Unsound (A Lei Crime Companion Novel)

by Neal, Toby

  He doesn’t deserve to know our story, Constance said. Don’t fall for his mind games.

  A scent of cinnamon with a chaser of prunes filled the air like a solid, tasty substance. My stomach rumbled in response.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” he said.

  I shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  “People say twins can communicate mentally sometimes. Did you and Constance do that?”

  I didn’t answer even as I heard Constance chuckle in the back of my mind. I wished I’d never said anything to him about my twin, let him that far into my head. Lying on my bunk, gathering my energy, I had an insight.

  Russell Pruitt was never going to just walk away and leave me alone. Even if he didn’t kill me, it wouldn’t be enough to just escape. I had to get him locked up, get him psychiatric help. There was no other way this could end, because he already knew so much about me and chances were good he’d always want to know more. I had to dig deep, find the resolve to end this stalemate.

  I swung my legs out of the bag. “I’m just not feeling well this morning. Inhaled too much smoke, stayed up too late, I don’t know. How’s the coffee coming along?”

  “Almost ready.” Russell Pruitt turned his back, pouring hot water over the drip cone that fed into the mug.

  I stared at the handle of the butcher knife protruding from the backpack.

  Stab him, Constance told me. Upward stroke between the ribs on the right. Hit his kidney and he’ll never get up again.

  That wasn’t my style, and I was the one in charge. But maybe there was something I could do to even the odds.

  I padded swiftly over to his hoodie sweatshirt hanging off the corner of the bunk and rifled through the pockets, one eye on Russell Pruitt’s back. My hand closed around the cylinder of nitro pills and I slid it into my pocket. I was bending over my boots by the front door when he turned back. “I’ll take the rope today,” I said. “Barefoot wasn’t very comfortable.”

  “Good,” Russell Pruitt said, bringing me a mug of black coffee. “I wasn’t going to offer that to you again. We went too slow. I heard there’s an old heiau on the ridge back a ways; I think we should go find it. Your reservations call for you to leave tomorrow, right?”

  “Right.” I took a sip of the coffee—delicious—and considered what Bruce was likely doing. He’d probably blown my phone call off as some sort of DTs panic attack. But in the morning, he’d want to check on me. He’d try my cell, and it would go immediately to voice mail. Then he’d call Aloha House and find out I’d never been there. That’s when he’d crank up a rescue operation, probably by sending the Park Service to the cabin to see what was going on.

  So all I had to do was get through today, and Russell Pruitt had promised not to kill me today. Hopefully the Park Service would come soon, and it wouldn’t turn into a situation with Russell Pruitt holding me hostage in the cabin. I laced the boots up around the elastic bottoms of my now-filthy sweatpants. I still had the flashlight and the barbeque lighter down in there, but wondered if that had been a wasted effort.

  Russell Pruitt brought the steaming bowls of cinnamon-laced, prune-filled oatmeal over to the table.

  “Wow, so healthy. My mom would approve.” I stirred the delicious-looking porridge.

  “You never talk about your parents,” Russell Pruitt said. “Tell me about them.” He blew on his oatmeal, his lips a small pink Cupid’s bow in the mass of his face.

  “Ha. Tricky, you.” I waggled my spoon at him. “Still trying to psych me into telling my story.”

  “No, really. I’m interested.”

  Now that I’d thought through the situation and knew I had his promise I’d have today and had a reasonable hope the Park Service would find me before it was over, I became a little expansive. “My parents weren’t very interesting. It was having beautiful twin girls that made them interesting.”

  “So what happened to them after Constance died?”

  I was hungry, and I knew I needed my strength, but the question killed my appetite. “Your questioning technique needs work. Try nonthreatening and open-ended when your client first starts to talk.”

  Russell Pruitt ducked his head, sheepish. “Sorry. Tell me more.”

  “My mother was a homemaker and working mom of that era—you know, the eighties.” I took a bite of the oatmeal. Somehow he’d remembered to bring brown sugar, and the flavors were exquisite. I let them roll around my mouth. “Mmm. Anyway, she was a legal secretary, worked during the day while we were at school. Wore those silky blouses with the built-in bows at the neck.” I gestured. Russell Pruitt shook his head, brow wrinkled. “Before your time. My dad was a midlevel bank exec. We had a very nice, middle-class American upbringing. Girl Scouts, piano lessons. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich either.”

  “So what happened after Constance died?”

  I took another bite, chewed. Set my spoon down. Picked up my mug of black coffee, sipped. “It all fell apart.”

  “How so?”

  “Constance was everything to us.” I looked down at the surface of the oatmeal, stirred it. I’d always liked the creamy colors of oatmeal. I decided in that moment that if I lived to get my new place, that would be the color of the walls. Maybe I’d do a little sponge painting for the texture. “Mom and Dad were no longer the parents of identical twin girls. They were parents who’d tragically lost the daughter with all the sparkle. They fought. They blamed themselves, then each other. They divorced. Pretty common scenario when a child dies.”

  “Go on. Is that what got you into psychology?” He’d finished already and turned around on the bench.

  “I think I was always trying to understand. Find my way as the twin who was left behind.” I stopped talking and ate rapidly, filling my stomach so it would settle. The oatmeal landed and coated it like cement in a mixer. I got up and ran water over the dish. “I want to put another log in the stove before we go, so it’s warm when we get back.”

  Russell Pruitt, leaning over and putting on his enormous hiking boots, nodded. I went into the closet stacked high with Pres-to-Logs and dropped the nitro pills down behind the stack. It wouldn’t do for him to decide to check where they were and then find them on me. Coming back out with a log, I found Russell Pruitt watching me.

  I ignored him, brushing by with no hint of my thundering heart. Getting those pills back out, even if you knew where they were, would take some doing. I wondered why I’d even gone through with this potentially hazardous decision—and knew it was Constance pushing me, like she always had, to take some action. I was the one who liked to let things unfold.

  At least I hadn’t tried to stab Russell Pruitt in the kidney. That would not have ended well. You might still need to use the knife, Constance said. You might not think he’s a psychopath, but I do.

  “I’m the psychologist, not you,” I muttered.

  “What did you say?” Pruitt handed me a plastic water bottle.

  “Nothing. Just talking to myself.”

  “Did you bring a camera? I’m planning to take some photos.”

  “You know perfectly well I didn’t. I had only the one in my phone, and you know what happened to that.”

  “It’s your own fault,” Pruitt said, as every abuser says to their victim. “Put your wrist out.”

  He tied the rope around my wrist and then tied it to his belt loop. It felt strangely intimate to be so connected, and I fortified myself with Constance’s rage at being restrained—Stockholmed or not, I was this man’s prisoner and I better not forget it.

  We walked outside for the first time that day. The nene had come back, and they chortled up, ducking their heads, picking their way across the grass with their mincing gait. Much smaller than Canada geese, their coloring still marked them as distant cousins. Their voices were sweet, gentle. I squatted down, and they circled me while Russell Pruitt locked the cabin.

  “The trail is this way.” Pruitt pointed up the grassy slope behind the cabin.

  We set
out. The path led through a series of empty campsites. I paid attention to it because I had to—rocky and poorly formed, it was clearly not the thoroughfare we’d followed through the center of the crater.

  It felt great to hike without the burden of the backpack. I looked out over the swath of lava being tamed by hardy native plants. We were circling back toward the heart of the crater.

  No photo of Haleakala seemed to convey—and looking from the rim just couldn’t show—the utter scope and vastness of the crater. Every hundred yards or so was some completely new, spectacular combination of vivid colors, arc of sky, land reduced to its purest forms in every shade from umber to gold. I stumbled, looking, and the rope yanked tight and abraded my wrist.

  “Shit!” I exclaimed.

  “I’m sorry.” Pruitt untied the rope as I held my sore wrist with the other hand. “I don’t think this is necessary.”

  “Thank you.” I rubbed the abrasion circling my wrist. “It isn’t.”

  My eyes tracked around the rugged lava—at ten thousand feet, out of shape, and with no hikers anywhere near us—I wasn’t going anywhere but following in his wake like a little tender boat. Russell Pruitt got out his camera, took some vista shots. It was a nice little point-and-shoot Olympus.

  “Smile.” He pointed it at me.

  I smiled, rubbing my rope-burned wrist. Keep the giant happy; look for your chance, Constance reminded me.

  “Where’s the heiau?” I asked as we kept walking, beginning to loop to the left, back toward the main trail.

  I took a slug of water and felt the familiar pinch of the boots as I put my fists into the back of my hips, arching upward. It was great not to be carrying the backpack and not to have the rope on my wrist anymore.

  But I worried that we were getting so far from the cabin that the Park Service would come while we were gone. That didn’t seem like a good idea—maybe they’d just leave after seeing my backpack with the permit on it. How would they know anything was amiss with my roommate? I felt anxiety beginning as a nervous whisper under my sternum.

  “Where are we going? And how long is it going to take?”

  “You’re worse than a kid on a road trip,” Pruitt said. “I don’t really know. Haven’t seen any signs of the heiau. But it seems like we’re looping back toward the main trail, so we might as well keep going forward.”

  I looked at his looming back resentfully. This was not going to be an idle morning amble; it was turning into a real hike. Oh well. No way out but through.

  We circled through a gray sand field and undulated down a long incline, circling around a cinder cone to find one of the Park Service’s brown-and-white signs: holua cabin: two miles marked a merge with the main trail.

  I remembered passing through this junction, an area of particularly spectacular formations. I took another pull off my water bottle, looking around for any other hikers—no such luck. The crater was as empty and enormous as ever.

  “I’ll be ready for lunch at this rate,” I said as we approached the huge hole fenced in by a low guardrail we’d passed the day before, where the ceiling of an underground lava tube had broken in, leaving a deep shaft. A sign nearby proclaimed danger.

  We’d walked by without hardly looking at it last time, but this time Russell Pruitt got out his little camera, took a picture of the scene: two humped cinder cones that reminded me of a Bactrian camel, the pit between them, the bare sand trail winding back toward Holua Cabin.

  Russell Pruitt stepped close to barrier, leaning down to shoot inside the hole. His flash lit that depthless-looking blackness and I came up beside him.

  “Can you see the bottom?” I peered down.

  “No. It’s really deep.” He slid the camera into his pocket, and suddenly his enormous ham hand was on my shoulder. “It looks dangerous.” His voice trembled. His hand felt hot, very unpleasant. I shrugged it off.

  “Yeah, looks like the Park Service thinks so too.” I pointed to the sign that said danger.

  “I bet they wouldn’t find you here.”

  “What?” I turned, blinking. His face had gone that telltale gray that spoke of stress and a lack of oxygen, but that wasn’t what had me scrambling backward, stumbling in the sand. “What did you say?”

  “I thought of this last night.” Sweat had sprung out on Russell Pruitt’s face, pearly, greasy beads of sweat that shone in the bright sunlight overhead. Details were very clear in my hyper-focused vision.

  I hadn’t infected him with hope after all.

  He reached for me and I leaped back, turning to flee, my boots heavy and clumsy, kicking up sand and refusing to obey fast enough. He got a handful of my shirt and it yanked tight against my throat, but now I was getting some traction in the sand, fight-or-flight had fully kicked in, and I swiveled, leaning over so he tore the T-shirt right off over my head.

  I spun and kept going, feeling a warm breeze on my bare skin. I felt a surge of strength so great I saw my liberty nearby and true, my body twenty years old again, competing for the race of my life.

  The grasp on my hair that stopped my flight was so abrupt I thought my neck had snapped as he yanked me back.

  He was going to kill me, and my main feeling was shocked betrayal. “You promised me another day!” I yelled.

  There was no reason to hold anything back anymore, so I fought like hell.

  I kicked him in the knee, went for his groin, reached for his eyes with the sharp hooks of my thumbs, uttering a feral growl I didn’t even know was my own voice. The trouble was, he was so very tall, so long armed, that as he held me by that fistful of hair, I was too far away to get in any meaningful damage—much like dangling an angry kitten by the scruff of its neck.

  Still, I scratched and clawed at his wrists, trying to loosen his grip. He then grabbed one of my wrists as well as my hair and jerked me off my feet. I hit the ground and took a faceful of sand. He flipped me over and turned, towing me back toward the hole.

  I opened my mouth and screamed, as loud as I could. Repeatedly.

  It was such an awful bellowing wail, I realized I’d never given voice to a full scream in my entire life.

  “Help me!” I screamed, remembering words were more useful in getting assistance.

  He let go of my wrist and smacked me. It was like being hit with a frying pan—my whole face wobbled and swelled instantly with the force of it, and I shut up, stunned. He got hold of my other hand and hauled me toward the oubliette in the middle of the crater. This was really it, the moment I looked death in the eye.

  “You promised, Russell Pruitt!” I cried, tasting iron from a split lip. “You promised me one more day!”

  “I lied,” he said, panting with the effort of dragging me through the sand. “You know I’m good at lying.”

  I dug my boots in and tried to slow him. I thrashed from side to side, trying to break his hold. A scene from a martial arts movie came back to me, where the heroine dug in her feet and stood up so forcefully she broke the attacker’s hold—but this wasn’t Hollywood, and I was a nearing fifty-year-old alcoholic who weighed in at one-third of her attacker. Words had always stood me in better stead. I kept writhing and digging, slowing down the inevitable as I said, “Bruce Ohale is my police chief on the Big Island. He’ll be looking for me, and you won’t get away with this. Please, we can do something else.”

  “I know who he is, and I know you spoke to him. That’s why I had to move up my timetable,” Russell Pruitt said.

  We’d reached the barrier, and he leaned against it, obviously winded by our struggle. “I figure my chances are fifty-fifty on getting away with it. I’ll clean up, leave your stuff in the cabin with a suicide note, and go out Sliding Sands instead of Switchbacks. Anyway, I was always willing to chance getting caught—what do I have to lose, right? I’m already dying. Remember those temp clerks they thought my dad killed?”

  I couldn’t nod, couldn’t move. The grip on my hair was paralyzingly painful, my wrist smashed in his massive hand, and I was facedown on
the sand, the toes of my boots dug in. What was this, a confession of some sort?

  Keep him talking! Constance yelled in my inner ear. Buy time!

  “What are you telling me?” I turned my face, spat sand off my lips.

  “I actually didn’t need therapy to figure out who I was, Dr. Wilson. Dad and I—we killed those women together. But thanks for the voyage of self-discovery. I know you tried to help me.”

  He reached down and hoisted me up under the armpits. I flailed and writhed in vain.

  “You’re acting like a psychopath, and that’s the same as being one. How sad.” My voice trembled with all the grief I’d ever shared, ever carried—for myself, for my clients, for this moment of my own death when I still had so much to live for.

  “I didn’t want to be. He made me one,” Russell Pruitt said, and lifted me. “I can’t help myself. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s bullshit! Even psychopaths have choice!” I kicked backward with everything I had and got him good in the shin. I heard him grunt. “I don’t want to die! Not now, not like this!”

  Constance and I were united in our cry. I’d given all I had to the fight—but none of it was enough to stop his savage heave. He was just so much stronger.

  I flew like a rag doll over the barrier.

  Chapter 20

  I flopped over the low wooden fence, my left arm trailing, and I grabbed hold of the lowest rail as my body hit the packed-gravel edge of the pit with a bone-jarring crunch. Sand embedded with sharp stones bit into my bare chest and face and my legs swung around like a pendulum, gravity hauling me into that dark maw.

  I added my right hand to hold desperately on to the splintery, rickety wood of the lower railing, a degree of my weight still supported by the lip of the cavern curving out from under my bare torso. I scrabbled with my boots on the side of the lava tube and heard the thunk and tinkle of a thousand pebbles and rocks bouncing away into infinity.