The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  My head. I passed out for a while and then the footsteps came back. Something nudged me.

  Boat oar. It was new. I’d put it in the oarlock myself.

  The moan came from somewhere deep.

  Something nudged me again, and I reached for it. I hung onto it as it shook and stabbed at me. A woman’s voice. “Get off, damn it.”

  I opened my eyes. The room was black but I could see a figure there. An oar. It really was an oar. The weapon of choice for lake people. My bound hands clutched at it—and, at the end of the long handle, not Ray. Not Ray at all, and not Bonnie or Bo. I hung onto the oar with all my strength, climbing up the handle like someone gasping for the shore.

  “Drop it, or I’ll kill you right now.” The gravel voice.

  I saw the shadow in the dark, let go of the oar, and fell back to the carpet. I knew. I knew, except all was black.

  MAMA BEA RANSEY came back with the oar and poked me in the side. “Get up.”

  Some time had passed, but I didn’t know: hours, days. The whispering had gone on for a long time. In and out of memory, I heard the voices, felt the skin on my face grow hot with fever. I threw up, only able to wipe my mouth feebly. I thought of Joshua and I did not cry. I watched a thin line of sunlight move across the room and fade, but lost track. Slept. Woke. Slept. Heard Aidan crying far down in a well, and scratched at the floor, trying to reach for him. Woke and heard the whispers moving toward me: “Make them tighter. I have to do everything—”

  “Let’s just—”

  “Pretty big talk, ‘Let’s just.’ You do it, if it’s so easy.”

  Slept. Woke.

  My thoughts had risen all at once, but now they started to line up. Into sense. Into fact. I saw the curtains behind me and calculated how I might get through that window. I could not get there. I would never be able to move fast enough through the woods, even if I could reach the window and heave myself outside. Even if my truck still sat in the drive. I felt with my elbow at my left pocket. Fact: the keys were gone.

  I had to try, though. I stretched and squirmed toward the window, managing only an inch or so.

  Bea. Concerned grandmother. On TV. In Russ’s office. I could not make order from this. Kidnapping your own grandchild and killing a young woman to do it. But—there was no sense to it. Not yet.

  Exhausted from stretching, I lay panting on my side, curled around my deadened hands. The binds so tight. They would have to amputate my hands when I got out of here. I imagined trying to get analysis work, not being able to write. Saw myself, like a Winged Victory, armless. Saw myself armless, ditched in a shallow grave.

  I braced myself for another effort toward the window. The door opened.

  Bea Ransey entered the room, the oar at her side. “Get up,” she said.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  I got to my hands and knees, retched. The pain.

  “If I were you,” Bea said, “I’d keep what you had.”

  Another voice behind her, a whisper. “Oh, hell.”

  “Shut up,” Bea said to her daughter. “This is your fault.”

  My head was heavy, my neck too weak. I let it drop.

  “I said get up. Come on.”

  “How is this my fault? I didn’t beat her brains in.”

  “We wouldn’t’a had to, if you’d had half a brain yourself,” Bea growled. “Jesus. Another ten minutes and you’d had her peeling potatoes and staying to dinner.”

  I grabbed at the oar. Bea shook me off.

  Bonnie said, “I think she needs help.”

  “You’d pick her over your own kid? What do you think Bobby’d do?”

  “I mean—I think she needs help up.”

  The oar dropped into view. I grasped at the handle and let it lead me upright. My head swam, the corners of my vision going to television static.

  “No, no,” Bea said. “That’s right. Just going for a little walk.”

  My knees buckled but I was on my feet. The sharp blade of the oar slipped out of my hand. My hand. I was untied. My hands were swollen and the wrists scraped raw, but they were free.

  The old woman jabbed the oar at me. I took a step, another. I used the wall to catch myself, pressing my palm flat and hard. Fingerprint. In the hallway, I scooted along the wall, letting my hand find purchase on the light switch plate. Fingerprint. We inched through the kitchen. All the blinds and curtains had been pulled. I used the back of a kitchen chair to catch myself. Fingerprint. I reached for the back of my head and brought back red-tipped fingers. Bea prodded me toward the door, but not before I found the doorjamb, the doorknob.

  “Bonnie, damn it. Get the blood, will you?”

  “What about the baby?”

  “You can look after him and wipe up the gore, too. The things you and your brother—I swear.”

  The screen door slapped behind us. We stood under a night sky, the black trees waving. To my right, the lake and sky had become one. Bea heaved me by my elbow and guided me into the yard.

  My tongue was too large for my mouth. “Where—” I choked.

  “Oh, now, don’t worry. We just need you to be somewhere else.”

  Bea took me to my own truck. The oar helped me step up, and then stuffed me in, like a loaf of dough into the oven. The television static came again. When I came to, I was curled on the floor, my head on the seat. We were moving.

  Finally I understood that I would die.

  Bea Ransey’s face was lit by the dashboard. Her hair blew out of a knot in long strands. I had the feeling this was the first time I had ever really seen Bea Ransey. She was no church lady now. She was no concerned grandmother rending her shirt on TV. Her eyes were black slits in deep wrinkles; she had the squint of an old ranch hand, even in the dark. The slits turned on me.

  “Just so we’re clear,” the woman said. “I have more than one way to open up the back of your head. The other way, you won’t be getting up at all.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “You think you know me?” Bea Ransey said. “Best reason to shoot you yet.”

  I had no argument for this. I had started to think about other things I had never really seen before. Things that made no sense until they began to make perfect sense. “You wouldn’t,” I said. My mouth was stuffed with my bitten tongue. I talked around the taste of old blood. “You wouldn’t leave my kid without a mother.”

  The slits turned on me again and then the linen skin at the sides of Bea’s mouth pulled tight and youthful. She threw back her head and laughed. We could have been on a Sunday night drive. The truck turned. I felt the surface beneath the tires change. “I’m not the goddamned orphan prevention society, you idiot. I’d rather make your kid an orphan than see my grandkids with their own damn parents. Aidan with that slut? Steve’s no-good dad had the decency to leave the state.”

  “My son—”

  “I don’t give a dang about your kid,” she said. “It’s my kids I’m saving.”

  “Why are your kids worth protecting”—we hit a bump in the road, and I lost my nerve for a second at the searing pain in my head—“and not mine?”

  “Because mine are mine. They are worth fifty of you.”

  “Even though you tell your daughter how stupid she is. Even though your son beats his wife.”

  “You’ll be wanting the rest of your brains spilled, then?”

  “You have a pretty rotten sense of worth,” I said.

  “Nah. I’m worth a million, believe it or not. My kids’ll do anything for me,” she said. “Even if it’s just to get their share someday.”

  I remembered the look Bonnie had given out the door over my shoulder, the apartment and job she wanted on her own. “They don’t love you.”

  “My kids love being taken care of. Love not working too hard. Love having Mama to bail them out and give ’em ice cream money.”

  The words ice cream money nearly slipped past, but then I heard them.

  Not money for ice cream; money from ice cream. Dairy Bar proceeds, fundin
g Bo’s hard living and Bonnie’s imprisonment in the family’s summer home. If I had just left the Dairy Bar parking lot instead of pulling into Parks. If I had only ignored blind nostalgia. How many times had I had that thought? If I had just.

  “Your malts are really crappy.”

  Bea cackled until she had to wheeze for breath. “They sell real good, though. And those two little shacks keep me, my kids, my grandkids.” She paused. “Half the town,” she muttered. “You’ve no idea.”

  I did, though, because she’d already been clear. Worth a million. I didn’t think she was rounding up. “They only fear you.”

  Bea gave the wheel a wide turn. Gravel pinged the bottom of the truck. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, having a son that fears you.”

  Joshua. She was saying something about Joshua. “My son doesn’t fear me.”

  “Sure, sure. Nothing to worry about with you in charge.” She shook her head and squinted out the windshield with purpose. “Kids raised on shaky ground always bounce back.”

  We made a sharp turn, and the gravel fell away. The tires grew quiet. Tree branches scratched at both sides of the truck. The sounds of the deep woods went silent around us. We drove for a long time, the smell of wet and decaying leaves coating my throat. I tasted lake air.

  Bea slowed the truck to a crawl, dragging through bramble and scrub, then stopped.

  My focus darted between Bea’s hands and the oar. The right moment—

  But Bea was faster. “I’ll get this,” she said, sliding the oar away. “Get out, and try to remember who’s got the gun here.”

  I had not seen a gun, but I believed in it. I slid out, using the truck’s door to stand upright and stare into the clean black of my surroundings. A slim moon hid behind roiling clouds.

  “Where—”

  Bea’s voice hissed in my ear. “Shut it.” The oar handle nudged me forward. I stumbled, wondering if Bea could see anything. Maybe now was my chance to dash away, use the dark to my benefit. I hesitated.

  “Do something funny,” she said. “I won’t even have to look at the mess.”

  She shoved me forward into the dark. The green smell of the lake gave me courage. “No wonder.”

  She sighed and prodded into my back with more force.

  “No wonder your kids are no good,” I said.

  “You think you’re better? Your father should have taken you out and drowned you like a kitten.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t think of that,” I said.

  “I’m pretty sure he did.”

  I staggered forward. “You knew him.”

  “Oh, hell, yes. I knew that piece of crap.”

  “We agree on this.” I stopped, let the oar dig into me. “You knew him. From coming to your lake house?”

  “Lake house,” she grunted. “You sound like one of them fudge shoppers. Ain’t no summer home, sweetie. That is my grand inheritance, or it would be, if I could outlive a few more cousins.”

  I stumbled over something, and Bea wrestled me back up. In the dark, I could identify the barest outline of a low roof against the sky.

  Through my rising panic, I tried to think of something to say. “My dad—”

  “Never thought much of him,” Bea said. “Or your mother. Or you. Didn’t put two and two together soon enough when you showed up in Parks.” A flashlight beam appeared, pointing out the rusty locks on a metal door. Bea fidgeted with a ring of keys, then used a series of them to turn groaning locks. “Wished I’d realized it was you first time I saw you. I would have yelled across the street, ‘If it isn’t little Leeanna Winger from Sweetheart Lake!’ You’d’a turned tail and we wouldn’t be going through this dance.”

  The door opened. Bea’s sharp fingernails squeezed and directed me. The flashlight lit a narrow path in the floor. The place, whatever it was, smelled like mouse droppings and grass, dank decay, and water damage. Like a garage. It was stuffy, hot, the air bad.

  Bea reached for my hands. I fought, slapping her away.

  The light swung into my face. Bea’s voice sliced at me: “But you’re the one that gave me the idea. Single woman on her own. Just her kid.”

  I heard the threat and let my hands be guided together behind my back. It was thick tape this time.

  “‘Where is the father?’ I ask myself,” Bea said. “Everybody notices, but nobody cares enough to find out. Leely would have done that. She’d’ve stole Aidan and run and I’d never see my grandbaby again.” Bea’s breath came hot and snorting as she wound the tape tight. “You were the warning I needed and then—well, things fell together.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Charity Jordan being murdered was not a flick of a domino. “You killed a girl and then stole Aidan so that his mother couldn’t. Your sense of justice is screwed.”

  Bea grunted. She was using her teeth to tear the tape. “Justice is what I say it is. Bonnie’ll tell you the same thing, soon as she gets her boy back. We all got our own right and wrong. Don’t tell me you don’t.”

  So that was Bonnie’s deal. Watching over the kidnapped baby while everyone else in the family did boo-hoos for the cameras and played straight-faced games with the police. And her reward? A boy for a boy. And Bo’s reward: his boy, all to himself.

  “You’d have done the same for yours,” Bea said. She pushed me up against a wall and let me crumple to the floor. My foot hit the flashlight, sent it rolling. The rough wooden wall caught at my clothes. “Hell, I’m pretty sure you did the same for yours already. We’re not that different.”

  “I would never kill anyone.”

  “I’m not going to kill you.” Bea began to tape my ankles together, the adhesive pulling at my skin.

  I heard hope fluttering its wings in my chest, but couldn’t listen. I knew what this looked like. “I would never leave anyone to die.”

  “Is that so?”

  There was nothing to say. If Bea knew my father, then she probably knew where he was. Probably had even known how he got there and who paid for it. Mrs. Bea Ransey kept up on her Sweetheart Lake news; she probably got the Vilas County News-Review delivered to her Parks, Indiana, front door each week. Clicked her tongue over property values and obituaries. Stored away bits of news like a squirrel packing its cheeks.

  Bea gave my head an awkward pat, leaving her warm hand on my forehead.

  She wouldn’t do it. She can’t.

  But the old woman was only holding my head so that she could find my mouth and force an oily cloth inside. I bucked and bit until Bea pinched my nose and shoved the cloth between my teeth.

  As I gagged, Bea heaved a sigh and stood. She retrieved the flashlight, the beam brushing past a few dark shapes in the corners and then pointing unkindly into my eyes.

  “I owe you, I guess,” the woman said. “Least I can do is Josh’ll never go needing, as long as I’m there. Of course, if his father comes along wanting him . . .”

  I kicked at the woman’s feet. I tried to cough out the rag and scream—scream at the retreating flashlight, at the door opening and closing, at the sound of the rusty locks squeezing back into place. At the black that descended and the silence that followed. Bea gone, and the wide woods of Wisconsin wrapping around me.

  Chapter Forty

  I worked on spitting out the cloth, making progress in increments I wouldn’t have known how to calculate. Bea was gone minutes, hours. Coughing, choking, spitting. And then I sneezed twice in a row and the awful thing was away from me.

  “OK.” I heaved and grabbed for air. “OK.”

  When I had regained my breath, I raised myself up on an elbow and screamed.

  The sound bounced against the walls and back, filling the shed.

  I tried again, listening carefully. Cement block or brick. Something sturdy. Not a shed, but an outbuilding, a garage. Surely some of the sound escaped. I took a deep breath and screamed long and loud.

  I pictured the shadowed woods all around, the gray lake. Houses—there would be a few, at least, and so
me more across the water. But it was off-season, and the lake could be broad. I thought of the ride in, the sound of limbs and scrub dragging across the truck. The pines around the garage and a mile back would be thick and cushioning. And the last paved road a half hour or better on the other side of that. I could spend all my energy screaming and no one would ever hear.

  I fought the tape at my wrists for a while without progress, then I let myself rest against the wall. How long before someone realized I was gone? But I was already gone, and with Joshua missing, who would even think of me? Margaret would wonder. Russ would not be surprised. Ray, Mamie, Theresa. No one would blink if they never heard from me again.

  I slid further down the wall and to my side and cried into the dirty floor. It was my fault, for teaching people to expect me to disappear. My fault, for spending all my energy saving Joshua and making sure there was no one left to save me. Not this time.

  That escape from Ray, I had let everyone else save me. I had needed them all.

  It was the little girl who saved me the first time.

  That day at the dock, when Ray threw me down the stairs and picked up the oar, I had woken in the water, my chin just above the surface. My head was heavy. I lay back and let the surface of the lake hold me.

  After a few minutes, I found the sandy bottom and walked my hands over the length of the dock until I could kneel in the shallows. Under the water, dark smoke rose from my skin. Blood. The ends of my hair dripped red streaks down my T-shirt. I reached for the back of my head, then stopped myself.

  The dock was dark with blood.

  The new oar lay on the embankment, cracked through the middle all the way from the blade to the collar.

  Up ahead: the house we didn’t own, the lives we wouldn’t get to live.

  I had decided.

  I reached into the boat and grabbed one of the lifejackets. I stumbled out into the lake and walked until the jacket floated, lifting me along with it.

  I had drifted around the bend and toward the camp’s dock, when the girl’s tuneless singing wormed into my fever dreams and woke me again. It was later in the day, the sun down a few notches. I hadn’t gone far enough. The orange kayaks were tied up, twenty or more of them, and the girl sat at the edge with her back to me, swinging her legs. The seat of her swimsuit was dirty, her ponytail long and crooked, hooking out from behind an ear. She’d tightened it herself at some point with her own grubby little hands.