammed the door. He watched her go up the drive. For some reason he thought of Lillian and her doctor. For the first time, it didn’t bother him as much as it had. He actually wondered if they were happy.

  He drove back to the meeting. He caught the eye of a couple people, they nodded or gestured. They all went inside.

  In the glow of his laptop, Martin picks up his phone. He needs to help the girl. He calls the number in the book, for Portis. The number’s been disconnected. In Brenner’s files is an email address. He composes a note, pecking at his keyboard.

  Hi Emily. My name is Martin Krug. We met previously …

  He sends the message. Then in his inbox finds a reply to a message he’d sent the day before. Attached are the call logs to Dr. Ashburn’s house for the week of the murders. He quickly scrolls. He stops. Double-checks the times. He makes notes on a sheet of paper.

  Twenty minutes later comes a text message, unrelated, from Lillian’s lawyer, requesting that Martin call him immediately, to arrange for a face-to-face as soon as possible.

  But at that moment Martin’s in the shower and doesn’t hear the beep.

  That evening, at dusk, two seagulls picket a wooden fence. He hops in his car and speeds out of town, up the road into the mountains. It really is pretty, the higher the road climbs. Like a postcard of virgin new world. The light falls away behind him, the houses become fewer and fewer. Then a car comes flying down the middle of the road. Martin hits the horn and swerves, nearly jams into a ditch.

  Two motorcycles fly by, side by side. Headlights that he mistook for a single vehicle, an illusion of two sources.

  Another five minutes and there’s half a dozen cars parked along the road. He slows and parks. Trudges his heavy legs up a ditch toward the media encampment. Sun tent. Several folding chairs. Nearly a dozen people, and someone’s running a halogen lamp off a generator. Could be a refugee site, could be a tailgate party. The Portis house sits two hundred yards uphill from the road. Old and dark, with a steep sloping roof, and two small wood and stone outbuildings, plus a barn that’s brown and black, as if covered in mold. The field’s fortressed by cords of firewood and a tractor. There’s a basketball hoop, a snowplow blade, a beat-up truck parked in the dirt drive, pointed uphill. Forest on either side canvases up the mountainside. A single light’s on upstairs in the house, otherwise the structures are as dark as the sky.

  On the road is a mailbox with several handwritten signs stored inside plastic bags. Private Property and No Trespassing and No Interviews and Go Away.

  “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” Martin announces, to no one, as he gets closer to the media people. In return he only sees hooded eyes. He stops and plants his feet. “Why don’t you all just go home?”

  Two men pause a card game to observe him dully, from plaid folding chairs.

  Martin says loudly, “She’s done nothing wrong.”

  More heads turn.

  “You do
n’t know what the hell’s going on,” he shouts.

  Someone says, “Get outta here.”

  “Why don’t you get a life? Let them get on with theirs.”

  Another voice says, “Who the hell are you?”

  He’s about to answer. At the same time he’s about to walk up the drive and offer to the girl to eject them properly. Then the light in the Portis house shuts off. A few of them turn to notice, Martin included.

  “Wait a second, you’re that cop. From New Jersey. Can I get an interview?”

  * * *

  “Who’s this?”

  “Nick, it’s Martin Krug. Don’t hang up.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I just have a question. The night at the Ashburns. When everything happened. Did you hear the phone ring?”

  “What?”

  “I got the call logs. There was a phone call. Right when everything went down. You didn’t mention it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “So you didn’t hear the phone ring? Or maybe Dr. Ashburn excused himself, when you were in the study together. The number that called the house, Nick, it was Emily’s dad. It’s his phone number.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just wait. Do you or do you not remember the phone ringing?”

  “Look, I would’ve said something.”

  “Just hold on. Listen to me. I’m trying to help you. I need you to tell me, okay? Because, if not, potentially we’re back to square one. There’s something missing, I can feel it, around this call. So if there’s something you’re not telling me, I need you to tell me.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “Nick, wait!”

  * * *

  Forty-five minutes later, back at the hotel, Martin bends down angrily in the dark to yank off his shoe when it happens: utter lockdown.

  When every muscle, from the middle of his back down to his tailbone, tenses and clenches in unison, and he yells out and crashes to the floor.

  The pain is like a fantasy, a dream. It doesn’t seem real. His whole body is immobilized. It’s almost impossible to breathe, like a big iron jacket just leapt out of the dark and wrapped itself around his body. Sweat breaks out on his face. It’s never happened before. Complete deactivation, from the spine out. He clenches his eyes shut. The tension continues to spread. Agonizing pain. His chest seizes, his jaw clamps shut, he can barely make a sound. He’d almost feel awe if it were happening to someone else.