Perdition

by R. Jean Reid

  “Who is this?” she demanded. She didn’t recognize the voice. It sounded muffled and distorted.

  “Nell McGraw. The story is in the woods. You’d do well to look there.”

  “Who is this?” she demanded again, trying to keep the edge of fear out of her voice. This anonymous voice, breaking into her night, had no benign intent.

  “The woods, Nell. You’d do well to look there,” the caller repeated, then hung up.

  Nell stared at the receiver for a moment, then jumped out of bed. The caller had meant to disturb her, and he—she was reasonably sure it was a man’s voice—had succeeded.

  It wasn’t even a conscious decision, but Nell found herself in the hallway at Josh’s door. As quietly as she could, she opened it. Caught in a faint beam of moonlight, her son was sprawled across the bed. Safe and asleep.

  Lizzie was curled around the big stuffed black panther she still slept with.

  Nell quietly made her way back to her bedroom. The call had tainted her night. The fear from the ringing phone, and the disturbing message, had taken sleep from her.

  Nell picked up the receiver and dialed the police station.

  After five rings, a voice drawled, “Jenkins here.”

  Damn, Nell thought. Officer Boyce Jenkins was a swaggering bully. She had rarely seen him without his hands hooked provocatively into his belt, one index finger just barely touching above the tight bulge in his pants.

  “This is Nell McGraw,” she said, then wished she’d just hung up.

  “Miz McGraw. Always a pleasure to hear from you,” Jenkins said.

  “This isn’t a pleasure call,” Nell retorted, more sharply than she’d intended.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Jenkins replied, using his annoyingly slow drawl. “But I do get lots of late night calls from lonely women.”

  Getting her angry or flustered was what he wanted. Keeping her tone neutral, Nell said, “Is there a police officer on duty? I need to speak to someone about a criminal matter.”

  “I’m on duty. What can I do for you?” His question still had the lazy insinuation of sex in it.

  Take me seriously and get your hand out of your pants, Nell almost snapped at him. “I need to report a disturbing phone call.”

  “Obscene?” he cut in, too quickly.

  “No,” Nell said firmly. “Someone I don’t know asked for me by name, then said, ‘the story is in the woods.’ Then he said—”

  “In the woods, huh?” Jenkins interrupted her. “You want you and me to take a nice moonlit walk in the woods?”

  There’s no way to get through to him, Nell decided. “I’ll call back in the morning,” she said, allowing herself to slam the receiver with enough force to tell Jenkins he’d been dismissed.

  She sat for a moment, the disturbing phone call further disturbed by Jenkins’s insolence. What could she really report him on? Tone of voice? Attitude? Just the facts, ma’am—and a woman’s feelings weren’t facts.

  Even that phone call—what did it give her? “The story is in the woods.” “Woods” wasn’t a very specific location. Five minutes in any direction, except south to the Gulf, would take one to a wooded area. What story could be worth covering that expanse of forest for?

  “You’d do well to look there.’” He had repeated that. Well to look there.

  Suddenly Nell was hit with one of those disparate connections that Thom swore she pulled out of the air. It was another of the things that had made her a better reporter than he was.

  Only one woods had a well in it, the small patch that still remained at the swampy upper end of the harbor.

  Nell recalled how, only a few months prior, she’d taken Jacko and Carrie into the woods to do a feature story on the bits and pieces humans had left: the rotting remains of a dock that no longer touched water, a few boards nailed to a tree that no longer had a tree house. The overgrown clearing of the hermit’s lost cabin and the well he’d dug there.

  Nell again picked up the phone. This time she called the sheriff’s office. She expected only a marginally better response than from Jenkins. At least she was on polite terms with Jenkins’s boss, not something she could say about Sheriff Hickson.

  A voice she didn’t recognize answered, “Sheriff.”

  Nell simply repeated the content of the phone call and her guess about the well. The deputy took it all down and ended with a noncommittal “We’ll look into it.”

  I’ve done what I can do, Nell thought as she put the phone down. Short of grabbing a flashlight and plunging through the woods to the well—which she had no intention of doing.

  She wasn’t satisfied. The adrenaline of fear wasn’t appeased by the noncommittal phone call and sitting waiting.

  I should try to get back to sleep, Nell told herself, but she couldn’t. She felt as if she had to be vigilant, to guard her home and children against the shrill assaults of the darkness.

  The phone rang again.

  Nell snatched it up, as if stopping the jar of the bell could limit the damage.

  “Mrs. McGraw?”

  This time Nell recognized the voice. It was Sheriff Hickson.

  “Speaking,” Nell answered. “I’m sorry, Sheriff, I didn’t mean to wake you …” She was surprised that he’d called her at this hour.

  He cut her off. “I was awake.”

  Nell braced herself for the “foolish woman wasting my time” speech. It didn’t come. He continued, “Little Rayburn Gautier didn’t come home for his supper. We been looking for him since sundown. Guess we better look in the well.”

  Nell felt the jolt of connection again, this time with an icy chill surrounding it.

  “I want you to remember as much as you can ’bout that voice, Mrs. McGraw,” he gruffly ordered her. “You remember and you write it down.”

  “I’ll do that, but I don’t think it will be much help. The voice was muffled and distorted. A deliberate disguise, I would guess.”

  “Huh,” the sheriff grunted. “We got a missing boy, someone calls the Editor-in-Chief to go look for a story in the woods. And he hides his voice.”

  He let the facts hang in the air.

  Nell simply said, “Call me … when you know something.”

  “I’ll call. You stay out of the woods. No place for you on a night like tonight,” he admonished her.

  “I’m staying home, Sheriff. I’m staying here with my children.”

  He grunted a goodbye.

  Nell stared for a moment at the dim shadowed moonlight outsider her window. Then she got up and again checked on Josh and Lizzie. Still sleeping. Still safe.

  It could always be worse, Thom used to say. The phone call in the night could be to tell you that your child had died.

  Dawn was still a long way away when the phone rang again.

  The body of Rayburn Gautier had been discovered at the bottom of the well.

  five

  Instead of letting Josh and Lizzie catch the bus to school, Nell had decided to take them. Maybe next week she’d let them go back to the bus—they were probably just as safe with thirty other children and the bus driver as with her. But for now she didn’t just want them safe, but to know that they were safe, to see for herself as they entered the brick school building.

  Can I ever protect them enough? she wondered as she watched them split off in their separate directions, Josh to the middle school and Lizzie across the courtyard to the high school.

  The front page of the Crier only had a small story on it that Friday: “Boy’s body found. Authorities are investigating.” It was all Nell could do before the deadline. She’d considered going back to sleep, but knew sleep would not come, so she’d hastily written the article and called the printing press, reworking the front page over the phone with them to get the story in.

  Sheriff Hickson had been blunt in his comment. “Call it
an accident. We don’t know anything more than that.” He hadn’t told her not to mention the phone call. Nell assumed that he figured she’d be a typical reporter and use whatever she could for the story. Or maybe he thought that telling a woman to do something would be the way to guarantee that she would do the opposite. But the location of Rayburn’s body was something that only a killer would know. Nell was already thinking of the caller as the killer, although it was possible that some sick person had stumbled across the child’s body and decided to play a depraved joke. Nell wasn’t keeping the phone call out of the paper in order to later prove the sheriff wrong, but to, in some small way, thwart the murderer. He’d called her to get noticed, to have his deeds splashed across the front page. She resented him turning her into a chess piece in his obscene game.

  Nell pulled Jacko off his usual stories and sent him to the sheriff’s office with orders to put most of his time and energy into the story of Rayburn Gautier’s … death. Nell held herself back from saying “murder,” even to her staff. It would come. That word would invade their lives soon enough.

  Even though she thought that Jacko was a better reporter than Carrie, she’d always treated them with a rough equality, assigning both of them scut work as well as feature stories. However, this decision had stripped away that veneer of equality. Pelican Bay was a medium-size town with a medium-size number of murders—a few that could be front page anywhere, but mostly just the occasional drunken brawl that got out of hand. A dead child was clearly a major story.

  “Are you sending him because he’s a man?” Carrie demanded, standing in the doorway to Nell’s office. She obviously resented having Jacko’s sewage and water board meetings dumped on her.

  Nell was both tired and wired from the jolt of fear, then the worry that had torn apart her night. She quelled her desire to snap, “It’s not his penis, but his brain.” Instead she merely said, “No, I’m not.”

  “Are you sure?” Carrie shot back. “Women of your generation often have some latent sexism still lingering in them.”

  “If you want equality with Jacko,” Nell retorted, still holding her tongue but not as tightly, “you have to earn it. Of course I’m going to give a major story to the reporter who stays late instead of the one watching the clock; the one who digs further instead of me having to give explicit instructions on every step; the one who does unassigned stories on his own time. And I’m from the generation that had to earn our equality instead of assuming it would be handed to us. Be aware of your own assumptions.”

  Carrie flushed, high color in both her cheeks, whether in anger or embarrassment Nell couldn’t tell. Nor could she care. The young woman spun on her heel and, without another word, disappeared.

  Nell briefly wondered if the sewer and water board would get any coverage at all this month. Skipping it might be a service to the readers, she thought as she closed the door to her office. She rarely closed it; only when she really needed to work on something and didn’t want to be disturbed. Or when a surge of grief hit her and she didn’t want to display it.

  Nell wrote down everything she could remember about the phone call. The time—a little before one in the morning. The description of the voice—low, with an electronic buzz running through it, as if the person was speaking into something instead of directly into the phone. She noted that it could be one of those synthesizers that change voices, made a man sound like a woman or vice versa. The syntax had been simple—no big words, but no grammatical mistakes either.

  When she was done, she looked at that single sheet of paper. It seemed so insubstantial, an ineffectual weapon against the kind of monster that killed children and then called to gloat about it.

  Nell left one thing off the sheet—the harsh knowledge she’d gleaned from the call that caused her hands to shake as she typed.

  The silent, awkward deputy, searching for words. His silence had told her that Thom was dead, slammed her into the brutal unfairness of life. How quickly the ones we love can be taken from us, bare seconds between life and death. Nell had hated the drunk driver who’d veered out of his lane, had cursed him and wished him dead and called him evil.

  But last night she’d learned what evil really was. A willful malice had entered her life.

  Whatever the sins of the drunk that had taken Thom from her—and he had many—he had not set out with the intention to kill a man.

  Her hands still shaking, Nell removed the fragile sheet of paper from the printer. Something evil was out there and it wanted her to pay attention to it. She had found Ella Jackson’s monster. Now she could only hope for justice.

  six

  Nell woke with a start, the early morning light too faint to be her usual waking time. She immediately sat up and swung her legs out of bed. She was halfway to the door to check on Josh and Lizzie before she remembered that neither of them had spent the night at home. Josh was off at a camp-out with his Boy Scout troop and Lizzie was at a slumber party. She’d spent yesterday in a frenzy getting them ready—how could a sleeping bag get so lost in their not-large house—before nodding off in front of the TV and dragging herself to bed.

  Holding still, Nell searched the room with her eyes, listening intently for any sound, any sign, of what had jolted her from sleep. The yowling wail of a cat in heat sounded outside her window. She spun toward the sound, half angry and half relieved.

  “You may have to do what comes naturally, but you don’t have to do it under my window,” she said in a loud voice as she pushed aside the curtains and opened the window. Part of her loudness was for the cats’ sake—to let them know that their amorous tryst had a less-than-happy witness, but also to help banish the lingering fear in the room.

  No cats were visible in the early gray light, but Nell had heard a satisfying rustle through the bushes at the sound of the opening window.

  Will I ever get a good night’s sleep? she wondered. Her nights had been uneasy, broken by Josh’s cough, Lizzie turning over and pushing her stuffed panther off the bed. Small, innocuous noises that shouldn’t have disturbed her slumber. The phone call—and the grisly reality that followed—had shaken Nell, pushed her into a hyper-vigilant state.

  The cats yowled again, but from a safer distance. Nell glanced at her bed with a sigh. Sleep seemed unlikely. Both the howling cats and the silence of the house were unsettling.

  Usually a night with both Josh and Lizzie gone would have given her a voluptuous solitude, but instead their absence only made Nell feel more alone and vulnerable. Even when the realistic part of her brain pointed out that a twelve-year-old boy and fourteen-year-old girl weren’t much protection, and that if she was going to be attacked, better her children be as far away as possible, didn’t quell the empty feeling.

  The sheriff still wasn’t calling the death a murder, at least not officially. It was possible that little Rayburn had tripped and fallen into the well, making it an accident. Then some sicko had stumbled across the body and decided to have a few jollies at the Editor-in-Chief ’s expense—to put those feminists back into their place, Sheriff Hickson hadn’t added. He’d only mumbled, after Nell’s third follow-up call, “Wish Thom were still here. Make it all easier.”

  Nell hadn’t replied to that, although she too fervently wished that Thom were here. She doubted that her reasons and the sheriff’s were the same.

  Hickson obviously felt that Thom wouldn’t have gotten that kind of call, that Nell had been targeted because she was a woman and alone. And therefore more of a burden to him and his deputies. They felt they had to replace the protection a husband would have given her. “We’ll drive by your house ev’ry so often, and you might get a gun,” he had mumbled at her, although clearly skeptical that a gun would be much use wielded by a middle-aged woman.

  Nell wanted Thom, her partner, her equal, back. She wanted him around to run decisions by, such as her decision to print nothing about the phone call in Friday’s paper. Was i
t a greater good to warn the public, let them know what was going on? Or was it better to keep knowledge of the call to only a few people, the better to trap the killer? Would splashing it in banner headlines only egg him on for more attention, more killings? Or would her seeming to ignore him do it?

  She’d also wanted someone to help her write the obituary for Rayburn Gautier. It had been a short one; a short life. As short as the obituary she’d written for Tasha Jackson—another life too short. As Nell wrote it, she couldn’t help but think that this could have been Josh or Lizzie. She desperately wanted Thom there to share her fears. There were two children dead now. That shouldn’t happen here.

  But the bed was empty, only her side rumpled and slept in. Suddenly Nell felt the sharp stab of pain. So much of the routine of her life had been empty of Thom for the last few months that the daily moments had lost their sharp edges. But these new places she felt herself entering, this sudden yawning fear and threat, created a glaring emptiness where Thom should have been.

  Nell fought the tightening in her throat, marching to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face.

  “Oh, Thom, I need you,” she said softly to her reflection in the mirror. Then quietly added, “But you’ll never be here again, will you?” She stared at her face, pale skin smudged by dark circles under her eyes. Eyes that were called blue on her driver’s license, but could vary from a deep blue-green to a chilly gray, were rimmed in red from the threatening tears, their color now a cloudy blue-gray. Her hair was long around her shoulders, still mussed from sleep, more strands of gray visible in the chestnut brown. She usually wore it up in a bun or chignon, something only possible because her hair was very cooperative in the matter.

  Nell watched herself in the mirror for a moment longer, watched the grief spread over her features, before she turned away, burying her face in a towel to catch the tears, holding the cloth for the scant comfort it could give.

  She let herself cry for several minutes, the emotions a swirl: grief for Thom, anger and fear at the invasion into her life of the phone call; even, she had to admit, self-pity at being alone.