Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  “Right. Could have killed it. Too soon,” Candace muttered, a child at her lessons. With no change of expression, the wisp of a girl retrieved the homemade weapon, returned to position and planted her feet as before. This time she gripped the spear more tightly.

  Before she set about her work, Anna had just time enough to wonder how long the thirteen mice had lived before succumbing to their final crucifixion on the outhouse wall.

  Not wanting to kill “it” too soon, Candace concentrated jagged thrusts at Anna’s legs and feet. The paring knife was sharp, but short of a direct stab, couldn’t cut through the heavy canvas and leather of Anna’s hiking boots, and she focused on catching the knife with the soles and sides of her feet. Twice the narrow blade slipped above the boots. Blood began to flow. Anna was glad for her cordovan-colored socks. She had no desire to know how much damage she was taking.

  Each kick grew more difficult. Her legs and back were already tired from the push down from Loomis. Fortunately Candace had taken that same road. On top of that, the girl had been starved and tortured till she had scarcely any strength left. The spear thrusts weakened rapidly as her pencil-thin arms tired. To compensate she began taking little runs at Anna, spear held fast to her side. These were easier to gauge and so avoid. Once, she got close enough Anna managed to land a bloody boot on her shoulder and knock her down.

  The macabre scene wore on Anna as much as the sheer physical force required to keep lifting and swinging legs grown heavy and unresponsive as wooden prosthetics. Sweat she could not wipe away blinded her, yet she dared not blink too long because child-of-Satan would be coming at her again.

  Candace did not sweat—probably too dehydrated and malnourished to spare so much as a drop of water or a pinch of salt—but she gasped for breath. Anna began to lose track of who Candace was torturing, the ranger cuffed to the ladder or the abused child holding the spear.

  After a couple of minutes, she didn’t care. The two of them, like Prometheus and the vultures, seemed locked together in an eternity of misery.

  So engrossed was Anna in this hellish pas de deux that when the front door banged open it took her completely by surprise.

  Alexis and Beth were soaked from head to toe, hair streaming water down their backs and faces. Buddy was wet from the chest down. His duty belt had been slung around his neck to keep it dry. Fern was a fishing lake—too cold for swimming—but the waters were clear. The package with the body would have had to be stored out a ways in deeper water.

  “Buddy,” she cried, never before so glad to see a corpse-bearing serial killer. In her moment of distraction, Candace rushed in. Pain so deep it encompassed the marrow of her bones, and the fillings of her teeth screamed through her. It wasn’t a cry, it was the shriek of an enraged and hurting animal.

  Candace fell back. Buddy and the other two girls dumped the dripping body bag they carried between them.

  Candace’s spear stuck out from Anna’s leg where the tip of the paring knife was embedded in her shin bone. Anna tried resting the shaft on the floor but it only brought another tide of pain so rapacious it nearly took her consciousness.

  “My, my,” Buddy said. “How fast they grow up. Before you know it they are off killing people of their own. Interesting, isn’t it? How there is no baseline of decency, honor, compassion—God, if you like—sugar and spice grows up with a knife.”

  Anna could barely hear him through the clamor inside her head. His smug, self-satisfied smirk conjured up a rage so intense, for the briefest of moments, it anesthetized her to the knife embedded in her bone.

  “Let me give you a hand,” Buddy said solicitously, enjoying the role of sane, kind man every bit as much as he did that of giggling monster. With him, they were one and the same. He stepped in front of Anna and leaned down to pull the spear from her leg.

  This was it, the one chance. Slim as it was, she took it. Calling on what reserves she had, Anna wrapped her legs around him and locked her ankles. No time to find the perfect position, she held him around his waist and his left arm in an awkward scissor grip. With a twist of hips and back she levered him off his feet. Luck, so long conspicuous by her absence, threw Anna a bone: the gun belt flew from his neck and slid into the relative darkness at the kitchen end of the room. Setting her jaw, she squeezed with the strength of someone who has no need to save anything for later.

  He bellowed with surprise and began hammering at her. She ignored the blows from his free right arm. They were of no significance at the moment. She couldn’t hold him more than fifteen or twenty seconds. Half a minute at most.

  “Kill him,” she screamed at the girls. “Do it. Do it. Kill him. Fucking kill him.” Candace stood motionless, the robot switched off. Alexis and Beth looked first to one another and then the cabin door. “Now. Quick. Chairs. Logs. Kill him,” Anna begged. “I can’t hold him much longer.”

  Her legs were weakening. Buddy was moving, squirming. He had his feet back under him.

  “Run,” she yelled at Beth and Alexis. “Run away!”

  For some reason they both looked at the corpse of Robert Proffit on the cabin floor. The sight of the black plastic, running with water, black and shiny and elemental in the ugly light from the Coleman lamp, threw a psychic switch. As one they ran at Buddy, screaming and clawing. They kicked and bit. Beth grabbed the fire poker and, two-handed like a baseball player at bat, laid into his back and legs. Several of the blows struck Anna and he fell from her scissor grip to the floor. Alexis took up a cast-iron frying pan. Again and again she brought it down on his hands, head, arms.

  Buddy curled up in a ball. The girls were crying, weeping, shrieking, uttering visceral grunts that, before this night, Anna would not have believed could come from the throats of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls. Then Buddy was still.

  The pounding didn’t stop.

  “Enough,” she yelled, perhaps a bit later than an upstanding law enforcement officer should have. Beth and Alexis were past hearing.

  Candace reappeared from the edges of Anna’s vision and snatched up the homemade spear that had fallen from her shin in the struggle.

  Whether Candace intended to dispatch or defend her master, Anna hadn’t a clue. “Look out,” she yelled at no one in particular.

  The paring knife poked Alexis’ thigh, then Beth’s shoulder. The beating stopped and the three children—schoolmates, playfellows, confidantes—stared at one another over the curled-up body of their tormentor.

  Blood seeped from Beth’s and Alexis’ wounds. Candace was spattered with Anna’s blood and that which she’d shed in the long fall from Loomis Lake to Fern Lake Cabin.

  Anna saw not children but maenads, the women from Greek mythology said to go mad on the day they worshipped the god Dionysus. They’d run wild in the woods. Any man they caught was torn to pieces, the gobbets of flesh used to festoon their dresses and hair. The myth of the intoxication of revenge and violence must have had its roots in the same bottomless well of hatred Anna had witnessed.

  “Candy,” Beth whispered. The first human sound in what seemed a very long time.

  The ersatz spear fell to the floor. Candace ran for the cabin’s back door, then was gone into the thinning darkness at the ass end of the night.

  thirty-three

  Frying pan held at ready, hatred narrowing her wide blue eyes, Alexis stood guard over the unconscious Buddy while Beth fished his spare handcuff key from his shirt pocket and freed Anna from the ladder.

  The temptation to fall in a heap was sufficiently powerful in both body and mind that for several long breaths before she dared move, Anna had to hang on to one of the rungs she had come to loathe. The bits of her that weren’t numb hurt. Both categories suffered exhaustion. She believed her lifetime’s supply of adrenaline to have been used up till Buddy groaned.

  Before he could move an eyelash she was upon him, rolling him to his stomach, one knee in the small of his back, one on the nape of his neck. Using the cuffs she’d worn most of the night, she secure
d his hands behind his back. In haste and fear she ratcheted them down too tightly. The steel cut into the flesh of his wrists. They’d cause him a good deal of pain.

  She didn’t care. It was because she didn’t, because she would have enjoyed his pain, that she loosened them. Evil wasn’t the thought; it was the deed. She chose not to identify with his acts, chose not to let the girls see her doing so.

  The first order of business was to get help. The base radio was of no use. Rising with difficulty from the prone person of Buddy Ray Stephen, she backed into the darker kitchen area to retrieve his weapon and portable radio.

  The floor was bare. In a small space with nothing to slide under or behind, the fact, unpleasant as it was, couldn’t be denied. Candace had taken them. She was a frightened child, a brainwashed serial-killer-in-training, and she had a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, three magazines of ammunition and a radio.

  “We can’t stay here,” Anna said. “We’re hiking out.”

  Alexis and Beth had hiked in from Bear Lake. They’d been half drowned, terrorized, beaten and kicked, but they said not a word of protest. They wanted out of the cabin and away from Fern Lake as much as Anna did. More.

  Anna doused Buddy with water. He came to with a theatrical sputtering that led Anna to believe he’d been conscious for a while. Playing possum. Lying in wait for an opportunity.

  She wasn’t going to give him one.

  In an act that, though not strictly by the book, was imminently sensible, she chose to hobble him. As she searched for a light, strong, cotton rope in the tool room, Beth watched her.

  Through the doorway Anna kept an eye on Alexis and Buddy. Alexis straddled a chair behind and out of reach of their prone captive. She held Anna’s service weapon trained at his head. The pistol wasn’t all bluff. A single round remained in the chamber when Buddy took the magazine.

  Buddy, chin on the floor, neck at an uncomfortable angle, stared at Anna. He’d said nothing since reviving. Said nothing and missed nothing.

  Beth folded back the clean canvas tarp Buddy had kept over the spotless, dustless floor. A square of flooring about eighteen inches on a side had been rough-cut from the planks with a chainsaw. A long hinge, the kind used on big cabinet doors, ran along one side. Opposite that was a heavy dead-bolt. Strips of rubber were nailed onto the door overlapping the cuts. Why Buddy had needed to seal cracks so narrow nothing larger than a cockroach could escape through them, Anna couldn’t guess.

  Beth squatted, staring at the crude trapdoor. “This was the sky.”

  “Don’t open it!” Alexis cried, as if once the trap were opened all the light and life of the world would be sucked down it.

  Beth shot the bolt. It moved quietly, effortlessly. She seemed surprised by this.

  “No!” Alexis wailed. Buddy never moved, never blinked. Beth raised the door, using the bolt as a handle.

  The smell of a cesspit poured upward, that uniquely foul odor of human degradation masquerading as human waste. The stink was so thick Anna half believed she could see it, a black fog threatening to poison them all. In a swift move she kicked the trap shut. The rubber gaskets snapped in place. Hell was once again trapped below.

  “That’s where you were kept,” she said flatly. It must have given Buddy such joy to know the children being so desperately sought were under the feet of the searchers the whole time, that while two armed rangers slept in the next room he could bring out one of his victims, rape her and put her back. That must have been especially piquant. How smart he must have felt, how powerful, how superior.

  Rage burned the stench from Anna’s nostrils and for a moment she saw red. Literally. The room filled with a mist the color of fresh blood and a sound like that of a winter sea. What she’d assumed all her life was a metaphor was instead a rare phenomenon.

  Till it passed she stood perfectly still, afraid, should she move, she would spontaneously combust and burn down this filthy cabin and the man who’d made it so. The psychic fire died, leaving cold ash. Vision cleared, then super-cleared, the edges of objects hyperdefined, human features thrown into high relief.

  The piece of rope she’d sought had found its way into her hand. She returned to the main room and squatted in front of Buddy, close enough he had to crank his neck to look up at her.

  “There’s a theory in psychology circles that people tend to manifest their internal lives in the external world. Those whose minds are dark and chaotic live in lightless, messy houses. You. This cabin. Neat as a pin for the public. A festering sewer beneath.”

  Having delivered this clinical observation, she continued to look down at him for a few beats of her heart. His cheek on the worn planking, his neck twisted and kinked as he stared up at her with one eye. He resembled nothing in nature, not a snake or a toad or a wounded bird. Not a person. He didn’t look human to Anna, but like a soulless alien from a sci-fi movie who’d taken on human form.

  It was easy to kill things like that. Was this how he saw her, the girls, the boys he’d killed back East, how he saw everyone but himself?

  The loneliness of it struck her with sufficient force a teaspoon’s worth of the cold ash within her soul stirred, an ember of humanity glowed. Not enough to pity him but enough to let him live.

  Buddy said nothing, just watched as she hobbled him and pulled him to his feet. In the predawn chill the four of them began the long walk out. Anna sent Buddy first, hands cuffed behind his back, steps limited by the eighteen-inch hobble rope, the tail of which she carried that she might trip him should he run. Unorthodox, possibly against park regulations, but with three adolescents, all traumatized, one armed and missing, she chose to err on the side of caution. Alexis and Beth followed her with instructions to stay close; instructions they obeyed with such zeal they trod on her heels more than once. She didn’t complain. In arranging their order of egress from the backcountry, Anna had felt she was back in the fourth grade with the story problem of how to get the fox, the goose and the bag of corn across the river in a boat that could only carry one of them at a time, without somebody eating somebody or something. If she put the girls first they would be vulnerable to Buddy behind them. She didn’t want them between her and the prisoner, yet if they trailed, they would be vulnerable to Candace should she be stalking them. Close on her heels was the best of the bad choices.

  Anna kept the pace slow both for the girls and to minimize the number of times the prisoner tripped and fell, but she didn’t make any rest stops. The girls needed to get out. Buddy needed to be put behind bars. Rita’s body needed to be recovered before the scavengers did too much damage. Rangers needed to be sent in to find Candace, a task Anna dreaded. She’d already shot the child once; she was craven enough to hope her generally beat-up condition would get her excluded from the search.

  They met no one on the trail, which was a blessing. By the time they reached the final descent to Bear Lake, the sun was rising over the hills to the east. Another blessing. The end of the journey and the coming of the light gave new energy. Anna heard Alexis and Beth talking quietly behind her. Even Buddy, though he’d yet to say a single word, seemed to be standing a little straighter, tripping less often.

  Maybe monsters did want to get caught, Anna thought wearily. Maybe he’s feeling the same relief at the end of it as the rest of us.

  Not so.

  “Ah,” he said and stopped.

  Anna’s mind, already in the parking lot stuffing him into the cage of her patrol car, took half a second to register what was happening. Because she’d been expecting it for two hours, when a childish voice addressed them from behind her left shoulder, she wasn’t the least bit surprised. There was nothing she could have done to guard against it and she wasted no time in self-recrimination. She’d gambled Candace hadn’t the strength or speed to make it down the Bear Lake trail ahead of them. She’d gambled the girl hadn’t the mental clarity or emotional stability to stage an effective ambush.

  Both had been good bets. On both counts she’d lost.
/>   “I’m going to shoot everybody,” Candace said. “We can’t go out. I’m going to shoot you all now.” Her voice was toneless and tight.

  “Not right now,” Anna said gently. “You can shoot everybody in a minute, okay? No hurry. We’re not going anywhere.”

  Candace would be standing behind the information sign where the trail forked, Anna guessed. Ideal cover, the sign was eight feet high and at least that long, built like the fake walls police and rangers sometimes used in training.

  “Can I turn around?” she asked politely.

  “I guess.”

  “No.” This was Buddy. He turned slowly, smiling.

  “No,” Candace echoed.

  “You don’t want to shoot everybody,” Buddy said past Anna’s shoulder. “You want to shoot who I tell you to shoot. You shoot everybody, then you’re alone. They lock you up. You’ve been locked up. Do you want to have to do it again?”

  Candace didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question, it was a threat. Though she had the gun and the cover and he was cuffed and hobbled, Buddy was still the figure of absolute authority: omniscient, omnipotent.

  He shifted his gaze to meet Anna’s. “You’re never as smart as you think you are, isn’t that right? How that must have blighted your life.” The smile flickered but didn’t go out. “Drop the rope and hobble and give the short girl the cuff keys.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “My life? My life? How about their lives? Shoot the tall one,” he ordered. Without hesitation Candace pulled the trigger. Spinning, Anna fell to her knees and pulled her weapon, training it on the northern edge of the wooden sign.

  Candace wasn’t visible. Freedom, escape, safety so close, Beth and Alexis had fallen several yards behind. When the gun went off they’d not had the sense to drop for cover if the bullet had missed them, or fall down if they’d been shot. Leaning together for support, they hid their eyes on one another’s shoulders.

  Another report gutted the stillness of morning. This shot was wild but not by much; Anna saw bark splinter from a pine four feet from where Alexis’ pancreas was located. Anna could have shot back. Her bullet would easily penetrate the wood of the sign and anyone standing behind it. But she wasn’t sure where Candace stood or if she were standing.