Last Words

by Michael Koryta

  “Sarah Martin,” he said. “I was imagining things. Hallucinating.”

  “Interesting. Here you are willing to tell me that, but in trance you were not.”

  “Which means what?”

  “That your subconscious has a greater difficulty dismissing the things that you saw.”

  “My subconscious can believe in ghosts, but I can’t? That’s what you mean?”

  “Possibly? I’m trying to facilitate access. I’m not trying to interpret for you. You can consider the meaning of all this on your own. Before we ended the trance, I asked whether there was anything you could or should do to further help yourself understand what had happened in the cave. You said you should have looked at the maps by now.”

  “That’s what I was going to do next. I want to look at a cave map with Ridley.”

  “That’s not the way you put it during trance. You said repeatedly that you were looking at the wrong maps, and that was a problem. You were very insistent that you needed to look at different maps. At this point, you laughed a little and told me that your mother wouldn’t have made the same mistake.”

  Mark felt a ripple of distaste, the first sense of regret over letting her probe around in his unconscious mind. It was easier to accept the notion that his subconscious believed in ghosts than it was to think he would give his mother any credit for logic.

  “The creek name,” he said, waving a hand. “That’s all that was.”

  “The creek name?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “My mother had a bullshit persona that connected to the creek name, which would be on maps. I get it. Don’t worry about it. You just said yourself that you’re not trying to interpret for me.”

  She gave a slow nod, but he felt like a specimen under a microscope.

  “What was the deal with my hand?” He made the circle with his thumb and index finger again.

  “That was done while we asked your subconscious mind to close the link between past and present.”

  Exactly what he’d understood, even though he hadn’t remembered the moment.

  “Well, I’m impressed, I’ll admit that,” he said finally. “Sadly, it didn’t turn up much of value.”

  “I don’t know if that’s true. Many times the value of memory—of the unconscious in general—isn’t readily apparent.”

  “Melting boards aren’t going to get me far with the sheriff or going forward with Ridley. That seems readily apparent.”

  “I asked about going forward.”

  “Oh? Did I crack the case?” Mark was smiling until she answered.

  “You seemed to take a macro view of the question. You told me that you would have to go to a place called Cassadaga, and then to the mountains.”

  She watched his smile fade into something hard and cold and said, “Cassadaga has meaning to you, I take it?”

  “A little. But I won’t be going there.”

  “What about the mountains?”

  “I don’t care for the mountains. If I can avoid them, I will.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’ve seen enough of them.” He got to his feet and picked up his phone from where it rested, still recording, on the coffee table beside him. He stopped the recording, put the phone in his pocket, and looked outside. The sky was cloudless today and the sun was gorgeous on the snow.

  “You’re willing to go into that cave with Ridley if it can be arranged?” he asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “And you honestly believe that he will say something of value?”

  “He wants to show me the place. He’s made that clear.”

  “It’s a hell of a risk for you,” Mark said.

  “I understand that. Do you think you can get us access?”

  He thought of Danielle MacAlister, crying in her basement chair surrounded by Ridley’s hand-drawn maps.

  “I think it’s possible.”

  46

  The sweat didn’t start until he was back in the rental car, and he was out of the driveway before he allowed himself to use his shirtsleeve to mop his face. He had wanted the hypnosis to work, had wanted to see Julianne Grossman provide something that allowed him to believe in her, but a part of him—larger maybe than he’d expected at first—was terrified at the idea that she’d been able to take him to a place in which he’d communicated without awareness or memory of it. Mark had no conscious ranking of his personal values, but one had floated to the surface during his time in Garrison: control. He didn’t just want it, he craved it. Self-control, he would have called it once, but that was a lie. The word was control, pure and simple, and though he’d sacrificed it willingly with Julianne this time, it still hadn’t settled comfortably.

  He was still sweating and so he put down the window and let the chill in. When his phone rang and it was Jeff London, he stared at the display with surprise. Only yesterday he would have picked it up eagerly. Now it seemed to confuse his purpose.

  “Hey, Jeff.”

  “Hey, Jeff? I left two messages. Markus, I’ve got to sit down with the board tomorrow. Do you have anything, and I mean anything, for me to show in your defense? I thought you said that you were making progress!”

  “I am.”

  “Good.” Jeff’s exhalation was audible. “Tell me something I can use.”

  “I’m not quite there yet.”

  “I don’t mean full resolution, I mean anything! What happened to the hypnotist? What about the ketamine? What can I tell them?”

  The road rolled by for a few seconds before Mark said, “You know I’ve never broken a case?”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “Not one case. I never broke one open.”

  “Bullshit you didn’t. Your work was critical on so many different—”

  “Critical, sure. I made some finds. I passed them off to you. I never got to see one through. That’s the point, isn’t it, Jeff? To come in without the truth and stay until you’ve learned it?”

  “The point is generating quality work product for the team.”

  “Did you ever solve one? I mean really solve one? Ever go from looking at crime scene photographs of a murder victim to seeing the truth come to the surface thanks to your own work?”

  Jeff’s voice softened. “A few times.”

  “How’d that feel?”

  “Why are you asking this?”

  “I need to know,” Mark said. The wind had picked up again and it should have chilled him but the cold felt good, familiar in the ways he’d wanted to deny when he arrived. “I need to know what it feels like. Maybe you were right that it shouldn’t be Lauren’s case.”

  “I know I’m right about that. You’ll drown in those waters, Markus. You’ve already come close. Don’t go back in.”

  “Sarah Martin isn’t Lauren. But she deserves it just as much.”

  “They all do,” Jeff said. “It’s the reason I sent you up there to begin with. I’ve already acknowledged that was a mistake. Don’t double-down on it. Please.”

  Mark was now just two miles from Trapdoor, and the open fields came into view and with them the snow-covered, collapsing trailer and beyond those and far on the horizon the high bluffs where the horses had been visible on Mark’s first visit. He hadn’t heard back from the Leonard family. Maybe it was time to go see the old man again. Maybe it was—

  “Markus? Mark?”

  The urgency in Jeff’s voice made Mark blink back into reality. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m here.” But he’d pulled off the road and was staring at the trailer. “Listen, Jeff, I’ve got to go. I’ll be back in touch fast. With something you can use. I promise.”

  He disconnected before Jeff could utter a response.

  What had once been the drive to the trailer was so overgrown that small shrubs were visible even beneath the blanket of snow. The trailer still stood, but that was a generous term. The whole structure canted to the left, like a sinking ship listing to port. On the road-facing side, the roof was bowed
in almost to its limits. The windows were broken and even the plywood sheets that had been fastened to them from the inside were pocked with holes and splinters. A corrugated metal ramp that had once served as a front porch was disengaged from the main building completely; at least three feet of air separated the top of the ramp from the front door.

  Mark killed the engine and stepped out of the car. To the east he could see the bluffs, no horses in sight today, and to the south he could see the tree line where the bluffs began their descent to Maiden Creek and the caverns its water had opened. He turned again, putting his back to the trailer, and looked to the west, his face into the wind.

  The wind worked on you with a honed blade, coming over those fields with nothing to disrupt it. Mark closed his eyes and felt the wind and thought of Julianne Grossman’s recap of his hypnosis session.

  You said that it was probably a house, you weren’t sure about that, but you knew that it was someplace where you couldn’t feel the wind, though it was still cold even without the wind. Your memory of getting inside involved walking a plank.

  He opened his eyes, turned back to the trailer, and studied that ramp, the way the connecting bolts were sheared, leaving it loose at the top. He walked down the drive and up the ramp slowly, and this walk he made with his eyes closed, paying attention to every other sense. The thin metal boomed with each step and flexed beneath his weight because it was no longer anchored to anything, the top end floating in the air. With his eyes closed, it felt very much like walking a plank.

  There were hinges for a storm door, but there wasn’t a storm door. The knob on the main door didn’t turn. Locked.

  He removed a credit card from his wallet and slipped it between the door frame and the door. It slid down past the dead bolt without making contact, which was good. Dead bolts were more time-consuming, though hardly impossible. Shimming a lock was a skill you picked up fast when you were regularly evicted from apartments. Mark’s mother had been a hell of a lock pick.

  He felt pressure on the card and then twisted the knob hard to the left and flicked the card down. The door swung open, releasing a wave of dank air. On the other side was a strip of peeling linoleum and stained carpet beyond that. A skim of ice had formed on one portion of the carpet.

  Cold even without the wind.

  As Mark stepped inside, he heard a plinking noise and saw that water was dripping through the molded tiles of the drop ceiling, probably right below the place where the roof bowed severely. He stood on the linoleum square and looked around, wishing for a flashlight. Not that there was much to see. The trailer was vacant and had been for years, save for the occasional rodent. There were mouse droppings on the kitchen floor to the right, beside a chair that been smashed and left in shards.

  He slipped his cell phone out and used its flashlight function and swung back to the left, where the trailer’s only source of sound was provided by the steady plinking of the dripping water on the skim of ice over the carpet, and then he stopped scanning the place and stared at the far wall of the living room. It was covered in the faux-wood paneling that had once been popular and now made most people shudder, the kind that was supposed to give a room a log-cabin feel. There was clearly another leak behind the wall, because the paneling was peeling away from the studs, warped and bubbling.

  He stepped over the ice and walked up to the wall. Ran his fingertips along the warped panels. Moisture had caused some to peel free and others to sag, although a few remained in place. The final effect was something you wouldn’t want in your home but that Salvador Dalí might have appreciated—it looked like the wall was melting.

  “Well done, Julianne,” Mark whispered.

  He’d been here before, and she’d gotten him to tell her about it. During hypnosis he’d ranted to her about a melting wall. It made no sense unless you’d seen these warped panels through a semiconscious haze, which was exactly what he’d done. He dropped to one knee and looked at the filthy carpet, tracked back through it until he found what he was looking for: four faint impressions, the kind left behind by the legs of a chair. Yes, this was where he’d been. The chair would have faced the wall. It was probably the one in splinters in the kitchen. Evan Borders had taken some frustration out on it. There were red stains on the carpet. Mark’s blood, probably. He lifted the cell phone higher and passed the faint glow over the filthy carpet. He turned halfway to the kitchen, froze, and then—slowly, as if rapid motion would scare off what he’d seen—brought the beam back.

  There was a piece of plastic in the shadows on the floor. He slid forward and then lowered himself until he was resting on his hands and knees and could see the plastic squarely centered in the light.

  It was about the size of a poker chip and bore the logo of the Saba National Marine Park. A diving permit.

  Mark reached for it and managed to stop himself when his fingers were about an inch away. He closed his eyes again and breathed a few times and then he rose without allowing himself a look back and went outside in the hard white glare of the day and called the sheriff’s office and asked for Dan Blankenship.

  47

  It took the sheriff just over fifteen minutes to arrive and when he did, he was alone. He was in uniform with the badge gleaming high on his chest and even had the brown trooper hat. Very Wild West.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “The door was standing open when you found it.”

  “You’re good at this,” Mark said.

  Blankenship spit into the snow, trying to hold his trademark sour expression with Mark, but he was struggling. Something about the place excited him, and that was interesting, because the only importance Mark could attach to it was that this was where he’d been beaten, drugged, and interrogated—all crimes that Blankenship claimed he didn’t believe had occurred.

  “You’ve got unique law enforcement in this county,” Mark said.

  “How’s that?” Blankenship answered.

  “Fieldwork tends to be handled by deputies. But I get the elected official himself, and I get him solo.”

  “You didn’t call 911, Novak, you called me direct. I always answer direct phone calls. Part of my duty to the taxpayers.”

  “That must be it,” Mark said. “In Florida, we don’t pay state income tax. I’ve always suspected policing was a lot more hands-on in places where you did.”

  Blankenship almost smiled at that. He walked through the snow and up to the ramp and put one gloved hand on the railing.

  “You said you had evidence, not just a story. Is that inside?”

  “Yes, sir. You’ll find a plastic dive permit on the ground in there that was previously in my pocket.”

  “The kind of thing you could have just dropped on the ground before you called me, in other words.”

  “Exactly that kind of thing. Only I didn’t. And the dive permit doesn’t belong to me. It belonged to my wife.”

  Blankenship turned away from the trailer and his expression softened.

  “You carried it with you?”

  “Every day, Sheriff. Every single day.”

  They looked at each other in silence and then Blankenship said, “Anything else?”

  “Bloodstains on the carpet. They’ll belong to me. Maybe not all of them, it looks like the sort of place that has seen some blood before, but I can point you to some of them.”

  “Stand where you are for a bit, all right?”

  “Sure.”

  Blankenship went up the ramp, walking carefully, and then withdrew a small tactical flashlight and used it to illuminate the interior of the trailer. He didn’t cross the threshold, but he didn’t need to in order to see the living room.

  “I didn’t touch the dive permit,” Mark said. “Sure wanted to, but I left it.”

  “You think it’s worth bagging and tagging?”

  “I doubt it, but that’s why I didn’t touch it. Two of them wore gloves, but maybe they took them off at some point. Test it, but I’d like it back when you’re done. Please.”

&nbs
p; The sheriff turned the light off and walked back down the ramp to join him.

  “So this is where they brought you, eh? Three masked men. An abandoned trailer. And you just happened to come across it?”

  “The search was a little harder than that.”

  “Yeah? How’d you get here?”

  “I was hypnotized. By a woman named Julianne Grossman.”

  Blankenship was one of those rare older men who could still intimidate with sheer size, and he knew how to draw it up. His body seemed to inflate.

  “There are some lines you don’t cross,” he said, each word deep and dark.

  “I’m not trying to cross any, damn it. I came back here to find out who had fucked with me, and why. She’s the woman who impersonated Diane Martin. Only it’s a little more complex than that. If you know anything about her, maybe you understand what I mean.”

  He had Blankenship’s full interest now.

  “You know Julianne personally, or you just know of her?” Mark asked.

  Blankenship didn’t answer right away.

  “What I was told,” Mark said, “was that she worked with Diane Martin after her husband died. That’s all I know. If she lied to me, then set me straight, please. Because I’ve got my own issues with Julianne.”

  The sheriff turned the flashlight over in his hands and hesitated as if he was trying to make up his mind on something. Finally he said, “What do you know about this place, Novak?”

  “I know that I can see the cave from here, and that’s where I ended up. I know that the Leonard brothers live at that farm way out across.”

  “The Leonards have gone to ground, by the way. Haven’t been seen in a few days. You know anything about that?”

  “I stopped by to talk with Lou.”

  “That would have done it. They’ll be MIA for another week or two and then I’ll see them again.” Blankenship pointed at the trailer. “But this place? What do you know about it?”