Blood on Their Hands (Mystery Writers of America Presents: MWA Classics)

by Brendan DuBois

  One of the old Wendaban skiffs was floating unmoored out in the wide bay, the result of too many lines being tied and untied, she guessed. She called Tom outside, who saw it right away, and they got into his runabout. “Let’s go get the stray,” he said, while she pushed them out from the other boats, and he backed up. She felt like they were running away—doing something daring going off together—the clouds, the boys, the fallen banner, even the voices getting more robust, And he laid down his hammer and he died, Lord, Lord—for those moments as he stood at the wheel and headed slowly toward the skiff, she believed in their own youth and goodness, and with no thought of the past she turned his face toward her and kissed Tom the golden Hackett boy who had, she was pleased to see, the good sense to shift into neutral while she did.

  She liked it that he said nothing afterward and as they approached the skiff she took a boat pole to pull it alongside so she could grab the bowline. At first she thought it was a paint rag in the old rowboat, but she couldn’t figure it out since no one had been using it. The hulls of the two boats were jostling as Tom kept the runabout in neutral. “We can just tow it—” he called to her, but she cried out and scrambled over the gunwales and into the skiff.

  There, laid out on the middle seat, was a very old red shirt.

  Her head was coming off from a headache no amount of aspirin could reach. She slept badly, twitching in and out of sleep, and cried at the thought that the fundraiser for the Wendaban Center for Environmental Studies was going to find her pale and baggy-eyed and bedeviled. Yesterday she had wanted to load the skiff with rocks until it sank, bearing the red shirt to the bottom. But she folded the shirt instead and locked it inside the small steel safe in her grandfather’s closet—just so it wouldn’t disappear again. As she handled it, her fingers felt detached from her body.

  By the time the guests started to arrive, she had changed into a yellow summer shift and managed to smile and pull off the handshakes, thankful that Tom Hackett and Guy eased into the void she couldn’t help creating. Someone handed her a drink that was even paler than her face and she stood as straight as she could and listened to Tom Hackett tell an important dean from the University of Western Ontario that he was prospecting for diamonds in the province. And she listened to Guy tell a woman from the Toronto Globe and Mail that two of Wendaban’s outbuildings would be converted into labs. And she listened to Benoit tell everyone that the tiramisu, if he must say so himself, was particularly excellent. Somewhere out back Kay and Luke—who had buttoned his top button and added a string tie for the occasion—were quietly hosing down a kitchen table they had dragged outside when the champagne punch bowl had shattered.

  Jo got through the video presentation without watching any of it. At ten-thirty Minette invited anyone who wanted to do wishing boats to come down to the dock. A few who were staying the night went upstairs, but Jo watched several others follow Minette, their way lighted by the Chinese lanterns Cheryl had driven all the way to North Bay to find that afternoon when they got the word from the ministry that the fire ban made torchieres out of the question. Minette had unscrewed the dock lights and one by one the shadowy guests set out on the lake a flotilla of lighted candles fixed on cardboard squares, launched with silent wishes. In the windless night they were tiny flames adrift until the cardboard soaked through and they sank.

  Jo watched them go from inside the double screen doors, while Guy, Tom Hackett, and the others were left looking at the architect’s plans for renovating the outbuildings. “Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl—” No, not now, Jo pressed herself into the logs of the front wall, not here—the same awful voice—but she didn’t have to answer and none of the guests would know she was Cabin Girl—

  “Jo—” Tom Hackett moved toward her, “—do you want me to get it this time?”

  She shook her head as people turned to look at her.

  “Cabin Girl,” Black Heart—who knew she was listening, knew he didn’t have to raise her again, knew formalities meant nothing when the accusation was murder—went on in that high, malevolent voice to a room that was completely silent, “tell them what you did with her clothes after you killed Christine.” Jo started up the stairs as she heard Tom explain to the others that Jo had been the victim of a wicked joke. She nearly laughed at how reduced it all sounded, then found herself listening almost like a normal person to the woman reporter coming toward her who was wondering what Jo wanted her to do with the laundry in the bathroom of room #12. Jo said she’d take care of it.

  She walked through #12 to the bathroom and swung open the door. Submerged in the tub half full of water was a white sleeveless top and green shorts. She stared at them for just a second before she shrieked, seeing Christine peel them off at the top of the diving cliff.

  Luke was first into the room. “What the hell—?”

  Jo stumbled out of the bathroom. “It’s a mouse.”

  “It’s not a mouse.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “What happened?” He looked into the bathroom.

  She saw it all. “You were in here today.”

  “So?”

  “You made up the bed.”

  “So?”

  “Who are you?” she hissed.

  “Why does it matter?”

  She yelled at him to get out—get out for good—and it was Kay who put her to bed in her old childhood room down at the sunset side of the lodge where the logs sloped and girls cuddled safe under the covers for years and years until they were very old women together. She knew it was Kay who kept the others out—she heard her arguing out in the hall with Tom Hackett and Minette—and little by little as the lodge grew quiet, she didn’t know who had decided to stay overnight with the crazy screaming murdering lodgekeeper and who had gone, instead, to the mainland on a wild night ride with Ellroy the tattooed cabby. She felt an isolation she could never repair as long as she stayed at Wendaban, but whether she died in her sleep or lived to leave the lake forever was a matter of complete indifference as she pulled the covers over her head and she dreamed once again of Christine.

  In the morning, she rowed the old skiff the two miles to Stone Maiden Cliff, in a bay near the opening to the North Arm. Kay watched her go from the edge of the main dock. The sun was strong and the clouds were mountainous, cut sharply into the sky as the wind kicked up. At the base of the diving cliff she tied up to a stringy overhanging cedar and listened to the boat bang rhythmically against the small rocks as she started the steep climb. It was harder at thirty than it was at thirteen. Her feet slid back, her hands could hardly pull her up, she weighed more. She made it to the top of the twenty-foot cliff and rolled in the brown fallen pine needles, the way they always did, for flavor, Christine said.

  It had been a quick, quiet row that night, sometime close to midnight when they were not supposed to be out. But it was July and they knew the lake well and they wanted to swim naked by starlight. They tied up out of the wind and scrambled to the top and lay there on their backs holding hands for the longest time. The moon was up, so the stars were fainter, but Christine pointed out Perseus. Then they stood up and stripped quickly, Christine peeling the white sleeveless top and green shorts, then kicking them behind her. At the edge they looked down at the cliff, the way it sloped in one place into a slanting shelf, the way a red pine sapling was growing bright and hopeless right out of the rock. They jumped together the first time, the way they always did, and crawled like naked dripping white monkeys back to the top. It was exhilarating, slamming into the water they could barely see in the black Temagami night. They clung to the sheer vertical face of the cliff as they treaded water, the little waves drawing them, pushing them, the rock so strangely warm still against their skin. They sputtered and groaned and laughed from the cold.

  Then at the top Jo stood shivering and stamping her feet with a sudden chill, her arms tight across her chest. And in the next moment Christine changed their lives forever by stepping in close and putting her arms around Jo, who froze. Ch
ristine kissed her first just next to her mouth, then on her mouth, whispering, No one will know. And what happened next was a struggle that made her sick the minute it lasted—Christine saying her name over and over—Jo first trying to get out with a smile and ripping her brain apart to make sense of losing her friend forever while she had never held her closer—the soft kisses, a hand on her waist, the powerful foreignness of the flesh next to hers—and then she kicked—and then she pushed, oh yes, she pushed—and the scream was a gulp, but Jo was pulled over, too, aware all at once that she was stopped by the sapling and her head slammed into the rock, and the hands that slid down to her ankles dropped away and a terrible weight was gone for good.

  Sixteen years later, she lay crying quietly on her back at the top of Stone Maiden Cliff and thought about all the campers and canoe trippers and lovers who had been here diving since that night. She tried telling herself she had been thirteen and that tenderness is only something you can learn when you’ve been afoot in the world long enough to see how bleak all things are without it. Her name would cease to be a good name if she stayed in Temagami because Black Heart would see to it. Suffering, he was telling her, wasn’t in recollection—it was in exile. Early that morning she had found her grandfather’s old personnel files in a storeroom near the back of the lodge. The nurse, Aimee Delacroix, Wendaban employee for two years until her daughter died and she left Temagami, was divorced with one son—Jean-Luc Delacroix, four years older than Christine—“Bright young man, good with his hands,” her grandfather had written in the margin. “Can we use him somehow?”

  Here is how the story begins: night fishing with old Will Stanley some sixteen years ago. He begged the old man to take him out. Night fishing: flashlight when you need it, cigars for warmth and satisfaction, navigating by the moon, whizzing off the boat, even, now and then, a fish. They were anchored off the far side of Stone Maiden Cliff when the girls went over. The boy, who was in the bow of the boat, saw it happen. Will Stanley muttered shit a couple of times and quickly started the motor. He and the boy nearly fell out of the boat to get to the one lying white and broken in the shallows. This one’s dead. Will Stanley said to the boy who was trying to keep the discovery, the sight of all that death and nakedness, down in his stomach. Leave her. A loon called somewhere close by, and the boy jumped. Leave her?

  She’ll be found in the morning and you’re not even supposed to be here and I’m an old Indian standing here with two naked white girls and I only have just so much explanation in me, boy. Will Stanley scrambled up the side of the cliff to the sapling on the shelf, where the other girl was knocked out, and managed to hand her down to the boy, who didn’t know where to grab her. She was banged up and knocked out but he grabbed her around the ribs since it made some sense and yielded him a quick feel that was goddamn the least she owed him after what he had just seen—

  Will Stanley dressed her in his red shirt and set her carefully in the Wendaban skiff. Then he pulled the dead girl up farther on the rocks out of a kind of decency, the boy thought, and said, I’ll row this one back and leave her out of sight. You give me half an hour and come after me, and I’ll get you home as soon as I can. The boy watched him row away toward Wendaban, bare-chested, an old man with just so much explanation in him, and he grew darker and more indistinct as he went. When he was out of sight, the boy sat near the dead girl until he couldn’t take it any longer and climbed shivering to the top of the cliff to collect the clothing. It wasn’t until later that he could see—with no more explanation in him than the old man—there was no easy way to return the clothing of the dead.

  It has taken two days since he set the ax next to the furnace to feel satisfied with the letter he wrote confessing to the events of four years ago, and the contents of the other envelope, a deed addressed to Cabin Girl. It is 2 a.m. and sleeping upstairs is a woman named Diane be found and married just after he drove Jo Verdyne forever from the lake and then never answered any of her calls. Overhead is a single light, seventy-five watts, enough to work afterward with the razor. A good light is everything, Will Stanley used to say without much more in the way of explanation. But to Will Stanley, everything was everything. A good net is everything, boy, he’d say. And other times, A good meal is everything. But surely a good ax is something, Will Stanley? And a good razor?

  No one answers.

  If he had a wishing boat, he would light the candle and launch it from the main dock of Wendaban, many hours away from this house in Nashville that has no meaning for him, and wish that he had never bought the Wendaban property through a holding company when Jo Verdyne put it up for sale and then never brought the wrecking ball in by barge. Much of the lodge had to be dismantled—dismembered, someone called it that day, and that seemed closer to the truth—and the very deep wrongness of it all didn’t strike him until sometime after the rubble had been cleared away. He stood bewildered that he didn’t feel more pleasure in getting what he had worked toward for months. And when the drilling yielded nothing, after all—not so much as a speck of kimberlite— he thought for the first time in his life that maybe he was a fool.

  No, not a fool, exactly, because he had always been a clever man. No one, for instance, the night of the fundraiser at Wendaban, had seen him slipping his hand under the table where the VHF radio stood and detaching the Walkman he had Velcroed in place. By then Jo was shrieking in the upstairs bathroom and everyone was rushing over to the stairs. Black Heart’s last message to Cabin Girl had been prerecorded, and was just about as fine an alibi as a man could want.

  He picks up the Sears Craftsman ax that someone named Jimmy sold him and starts up the basement steps. It is time to gather in those parts of him that will suffer when the letter is found. If he had a dog, he would have to gather it in for it would be the dog part of him that would remember forever what he had done. Now he will gather in the wife part of him that will only feel shame, but the blunt end of the ax is a good gatherer. And afterward the razor will draw a quick hard line below his chin and say there will be no more lies or false smiles from everything above this line. Do good for the people, when you grow to a man, you hear? Will Stanley told him softly from the darkened stem of the boat as they fished quietly off the far side of Stone Maiden Cliff. I will, I promise, the boy said, but he stopped baiting his hook as the wind edged them closer to the front of the diving cliff and he looked up and saw something remarkable. Two naked girls kissing. He knew them. Their heads and arms and hips moved in the starlight that excluded him for all time. You got the money, Tom, boy, but you also got a good heart. And a good heart is everything—

  One of Us

  Tom Savage

  “Aren’t you ready yet?!” she cried as she burst into the bedroom. “We’re supposed to be there at seven, and it’s already six-thirty. I swear, you’ve been lying there for hours! What have you been doing all this time?”

  “Thinking. I’m not really looking forward to this.”

  She rolled her eyes and emitted a long, pained sigh.

  “Of course not,” she muttered, dropping onto the stool before the vanity table and inspecting her face in the mirror. “I suspect you’ll be very uncomfortable, which is exactly what you deserve.”

  “You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?”

  She swiveled on the stool to look at her husband, who had not risen from the bed.

  “You’re so quick, Robert!” she hissed. “Nothing gets by you! Now, get up and get dressed, for heaven’s sake. I’ve even laid out your dinner clothes on the chair over there. I swear! Lying there, stark naked. It’s positively indecent!”

  “You used to think it was sexy.”

  She picked up the lip gloss from the table and began expertly painting her already perfect lips.

  “That,” she sighed, “was before all this.”

  “Oh, boy. Here we go again.”

  She glanced at his reflection in the mirror. He was sprawled on his back, one arm flung over his face as if to shield his eyes. Poor dear, she
thought. He always does that when he can’t confront something, just like a little boy. Well, too bad!

  “Look,” she said in that kindergarten teacher tone of voice that had always infuriated him, “I think I’m being very good about this. I should kill Valerie! Most women would, but not I. Oh, no, my dear, not I! I’m going to her house for dinner, of all things. Now, if that isn’t civilized, I don’t know what is. It’s more than civilized. It’s positively Noel Coward!”

  “We don’t have to go, you know.”

  She picked up her silver-plated hairbrush, contemplated throwing it at him, and thought better of it. Instead, she ran it through her sparkling gold pageboy.

  “Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you, Mr. Casper Milquetoast!” she said. “Forty-six years old, and you’re still afraid of embarrassing scenes. Well, I’m not. In fact, I’m rather looking forward to it.”