The Girl in the Maze

by R. K. Jackson

  The treadmill console emitted a perky electronic beep, signaling that Vince had reached his goal for the session. He stepped off the machine, panting, enjoying the endorphin rush. He glanced around at some of the other patrons. Atlanta’s attractive and powerful. Silver-templed investment bankers. Buckhead hotties in spandex.

  He pulled out his Android. Odd…the call was from Frank Chen, his supervisor at the Emory Clinic. He’d never known Frank to call after hours.

  Vince pushed the CALLBACK button, and Chen answered on the first ring.

  “Vince, where are you?”

  “At the gym. What’s up?

  “Have you been watching the news?”

  “I never listen to news at the office, Frank. You know that. After work, I came straight to the gym.”

  Vince glanced past the phalanx of fitness machines toward a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. The screen carried a feed from CNN. He could make out a reporter standing in front of a white-columned mansion.

  “Jesus, Frank, what’s happening? What’s going on?”

  “Vince, I want you to come to my house right now. Don’t stop anywhere, don’t turn on the radio.”

  Vince walked toward the screen. He felt a squirt of ice water in his veins. Police cars, uniformed men. White columns wrapped with police tape. After another step, he could read the text in the lower third of the screen: DEVELOPING STORY: MENTALLY ILL WOMAN ACCUSED OF MURDERING EMPLOYER.

  “Vince, are you there?”

  Vince’s mouth felt rubbery, but he forced out his words. “Frank, what’s happened? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here.”

  Chapter 17

  Cooking meat. Sausages.

  Martha sat up in the bed. A kerosene lamp burned on the round table at the other end of the room. The shade was rolled up on the small window, the view beyond it black. Martha slid back toward the wall and looked at her right arm. The IV was gone. She crossed her arms and massaged her muscles and back, sore from the lumpy bed. But her head was clear—the doping effects of her medication had already begun to lift. With her senses heightened, the smell of the food was palpable.

  And her bladder was about to explode. She flicked the sheet aside and started to get up, then looked down and remembered. No pants.

  The door swung open and Jarrell entered carrying a plank with a pair of aluminum pie plates. The aroma of the breakfast came in with him. Martha swung the sheet back over her legs.

  “Hungry?” Jarrell asked.

  “I have to pee.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Where are my pants?”

  “Hang on,” he said, putting the plank down on a small plywood table. He went back outside and returned with her beige shorts in his hand. “I washed them.” He dropped a pair of dog-eared sneakers next to the bed. “These belonged to my cousin. She’s about your size.”

  Martha took the pants. They were wrinkled but dry and showed the remnants of a faded bloodstain. She waited for the young man to leave the room.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Nothing I haven’t already seen,” Jarrell said. “I thought you might need help.”

  “I’m fine,” Martha said. Jarrell shrugged and went back outside.

  Martha gingerly slid one of her bandaged legs into the shorts, then the other. She worked her left foot, her good one, into the sneaker. It was a loose but serviceable fit.

  Jarrell returned with a homemade crutch fashioned from a tree branch, with fabric bunched around the shoulder rest and tied with string.

  “You’ll need this,” he said. “Try to keep the injured leg still.”

  “Where did you learn how to do all this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Take a bullet out?”

  “I went to school. Pre-med.”

  Martha took the crutch and stood.

  “Where’s the bathroom?” she asked, leaning on the crutch.

  He grabbed a tattered roll of toilet paper from a beam and held it toward her. “Anywhere you want it to be.”

  —

  Crouching in the grass, Martha could see a glint of moonlight on the river through a stand of rushes. A small skiff rocked in the water, tied off to a sapling. Mosquitoes hummed in the night air.

  When she returned to the cabin, her hunger felt like it would gnaw a hole through her. Questions, so many questions, but first she needed something to eat. She took a seat at the wood table across from Jarrell, picked up a fork, and dug into the link sausages and dirty eggs.

  “How are you feeling?” Jarrell asked.

  “A little bed-sore. Fine otherwise.” Martha took a sip of water. “What about my leg? Shouldn’t I be in a hospital?”

  “They wouldn’t do anything I haven’t already done,” Jarrell said.

  “What about infection?”

  “You’ll be fine. I treated it with Neosporin. Gunshot wounds aren’t such a big deal.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jarrell speared a piece of egg, chewed, ignored her question. “What about your other condition? How are you feeling mentally?”

  “I think I’m all right,” Martha said. Her senses were alive and clear, flickering and darting. “I just need to know what happened. And I want to know who you are.”

  Jarrell pulled off his knit cap, unleashing a bouquet of dreadlocks. They waved on his head like a multistalked sea plant. “A protector.”

  “Protector of what?”

  “Of these islands, the marshes, the people who live here. Now, tell me about you.”

  “My name is Martha.”

  “I know.” Jarrell carved off a piece of a sausage on the pie plate. “I want to know about your condition.”

  “I’ll tell you as soon as you tell me how I got here,” Martha said.

  “I’ll tell you that, as soon as you tell me about your condition.” He looked at her, his faint goatee flexing as he chewed.

  Martha took another bite of sausage and felt grease dribble onto her chin. “Napkins?” she asked. Jarrell gestured toward the roll of toilet paper. She tore off a piece and used it.

  “All right.” Martha swallowed her food and took a deep breath. “I’ve been diagnosed with schizophrenia.” She paused, watching Jarrell, waiting to see his reaction. He didn’t even look up from his plate.

  “But I’m recovered,” Martha continued. “I’m completely functional, as long as I stay on my medications.” She paused again, trying to gauge his response. Nothing. “Okay, now it’s your turn. What happened? How did I get here?”

  “You were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and involved with the wrong shit, that’s what happened.” Jarrell reached into a backpack beside his chair, pulled out a copy of the Amberleen Gazette. He placed it on the table between them. “Read all about it.”

  A headline screamed from the top of the page in extra-bold, sans serif typeface: DUSSAULT MURDERED IN HOME. Below that, a subhead: DERANGED EMPLOYEE BLAMED IN ATTACK, PRESUMED DEAD.

  Martha put down her fork and held the paper in her hands, feeling the blood drain from her upper body regions. “Dead? They think I’m dead? Why?”

  Jarrell waved toward the paper, and Martha looked at it again. Below the headline was a large photo of Lydia, looking beautiful and regal. Next to that, notched into the left column, was a smaller picture—Martha, her senior yearbook photo. Smiling. Not looking crazy at all.

  The sordid reality of the murder—what she’d found that morning, in the sitting room—came rushing back at her. Martha held her knuckles against her cheeks, felt a tear trickle between her fingers. “Why? Why would anyone kill a person like Lydia? It’s so horrible.”

  “Money,” Jarrell said. “Serious money—the kind that can change people’s lives forever. Lydia was the last obstacle. Once this deal goes through, some people in this town are going to be sitting pretty.”

  “Who?” Martha asked, wiping under her eyes with a piece of the toilet paper.

  “Some of the county commissioner
s. The sheriff. They’ll get a cut of the purchase.”

  Martha turned the newspaper over. The picture of Lydia was more than she could bear right now. “So it’s all in here. My schizophrenia and everything.”

  “Your ‘secret’ is anything but,” Jarrell said. “Now, I need to know what to expect. I’ve never met anyone with your condition before.”

  “Maybe you have, and don’t know it,” Martha said. “It isn’t that rare.”

  “So, how’s it going now? Are you hearing voices, or whatever?”

  “No.”

  “So maybe you’re over it. Does that happen?”

  “There’s no cure. Sometimes I think I’m all right. That’s what Vince—my therapist—warned me about. It isn’t constant. You can go for days or weeks without an episode. You think you’re fine, but you’re not, really. Stress can trigger an episode. The key to recovery is to keep taking your meds, no matter what. That’s what they taught me at the clinic.”

  “You seem all right, at the moment.”

  “Thank you. I feel all right, at the moment.”

  “I need you to be all right,” Jarrell said. “I need you to help me. Until this mess gets straightened out. That would be real helpful.”

  “So, how did I get here?”

  “I brought you.”

  Martha traced back through the chaos of recent events, tiptoed through the memories like a minefield. “You were in the alley. You were the—”

  “Yeah, I was there. There’s a tunnel below the palisade at Planters Walk. You can row a small boat inside of it at high tide. Some people say it was used by rum smugglers during Prohibition, but I think it’s just an old service tunnel. I use it to get in and out of town without being seen.”

  “I remember something like a track. A track leading into the water.”

  “You saw the ladder. It leads down into the tunnel from inside the old cotton warehouse.”

  “So you carried me all that distance?”

  “Just down to my boat. It wasn’t hard. You don’t weigh ninety pounds, soaking wet.” Jarrell rotated his pie plate, forked a piece of sausage. “The cops don’t think it’s possible that you could have escaped. There were too many people around town at that hour. You left a trail of bloody footprints that suddenly ended. They think you just jumped into the canal, or maybe fell in.”

  Martha sat back, trying to process it all. “Why were you there?”

  “My usual bad luck. I’ve been following him. Morris. Watching what he does. But I never thought he’d go this far.”

  A faint chill glided across Martha’s skin. “So it was him. He killed Lydia.”

  Jarrell nodded. “It was either you or him. No one else was at the house that night. It wasn’t you, was it?”

  Martha shook her head.

  “Then it was him.”

  “You saw him go into Lydia’s house?”

  “I saw someone go in. I’m sure it was Morris. I was following him. He walked all the way from the courthouse, then went into the house at three A.M. He was in there for about an hour.”

  “How did he get in?”

  “Lydia let him in.”

  “Why?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Did he know I was there? Upstairs?”

  Jarrell put his fork down next to the pie plate. “He must have. He must have known something about you—I mean, about your illness. Maybe he saw an opportunity. Any reason he would know about you?”

  Martha thought back. “I went to his office. I filled out an incident report form. But my medical history wasn’t part of that.”

  Jarrell shook his head. His dark eyes looked thoughtful in the glow of the kerosene lamp. “But he found out. He must have looked into your background. I’ll give Fish-belly some credit. He may be crazy, but he’s not stupid.” Jarrell’s eyes twitched toward Martha. “Sorry—I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Martha said. “How did you get involved with this?”

  “I’ve been involved.” Jarrell put his fingers around the knit cap on the table, squeezed it hard. The tendons stood out on his arm. “I’m not going to let him win.”

  On Jarrell’s forearm, the tattoo of the snake glistened in the lamplight.

  “That symbol—I’ve seen it before,” Martha said. “It’s a gang insignia. They showed a picture of it at the commission meeting.”

  “Gang? We call it an activist group.”

  Jarrell stood. He walked over to a backpack hanging from a nail on the wall. He reached into it and pulled out a large, clear plastic bag. He brought the bag over to the table, unzipped the seam, removed a laptop computer. He powered up, tapped the keys for a few seconds, and slid the laptop over to Martha. The screen displayed an image of a large, expensive-looking white boat cruising along a river.

  “Take a look at these,” Jarrell said.

  “Nice boat.”

  “That’s his. He always wears sunglasses and civilian clothes when he takes it out.”

  Martha squinted at the image on the screen. She could make out the shape of a stocky man standing inside the cabin, driving the boat.

  “Keep going,” Jarrell told her.

  Martha clicked on the next photo. It showed the boat again, this time from a distance. The stocky man was now standing at the rear of the boat, outside the cabin, bending over. He wore a white sweatshirt and sunglasses. There was another shape inside the cabin.

  “Looks like he’s rigging up a fishing rod,” Martha said.

  “Take a closer look at the man in the sunglasses. It’s him.”

  Martha squinted at the image. “Maybe.”

  “And look at the boat. What does that tell you?”

  “That he likes to fish in his spare time.”

  “That’s not just any boat. It’s a Marquis 500. Brand-new and fully loaded. Do you know what one of those would run you?”

  “No.”

  “About one million, used. How does that square with the salary of the Amberleen County Sheriff, annual income of fifty-two thousand, according to public record?”

  “Maybe his wife has money. Is that her in the boat cabin?”

  “He’s not married,” Jarrell said. “Next photo.”

  Martha clicked the button. The image was at night, and the boat was barely recognizable, in shades of night-vision gray. A ghostly smudge of a man appeared to be descending a ladder at the back.

  “Morris again? How did you get these photos?”

  “I’ve been following him. He goes out at least once a week, usually at night.”

  “How could you? Doesn’t he—?”

  “I know this marsh like the veins in my hand. Nobody sees me unless I want them to. The fact that Morris does his stuff at night actually makes it easier for me. Next photo.”

  A jumble of vague, grainy shadows, and a small oval of light.

  “What’s happening here?”

  “That’s him, with a flashlight. He was planting evidence.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “Acetone, crack pipes, paint thinner. He puts stuff in shacks and sheds out there. Anything to make it look like somebody’s dealing, or trying to manufacture meth out on the island. He’s created a crime problem that doesn’t really exist so the commissions have a rationale to condemn the land on Shell Heap. That boat must have been some kind of down payment for his efforts.”

  Jarrell pressed a button on the laptop to begin the shutdown cycle. “Gotta save the battery.”

  —

  Later, much later, Martha lay in bed listening to the night sounds, her mind spinning. Too much sleep during the day, too many things to think about.

  Moonlight filtered through the open window, casting the spiky shadow of a palmetto frond on the wall. Her leg was throbbing. She rolled over and felt something hard in the pocket of her shorts, pressing into the flesh of her thigh. She reached down and pulled the object out. She touched its familiar texture in the darkness, traced the coil with her fingertip. The
serpent root—the protective totem Lady Albertha had given her.

  She put the root on the bedside table and rolled over again and her nostrils began to pick up a scent. Smoke? Yes—a familiar scent. Tobacco, burning cloves. A specific brand of cigarettes.

  She turned her head and wasn’t at all surprised to see a shadowy shape perched on a crate next to the left wall. A white caterpillar of ash clung to the end of his cigarette.

  You keep looking around, Lovie. Is something wrong?

  Martha turned her head away. “You aren’t here.”

  You’re just splashing around in de-Nile again, Lovie. Are you just going to lie there and take this?

  Martha tried to focus on the shimmer of the night creatures outside the window. She listened for Jarrell. Where did he sleep? Did he snore? If so…

  Lovie, haven’t you learned anything? I thought we weren’t going to be soft in the head anymore.

  Lenny fell silent. Martha waited, counted slowly to ten. She turned back and he was still there, taking a draw from the cigarette. It glowed orange. He exhaled, and faint wisps of smoke curled around the knob of his head.

  You’re in danger, Lovie.

  “I know,” Martha replied.

  I’m only concerned about your safety. You’re not being very cautious, are you? He’s out there. Now’s the time for action.

  Martha looked around the room again, as if searching for an answer.

  Don’t trust him. You can’t trust anyone. Haven’t you learned that?

  “He saved me.”

  What for, Lovie? Stop kidding yourself. What’s he really up to, right? Maybe he killed that woman. He was there, too, wasn’t he?

  Martha folded the pillow around her ears. “Go away.”

  I’m just lookin’ out for you, like I always do. You better think about it. Consider your options.

  “He’s bigger than I am. And stronger. Plus, I’m injured. I don’t have any choice but to trust him.”

  There are always choices, Martha.

  Martha lifted her head. The first thought that sprang to her mind was knife, but she pushed it away. She didn’t want to find that. Hoped she wouldn’t.