Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  Anna did love her, she realized with a jolt. An incomprehensible alchemy born of proximity, shared humanity and nearness to death connected them as surely as the steel cuffs entwining their arms. Anna loved the sweet warmth of Candace’s body against hers. She loved the dusky smell of her unwashed hair and the memory of tears too hot to the touch. She loved that she had learned to bark rather than to die.

  Anna loved the girl with an intensity that took her breath away; she loved her enough to kill her. But not now. Not till she had to. Not till the next death, guaranteed, would be her own.

  Her arm fell away from the slender throat. Her cheek dropped to rest against Candace’s.

  The girl swam to consciousness on a scream.

  Then Buddy was upon them.

  Abruptly Candace went silent, her body stony in the circle of Anna’s arms, a rabbit frozen under the coyote’s eye hoping beyond hope it would be passed over. This time.

  Fierce glare from a six-cell flashlight a yard from her face robbed Anna of everything but a harsh vision of the afterlife. This was fine; she had no wish to see Buddy’s face.

  Candace had gone away inside herself.

  Buddy was cloaked in the absence of light.

  Anna was alone under the spotlight. “So. What now?”

  “I have made time for you now.” The words came from the black beyond the field of Anna’s vision. Buddy didn’t speak. Nor did the ersatz Raymond Bleeker. This was a new entity. One Anna wasn’t crazy about getting to know.

  “You must be taught your place.”

  In a time warp that took Anna off guard, she was suddenly in a darkened theater—a black box, really, on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Zach, her husband, slouched beside her, his bony knees wedged against the seat back in front of him, his shoulders about on a level with the armrests. Rehearsal for The Boys in the Band. The salad monologue.

  “No. Pace! Pace! I could drive a truck between lines,” boomed down from overhead. Actors, blinded by the kliegs, stared up at the light booth where the director sat behind the mike.

  “God,” Zach had explained.

  “God,” Anna said, staring into the light masking Buddy.

  “You learn quick.”

  From the white-hot glare of the cold dead night emerged a gray cylinder. Two cylinders, one melded into the other, the barrel of an efficient German-made semiautomatic weapon. Close. Closer, till it stopped four inches from the tip of Anna’s nose. Her eyes crossed and two pistol barrels crossed, swam away from one another. She made herself look away, turn her eyes to the kinder shadows on the ground.

  Buddy had come nearer. His sneakers rested either side of Candace’s thighs. Anna sat on her heels, the position she’d adopted the better to asphyxiate children. This was the closest to her he’d come. Buddy was confident. Not confident, realistic. There was nothing she could do with the deadweight of a girl in her arms, their fates linked by bonds of Bethlehem steel.

  “Open your mouth.”

  Against Anna’s will her eyes fixed again on the gun barrel.

  “What?” she asked stupidly.

  “Open your mouth.”

  Anna might have complied had she not been paralyzed by the thought that she was about to die. Her body was locked but her mind was racing. If she took the barrel in her mouth and Buddy blew her brains out through the back of her head, could he make it look like suicide? Get away with it? Anna did not intend to go to hell alone.

  “Suck it,” he said sweetly. “Suck it like it is St. Peter’s cock and you’re paying your way through the pearly gates.”

  The obscenity shocked and appalled her and she was amazed that she could be shocked and appalled by anything new a monster who tortured children might come up with.

  “Open, open, open. Suck, suck, suck.” Buddy was back with the playground singsong.

  The barrel of the SIG Sauer twitched slightly up and down as an erect penis might twitch as its owner tensed with excitement and anticipation.

  “Suck it like you love me or I’ll jam it in our little doggie here and make it go off.” Playground pervert was gone. It was the empty place within the shell that spoke.

  Anna tried to look away from the gun and failed. Molly, her sister, came into her mind, as did Paul, her brand-new husband, Taco and Piedmont and the newly acquired kitten. People and animals who loved her, who would grieve if she were gone from their lives. She thought of her husband’s god who, real or not, had imbued half the world with the concept of sacrificing one’s self for the good of others.

  Those who loved her and those who depended upon her, like the warm, still child in her arms, would be better off if she stayed alive, regardless of what it took to do so.

  She leaned in toward the pistol barrel.

  “Oh baby,” Buddy moaned, as if he truly expected a blowjob. Maybe he did. Maybe this violence was his sexuality.

  Those who needed her to live lined up across Anna’s brain. It surprised her how many had come, how many cared.

  But she’d been raised to worship John Wayne, not Jesus of Nazareth. Smiling an apology, she launched herself forward and rammed the thickest part of her skull into Buddy’s left kneecap.

  twenty-nine

  Buddy twisted away, screaming. Anna hoped she’d managed to dislocate the joint or break the kneecap. Hands entangled with the girl’s, arms around the narrow shoulders, she could do nothing to check her forward motion and fell, Candace jackknifed beneath her.

  Constrained by child and chains, the blow hadn’t struck squarely and Buddy cried out as much from rage as pain. Before she could draw breath, he was on her back, riding her. The pistol whipped hard across the side of her face, the back of her head, her shoulders.

  The speed of the battery shattered conscious thought. Anna pinned, center of gravity upended over a crushed girl, she could not defend herself, could not roll away, could not separate pain from shock. Maybe he hit her half a dozen times, maybe twenty.

  Then it was over. The whipping was frenzied, vicious but not deadly. His weight lifted and she rolled to the side lest Candace suffocate beneath her.

  Buddy retreated out of reach. She could hear him panting, out of breath from the exertion or sexually excited. Candace didn’t move. Dragging their manacled hands up, Anna pressed her knuckle under the girl’s nose. Warm air blew reassuringly across her skin. Candace still breathed.

  A shoe slammed into Anna’s back. Wordlessly, Buddy kicked and, using the six-cell flashlight, flogged her to her feet. Standing, she was able to lift her arms from the killing embrace she’d maintained around her fellow captive’s neck and pull Candace up from the ground.

  A kick hard enough to momentarily paralyze the big muscle landed on Anna’s left thigh. It would have brought her to the ground again had it not been immediately followed by Buddy grasping the waistband of her shorts and jerking her up. Still breathing audibly, he whipped and kicked them back through the woods. Grunts and gasping and blows took the place of conversation.

  Had she had time to think as she and her young chain-gang sister were driven down the dark trail, she might have been reassured. Clearly one or both of them were still of use to Buddy. Candace, she suspected, was kept on in the role of albatross. With a brainwashed girl shackled to her, Anna was effectively neutralized as a threat. How Anna herself might be expected to serve, she couldn’t guess.

  For the next eternity, they fell, were kicked to their feet, beaten onward to stumble and fall again. Gravel and needles and dirt packed into bloodied knees and elbows. Unable to break falls with her hands, Anna’s face was scraped.

  When she could breathe she tried to draw Buddy out, tried to rally an echo of life from Candace. She cursed, threatened, promised, spat, speculated and reviled. Nothing worked. Buddy panted and herded them with blows and pokes from a broken branch he’d picked up. Candace had hidden so deep within herself she didn’t cry out when she fell or when the skin was raked from her shins, made no sound when her lip split open against a stone. Anna believed sh
e would go on like an abused beast of burden till there came a time when dying held no more terrors than living. At that point she would stop and be beaten to death.

  After what seemed a lifetime, they descended the trail to the little bridge over the outlet of Fern Lake. Up on its stony rise the cabin was dark. Though Anna had the feeling it would be the end of the line for her, she felt a stab of gratitude. The forced march was over. The ground would stop rushing up from the flash-cut darkness to crack kneecaps and elbows, peel the skin from bare legs. Maybe the rough point of Buddy’s stick would stop castigating the flesh of their backs, cutting at shoulder and neck.

  Maybe that was too much to hope for.

  It was also too much to hope that Jean Claude Van Damme and Jet Li would be doing a bit of night fishing and hear calls for help. The lake was deserted, the surface calm and mirror-bright. It was considerably past midnight and the air had turned cold. What campers remained following the exodus after Labor Day weekend would be snug in their down sleeping bags.

  Anna would not have called out to any camping group less formidable than the 10th Mountain Division anyway. It would only be inviting them to step into an early grave.

  As she and Candace staggered in tandem toward the wooden steps up to Fern Lake Cabin’s door, Buddy uttered his first words since the pistol whipping a couple of hours earlier.

  “Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.” He had cheered up since Loomis Lake. Perhaps some more fun was in the offing.

  The narrow window of opportunity Anna was hoping for when he uncuffed them was never opened. In a move so sudden she never saw it coming, he smashed her on the temple with the butt of his gun. The next thing she knew he had uncuffed Candace and locked her wrist bracelets together around a head-high rung of the ladder that was bolted to the cabin wall to provide access to the small loft space. Chain-looped through Candace’s linked cuffs, Anna could bring her hands no lower than her chin.

  Chatting and bustling like a happy homemaker, Buddy began to lay a fire in the cast-iron stove. “I’d been hoping for company,” he said conversationally. “They hadn’t arrived yet when your radio call came through. Bad timing that. At first it looked like it would be bad for me—heavy-footed Neanderthals clomping around being heroes in my clean house. I shall miss this place. If it had a flush toilet I could live here. But now I have fixed things—I am a great fixer of things—and so it will be bad timing for you.”

  Candace, though freed, had remained standing in the middle of the floor, an automaton whose batteries had gone dead. The sound of water dripping caught Anna’s ear and she shifted her attention from Buddy. Urine poured unchecked from the wide leg of the men’s cut-offs to spatter on the wooden floor. The expression on Candace’s face didn’t change. Buddy’s did. The Mister Rogers mask he’d donned so abruptly outside the cabin dropped away. Beneath it he wore that of an angry nun from a Catholic schoolboy’s hell.

  “Disgusting,” he snapped. “Like a pig. Decent people live here. Clean it up. Now.”

  The dialogue was stilted and hit the ear as awkwardly as a poorly written play. At first, unsettled by Buddy’s rapid change of personas, Anna wondered if he suffered from multiple personality disorder. It was rare but occurred often enough to be taught in med school during the psychiatry rotation. Watching him, ice cold and authoritarian as he threw his words at the child soiling herself, she realized that he knew exactly who he was. The masks, the play-acting, were a game, an exercise in power, an entertainment.

  “I have to go to the bathroom, too,” Anna said before he could do anything to Candace, if that was what was on his mind.

  “Be my guest,” he said pleasantly. “Clean it up,” he ordered Candace in the nasty nun voice.

  Candace got down on her hands and knees and began to lick at the puddle. Anna was grateful it had almost immediately been absorbed by the tinder-dry wood on the floor.

  “That’s attractive,” Anna said acidly. “What’s the point of it?”

  “Discipline. And it amuses me.” He turned from lighting the kindling in the stove. Masks were gone. Instinctively, Anna knew she was seeing the real man beneath the poses.

  The most terrifying thing about the look of him was the sanity. Eyes were clear, muscles relaxed, humor of a hard and edgy sort played around lips neither too niggardly nor too lush. He had dropped the aura of a flesh-eating Jeffrey Dahmer and doused that inner burn that ate away at the jailed remnants of Charlie Manson. Not that Anna had had any personal contact with either of these men, or others of that ilk, but even through the diffusing effects of the television screen their dysfunction was visible. At least in retrospect.

  This guy, this new Buddy, was the old pseudonymous Ray Bleeker. He was comfortable. He felt like people.

  Without any more thought than a man batting aside a crumpled-up bit of newspaper, he kicked Candace out of the way with the side of his sneakered foot. She crawled from the urine stain to sit in a narrow space between the rope-sprung bed and the dining table. Anna could see nothing of her but the toes of her shoes, then they, too, were drawn from sight.

  Buddy stepped carefully around the wet spot on the boards and looked squarely at Anna.

  “I doubt you’d take well to discipline and you don’t amuse me,” he said. “I need you to assist me in a housekeeping chore. Man’s best friend there isn’t strong enough.”

  “Maybe because she’s half-starved.”

  “There is that,” he said with his razor-sharp smile.

  “Had my other guests arrived, you would have been saved a walk down the hill. As it is, my departure from this little Eden won’t be as tidy as I hoped, but it will have to do. After we’ve had our tea—the royal ‘we’ mind you, you would have trouble holding the cup in your present position—you and I will go fetch Brother Robert.”

  Of the many things Anna expected, this was not one of them. When Candace showed up with all ten digits accounted for, Anna had assumed the bone in her evidence envelope, the finger bone rescued from the wolf pups, had once carried the flesh of the vanished Robert Proffit’s pinky finger.

  But Robert was here.

  Robert was in on it.

  Psycho meets psycho in the beautiful mountains of Colorado, a marriage made in hell.

  No.

  She was to help fetch Robert because Candace hadn’t the strength. “You killed him and kept the body.”

  “Don’t make it sound so dramatic,” he said peevishly and turned from her to answer the call of the kettle murmuring on the stove. “It’s not as if I intended to eat it or make Christmas tree ornaments from the viscera. It’s a prop I need for the last act. My disappearing act. Besides, I didn’t keep it all.”

  “You threw a handful of fingers to Rita’s wolves.”

  “I was curious. They seemed to like human flesh just fine.” He poured water over his tea bag, then set the alarm on his watch before leaving it to steep.

  Her hands had been held higher than her heart for so long, the blood was draining from them. She began clenching and unclenching her fingers in an attempt to pump some back uphill. Why she might need them was not immediately apparent, but she wasn’t anywhere near ready to lie down and die, literally or metaphorically.

  A tiny beep sounded. Buddy’s tea was steeped. Having removed the bag, he wrung it out against the spoon, then held it up by the string. “Remind you of anything?”

  Anna drew a blank.

  “I’m disappointed,” he said as he tossed it into the fire. “A dead mouse maybe? Nailed to a wall?”

  He sat down in one of the ladder-backed chairs by the dining table and blew gently on his tea. There was a skittering sound that might have been Candace moving deeper into her own darkness or the little feet of Fern Lake Cabin’s mouse population.

  “I think you just reminded them why they hate you.”

  “I have evened the odds somewhat,” he said amiably. “My three pets were quite good mousers. We made a game of it.”

  In her mind’s eye Anna saw the t
hirteen mice nailed alive to the outhouse wall, the charred and bloodied remains of the Abert squirrel burned alive in her bedroom.

  Beth, when she had rescued the kitten that was to become Anna’s, had gone berserk at the sight of boys torturing it, yet had run screaming at the suggestion it be entrusted to her care. The ritual torture and murder of small animals must have been part of the package.

  As he sat at apparent ease studying her, Anna studied him. At this moment he looked sane. Mostly he felt sane. Yet, knowing what she did, he could not be defined as sane by anyone’s tenets. Not true, she realized. The world was full of killers, they simply didn’t make Lifetime’s movie-of-the-week lineup if they did it on a grand scale. If they weren’t white males between the ages of twenty and forty who kept to themselves, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, most of the boy soldiers surviving in the armies of Africa and Asia, despots from Nero to Stalin, all behaved far worse than Buddy.

  According to the rules of his kind, Buddy was perfectly sane, reserved even.

  To take some of the weight off her feet, Anna rested her butt on the third rung of the ladder. Her hands were cuffed above and behind her head and she realized she was posed like a sadist’s vision of a forties pinup girl.

  “So,” she said. “You killed those two boys—students in your freshman sociology class weren’t they? At that school in the East.”