by Sara Gran
“Look who’s the fucking clever one now,” he said.
That was the last thing Cynthia remembered before Overton held his handkerchief, soaked in chloroform, over her nose and—
* * *
There was a green field. It seemed to go on forever; Cynthia was sure she could see the curve of the earth at the edge of it. And at the end of the field were Cynthia’s mother and father. They were alive! Oh, she’d always known it. Always known that they wouldn’t leave her like that. They reached out to her, and Cynthia’s heart overflowed—
* * *
“Wake up, you meddling little cunt.”
Hal Overton’s uncouth words woke Cynthia from her chloroform high.
She sat up and looked around.
They weren’t in a lush green field, as Cynthia had dreamed. Instead they were out in a wide expanse of dry, green-brown scrub, surrounded by woods thick with pine, eucalyptus, and live oak. Cynthia made a quick calculation based on the sun, the moss, and the plants around her—and saw that they were in the middle of nowhere! They were miles and miles away from a city, a town, electricity, or running water. Cynthia knew this area—it was one of the least-developed spots in the country, and due to the thick woods, one of the hardest to search.
She was stuck.
Cynthia and Hal Overton stood and looked at each other.
Cynthia bit her lip nervously. She’d been in plenty of jams before, but this was the worst.
“It’s finally curtains for you, you meddling teen detective,” Hal Overton said with a grin. “Now strip.”
Cynthia took off her clothes as slowly as she could. When she was naked, the criminal grinned. Cynthia felt his eyes take in her cold and goose-fleshed hips, her bruised thighs, lingering on the tattoo on her lower abdomen.
“And now hand over that expensive jewelry your parents left for you,” he said with pleasure.
“No,” Cynthia said, through tears. She’d given up on solving her case, or winning her battle with Overton. But this—this was too much. She felt something twist inside of her. She was drowning, drowning from the inside out, and it was like nothing she’d ever felt before: naked, with nothing to protect her.
“Not the pearl amulet Mother left me,” Cynthia said quietly. “It’s all I have left of her. I promise, promise on my mother’s grave, I’ll deactivate its sphere of protection! I’ll do it right now! But please. Let me keep the pearl. Mother wore it every day, and it’s all I have of her.”
Overton laughed cruelly and pointed his gun at her. “Hand it over.”
Crying, Cynthia unclasped the pearl necklace and threw it at Overton’s feet.
“Keep going,” he growled.
As tears fell from her eyes Cynthia took off her gold earrings, the lapis bracelet Professor Gold had given her, and the engagement ring from Dick she still wore. She tossed them all at Overton’s feet.
But as awful as it was, and as frightened as she was, there was some very tiny part of Cynthia that seemed lighter with each item she tossed over.
Cynthia had always excelled. Always won. But underneath it all, she now saw, there had always been an undercurrent of fear. Fear of failure, fear of exposure—and worse, fear of her own darker self rising up and taking over. Now she saw how much that fear had stained her consciousness, cut into her potential for joy.
Well. There was nothing to be scared of anymore.
Overton laughed at Cynthia.
“Good luck finding your way home, kid.”
Cynthia looked around, horrified.
Overton jumped into his car, and sped away.
* * *
Naked and alone, Cynthia stumbled toward the forest, crying and cursing her fate. Soon her feet and legs were cut and bleeding, and then her hands and forearms. She was filthy.
What had she done to deserve this? How did she end up here? She did everything right and somehow she still ended up in this accursed place, alone not just in body but in spirit.
She was entirely alone in the world. She knew no one would find her here.
No one but Mrs. McShane would miss her. No one, it seemed, was willing to do the job of loving Cynthia for free.
She shivered from the cold.
* * *
After the first two days she was too miserable to feel hunger, but her body shook from lack of food.
There was nowhere to go. Cynthia knew her science well enough—naked and starving and dehydrated, she could easily die from exposure before anyone found her. She was at least a hundred miles away from a paved road.
After three days she knew she wasn’t going in any direction that made sense.
She wondered if death would come soon.
“So this is how it ends,” Cynthia said to herself. “After all my adventures fighting crime, my great dates, my perfect outfits, and my 4.0 average at the junior college. I thought I was so special and now look—turns out I’m just another victim of the evil Hal Overton. Just another dead girl in the woods.”
But as horrible as it was, there was something freeing about the thought. Never again would she struggle to impress the lama or Professor Gold. In death she would never have to worry about letting anyone down again.
And then, just as everything was starting to fade to red and black around the edges, just as the ground was starting to feel indistinguishable from the air, a miracle happened: she found a stream of clear running water. She drank on all fours, like a dog. Water had never tasted so good. Nothing had ever been so enormously wet before.
She hadn’t eaten anything since Overton had abandoned her. After gorging herself on water, she rested by the stream for a little bit. Her blood was thinned and her mind was cooled, and she could think a little more clearly. After a little more water, she remembered the obvious. Fish live in water, and this water was clean and running strong.
Cynthia doubted her ability to catch fish with her hands. But there were plenty of bushes and trees around, and it was easy enough to fashion a kind of spear out of a long twig.
She watched the cold water, squatting on the bank of the stream. She failed on her first try, and her second, and her twentieth, and her thirtieth.
But on her thirty-second try, she caught a fish. Once it was caught, she didn’t know what to do with it. It flapped around on the stick, iridescent scales glimmering wet, trying to live.
Cynthia decided she would live instead.
She set the fish on the shore and let it die, and then she used the sharpened stick to widen the gash she’d made in it and held it in the water, hoping the blood would flow out. Some did. When it was as clean as she could make it, she scraped off the scales, picked off some of the skin, and ate it raw.
At first it was hard to swallow. She’d lost her taste for food, and her mouth puckered up at the first bite. But after a few bites her mouth began to water and her stomach growled and she ate most of the small fish at once.
Maybe, she thought, I will not die today.
With that thought the world around her took on a quality she’d never seen before—a kind of sharp reality that she knew must have always been there, but she’d never seen before.
Had green always been so beautiful? Had water always tasted so good?
So this is my life! she thought. This is life now!
* * *
Cynthia ate fish for three days, then found a blackberry bush nearby and ate what the birds had left. After a few more days she trusted herself enough to recognize dandelions and purslane to eat. She had no books, but she had years of study and her own intuition. A few times over the next few weeks she made herself sick eating the wrong plants, but she recovered.
Cynthia had always taken her esoteric upbringing for granted before, but now she saw how truly lucky she’d been. She knew so much, she now saw—the doctrine of signatures, plant communication, the phases of the moon.
She missed her parents.
Every day was a miracle.
* * *
From far away she heard animals—may
be wolves, maybe coyotes, maybe feral dogs. But she never saw them. She did spend time with birds of all kinds, though, who seemed not to know enough to be scared of her. She knew it was ridiculous and arbitrary, but she could only bring herself to kill the fish for food, never the birds. How ridiculous life is, she thought, that you have to kill in order to live! But that was what it was for Cynthia, at least right now.
At first she tossed her fish bones back in the stream. Then one day she noticed a hawk, just a few feet away from her, picking at the head. She’d never seen a hawk so close before. She was so lonely she ached, and had to hold herself back from embracing him. From then on, she always left her fish heads out on the river bank, and the hawk started visiting more often. Cynthia came to think of the hawk as her friend.
At first, the silence in the woods terrified her. It bore down on her, made her throat burn from silence. She tried talking to herself, but that made her feel like reality was slipping away, like she was moving into a tilted, confused world. When she wanted to use her voice she chanted or sang instead, and that made her feel sane.
Soon the silence came to be a comfort and a friend.
* * *
Days passed, then weeks. Cynthia thought that once she got her strength back, she would look for a road out again. But as the weeks passed, a road out started to seem like the plan of a silly child. Where would she go? What difference would it make? She would be in her locked room wherever she went. There was no big mystery in walking across a room. This was as good a place to enjoy the room as any.
The days got shorter, and colder. Cynthia couldn’t figure out how to make any clothes, but she did make a kind of blanket for herself out of moss and dried leaves. As the days got colder, she began to worry. But then something incredible happened. She’d gotten in the habit of going on long walks every day, to look for food and moss and just to walk. And then there it was, like an answer to her prayers: a dead coyote, not too badly mauled, coat almost intact. It took weeks to skin it and clean it, but Cynthia had a very warm, dry, fur to wear through the winter.
* * *
In spring Cynthia made I Ching sticks from wild yarrow stalks in the special method Professor Gold had taught her. When she threw them she got hexagram 186: the lotus in the mud.
Image: Lotus seeds can only be planted in the mud. Filth is a superior food.
Meaning: All life must come to an end; but your day is not today. Tomorrow isn’t looking so good either. You have one precious human life, and you’re stuck with this one: use it wisely, and try not to fuck it up.
Cynthia thought about all the locked-room mysteries she’d solved over the years as a teen detective. But life as herself, inhabiting her own body and mind, which had also seemed so mysterious and elusive, was nothing but another locked room. There was no way in or out. Even if you could escape, you’d be in another locked room: this fucked-up world, which you could get out of easily enough, but never get back into (as far as she knew) once you left.
But this locked room was all that she had—all anyone ever had, or ever would. Everything you could look for, it was here, in this room—in these woods, in this life. There was nothing else. Here we all were, Cynthia figured, locked each in our room, in this house together, and the best we could come up with was ways to murder each other.
But you could find everything you wanted in the locked room, if you looked hard enough. The most interesting things weren’t right there on the surface. They hid in the corners, under the carpet, behind the potted plants. Always getting a little farther until you stopped looking. And then somehow, mysteriously, if you proved to the interesting things that you would really listen, that you would really see them, they would come to you.
The less space you carved out for yourself in this house we shared, she now saw, the more space you left for everything else—things that were so much more interesting and important than she could ever have dreamed. And a coyote skin and a fish bone could tell you everything you needed to know, if you listened when they spoke.
* * *
At first Cynthia missed her old life in the city. But as time went on, she thought about it less and less. And as her hair turned gray and she felt her breasts sag and her face grow soft she came to appreciate her life in the woods more and more. Here she had everything she needed. Here she was really alive in a way she’d never been around other people. Here each moment was real in a way she’d never known was possible.
More and more when she looked back on her old life in Rapid Falls, her life with fancy clothes and a big house and restaurants and hospitals, she felt like she was thinking about someone else. Some overwound girl who worried all the time about things that didn’t matter at all. And while she loved that girl, she also felt a little sorry for her. Too busy with her mysteries and meditations and bills to pay and movies to see that life was passing her by before she even knew what she was missing.
Maybe, here in the woods, she’d found a way out of the locked room, she thought sometimes. Or maybe she’d just really, for the first time ever, found a way in.
* * *
One day Cynthia went back to her camp after collecting dandelions and found an envelope on her favorite rock. Across the front it said, in crooked familiar handwriting:
Cynthia
Cynthia opened the envelope. It was thick paper, maybe silk—how much she had forgotten over the years!—with a string-and-tie seal. Inside was a plain card. Written on the card was:
Cynthia,
A+.
Mystery solved.
PS: I miss you. I love you. You are my friend.
Sincerely,
Professor Gold
CHAPTER 19
THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP
* * *
Las Vegas, 2011
Remember, remember.
I was tumbling in the ocean, in and out of the waves, gasping for breath—
Remember, remember.
The waves were suffocating me and I was fighting. Fighting and losing—
Remember, remember—
I inhaled. The sharp, antiseptic smell of a hospital.
My eyes tried to open. They wanted to stay shut as much as they wanted to open. A warm net of opiates was holding me together from the inside.
Hospital.
Las Vegas.
Jay Gleason.
I slipped into a warm place close to consciousness, but not entirely there. I tried my eyes again. With a little willpower they opened. There was a feeling across the surface of my eyes that would have been pain if it weren’t for the opiates. Across the top of my left shoulder was another, much deeper, nearly sickening, kind of abstract pain.
I sat up and looked around. I was connected to all kinds of machines and IVs.
I was alive.
Everything I’d learned over the past few days fell into my head, bit by bit, block by block. My thoughts were still thick and messy, but the pieces were starting to come together. A picture was becoming clear—a picture of the past few days and a picture of the last forty years.
There are things that bind people forever. Hate. Love. Certain kinds of sex. Mysteries. And violence.
I felt him. Jay Gleason. He was here. In the hospital.
I sat up all the way. I wasn’t entirely sure I was awake. It was night and the hospital was quiet. I started taking tubes out of my arm.
I was wearing a hospital gown and hospital socks. I wrapped the gown tight around myself, twice, and tied the ties. It felt like I had stepped outside of time; I could have woken up an hour ago or a minute.
I still wasn’t sure I was entirely awake. There was a nagging, haunting echo of a thought in my head that maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was at all.
But something else was guiding me, not my normal waking self but some other part, stronger and smarter, that felt the gold thread connecting me to Jay Gleason.
I sat up. Maybe an hour really had passed by now.
Next I stood up. It took a couple of tries but I di
d it. I was in a private room. It took me a few minutes to find the bathroom and then get the sink on. My mouth and throat were sticky and dry. I drank and drank. I felt a little more real after the water, but not much.
Think, think.
Maybe I was under arrest. The door to my room was partway open and I looked out in the hall. It was empty. The nurses’ station was far at the other end of the corridor and whoever was doing the rounds taking vitals was nowhere nearby.
No cops.
I let the golden thread pull me to the man who wanted me dead.
Hospitals are liminal places, at least for the patients, like hotels or resorts or shelters—places where ordinary laws don’t apply, and where new laws would be found and applied as they demanded.
I let myself be pulled around the floor, down a flight of stairs, into another wing, avoiding hospital staff, still unsure what, if any of this, was real.
And then I felt him. He was in room 108. There was a cop, a kid in a uniform, sitting outside the door to room 108 with his phone in his hands, fingers flying away at a text or a game or whatever people like him did. Boring people.
I went back around the corner.
Was this real? Was I real? Were any of us, ever, real at all?
Either way, game or real, whatever the prize was: I was going to win.
I went through some corridors, pulled by the gold thread, until I was around another corner where I could keep a good watch on room 108 but the cop wouldn’t see me unless he was looking.
It was less than an hour before he left to go to the men’s room down another hall.
I stepped into the room. Like mine, it was private. The door shut behind me. There was a chair next to the man’s bed and I sat in it, just in time, because I wasn’t going to be able to stand much longer.
There he was. Jay Gleason. Not that different than I remembered from when I pulled a gun on him seventeen years ago. At something like fifty-eight Jay had a face that didn’t age much and likely never would. His skin was still taut, cheekbones still high, hairline just where it was. As he aged he would just get narrower and narrower until he was a little scrap of wire, and then he would die.