Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “Chief Bradley,” I said.

  He looked up, wet-eyed, into the rearview mirror. “What, Andrea?”

  “My mother lied to you. She knew all about the stepfather. If she pretended not to believe you, it was only so no one would hold her responsible. But she knew.”

  “No.” He shook his head, slowly at first, then more emphatically. “No, you are mistaken, Andrea. Your mother would never have condoned that.”

  “She did.”

  “No. I understand you being bitter, but if you’re going to blame someone for not protecting you, blame me. If I’d listened to you more carefully that time—”

  “You know you can’t do that, Chief Bradley. You can’t say you killed the stepfather by accident and then apologize for not murdering him sooner. Besides, you didn’t do it for my sake—or for hers.”

  “Maybe not,” the chief said hotly. “Maybe not. But—”

  “And another thing. I can’t claim to understand my mother’s motivations any better than you did, but one thing I’ve figured out about her is that she didn’t give her love to anyone who really needed it. So even if you’d gotten rid of the stepfather years earlier, it still wouldn’t have gotten you what you wanted. She never would have picked you. Not if you’d killed a hundred stepfathers.”

  “Well…” Chief Bradley said. “I suppose that’s a moot point, now.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “So there’s no reason to talk about it anymore. I appreciate you telling me the story, but my hand hurts, and I’d like to go to the emergency clinic now.”

  “Andrea…”

  “You can drive us there if you want, or you can just unlock these doors. I’m sure Penny wouldn’t mind walking.”

  He stared out the front windshield at the lake, both hands gripping the steering wheel. “You still haven’t answered my question, Andrea,” he said. “About why you came back here.”

  “It wasn’t to hurt you, or get you in trouble,” I told him. “But it’s not my place to excuse what you did, either. Now if you want to tell your story to a judge, maybe—”

  “A judge?” He laughed, a high bleak sound. “A judge…so you did come back to punish me.”

  “No, Chief Bradley.”

  “You know no one would believe you, if you told them. A troubled girl who’s spent time in a mental institution.” He shook his head. “You probably make up all kinds of stories…but no one would believe it, without proof.”

  “Then there’s nothing for you to be afraid of. You can let us go.”

  There was a long silence. When he spoke again, his tone was regretful but resolved, and though he addressed me by name, I could tell he was really talking to himself. “I’m sorry, Andrea. I never intended to harm anyone. I only ever meant to be a good and just man…”

  “You still can be, Chief Bradley.”

  “…but I loused up almost everything. I lost my best friend, and the woman I loved…even the woman I didn’t love. My name and reputation in this town, they are all I have left now, and if I were to lose them too, that would be the end. I can’t risk that. I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, but I can’t.” His left hand came off the steering wheel and dropped out of view. Adam cried an urgent warning from the pulpit, but there was no need.

  “I’m sorry too, Chief Bradley,” I said. Then, preparing myself: “Seferis. Get us out of here.”

  When the moment comes, Mouse is on the verge of blacking out. Ever since Chief Bradley drove past the medical clinic without stopping, she has been trying, unsuccessfully, to melt through the floorboards of the car and escape. Unable to bend the laws of physics, she’s been forced to listen with steadily mounting terror to the dialogue between Chief Bradley and Andrew. Chief Bradley’s every statement—even the most self-pitying—is freighted with menace, but it’s Andrew’s side of the conversation that really sets her on edge. Rather than watch what he says, the way you do when someone has you at their mercy, Andrew is recklessly free-spoken, and at points seems almost to be trying to goad Chief Bradley into losing his temper. Shut up, Mouse wants to yell at him, shut up, and Maledicta, in the cave mouth, does more than just think about yelling it.

  Finally they reach a critical juncture, the dialogue becoming a monologue as Chief Bradley readies himself to do something very bad. Up in the cave mouth, Maledicta is chanting “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,” and Mouse feels her grip on time begin to give, blackness looming, and she welcomes it, not wanting to be present at her own murder.

  And then Andrew beside her says “I’m sorry too, Chief Bradley,” in a loud clear voice that makes her turn her head. She sees him change, his posture shifting in a way that makes him seem to bulk up in his seat, as if he were physically expanding. He raises his right arm and places his elbow against his car-door window; his arm jerks, and the window bursts outward. Before Mouse can even gape at this feat, he dives through the opening.

  “Andrea!” Chief Bradley bellows. From outside, Mouse hears footsteps pounding, circling the car; they reach the driver’s side just as the chief gets his door open and steps out. There is a loud grunt, and sounds of a scuffle; something heavy clatters across the front hood.

  Then Mouse’s door is wrenched open and Andrew leans in. “Come on, Penny,” he says—

  —and they are outside. Andrew tugs at Mouse’s arm, trying to get her to keep moving, but she hesitates, seeing Chief Bradley staggering dazed in the glow of the police car’s headlights. The chief appears to stumble and drops out of sight, but just as quickly he pops back up, clutching his gun. Andrew tugs at Mouse’s arm again—

  —and they are crashing through dense underbrush in the dark. Invisible branches smack Mouse repeatedly in the face, but Andrew’s arm is around her waist, bearing her up and carrying her along.

  “Andrea!” Chief Bradley calls, blundering through the brush not far behind them. “Andrea, stop! Andrea, I see you—”

  —and there is a flat crack!, like a big branch breaking—

  —and Mouse and Andrew stand with their backs up against the bole of a tree. Andrew has a hand over Mouse’s mouth to keep her from squeaking, which is a good thing, because Chief Bradley is directly in front of them, almost close enough to reach out and touch. He stands with his back to them, poised, listening; to Mouse, the sound of her own breath in her nostrils seems suddenly as loud as a jet engine.

  Chief Bradley looks left, then right, then left again. It’s full dark now, but this close, if he turns all the way around, he can’t help but see them.

  He doesn’t turn around. He takes a step backwards. This brings him within arm’s length, and Mouse feels Andrew tense up, preparing to push her aside and grapple the chief from behind.

  Then something else moves, out in the dark; some animal. Chief Bradley fixes on the sound, starts moving towards it. The animal, whatever it is, hears him coming and bounds away; Chief Bradley gives chase. He vanishes in the gloom.

  Andrew relaxes again. He removes his hand from Mouse’s mouth.

  Mouse slumps—

  —and she is crouching in a thicket of weeds alongside a footpath that is just barely visible in the moonlight. She can hear water somewhere close by; the lake, maybe, although it sounds more like the burbling of a river or a brook. Farther off, in the opposite direction, something is crashing around in the brush again. Chief Bradley, Mouse guesses, still chasing after wildlife; he’s making a lot of noise but he doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.

  But where is Andrew? Keeping her voice below a whisper, Mouse speaks his name. A shadow on the other side of the footpath responds with a soft “Shhhh…”

  Andrew crawls over to her. Cupping a hand to her ear, he murmurs, “Are you hurt?”

  Actually, Mouse realizes, what he said was, “Are you hit?” as in shot.

  “I don’t think so,” she murmurs back.

  “Good,” Andrew says, and raises his head for a moment. “I think Chief Bradley’s far enough away now. We’re going to go along this path—stay low until it turns
by the side of the brook, then stand up and start running.”

  “Where does the path go?” Mouse starts to ask, but Andrew puts a finger to her lips. The sound of crashing underbrush has suddenly gotten louder again.

  “Move fast,” Andrew whispers, and—

  —Mouse runs.

  There was a moment’s sting as I dipped my hand into Hansen’s Brook. Then the cold water went to work, rinsing out and anesthetizing the cuts. I knelt at an angle on the edge of the bank, gripping a branch with my other hand so that I wouldn’t fall in.

  We’d come about a mile up the path. It probably wasn’t smart to stop here, but Penny was out of breath, and I was starting to feel dangerously lightheaded; my hand was throbbing in time with my heartbeat, and I was worried I might be losing too much blood. Before kneeling beside the brook I’d listened carefully for sounds of pursuit, and because his hearing is better than mine, I’d called Seferis back out and had him listen too. Neither of us had heard anything.

  After a couple of minutes I pulled my hand out of the water. I tried to examine it, but it was too dark to make out much detail; in starlight, blood and shadow are the same color. Shivering a little, I wrapped my hand up tight again in the dishcloth.

  Penny was shivering too. She hugged herself, twisting back and forth in an attempt to stay warm.

  “Hey,” I said softly, “how are you doing?”

  “Cold,” came her answer. “Scared.”

  “Me too,” I told her. “But I think we’ll be all right…”

  “All right?” Penny said, and had to struggle to keep her voice low. “Andrew, the chief of police is after us. You hit him—I’m glad you hit him, but now if he doesn’t just kill us, he’ll probably put us in jail.”

  “No,” I objected. “It isn’t going to happen that way. He’s the one who did wrong, not us!”

  “That doesn’t matter. He’s the chief of police. He can do wrong, if he wants to.”

  “He confessed. To both of us! If we tell people—”

  “They won’t believe us. It’s true, what he said: you’re officially crazy in the state of Michigan, and I, I’m traveling with you. Both our words together won’t measure up to his.”

  “Officer Cahill will believe us. Or at least he’ll want to give me the benefit of the doubt. And when Mrs. Winslow gets here…”

  “Mrs. Winslow?”

  “Yes,” I said, “she’s coming here. Chief Bradley spoke to her this morning. She could be here already.”

  “Well even if that’s helpful,” Penny said, “how is she going to find us?”

  “Well…” I had to think about that for a moment. “Well, this path we’re on, it goes all the way to Quarry Lake, and from there, you know, we can get up to the cottage, and then…”

  “Oh God,” said Penny, making it clear that that was the last place she wanted to go back to.

  “I know,” I said, “I don’t want to go there either, but…what else can we do? I mean you’re right, if we stay out here Mrs. Winslow will never find us. What we really need to do is sneak back into town, and from the cottage I think we have some choices how to go.”

  “But won’t Chief Bradley find us, if we go to the cottage? He must know where this path leads to.” As the thought took hold, she looked away fearfully up the path in the direction of Quarry Lake, as if expecting the chief to already have outflanked us.

  She had a point: Chief Bradley was sure to be familiar with the hiking trails in the area, especially one that led up the back way to a house he coveted. But Adam, chiming in from the pulpit, argued that the chief didn’t necessarily know we’d gone this way, and that even if he suspected, he would resist the conclusion as long as possible. “He wants to find us by the lake,” Adam said, “so even if he guesses we aren’t there anymore, he’ll keep beating the bushes a while anyway, hoping he’s wrong.”

  “But why…?”

  “Chief Bradley doesn’t want to shoot us. He wants us to have an accident—something that even he can think of as an accident. The cottage doesn’t have a swimming pool.”

  “Quarry Lake,” I pointed out.

  “He can’t roll his car into Quarry Lake…Look, I’m not saying he won’t go to the cottage, but we’ve probably got some time before he does. Don’t waste it.”

  Penny, following her own internal discussion, had come to a similar conclusion. Saying, “Oh God, let’s just get it over with,” she started walking again. I went with her.

  I thought of Xavier, coming along this same path six years ago. Gideon had left him a map and written instructions specifying that he was to sneak up on the cottage from behind, slip through the back gate around sunset, and bang on the kitchen door after first making sure that there were no visitors in the house. The rest of the plan, which involved threatening to expose Horace Rollins as a child molester unless he wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars, struck me as improbable on a number of levels, but the stepfather never got a chance to laugh in Xavier’s face. Reaching Quarry Lake at dusk, Xavier had missed the path to the cottage and gone up the Mount Idyll trail instead. By the time he realized his error—by the time Gideon got him turned around—the sun had set completely, and if not for the almost-full moon that night, he might never have found the right way. And then it was too late: coming through the gate at last, he heard shouts from inside the cottage…

  I stopped short; the brookside path had just come to an abrupt end, and Quarry Lake was before us. Caught by surprise, I turned to look back the way we’d come.

  “What is it?” Penny whispered, misinterpreting the gesture. “Do you hear something?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s just…” Hadn’t there been a forest of brambles here, only this morning? No, I thought, that was twenty years ago…and the evil conjurer was dead now, having met up with the wrong prince. “It’s nothing,” I told her, shaking my head. “Ghosts.”

  “Come on,” Penny said. She took my hand, and led me along the lakebank to the start of the cottage path. Then, huddling close together, we stepped into the woods.

  It’s pitch-black beneath the trees. They climb slowly, stopping often to make sure they have not left the path. They listen for suspicious sounds ahead, and the woods oblige them with all manner of strange noises: at one point they hear a weird scraping that reminds Mouse of a manhole cover being dragged open. They wait to see if the scraping will be repeated, but it isn’t, and so they continue on.

  The ground levels out, and the quality of the darkness changes, becoming less total; up ahead, Mouse sees an irregular line of shadow interrupted by a gate.

  The gate is closed; it does not beckon them inside. Mouse takes this as a good sign. Still, they don’t rush through it. They stand just outside, looking for monsters. After the dark of the woods, the faint moonlight shining down on the cottage’s backyard is like a searchlamp; Mouse doesn’t see Chief Bradley, or anything that looks like it might turn into Chief Bradley. No sound or sign of movement comes from the cottage itself, and while they can’t see the front yard from here, if a car came up the drive right now, they’d know it.

  Mouse, afraid to speak even in a whisper, gives a light tug on Andrew’s hand to see if he’s ready to proceed. He isn’t; Mouse, thinking he’s noticed something she hasn’t, makes another scan of the backyard.

  “It’s the fucking toolshed,” Maledicta advises, from the cave mouth. “He’s petrified of it.”

  The toolshed: Chief Bradley could be hiding behind it, or inside it, but Mouse doesn’t think so; this close, listening this hard, she thinks she’d hear him. Andrew has more experience here, though. Still holding his hand, she makes a sideways gesture: does he want to avoid the backyard entirely, and go around?

  He hesitates long enough that she knows he is tempted, but finally he shakes his head. If they go around, they will probably blunder into a thornbush; and they will make noise. Bracing himself, Andrew reaches out; he lifts the latch and pulls the gate open.

  The latch clanks. The gate hinges
shriek.

  Nothing jumps out at them.

  “All right,” Andrew whispers, “straight through here, on tiptoe around the side of the cottage, and as soon as we see there’s no one in the front yard we start running. Adam says there’s another footpath that starts about two hundred yards down the road; it should take us most of the way back to town.”

  They pass through the gate, Andrew jigging sideways to give the toolshed a wide berth, pivoting to keep it in sight. Chief Bradley is not hiding behind it, and he does not come bursting out from inside. They cross the backyard without incident.

  Then, as they reach the rear of the cottage and start to go round the side, Mouse is suddenly wary. She senses that something is wrong, something is different, but she can’t figure out what it is until her foot strikes a hard object, and then it comes to her.

  The bracing planks: they have all been taken down again. The telephone pole is still in place, but the planks that Gideon rearranged this afternoon have been pulled down and laid flat on the ground. Mouse is tripping over one of them.

  She hits the ground and a flashlight comes on, pinning both her and Andrew in its beam. Mouse looks up into it and is blinded.

  From behind the blinding light, Chief Bradley’s voice: “Stop right there, Andrea.”

  And Andrew’s voice, once more unbelievably calm, answering: “Hello, Chief Bradley.”

  Chief Bradley’s right hand moves into the light beam, holding the gun, pointing it. “Right there, Andrea,” he says. “Now listen carefully. You and your friend are going to turn around, and you’re going to walk slowly to the back door of the cottage. And then we’re all going to go inside.”

  “Why?” says Andrew. “So we can have an accident?”

  “Andrea…”