Dig Two Graves

by Kim Powers

  That got their attention.

  The boys looked over to see something that was even more surreal than their own rites: me, slipping and sliding in the muck, trying to grab the ring of boar fangs off from around its neck. At first they must have thought I was one of their own, already so splattered with mud they couldn’t make out who I was.

  They cheered me on, whatever they thought I was doing. It didn’t matter. It was all part of the fun, part of the ritual.

  “Soo-wee, soo-wee . . . ”

  The sound of the pig got more desperate, as if it were already roasting on a spit. But alive.

  I turned toward the bonfire, and they finally saw my face, cutting through the flames.

  “Professor Holt?”

  Their limbo dance stopped. So did their chanting, as they saw their professor, a respected member of the Canaan College community, sliding through mud and shit, holding on to this animal for dear life. Outtakes from Animal House, until they saw how desperate and deranged I was. Now there was nothing in the air except crackling fire and me—and a pig that was suddenly escaping. Dashing through the pen’s open door. Squealing.

  I couldn’t let the pig get away—it’s like the pig suddenly was Skip, my only link to her—and began chasing it, followed by thirty boys in wine-stained togas and one out-of-shape cop, her hand on her holster.

  That’s when I remembered the last part of the rhyme—the thing I should have started with.

  Your next clue will be under . . .

  Where Zeus let loose his thunder.

  I ran to the front porch, and collapsed onto my back, to look up at what I hadn’t seen before: that the tip of the thunderbolt touched right down onto the mailbox.

  And underneath the mailbox, taped to the metal, was a folded piece of white paper.

  I reached up and yanked; as soon as I grabbed it, I knew it wasn’t just paper; it had weight, a weird squareness. There was something inside it, but my hands were so thick with mud and pig slobber that I couldn’t get it open at first. I kept fumbling at it as three or four squares of something heavy fell out.

  Photographs.

  It was dark, the streetlights were flickering, the neon of the thunderbolt pulsing and buzzing. Mizell was running up on the porch, togas and boys were flying everywhere, and I was in overload, trying to grab up the photos and read at the same time.

  Fingernails on the chalkboard? No, I’ve used my sword,

  But at least I’ve left eight, for Skip’s trip o’er the River of Hate.

  Mizell, see-through plastic gloves on, snatched the paper from me and held it to find the perfect angle in the dark to read, because something else was there, glued below the fold of the page.

  Little squares of black, with squiggles of white lettering.

  I could see her eyes scanning back and forth, a line of type coming to the edge of the page and then getting zinged back to the beginning by the return.

  “C’mon, let’s go. We’ve got the next clue,” she barked out, trying to pull me off the porch.

  “What? What else does it say? What are those shiny things?”

  “Let’s get to the station where we can get some light . . . and get you cleaned up . . . ”

  “WHAT? What aren’t you telling me?” I yanked the paper away from Mizell and felt them.

  Hard. Squarish. Bloody. Polished.

  Skip’s fingernails. Two of them. The A and H, from where she had written “I HATE WENDY.”

  And one more thing. His PS, at the very bottom of the page:

  HER FINGERS WILL BE NEXT.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Skip had been in the hospital once, after her mother died, with something the doctors couldn’t figure out at first. Pain in her stomach. Excruciating pain, like a kidney stone or her appendix about to burst. The only time it went away was when she stretched out and sort of arched her back, like she was shifting the pain around and giving it more room to breathe. But they couldn’t give her medicine because they needed her to have the pain to figure out what was causing it.

  For three agonizing days—while tests were being run and fluids were being pumped into her body from IV bags, and doctors and nurses kept coming into her hospital room in the middle of the night so she couldn’t sleep—she hurt too much to talk, so her father talked for her. He brought her goofy presents from the gift shop downstairs and held her hand and told her if she just listened to what he said, she wouldn’t hurt anymore. He was going to give her a test when she was all better, so she had to pay attention to what he said.

  And then he just started talking, nonstop, for three days. He told her anything and everything that came into his head. How much he had loved her mother, how they had fallen in love in college. He told her about his training years ago and what it had felt like being out on the track after his teammates had gone home at night and it was just him and Sig. How he’d listen to Sig map out their plans for the Olympics, the timelines they’d be on and the order of events and how to pace himself. And when her father’s voice got too hoarse, Sig came to visit and took over the job, telling Skip about how he’d come up with the idea of making her dad put a hurdle in his living room so he could still keep practicing, jumping over that thing at least twenty-five times a day when he was away from the track. It had been agony then, but it seemed funny now, and Skip’s dad and Sig started laughing, and she started laughing too, and that’s when she knew she was going to be okay. Lying in that hospital bed, she wasn’t thinking about her pain anymore, she was thinking about how much she loved her dad and Sig and what goofballs they were, for grownups.

  Mesenteric adenitis, the doctors finally figured out, that’s what Skip had. An inflammation of the lining around the stomach. Maybe it was caused by stress after her mother died; they didn’t really know. Skip thought they were saying something about her adenoids, which she thought was something in her throat and not her stomach, but she even laughed about that.

  She could laugh, because the pain was finally gone.

  That’s how much pain she felt now, the kind she’d had when she was first in the hospital, even with the shot her kidnapper had given her to put her asleep, before he hurt her hand, carving out those two fingernails.

  Skip woke up—how many hours later, she didn’t know—and the helper in the suit and the smudgy glasses was standing over her. She was still woozy from whatever drug the kidnapper had given her, so it took her a minute to focus.

  He was looming over her, stroking her bandaged hand. Smiling so eagerly.

  The smell of fresh spray paint was in the air. Up on the walls, two more of the murals had been crossed out with giant neon Xs in yellow, almost like the same color from the spray paint can that had exploded on her face that time, when she’d stuck a screwdriver into the can. One of the murals had antlers nailed into it. Real ones, with the bristly part of the skull still attached, and the horns covered in gold glitter. And the other mural had a pig mask with a snout, thumbtacked into the middle of a forest scene. The pig face looked like it used to be a balloon or something, maybe a Halloween mask, but somebody had stuck a pin in it and all the air had escaped, deflating it. All that was left now was hanging pink skin, with a snout. She’d seen a rerun once on The Twilight Zone about people with pig faces, their noses upturned and their cheeks all puffy, and it looked like one of them.

  In her haze, she thought the man who was touching her looked like one of the Pig People. Puffy cheeks, nostrils, glasses. Hippocrates, the kidnapper had called him.

  Hippocrates was a doctor. Doctors were supposed to help people.

  “It hurts, I know. I’m sorry,” he said, still running his fingers over Skip’s left hand, where the two fingers that had held the H and A fingernails were wrapped up in the same gauze that had been wrapped around her eyes. Blood was turning the white gauze pink, so she could see where her two fingernails had been.

  “A and H,” she remembered her kidnapper saying, just as she was falling asleep from the shot he gave her.

>   She didn’t know why he picked those two, and he wouldn’t tell her.

  At least she hadn’t been awake when he did it.

  Now her fingernails would just spell out “I TE WENDY.”

  “Hippocrates” was trying to comfort her, rubbing at the bandages on her hand, like he knew how much she hurt. Skip could use that. She could have him help her get away, while the other guy and the one in the wheelchair were gone. She had to talk through her pain to him, just keep talking and not stop, but she had to do it in a hurry, before the other two came back.

  He’d told her he was sorry. Now she had to make him prove it.

  “What’s your name? Your real name?”

  “Jeffrey.”

  “Are you really a doctor?”

  “No. A CPA. A bean counter. This is . . . more exciting.”

  “But it’s wrong. I need a real doctor. You’ve got to help me. Get me out of here and take me to the hospital. My hand hurts so much. Please. Untie me, and I’ll take care of you. But we have to go. Now. Fast.”

  Skip made her voice go soft and high, like her mother used to do when Skip was sick. Skip thought how it was almost a maternal instinct, making your voice go high like that when you wanted to baby someone. The way you’d talk to an eager dog who was licking at your face. So that’s what Skip had to do. Baby him. Jeffrey. She got as close to his face as she could, even though she was still tied up and it made her sick to look at him and his teeth, which she could tell he didn’t floss.

  “Get some scissors. Are there scissors in the other room? Go see. Hurry! You can cut the tape off my hands but keep the bandage on because I’m still bleeding . . . ”

  Jeffrey was trying to get her untied without the scissors, on one side of Skip’s desk so he could keep looking toward the door, but his big clumsy hands were almost as useless as Skip’s hands were, tied down.

  “It hurts, I know,” he said to her, as if he really did understand.

  “Yes, it does. It hurts a lot,” Skip said back to him, trying not to reveal how impatient she was. How desperate. “So we’ve gotta get away. I’ll tell the police you helped me. You’ll be a hero. They won’t do anything to you. I promise.”

  “There’s a reward from your father. I need the money. Can you get me the reward?”

  “Of course I can! I promise! You just have to get me out of here . . . ”

  Skip was looking in his eyes—hard to see through the smudges on his thick glasses—trying to make a connection with him, even though he seemed so spaced out on some kind of drugs himself. She wasn’t getting through to him fast enough.

  “You don’t wanna work for somebody who hurts people so bad, do you?”

  “No, but . . . I know it hurts.” It was as if that’s all he was programmed to say.

  “I know it does, I know, but you’ve already said that! Quit saying it! I don’t wanna think about how much it hurts. I just wanna get away from here and you’ve got to help me!” Skip was screaming now, and crying. She couldn’t ignore how much her hand hurt, no matter how much she talked.

  It was her father’s old trick, from when she was in the hospital, but it wasn’t working anymore.

  She saw the barest flicker in his eyes—maybe he did understand, after all—an actual physical flicker, like his eyes were registering something new, and . . .

  A gunshot.

  Jeffrey stopped.

  The kidnapper was back in the doorway, with a gun. Now a smoking gun.

  Jeffrey repeated the only words he seemed to know anymore. “It hurts.”

  “I know it does, I know.” The kidnapper did a perfect imitation of Skip. She hadn’t even heard him come back inside. She hadn’t heard anything, except for the gunshot.

  “Now it won’t. Hurt, I mean. At least, not for him.”

  Blood soaked through the front of his shirt, and his dead body collapsed on top of Skip. She tried to scream, but no sound would come out, except the heaving of her lungs, trying to catch her breath under the weight of a dead man.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “At least she’s alive.” That’s what Wendy kept pushing me to focus on. “That’s good.”

  “Good? A psycho’s pulling out her fingernails and writing about the River Styx and you think there’s anything goddamned good about it?”

  “The River Styx?” Frick—or Frack—broke in, looking at the latest bounty from the kidnapper laid out on my kitchen table.

  I pointed it out on the rhyme. “‘But at least I’ve left eight, for Skip’s trip o’er the River of Hate.’ The River of Hate. Same as the River Styx. What separates the Earth from the Underworld . . . from being dead.”

  This wasn’t happening.

  My dining room table, crowded with food from neighbors, pushed aside to make room for four horrifying photos. Skip shot from different angles, but never so I could see her face. Just where she was tied up. Two fingernails, ripped from my baby’s hand. The smell of burnt coffee from the kitchen. A setup of recording equipment from the police, tape recorders and head sets and switches on the marble top of the island in the kitchen, where Skip had her breakfast every morning. Where she’d left a plastic bag of groceries. Meatloaf ingredients, to say “I’m sorry.” Two FBI guys in suits. In my fucking house.

  That’s what wasn’t happening, except it was.

  Eight fingernails left, out of ten. Two taken.

  “See if we can find some detail in these photos . . . ” Mizell started.

  “What detail? Just look. She’s tied up to a fucking desk. That’s the detail. There’s nothing else there. Oh my God. Oh my sweet Jesus . . . ”

  I saw the furtive looks between Mizell and Guillory, the cop with the recording equipment: Get these away. Fast.

  Guillory started to take the photos away, along with the fingernails at the bottom of the latest rhyme, but I clamped my hand down on them.

  “No.” I scooped up everything on the table and held it to my chest.

  Nobody moved.

  “Uh . . . why don’t you take one of my pain pills from the hospital?” Wendy offered. “It’ll help you calm down.”

  I didn’t want to be calm. I didn’t want my senses dulled in any way; I needed to be on high alert to find Skip, and I didn’t want anything she didn’t have. If she didn’t get pain pills, I didn’t want them either. I wanted to feel her pain, and I did, looking at the four photographs of her tied up. A camera flash obliterating her face in every one of them, seeing her jerk away from its light.

  She was sitting in an old-fashioned school desk, in the middle of what looked to be an empty room. One of the photos just showed her right leg, duct-taped to the side of the desk. Another showed her left leg, taped the same way. I could tell it was Skip because of her socks—blue on the left leg, red on the right—the same she’d worn the morning of our last run together. The third photo showed the back crook of her right elbow, still wearing the same long sleeve jersey she’d gone running in. She’d inked in a spider’s web on both elbows; that’s how I knew. And the final photo showed a spoon going in her mouth, with what looked like oatmeal in it. I could see the little scar on the upper right corner of her lip, from where she’d snagged herself with her school ID bracelet.

  “Are you absolutely sure it’s her?” Zaccaro from the FBI asked, but there was no doubt. Every one of the photos said “Skip,” just like that painted outline he’d first made on her bedsheets. They couldn’t be any other little girl, but the kidnapper was taunting me, by not showing her face. Not letting me see my baby.

  Mizell smoothed out the newest poem on the dining room table and started reading, to try to get us all back on track. “Hercules cleaned out the Augean stables . . . ”

  I took over reading it aloud; this was mine.

  By sweeping away shit with the water table.

  But since I’m such a modern-day guy

  I want you to go where the drugs they buy

  Give it a twist, make it today

  Instead of shit, sweep crack away.<
br />
  For your lessons to learn,

  Make those muscles burn . . . and I do mean burn . . .

  To keep Skip alive, just do number five.

  “Wait . . . what are those squiggles? Letters? What do they mean?” Wendy asked, out of the blue.

  I’d been looking at the poem; Wendy had been looking at the fingernails glued to the bottom of the paper it was on. The one thing I couldn’t look at anymore. The one thing I didn’t want Wendy to look at.

  That’s the other way I knew this was my daughter. How many other teenage girls had written out “I HATE WENDY” on their fingers? I hadn’t told Wendy because I hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but I couldn’t keep it from her now.

  “She wrote something on her fingernails. The night of the party. After the party.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just something stupid, to get back at me about that DVD. She didn’t mean it, she was just mad because . . . ”

  “Tell me.”

  “Don’t hate her. Please. It was just stupid teenage stuff . . . ”

  “What?”

  “‘I hate Wendy,’” I said, hating myself just as much for having to say it out loud.

  Wendy let out a breath, then pursed her lips together. Shook her head, like it was her fault. “I shouldn’t have come.” This woman, still on pain pills from the hospital, still covered in stitches and plum-colored bruises . . .

  She tried to turn her hurt into solving the riddle, instead of turning on Skip. “That’s the, uh . . . H. And the A. From ‘hate.’ The first two letters.”

  “Wendy, she was mad, she was mad at me, not you . . . ”

  “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but getting her back.”

  Michaelson broke in. “But why those two letters, out of all the ones he could have picked? A.H. That say anything to you?”

  “Hitler. Adolph Hitler. That’s what it says to me. Madmen. Both of them madmen.”

  “Something’s changing here,” Mizell said, moving the photos around, almost talking to herself. “Now there’s . . . stuff. Props. That’s a first. Not just a poem anymore. Like those antlers. And now these. So what does that mean? ‘Fingernails on the chalkboard? No, I’ve used my sword . . .’” Mizell turned to me, as if there was any doubt who she was talking to. “He’s talking to you, directly to you, about what you yelled on the phone. ‘Fingernails on the chalkboard.’”