Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  I located my glasses after only a brief search. They listed badly to starboard, but they were intact. I could see. I’d missed vision. Things don’t seem quite so dreadful when you can see them, even if they are exactly that dreadful. I went crawling around after my shotgun—

  Somebody was coming my way on the trail! I couldn’t see anybody, but I could hear rocks clunking together. I couldn’t find my shotgun. If I had found it, I can’t say with confidence that I wouldn’t have used it on sight, just started blasting away, no questions asked. But I had to abandon the search for the gun and crawl off the trail into the fern forest to hide. The ferns felt good against my face, like lace, but I remembered the visible wake Jellyroll had left when he’d passed through them, so I didn’t go in very far before lying motionless. I felt no wind down there, stillness, the small sound of my breathing, of rain droplets against my face. I could feel the stranger’s approach, a soft thudding in my chest.

  I peeked up. His back was to me—this is when I might have shot him. He was bending over Perry’s body. Returning, maybe, to the scene of the crime. He wore brown woolen pants, lace-up rubber boots with leather tops, a dirty white sweater, and a yellow slicker with the hood drawn up. A local. He nudged the body with his toe. Perry would never move again. The stranger straightened, looked around as if surprised, frightened by the corpse in the ferns.

  I ducked flat and held my breath…

  He dressed just like Hawley, but he was too small to be Hawley. Yet he was carrying that same canvas gym bag, the one Hawley had carried his hatchet in. But then I remembered something—Hawley’s gym bag had broken handles. These handles were not broken. His hood was drawn tight around his face, and I had only caught a glimpse of it when he turned my way. What had I seen? There was something wrong with the face, I couldn’t tell exactly what, but it had looked familiar, and it did not belong to Dick Desmond. Maybe it belonged to a friend, an ally. I could have used either. I craned my neck to look up. Our eyes met—

  It was Clayton Kempshall!

  “Artie!” he said. “Artie, is that you?”

  “Hello, Clayton.” I stood up in the ferns.

  “Did you kill this guy, Artie?”

  I giggled mirthlessly, hysteria tickling the edges of my mind. “No, Clay, I didn’t. I thought maybe you’d killed him.”

  Clayton giggled, too. He also sounded a little hysterical. He pulled back his hood. His face was streaked with grime; his matted hair stuck straight out on the sides. His hands, too, were caked with dirt. Clayton edged some ferns aside with his boot to see the dead guy’s face and said, “No, I didn’t kill him. I don’t even know him. Who was he?”

  “He was one of the stalkers. Dick Desmond is the other stalker.”

  “Dick Desmond? Not Dick Desmond from Ten Pins?”

  “Yeah. Do you know him?”

  “Not personally. You know who knows him? Kevin James knows him.”

  “…Desmond has Jellyroll now. I think he’s taking him to the Crack. I’ve got to go after him, Clay.” I pointed up the trail toward the Castle.

  “He’s got Jellyroll—? Want me to go with you? I know this island. Teal Island. I grew up here, you know?”

  “Sure—”

  “Well, you don’t want to go that way. Come this way. This is a shortcut.” He stepped over the corpse and headed off into the ferns. I followed. The Castle ruins seemed to be somewhere up on the left. We appeared to be going around the hill rather than over it. When I caught up, he said, “You haven’t been having a very relaxing stay, have you?”

  I giggled again. Maybe there was a little more hysteria in this giggle.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Off the beaten track, I was already disoriented, but I followed. I watched the back of his head and wondered if he’d killed anybody recently. I wondered how to approach the question before I became totally lost. Clumsily, I decided: “What have you been doing, Clay?”

  He waved his arm vaguely as if to take in the entire island. “I’ve been pondering things. The past. Trying to remember. I thought if I came back here, I might discover something. I’ve been living up in the ruins.”

  “You’ve been here on the island the whole time? I mean, you haven’t gone to the mainland?”

  “No, staying here was the point. I thought if I immersed myself in the past, I’d remember something about it. Actually, it was my analyst’s idea.”

  “How did it work?”

  “I don’t want to evaluate it too much yet, but one thing seems clear, Artie. I killed my father.” With that he held the gym bag out at eye level and gave it a shake. It rattled like—well, bones.

  “You mean, he’s…in there?”

  Clayton nodded slowly. “Remember that day on the pier you were telling me about the stalkers, and I invited you to the boathouse? You said there was a cartoon about Jellyroll. The stalker killed him with a hatchet, remember?”

  The wind blew the rain against our faces; I staggered. “Yes,” I squeaked.

  “Such a horrible thought, it struck me. I kept thinking about it all that night and the next day, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I began to think it had something to do with me personally…Artie, I knew exactly where he was buried. I don’t know—I don’t remember anything else, but I knew just where my father was buried. Nobody else knew. I went and dug him up. Twisted, huh? Well, I thought it would help me remember, sort of like a talisman.” He stopped, turned, and looked at me to see how I was reacting.

  “Did the dogs disturb you?” I asked.

  “Yes!” He patted his chest as though his heart were still pounding. “Those dogs. Here I was all alone, except for the skeleton of my own father which I’d just dug up, and suddenly it’s the hounds from hell! I ran. I just freaked and ran until I couldn’t run anymore.”

  “That must have been terrifying, Clayton,” I said lamely.

  Poor Clayton began to cry. “Maybe he wasn’t such a bad man. Maybe it was just me.”

  I hugged him, tried to comfort him. I patted his back. It was all I had to offer under the circumstances.

  “Artie,” he said after a while, “how do you know Dick Desmond was heading for the Crack?”

  I told him about Crystal and how even now she was standing chained by the neck to a tree.

  “Come on, Artie, let’s go, this is a great shortcut—”

  “Thanks, Clay.” And off we went as fast as we could.

  The ferns were nearly head high now, like a stunted rain forest.

  “You don’t feel it down here,” he said hustling, without turning around, “but there’s a lot of wind blowing, and I think it’s blowing from the northeast.”

  I jogged to catch up. Dwight had said it never blew from the northeast in the summer. “What about boats in the Crack, Clayton?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never seen it, because it never blows from the northeast in the summer, and I’ve never been here any other time. But I’ve heard people talk about it. It sounds bad.”

  We stopped abruptly at the edge of a swamp.

  “This is the only trouble with the shortcut, right here,” said Clayton.

  It wasn’t a huge swamp. In fact, it was sort of a miniature swamp, but it still had all the impediments for travelers of full-sized swamps. There was brown water of unknown depth. Lily pads with stiff yellow flowers on short stalks grew in it along with other aquatic vegetation. Dead tree trunks festered in it, and there was a coating of green scum over everything. It was just vegetable matter, but it still looked uninviting, like plutonium waste.

  “It’s not too deep. At least it didn’t used to be too deep.”

  I looked down at my shoes. I was sinking even as I stood there. Tannin-dark water lapped over my shoelaces.

  “But you’ll be amazed at what a good shortcut it is.” And he stepped into the swamp, immediately plunging to his thighs in black mud and detritus the consistency of oatmeal.

  I waded in after him. The swamp sucked at me, trie
d to claim my shoes; I curled my toes to keep them.

  I lost my balance and went down thickly on my hands and knees. The swamp tried to keep my vulnerable finger. I snarled as I withdrew it. Now, dripping black ooze, it stuck straight out in the opposite direction from before and hurt like hell. It was making me mean.

  “Christ!” said Clay. “You broke your finger!”

  “I broke it before. I tripped over the dead guy.” That can happen when there are a lot of dead guys lying around.

  “Let’s see,” Clayton asked, concerned.

  We stopped waist-deep in the swamp, and I showed him. Maybe he knew what to do.

  “Jesus, it’s kind of sickening, isn’t it? Is there anything we can do?”

  “No, let’s keep going.” We did. We surged on through the viscosity, and sooner than it seemed, we emerged and climbed onto rocky ground. “Clayton, I think Desmond and that dead guy back there killed Kevin James.”

  “What! Kevin’s dead—?”

  “Murdered. In Boston. His head was split by a blow from an ax or something like that, a hatchet. Just like the guy back there. Just like the people in Micmac.”

  “Just like my father,” he said.

  “Desmond and the dead guy came here in Kevin’s boat.”

  “What, that big black fishing boat?”

  “You know it?”

  “I’ve seen it from the Castle.”

  “They knew Jellyroll was coming here. They showed up the next day. How long’s it take to get from Boston to here in a boat? Days, right?”

  “I should think so, sure. Do you mean they killed Kevin to find out where you were going?”

  “Could be.”

  “And Kevin knew because I told him that day on the pier? Jesus. Dick Desmond, imagine! I did a Murder, She Wrote with him about a hundred years ago…You never know.”

  The trees thinned. Were we there already? We both quickened our pace. Then we heard the noise—it stopped us in our tracks. Wind roared through the branches overhead. But there was another component to the noise, a water sound, as loud as a big waterfall, but not consistent like that, more of a staccato rhythm, like artillery salvoes. Surely the sea wasn’t making that sound—

  I could see the clearing ahead, the old railroad station. The wind blew so hard we couldn’t look into it. I put my good hand over my eyes, peeked through the chinks between my fingers. Then as I stepped out into that clearing around the Crack, the wind stopped me in midstride, one foot off the ground, like a sight gag. It unnerves me, sometimes, to see how often life, reality, resembles the slapstick sight gag. Objects flew on the wind.

  “Let’s get behind the sheds,” Clayton shouted.

  It sounded like a good idea, to get behind something solid, but I didn’t move. I was transfixed at the sight. The sea beyond the mouth of the Crack ran white with streaks of spray snaking in the troughs, while great waves marched rank after rank from as far out as I could see toward the opening of the Crack. The wind had wiped away the clouds and fog, and now the sky was blue and cloudless, a terrible unending clarity.

  The waves disintegrated in stark white explosions against the headlands on either side of the Crack—but a part of each wave kept coming right on through the opening. Their speed and size increased as they drove inward and compressed between the rock walls, where they seethed like the great caldera of an ancient volcano when the earth was still new and unformed. As one wave tried to recede, the next slammed up behind it, then the next and the next, and the energy built on itself until the properties of water itself seemed to change from the familiar into something volatile and unstable, like lava. The fifth or sixth wave, having no other way to expend its force, blasted straight up in the air from the apex of the Crack like a white-hot geyser. I stood there slackjawed until a short piece of wood struck me in the chest and knocked me back a stride. Then I followed Clayton and his bouncing gym bag into the lee of the red shed near the side of the cliff.

  I pressed my back against the boards. “Nothing could survive in there, right?” I said. Wind whistled through unseen cracks between the weathered boards.

  “I don’t know,” said Clayton. “Your hand looks like hell, Artie.”

  “Yeah. It does.” I held it up, and we watched it for a little while. It was unusual to have parts of myself broken, disjointed, uprooted. I hoped the pain wouldn’t get any worse, so I could concentrate, react.

  “God, Dick Desmond. I can’t believe it,” said Clayton. “We have the same agent, did you know that? I’d see the guy at auditions, he seemed normal, happy…as normal as anybody in the business, I mean. He had a family, kids. He showed me a picture of his kids once. Two little towheads at the beach. You can’t ever tell who’s going to turn out to be a psycho these days.”

  It was possible to walk to the edge of the Crack but too scary in the face of forces I never imagined I’d actually see, let alone approach.

  “Artie, maybe he’s just after the publicity, you know? Maybe it’s just some kind of twisted stunt.”

  “It’s already gone too far,” I said in a cold voice I’d never heard before. “Thanks for showing me the shortcut, Clay.”

  “Sure, Artie. He’s my favorite dog, too.”

  I crawled to the edge of the Crack, trying not to drag my finger. It was hard to see through my salty glasses and all that spray in the air, and that enhanced the surreal quality. Each wave seemed to reach higher than its predecessor, and soon, I thought, they’d top the cliff and wash me off. After a wave passed, the water level plunged down over the rocks with a scary sucking sound.

  Not a single stairway remained on the rock. I could see their broken bones crashing around in the maelstrom. The floating docks like the one the Hampton boat had been tied to was gone. The railroad-tie rack from which the sub had been launched showed no signs of ever having existed. Obliterated. All of it.

  There were three vessels in the water. Broken, awash, sunk, they sloshed around like bathtub boats. Each of them, it occurred to me dimly, was from away. There were no islanders’ boats broken in pieces down there.

  There was the submarine. The sea had stripped it of its tanks, hoses, pipes, and other external fittings; its Plexiglas bubble was ripped away. It was nothing more than an orange steel tube full of water, but there must have been some sort of flotation inside, because the pathetic ruined thing hung near the surface, and every wave dashed it against the rocks near the apex of the Crack. The dark granite was slashed with orange paint.

  Near the sub, being driven against the same rocks, was the black-clad strangers’ Cigarette boat that had circled Dog Cove. How long ago was that? Its red bow poked the surface every so often. Then I realized that the bow section was all that remained of the boat. Its back had been broken in two. The engine half was probably on the bottom. That’s probably where the hipsters were, too.

  And then there was Seastar. My heart sank when I identified it. There wasn’t much left. I put my forehead down on the rock to cry or moan or something, but pebbles blew into my eyes. I looked again. The boat was upside down. Its bright green bottom pointed at the sky. The propeller was gone, and the thick shaft was bent like my finger. Splintered pieces of the cabin and the deck swirled in and out with the waves. Had my dog been aboard that boat when it went over? If so, I’d never see him again.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I scuttled like a crab away from the Crack, back toward the faded red shed, where Clayton waited. He was pale, his eyes fixed on mine. What had I found? Jellyroll drowned and sloshing around down there? Tears welled up in his eyes. Clayton and Jellyroll loved each other. I told him about the wrecked vessels I’d seen, the submarine, the Cigarette boat, the black sportfisherman, but no people and no dogs. “Maybe we beat Desmond here,” I said.

  “You want to wait?”

  How could I wait? Maybe they were never heading this way. Maybe they only told Crystal that so she’d tell me and I’d take off on a wild goose chase. What to do? Mostly, I like to do nothing; now here I was making t
hese sorts of decisions, potentially life and death decisions, while staring at my hand with a grotesque fascination. So do I wait in ambush while Crystal stands chained to a tree in the storm? I wished I had my gun. That would have made it easier, all that power to destroy, even if destroying didn’t make any sense. Psychos beget psychos.

  “What’s in this shed, Clay?” I demanded.

  “Christ, Artie, I don’t know, I haven’t been here since I was ten. Since the night I killed my father, I guess. They used to store railroad parts and equipment in there. All the stuff was greasy, I remember. Too greasy to play with.”

  I knelt down to look through a chink in the weathered boards. I moved to hood my eyes with my hands so I could better see into the darkness, but I rammed my finger into the side of the building. I howled in pain. Besides, the goddamn shed was empty inside. “Jellyroll—” I called, nonetheless. Silence, of course. Hearing his name out loud, I started crying.

  Clayton put his hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t we wait in the depot?” he suggested.

  The depot—that would be a good place for us to wait, or for Desmond to hide.

  I turned to look at it, across the clearing from us, about a block away. Windblown objects bounced against the boarded-up facade. Nature had leached all the moisture from the wooden structure; the naked boards had contracted, nails had rusted away, and the roof had sagged in the middle. The wind and salt had scoured off the paint, but a red-with-white-trim tint remained deep in the grain of the old boards like a shadow of the past. You could still see KEMPSHALL ISLAND in the stain of once-white letters over the boarded door. The depot was the cliché of rural American whistle-stop stations, yet in miniature, almost half-scale. Maybe that toylike quality had been a whimsical touch by Clayton’s old man. Now it just felt grim, depressing, and weird, a death house, the sort of place where serial killers leave messages for each other.

  “Was this your toy, Clay?”

  “Fuck no, it was his toy. He’d put on his engineer’s suit, you know, with the hat, one of those old-fashioned oil cans, and hang out the window, waving like he was just a jovial old eccentric fellow.” Clayton’s lips were tight as he remembered.