Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

“I did.”

  “You’re a regular Benjamin Franklin, Nisbet.”

  The jab at his intelligence caused his face to darken again. “I’m surprised you’re not asking me questions about what happened with Casey.”

  “What would be the point? I’m going to be dead soon. Knowing your master plan doesn’t really interest me.”

  He leaned his fat ass against the sawhorse once more. “You’re such a liar.”

  Of course I was lying. I wanted to stall him and keep him talking—anything to give someone an opportunity to find me. But clearly the one thing Nisbet craved above all was respect for his towering intellect and awe at his personal power. Denying his superiority, mocking his pretentious self-regard, was a risky gambit, but what other hand did I have to play?

  I straightened my spine. “You abducted a teenage girl, caged her up, and shot her full of heroin for four years. That doesn’t make you a superman. It makes you a pathetic creep.”

  He brought his hands together again, but this time he began kneading his palms, almost as if contemplating the satisfaction of throttling me. “Let me ask you something. The night you first came to my house. The night you saw Casey. Did she say anything to you? Did she cry for help?”

  “No.”

  “What was stopping her?”

  “She was afraid of Becky.”

  “Bullshit. She didn’t cry for help because I trained her to do whatever I tell her to do. I have totally erased her previous identity. She doesn’t remember who she used to be. That’s why I call her Kendall. Casey Donaldson is dead.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “So what’s your long-term goal? You have a secret harem of brainwashed women living in ratty shacks across greater Fryeburg?”

  He bounced up and down on the sawhorse. He clapped his hands together with delight. He had found the chink in my own suit of armor. “I knew you were lying! You want to know what happened the night Casey disappeared. You think it has something to do with John Blood’s old cabin, but you’re not sure of the connection. Why have I spread the word that homeless people are free to camp in those woods?”

  “I know why.”

  “Oh?”

  “Because you’re always on the lookout for the next vulnerable girl. It’s why you work the night shift on the Saco. It’s why you pick up hitchhikers and give runaways and drifters a place to hide from the world. You’re looking for the next Casey. You’re looking for girl number three.”

  “Who said there haven’t been others, Mike?”

  Nisbet had been leading me to this place from the start, the way you lead mice to a trap with cracker crumbs. The sense of failure and humiliation I had felt before rushed back like a rising tide. I pulled with all my strength against my handcuffs, causing the stanched blood to flow freely.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “There we go.” He laughed. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

  “Who’s Frank Cobb?”

  “Just a name I got off a tombstone.”

  “What happened to Casey’s baby? Was she born alive? Did you make Becky kill her? Whose idea was it to leave her to the pigs?”

  “And now I believe my work here is done.” He dragged the sawhorse loudly back into the corner. “I’m going to tell Becky to give you some time—I won’t say how much—for those questions to eat a hole in your heart. I want your last hours to be a period of reflection in which you contemplate your utter stupidity and defeat. And of course, I need to have an unshakable alibi for your time of death, not that anyone is ever going to find your body.”

  With that, the monster I’d insultingly called Fat Elvis popped a fresh stick of gum in his mouth and plodded heavily back up the stairs.

  43

  I knew why Nisbet had given me this stay of execution. He wanted to get as far away as possible from the house in the event my corpse was ever discovered. Medical examiners always say that time of death is never conclusive. All sorts of biological and environmental factors can conspire to confuse the issue. But it wouldn’t hurt Nisbet to have an unquestionable alibi for the span of hours when my heart ceased pumping oxygen to my brain.

  This was the house I’d seen under construction on the road into the homeless camp. I was sure of that much. Nisbet had bought a piece of John Blood’s land at the edge of the dying man’s property to build his custom torture chamber.

  There were no windows, of course. And the insulation above me was thick. Eventually Nisbet would decide he needed to soundproof it as well.

  For now I could hear voices. Nisbet’s and, I was guessing, Becky’s. The words were just vague sounds. But I had to assume they were making a plan on what to do with both me and the lifeless body of Steve Nason.

  They’d taken everything from me: my gun belt, my bulletproof vest, my dagger.

  Or had they? Had they found the secret pocket where I kept my spare handcuff key?

  For the first time in a long time, I felt a surge of hope. I tried bringing my chained hands around the pole to my front pocket. But I couldn’t get them that far.

  Damn it! Is the key still there or not?

  The door opened at the top of the stairs. Light from above spilled down the steps. I heard floorboards creak at the top.

  I pulled as hard as I could against one of the steel bracelets. I was willing to sacrifice a thumb if it meant my life. But all I did was succeed at opening another vein.

  I watched as Casey Donaldson descended the stairs. She had a canister of pepper spray in one hand: my canister of pepper spray this time, the one from my gun belt. In her other hand she carried another plastic bag.

  She seemed to need to rebalance with every step, the way a drunk does when taking a roadside test for driving under the influence. Her shoulders slumped. Her pupils were as small as birdshot.

  But she was still pretty, still (barely) recognizable as the vital young woman I had seen in the YouTube videos.

  She was still Casey. Even if she no longer believed it, I had to convince her of the truth.

  “Hi, Casey,” I said hoarsely.

  She hesitated on the very last stair. “He told me not to talk with you.”

  “Who did?”

  “My husband.”

  “Jeff Nisbet isn’t your husband, Casey.”

  She refused to come any closer. “That’s not my name.”

  “I met a man this morning who said it was. He was very nice. His name is Tom Donaldson. He’s lost his stepdaughter and doesn’t know where she is.”

  They must have injected her again before sending her down, because she was a sleepy, slobbering mess, barely capable of forming a sentence. “I’m not supposed to listen to you.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “To watch you.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m handcuffed to this post and I can barely see. You sprayed me pretty good before.”

  She didn’t respond, but she did step off the bottom step.

  “You can sit down if you want. Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything. I can’t do anything. I’m all tied up.”

  She refused to look me in the face. They must have warned her that I would try to persuade her to let me go. Was this some sort of initiation test? Becky had argued to Nisbet that Casey would need to kill me before they could ever fully trust her.

  “You’re over there, and I’m over here. You can sit down if you’re tired. There’s nothing I can do to you.”

  She scanned the floor around her, then lowered herself awkwardly onto the sealed concrete. She sat with her knees raised and pulled up close. She wrapped both arms around her calves but kept the canister pointed, more or less, in my direction.

  “My name is Mike Bowditch, Casey. I’m a Maine game warden.”

  “My name is Kendall.”

  “That’s strange, because you look just like the stepdaughter of the man I met this morning, Tom Donaldson. He lives in Westbrook. His daughter Casey was a student at the University of New Hampshire.”

/>   She sank her head against her knees.

  Christ. She’s going to pass out on me. “Casey.”

  Her head bobbed up.

  I made my voice soft again. “I was saying that I’m a game warden. Do you know what game wardens do? We protect fish and wildlife in the state of Maine. That means we’re out in the woods a lot. I found something horrible in the woods the other day. I was up on the Knife Creek Trail, not too far from here. It was the worst thing I have ever seen. I think you know what it was.”

  She made a gurgling noise in her throat.

  “It was a dead baby, Casey. A baby girl.”

  She slurred, “My name’s not Casey. It’s Kendall.”

  “Someone had buried this baby in a pool of mud and pig shit. They couldn’t even be bothered to dig a real grave. They just left that precious baby to rot. Who would do something like that?”

  She lifted her head, the dark strands of hair hung down, but I could see tears shining in her eyes now.

  “Do you know what the worst part was?”

  She paused, then shook her head no.

  “When I found the baby, she was being eaten by pigs. Whoever buried her there had done it on purpose. They wanted that little girl to be eaten up, so there would be no evidence that she ever existed.”

  Casey began to sniff because her nose was running.

  “But that little girl had a name, didn’t she? What was her name?”

  Her face wrinkled and turned red as she started to sob. “Kylie.”

  “Kylie Cobb?”

  She nodded.

  “She was your baby girl. She was your baby girl who died and you wanted someone to remember that she’d been alive. That’s why you scratched her initials on the tree.”

  Just then, at the top of the stairs, I heard clapping.

  It was the same slow, perfectly rhythmic, mocking applause I had heard earlier. I saw a big shadow on the staircase.

  Nisbet descended into his do-it-yourself dungeon. “That was a nice try. I was curious to see how you would go at it. I assumed it would be the baby angle. But I didn’t figure you’d bring up her stepdad.”

  “I thought you were leaving to establish an alibi.”

  “I’ve never understood why people are so willing to believe whatever you tell them.”

  I tilted my chin in the direction of the sobbing young woman on the floor. “So did she pass her test or not?”

  “Who said it was her test?”

  I closed my swollen eyes and tried to focus on my breath. I listened to my heart beating—the echo percussive inside my aching head—and willed it to slow down. I did everything I could to gather myself.

  I opened my eyes and smiled. “You should have given her the key to the handcuffs.”

  He made a piggish noise through his nose. “Really? Why would I do that?”

  “Because I knew she couldn’t save me. I understand that I’m already dead. It would have been a real test if you’d given me some incentive. I knew that all I could do was to stall her. You didn’t get my best effort.”

  “I think I did. It doesn’t matter at this point, anyway. Besides, Becky has your gun belt. I think she wants to keep it as a souvenir. She’s going to be mad at me when I tell her we have to dump it.”

  Casey hugged her knees as she cried. I wondered if, in her grief, she might still be listening to us. I hoped she was because I needed her to hear what I said next.

  “You might consider getting a vasectomy, Nisbet. If you’re going to keep raping young women like Casey here. How many other babies have you had to kill?”

  He glanced at the girl on the floor and raised one of those soft hands to his double chin, as if contemplating how I might be trying to outmaneuver him. “I told you I have never killed anyone. In retrospect I should have buried the child somewhere else. But when I saw those wild boars come through the yard, I thought … Clearly, it was a mistake, or you wouldn’t be here now. But I pride myself on never making the same mistake twice.”

  Suddenly Becky shrieked from the top of the stairs, “Baby!”

  “What?” he bellowed.

  Her voice echoed down the staircase. “There’s a police car out front. It just turned down the drive.”

  He raised his head to the ceiling beams. “Son of a…”

  I tried not to grin. I didn’t want to goad him now. If anything, I wanted Nisbet to forget about me.

  “Is it a deputy or a trooper?” he yelled.

  “A trooper. A woman.”

  Dani.

  It had to be. Why was she here? And did she have any clue of the danger waiting for her?

  Nisbet removed the .45-caliber semiautomatic from the holster on his belt and tucked it in the back of his pants. He unfastened the buckle on his gun belt and dropped it to the floor. He was going to go out to meet Tate looking as if he were unarmed.

  He glared at me, unsure of how I’d managed to effect this unexpected visit. But he didn’t have time to quiz me now.

  He reached down and pinched Casey’s neck so hard she screamed. “If he moves, put the bag over his head. You do it, you stupid bitch, or I’m going to take away your medicine.”

  She made blubbering noises to signal her surrender.

  The last thing he did was to bend down and remove his handcuffs and handcuff key from the pouch on his holster. He stuffed them in the front pocket of his baggy blue pants. He gave me a final, gloating smile. “Wouldn’t want to forget these.”

  For a heavy man, Nisbet stepped quickly up the stairs. A moment later the blower started up overhead, drowning out all sound from above, along with any cries for help I might possibly give.

  Casey and I were alone again.

  44

  I couldn’t hear a thing from upstairs, and that worried me to death. I had come to terms with the idea of dying myself, but the thought that Dani Tate might now be walking into a lethal trap—How the hell had she found us, anyway?—raised goose bumps along my neck and arms. I had believed my adrenal glands to be spent, but they sent one last burst of energy into my bloodstream.

  This was, quite literally, my final chance.

  “Casey?” I said softly. When she didn’t respond, I tried again, “Casey?”

  She raised her red-streaked eyes. This time there was no bullshit about her name being Kendall.

  Mentioning her dead baby had broken through the wall, but how could I widen the gap? Maybe if I kept repeating her real name. Nisbet had spent years breaking this poor girl’s spirit, with the goal of making her his personal slave.

  But what about Becky? What were Casey’s loyalties to that cruel and unstable woman?

  “You need to listen to me. You need to watch out for Becky. She’s not your friend.”

  Casey made no answer. Her numbed brain cells were struggling to make sense of what I was saying and why I was saying it.

  “She’s jealous of you because he wants you more than he wants her.”

  I had no idea if what I was saying was true, but Casey didn’t refute me.

  “She’s going to kill you someday. In your heart of hearts you know she will.”

  “I can’t think right now. Please leave me alone.”

  I needed to try another tack. “Tell me about your mom, Casey. Her name was Claire, right? I saw a picture of her. She was beautiful. You must miss her so much.”

  Casey’s eyelids fluttered. “My mom?”

  “We found your mom’s ring, Casey. Her diamond ring. You thought it was lost forever, but we found it.”

  “Where?”

  “It had fallen out in Noah’s canoe. Remember Noah? Remember Angie? Your friends miss you so much, Casey. They want you back. Don’t you miss them, too? You can see them again if you help me.”

  She focused her small pupils on me. “There’s nothing…”

  “When you searched my clothes before, did you find a key in my front pocket?”

  “Car keys?”

  “No. A little key. It would have been inside a small pocket in
my front right pocket.”

  Her blank expression suggested that she hadn’t.

  “I need you to do something now. I need you to reach into that pocket and feel for it.”

  Her hands were shaking.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. Please, Casey.” I swung my body around so that my right side was facing her. “Help me get out of here, and I’ll take you to see your friends.”

  She pushed herself to her feet and wobbled in place a moment. Then she took a tentative step in my direction.

  “You can do it. You’re a brave person. You’ve had to be brave to survive what’s happened to you.”

  Another step closer.

  “My right front pocket.”

  She stretched out a hand. With the other she pointed the canister of pepper spray at my face. She stood as far away from me as possible as she slid two fingers into my pocket.

  At that moment, the basement door banged open and someone began to descend the steps in a hurry.

  Before I could speak again, Casey dropped my second handcuff key to the floor. It bounced behind me, out of view.

  Becky leaped down the last stairs. Her face was ugly as a war mask. She waved my SIG Sauer in the air. The heavy gun looked huge in her small hand.

  “Put the bag on him,” she hissed at Casey. “Do it now!”

  When the younger woman didn’t move, Becky slapped her in the back of the head. “Do it!”

  “No, Casey,” I said. “Please.”

  Her face was contorted with fear again. Whatever courage she had rediscovered had deserted her. Becky, her tormenter, was simply too terrifying.

  I leaned back against the pillar as Casey picked up the bag. She advanced on me again, her mouth tight, tears streaming once more down her pasty cheeks.

  “Please, don’t do it,” I said.

  She mouthed the words, “I’m sorry,” as she pulled the suffocating hood down over my head.

  This bag, unlike the other, had a drawstring, and she pulled it tight. It was also larger and heavier—too thick for me to bite through.

  Once again I found myself desperate for oxygen, but this time I’d been prepared enough to fill my lungs before my air supply was cut off. I figured that I had, at most, two minutes.