by Susan Dunlap
Leo didn’t answer.
Had he fallen in the river? Like Aeneas?
Oh, God, like Aeneas? The killer? Had the killer managed to get ahead of us? “Leo, answer me!”
The only answer was a metallic sound. An irregular clanking and the grumbling of a small motor, like the wee electric mowers New Yorkers use to mow their wee back lawns. Like a hedge clipper. Or a motor bike.
I stopped. The grumbling was steady, but the clanking seemed more distant. Two sounds? What did that mean?
The clanking was growing softer. But it was all I had. I ran toward it.
“Leo!”
Still no answer.
I almost fell over the source of the noise. If I’d come this far on this path earlier with Amber, I surely would have noticed the bottom of the pulley lift up to the fire tower. It was a big metal cube—a generator, maybe—with heavy wires leading upward. I squinted into the dark and thought I could make out the carriage box lurching upward. Maureen had been insulted at the idea of taking it down from the fire tower. Leo had to be in it now . . . unless it was a decoy to lead the killer uphill and let Leo get behind him. But Leo wasn’t devious. He had staged this walk to draw the killer’s attention. He was in that box, moving slowly up the hill, marked by his light and the rattle of wood and metal resounding through the forest. He couldn’t be more exposed. All the killer had to do was cut the cables. They were sturdy wires, but hardly indestructible.
Or, easier yet, he could race up to the fire tower, tip over the arriving cart, and fling Leo down the hillside to what would look like the most unequivocal of accidental deaths: Sick Man Falls to Death Exiting Awkward Carrier.
“Oh shit!” That could be true, murderer or not. It would be one thing to stand at the edge of the widow’s walk up there and haul a desk chair out of that cart, but a different and way more dangerous project getting yourself out of that swaying crate onto the deck with the wind gusting, smacking you and the cart.
I raced back till I found the cut-off up to fire tower, the tine, as Leo had called it when he told me about the fork in the road.
This was the steep part, I remembered that. I clambered up grabbing branches, yanking myself over bulging rocks, my feet slipping on leaves and twigs and loose pebbles. Fog floated down the hillside like gray paste, thicker with each foot I climbed ; it caught on the outcroppings, sagged wet on my shoulders. It pressed the branches and fronds into my face as it had done in Tilden Park or Muir Woods. My face was against the mountainside. I could barely make out the dirt and leaves and vines. I grabbed a branch, hoisted myself up, feeling for footing, finding none, sliding back down, hanging by my hands, my nose scraping against rock. I was going to throw up. I was going to scream.
No! I was not four years old, not now. I clamped my mouth shut, forcing myself to stare down at the ground, to stay in the present. Had I missed the path entirely? I couldn’t bear that thought. I climbed again, grabbing, yanking, planting my feet and grabbing before they had time to slip. Bile filled my throat, sweat coated my face; I saw the walls of the canyon in Tilden Park the day when I was four; I heard my brothers laughing while I screamed and screamed and screamed. They laughed, softer, softer, and then there was nothing but the cold fog and the side of the canyon and the dark.
My tailbone slammed against something, slamming me back into the present. The pulley scraped louder. The carriage banged high above my head.
I could hear Roshi groaning.
“I’m coming,” I yelled.
I scrambled hand over hand, feet barely touching the hillside, not thinking, just moving. When I reached the uphill path, I ran, slipping on the scree of pebbles, leaves, and twigs. I grabbed branches and kept pulling myself forward. My breath was short, shallow, my lungs banging against my ribs with each gasping breath. I rounded a switchback, and another. Everything looked the same. Was Roshi still calling, moaning? I couldn’t hear anything over the branches snapping underfoot and my own gasping.
Where was the carriage? I looked up, squinting into the foggy night for wires, for the box. I smacked into a branch, something sharp piercing the corner of my eye. Blinking madly, I rushed on. The danger would be at the top.
I was gasping for breath, my throat raw, my mouth dry as incense powder. I couldn’t go another step.
I had to keep going. Just take this step. This step. This step.
The stairs to the fire tower erupted out of nowhere. I almost flung myself down on them with relief. The cable screeched next to me. The clanking of wood on wood sounded like a hundred pairs of clappers calling me to the zendo, to the fire tower, on up all four flights of steps.
The carriage was above me, inching toward the widow’s walk.
The stairs rose, endlessly. My legs wavered and I could barely breathe. I thought—I stopped thinking and stepped, and stepped. I didn’t call to Leo anymore. I had no breath for that.
I lifted my foot for a step that wasn’t there and almost toppled onto the platform, the first landing. Grabbing the rail, I muttered, “Keep going. Step!”
My head swirled. I was gasping with every footfall, pressing on feet I couldn’t feel. I cleared the second landing and it was all I could do not to collapse across it.
“Step.”
Wood thudded above. The carriage hitting against the docking. Stay where you are, Leo! I was desperate to yell, but couldn’t. I could only keep moving. There was no rush, I told myself; he would let the carriage settle into place before he tried to climb out. Or he wouldn’t wait. He would stand up. He would wave his lantern. He would leap over the edge.
I forced myself up, hands shaky on the railing, yanking myself upward. The wind snapped my jacket like a flag, whipped my hair against my face. Step! I pulled myself up, and up again.
A noise came from the widow’s walk. I shoved my feet down, pressed harder, and climbed. It was only when I cleared the top and looked right over the planking of the widow’s walk that I saw the cart waving in the wind and a figure bent down beneath the windows waiting.
CHAPTER FORTY
I froze against the fire tower stairs, my head just about the level of the planking on the widow’s walk. The fog was thicker up here, sucking a dimension out of everything, leaving the fire-watch room and the figure huddled beneath its windows flat sketches of grays. I stared at the form, unable to judge size or intent.
A gust shook the stairs as if they were four stories of toothpicks on the top of the mountain. The pulley carriage swayed. I strained, desperate to make out Leo still in it. A second gust jostled me loose. I grabbed for the post.
The huddled figure had moved away from the wall, closer to the pulley carriage.
Covered by the cacophony of sound and shaking from the next gust of wind, I swung around the railing, up onto the walk and in one leap was next to the figure, arms extended, hands clasped like a baseball bat.
“Stop!” Roshi sputtered, and sank to the flooring.
I just caught myself in time. “Roshi! Omigod! However did you manage to get yourself out of the carriage?” My words were lost in the wind. I half lifted, half dragged him around the corner and inside the fire-watch room. The room was almost as icy as the outside. I spread out the sleeping bag, helped him onto it, and pulled the other side over to cover him. Then I pulled off my coat and made a pillow to keep his head off the hard wood floor. It was a sign of how wasted he was that he didn’t object.
“The lantern,” he said.
It was outside, standing next to the wall by the carriage. The rough trip should have broken the globe or sloshed out the kerosene, but Leo must have focused his whole attention on protecting it. Old and dried out as the wood was up here, that lamp could have sent the whole fire tower up in smoke.
Leo looked spent. Like Maureen he had used every bit of energy on the trek. I tucked my coat sleeves around his shoulders and fussed with squirming nylon sleeping bag trying to create a cocoon for him.
“Oh, Leo,” I moaned, wishing for words for the amalgam of love, fr
ustration and fear I felt for this man.
After a while he said, “Put the lantern on the cabinet over there.”
“What about the skull?”
“Stick in inside.”
I must have gasped or something, because Leo actually laughed.
“Darcy,” he said, “it’s just a piece of plastic.”
“Plastic!” I held it to the light. It may not have been bone, but it was a very good likeness. “Maureen said—”
“Maureen chooses to imbue it with spiritual meaning. That meaning is her illusion, in her head. Not in the plastic.”
“Suppose it was a statue of the Buddha, would we still plunk it inside like a disused ashtray? Would it still be just plastic?”
He reached up with his fist and knocked on my forehead.
“Ah, ‘There’s nothing that can’t be replaced, except what someone didn’t want to tell you to begin with.’ Who said that?” he demanded in a completely different, all business, tone.
“You did, Roshi.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“After Aeneas took the Buddha off the altar. A while after.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“I don’t know. Someone told me. Why?”
“It doesn’t sound like me. What I probably said was that no ‘thing’ can’t be done without. You know why, Darcy?”
I nodded. “There is no bodhi tree, no mirror or stand; fundamentally nothing exists, so there’s nowhere for dust to land.”
“I was going to quote Suzuki-roshi: Things change. But the Sixth Patriarch will do.” He held my gaze a moment and he grinned, a big full grin like I remembered from the truck driving in. “As for the part about what someone didn’t want to tell you to begin with being irreplaceable, I don’t know who said that.”
But I did. And I understood why it had been said, and what was in the manila envelope.
He motioned me to get zafus out of the cabinet and go ahead with placing the lantern.
“But Leo, there’s a killer out there. If I put that light up there I might as well hang out a sign, ‘The Roshi is in.’”
“For anyone who didn’t notice the pulley?”
“Well, yeah.”
He maintained the smile. “Pulley was half an hour ago. Only one here besides me is you.”
“He could be waiting till I leave.”
“Go.”
I gave up. I mean, what was I going to do with the man? I couldn’t cart him back down the hill, not weak as he was. So I stuck the plastic skull in the cupboard, and replaced it with the lantern. The cupboard held two worn zafus, which I pulled out for us. Roshi was quite particular about his spot against the blank wall. He wasn’t looking straight on to the door, he was facing the spot next to it. And that was where he motioned me to sit. I tried again to wrap the squirming sleeping bag around him, as I had with Maureen, and somehow in that effort I understood the sincerity of her practice. Meditating on the skull up here was like a flashy pirouette; her real practice was just the basic steps of being at the monastery, working the garden, storing the cabbages for sesshin, staying out here winter after summer after winter, wrapping herself in the miserable nylon sleeping bag as he was. It was staying here in spite of her fear and suspicion that Leo was a killer, because at gut level she had never really believed it and she loved him too much to leave him unprotected.
I was glad that she was down in the monastery, safe in Barry’s room over the kitchen and that, finally, she had her teacher back.
Now Roshi was doing for the killer what she had done for him, giving him the chance to reclaim himself.
The gusts rattled the windows. A steady draft slipped under the door and wound up over the top of my socks under my pant legs. In zazen the gaze is supposed to be downward, but I glanced at Roshi. The lantern threw wavy shadows over his face, emphasizing bushy eyebrows over sharp cheekbones. I don’t know whether he felt my gaze on him or if he’d just been worrying about me, but when he raised his eyes and met mine his small sweet smile almost made me cry. It was gone in an instant and his face melted into a fuzzy outline of regret.
A moment passed. His eyes narrowed, his jaw tightened.
“Go, Darcy.”
I didn’t go. I sat down on the cushion, crossed my legs, put my hands in the mudra, right hand resting in left, thumbs touching lightly. Despite the wheeze of the wind, the windows crackling, and the imminent prospect of footsteps on the stairs, there was an odd uneasy calm here, like being in the eye of a hurricane. I found I was aware of the movement of my breath, the cold air on the bit of shin I hadn’t quite gotten covered. My eyes shut. What I saw was the hillside, bracken-covered, fog-dimmed, the meld of this hill and the one in Tilden all those years ago. My throat tightened; my skin went clammy; I was desperate to escape. I breathed. The spicy bite of incense tinged the air. I “heard” my brothers laughing, as they walked away from me. How could they? How could they have just left me there? I’d been screaming! How—Roshi shifted. I shot a glance, but he was okay. And when I closed my eyes I was back abandoned in Tilden Park, hearing my brothers, the responsible ones, giggling as they walked away. The incense was thicker; I inhaled.
And then I laughed.
“What?” Leo demanded, grinning himself.
“My very responsible brothers were smoking grass. No wonder they didn’t want me to tell Mom.” I couldn’t stop chuckling. Mom would have taken their heads off.
The light sputtered. I jerked my eyes toward it. It danced and settled.
Leo, Roshi, sitting against the far wall of the fire tower was still looking over at me. “Darcy, you think you’re protecting me. But you’re not; you’re only putting off what has to happen.”
“It doesn’t have to. Not here!”
“Here, is where I have chosen—away from the zendo and the grounds, where it is private—”
I started to protest, but he silenced me with his gaze.
“Here,” he said, “where it is dokusan.”
“But—”
“There will be two of us involved. I am doing this for both of us. Without this, I cannot go on. Do you understand?”
I nodded. I did understand. But I wasn’t leaving, and Leo understood that.
I sat listening to the sounds, feeling the cold on the slice of exposed ankle as if only that small bit of my body existed, its cold smothering the passable warmth of the rest. Drafts stung the edges of the skin where the covering of slack leg stopped; it dug through flesh to bone, icing the fibula, like steel on steel. I felt that small, all-consuming patch of cold, and I thought of the manila envelope Aeneas had stolen.
“There’s nothing that can’t be replaced, except what someone didn’t want to tell you to begin with.”
“Darcy!”
Who could have predicted my siblings’ secret plan to smoke marijuana on a family hike in the woods would lead to my years of fear? Who could have imagined Aeneas’s casual grabbing of a manila envelope would end with him dead? No wonder my brother John had been stunned that my fear of the woods was still a big deal. I was the little kid scrambling to keep up; I had always laughed about it with the rest of them. Right now he was probably berating himself for not checking on me every year after the Tilden event, making sure I was unscarred.
But the killer had checked on the red maple, made sure it wasn’t in danger of being dug up. When Leo announced this was his last sesshin, he brought it all to a head at this sesshin.
Cloth rustled. I pretended not to hear. I ignored the groaning of the wooden structure. I couldn’t deal with Roshi’s demand to leave, not yet. If the killer had stayed with Aeneas’s body, called for help, said Aeneas slipped off the bridge, no one would have doubted him. But he looked at Aeneas’s body which covered the manila envelope, and assumed the envelope with its irreplaceable document was floating away downstream. He had to choose. He went after the envelope.
A hand touched my head.
“Roshi—”
But it wasn’t Roshi.
/> CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Damn Gabe Luzotta and his fucking rental car!” Barry yelled. He filled the doorway of the fire tower. His corduroy pants were thick with mud almost to the hip, his navy V-neck sweater was ripped at both shoulders, and his blue shirt sweated through. If he had worn a cap it must have caught on a branch somewhere on the hillside, and there were blood-caked scratches on one side of his shaved head. He was panting, glaring down at Roshi. I could hardly believe he was the sweet guy who had loaned me his anorak. He gasped in air, seeming to swell even larger, and yelled, “I ran the whole way; the path’s almost as bad as the road. Damn you, Leo! If you hadn’t announced you were leaving, and made this sesshin a big deal, last chance ever sesshin, Gabe fucking Luzotta wouldn’t have hot-footed it out here. And his damned rental car wouldn’t be stuck in the middle of the road.”
The car Gabe had complained about that first day I met him! Of course it would be blocking the road. Gabe had abandoned it and hiked in on the path! All Barry’s work, his isolation, his fine imported equipment, to create the perfect batch of chocolate, and now that chocolate was stuck in the front seat of the truck miles from the paved road.
Hot sweat vaporized off his scalp. “I spent six fucking years here to get myself in shape to go back to the Cacao Royale. I sat every fucking sesshin so I could learn to be calm enough to handle the contest. And now . . . now you do this!” His hands were on the doorjambs, as if they were all that restrained him.
I was too stunned to move.
Leo looked up at him, no sign of fear in his face. He seemed to be considering what to say.
Don’t! I wanted to shout. Keep still. Don’t set him off! On impulse he’d tossed the peanut oil in his other contestant’s vanilla tart. And now Barry was just waiting for Leo to stoke his rage. He was so furious he could barely breathe; his breaths were like great crackling thunder. How could I have missed him coming up the stairs? Leo must have heard him, why didn’t he warn me?