Wicked River

by Jenny Milchman

  “And obviously it was yay,” Natalie said. She was finding it hard to breathe. “So Luke put the drugs—heroin, was it?—in the canoe that night.”

  Doug shook his head. “Mark and Brett took care of that at the wedding. What Luke did was mark the right route on the map for after I dropped the GPS. I did that deliberately,” he added, with the air of relief that accompanies someone outside a confessional. “The route took us to a spot a few miles south of the Canadian border. I knew you might follow our progress on the GPS, but maps you’d leave to me.”

  Slick, slimy deceit enrobed her. The mud at the bottoms of the rivers that had gotten them here. “And did you arrange for those…those drug dealers to show up?” Natalie raked air into her lungs. “Before our wedding?”

  “No!” Doug said. “I swear. They were supposed to meet Mark and Brett earlier. They were late. We all got pissed off about it.”

  “Imagine,” she bit out. “Drug dealers not keeping reliable hours.”

  Doug’s mouth hiked a smile, which vanished when he saw Natalie’s expression.

  Shards of understanding—each a sharp sliver of glass, stained bloody red and lurid—were finally filling in to form a whole picture. It wasn’t water Natalie lacked now, but air. She was unable to catch her breath. “So this is why we’re on a backcountry honeymoon,” she said numbly. “To accommodate your friend’s drug deal.”

  Doug faced her. “We’re on this honeymoon because I love the outdoors,” he said, taking both her hands in his. He moved easily now, rejuvenated, all prior injuries and wounds healed, or at least unfelt. “And I wanted you to love it too. I wanted to show you all the majesty and greatness there is out here. You have to believe that. We’ve been preparing for this trip almost as long as we were planning the wedding.” He swallowed, a smooth, easy ripple of his throat. “That our plan happened to accommodate what my old friend suddenly needed… Well, that was just luck.”

  “Luck?” Natalie breathed, hardly able to force the word out. She tried to lean back against the tree, but didn’t have the strength to lower herself in stages and wound up hitting it hard. Her eyes burned with unshed tears.

  Doug’s gaze gripped hers. “It wasn’t supposed to go this way, honey. The getting-lost part. This was supposed to be simple. Easy. Two days in, two days out.”

  “The Craig-getting-killed part,” Natalie offered. “I assume that wasn’t supposed to happen either.”

  Doug flinched, and she felt a savage gladness.

  “There’s one more thing I haven’t told you,” he said after a pause. “About why I had to help Craig.”

  Paralysis was settling into her limbs, her lips, her entire being, and Natalie’s eyes fluttered shut. “One more thing,” she repeated flatly.

  “You’re just…so unquestioning, Nat,” Doug said. “You accept stuff. Maybe that worked for me. For us,” he added with a flash of insight that struck her as significant, although she lacked the strength to explore it. “But did it ever occur to you to wonder…”

  “What?” Natalie asked in a barely audible monotone. “Wonder what?”

  “That huge apartment my mother lives in,” Doug went on. “You know I didn’t grow up rich. How did we pull such a thing off?”

  Natalie frowned. She’d thought about it, of course—such a grand apartment with an address to match—but only vaguely. “So?” she asked, her anger directed as much at herself as him. “What does that have to do with helping Craig?”

  Doug shifted on the ground. “Remember I told you how my mom and I nearly became homeless?”

  Natalie shrugged one shoulder in sharp assent.

  “Well, Craig is the reason we never actually did. The eviction notice had been slapped on the door and everything. My mom planned to go to a shelter… I think she thought they’d take care of things for her. But I knew what shelters were really like. I was planning to live on the street, with or without my mom.”

  Natalie felt a mass blocking her throat, and fought to swallow.

  “And then Craig stepped in,” Doug concluded. “He had this big win one weekend—the biggest of his life. And he was really close to my mom. Craig’s own mother is a complete whack job, used to go on retreats to Nevada, leave Craig alone for weeks at a time. She got herself renamed… Blossom, Flower, something like that. Total flake.” Doug scrubbed the hair out of his face, but not before Natalie caught a sheen of fury in his eyes. “Compared to her, my mother was everything a boy could want. Always around, so grateful for anything anyone did for her. You can imagine what Craig buying the apartment—saving her from abject disaster and freeing her up for the rest of her life—accomplished.”

  Even in her disintegrating state, the scope of the act stunned Natalie. “I can.”

  “So then you can probably also see that when the chips were down in Craig’s life—when he was as desperate as I once was—I couldn’t turn my back on him again.”

  Natalie got the two words out once more. “I can.”

  “Craig was going to take care of the really illegal part: floating the canoe across the border. All I had to do was get close, navigate the tricky terrain. Craig’s lived in the city his whole life. Until this week, he’d never…” Doug broke off, rolling his hands into fists. “He’d never even been on a hike.”

  Natalie stayed silent.

  “If we’d gotten stopped,” Doug went on, “we would’ve pretended we had no idea anything was inside the canoe. It wouldn’t even have been pretense in your case. That’s part of why I kept you in the dark.”

  Branches crackled to their left. Natalie squinted, trying to bring them into focus.

  “I’m sorry, Nat,” Doug said softly. “I’m so sorry for everything.” Then he added, “I just want you to understand. Why I did it. Even if it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  She still didn’t answer.

  “Hold on,” Doug said, and rose.

  “More water?” Natalie asked sarcastically.

  “Um, no, not now,” Doug said, but he sounded distracted.

  He walked off into the woods.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Not one, but two.

  After the dearth of company Kurt had suffered since staggering out of the river and into these woods, the number promised plenty of a level he’d never dared hope for.

  Two, the first even integer, the amount comprising every pair, the magic threshold needed to create human life.

  And two, the number of hikers headed toward Kurt’s camp.

  They’d been lured by the false hiking trail, just as Kurt had intended. Since painting the flags, Kurt had taught himself the rudiments of tracking, and he was able to monitor his impending visitors’ progress, crouching to trace sets of footprints in the soil, finding indicators of disturbance in the woods. Who needed the pseudo-utopians to teach him anything, when Kurt was capable of such mastery on his own?

  The duo wore strange shoes given the treacherousness of the terrain, a curiosity Kurt could scarcely wait to investigate. He gauged the pair’s height by examining broken stubs of branches and leaves torn from the trees after they stumbled through a stretch of forest. A man and a woman, Kurt guessed, though he hadn’t caught sight of them yet.

  That singular joy would come tonight.

  With the pair contained, Kurt had decided to hold off on making contact.

  He had determined two reasons behind his failure the first time he’d attempted to bring someone to his camp. First, he hadn’t fully utilized the power of his mind, his insight and skills of persuasion. And second, he had forgotten to account for a key element that would characterize anyone Kurt decided to take.

  In hindsight, it was obvious.

  Such a person would be desperate. He or she might not understand that Kurt was offering salvation, a different, better sort of life. The person would fight, his or her muscles would balloon with adrena
line, nails would become skewers, and teeth, daggers. A hiker or outdoorsperson, someone in his prime, would possess especial might.

  A trapped animal could chew through its own limb—or the limb of the person attempting to keep it captive. Similarly, people in the full flush of youth, at the peak of life, were going be difficult to take down. This couple certainly fulfilled that description, Kurt observed, when he finally allowed himself a glimpse of them, his body a black outcropping of the boulder he hid behind.

  Luckily, the solution was also obvious.

  Kurt needed for the pair to become less robust.

  Which they were doing all on their own—growing weakened through futile lurching around, failing to take advantage of perfectly apparent resources.

  They were veering toward camp by a circuitous, haphazard route that suggested just how badly disoriented they must be, helped along by the blazes Kurt had provided.

  Now it was time to hasten the process.

  Kurt dragged downed logs into place and moved rocks so that the couple would walk in circles, exhausting themselves. He scattered debris to make them turn and head in different directions, effectively corralling them, drawing the pair closer and closer to his encampment without them ever knowing they were being steered.

  And then the man did something so foolhardy that Kurt could hardly believe his luck. In a matter of days or even hours, the man would be helpless to muster a protest, let alone fight, and the woman would be out of her head with horror and disgust.

  Kurt could sit back in delicious anticipation and await their arrival.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The truth was before Natalie now, an amorphous, bilious pool. It had finally started to slow in its spreading, its boundaries beginning to set. The contents were darker, ranker, denser than she could’ve imagined. Bilge and ash and ruins versus the spun sugar and ivory taffeta of wedding dreams.

  Her husband had lied to her during the days leading up to their honeymoon, at the wedding, and for every moment of this trip. He’d acted out a charade—in that town she’d all but fallen in love with, on the river after purposely dropping their GPS, while convincing Natalie to abandon the canoe. Even once they had discovered his friend’s body, Doug still hadn’t told her the truth. If they hadn’t gotten lost, if all had gone as planned, Natalie might have lived the rest of her life without knowing she’d been well and truly fooled.

  Secrets were like dry rot, invisibly eroding the floor beneath you and the walls all around. Natalie stared off into the woods, realizing she had no idea where her husband had gone. If he didn’t come back, what would she do? She wasn’t sure what was more horrifying in that moment—the idea that Doug might not return, or the fact that she wasn’t sure whether she would go and try to find him.

  Leaves began to break and crunch nearby, then the sound of shoes stumbling across small stones could be heard. The ground around Natalie felt like it was shaking; she had to splay out her hands and brace herself as the footsteps came nearer.

  Doug settled himself down beside her, using the tree trunk for support.

  Natalie forced herself to speak. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” Doug replied. “Fine.” He offered her a smile. “Bodily functions just getting back up to working order again.”

  He had left to pee. Natalie felt a vile slash of envy. How long had it been since she’d gone herself? Every passing hour served as some sort of ticking countdown.

  “So what went wrong?” Natalie asked, feeling only scant interest in the answer. “How did Craig get killed?” The flat quality of her voice frightened her. She sounded as if she were already partway dead.

  “I don’t know,” Doug replied, equally tonelessly. “I assume the guy Luke found in Canada—who was going to be responsible for unloading the supply—got greedy, decided there was no reason to pay a lone man walking around in the wilderness. Why not just take the stash? Which means those dudes from our wedding have got to be pretty pissed right now, wondering where Craig is with their money.”

  Natalie gave a nod.

  “I thought I could help my friend,” Doug said, swiping at his eyes with the back of one hand. “Pay off a debt, and make up for walking away from him all those years ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Natalie asked.

  Doug looked at her; she felt his body turn toward her in the dark.

  “Maybe I could’ve helped,” Natalie said. “At the least, we would’ve been on the same page. Handled things together.”

  Doug let out a short, hoarse grunt, and for a moment she went weak with shame. Of course Doug wouldn’t have thought to rely on her for any sort of assistance. It was Natalie who sought out assistance, guidance, and direction—and had for all her life.

  But then Doug said, “You would’ve married me, Nat? If you knew all of this? Where I had come from, and what I was going to have to do about it?”

  “That’s not giving me much credit—”

  Doug jumped to his feet, so agile that she experienced another stab of envy. Natalie didn’t know how she herself would ever make it to a standing position again. She canted her head, peering at her husband to the extent that she could. Her head felt too heavy to hold up, like a sandbag.

  “Look what I did in high school,” Doug said, looming over her. “Just turned my back on my best friend when he couldn’t pull himself out of the muck. What if you had decided to do the same thing to me?”

  Natalie stared down at the ground. It was only inches below her hanging face, but the darkness was so complete, she couldn’t see anything. “It’s too bad that you didn’t trust me,” she said softly. “Because you made it so that I could never trust you.”

  “Don’t say that!” Doug dropped back down beside her. He reached to stroke her arm, but she pulled away. “Nat, honey, of course you can trust me. I did what I had to do. I was loyal, I lived up to the demands of the past. And now it’s the present. It’s our present. We can move on and never look back.”

  Natalie waited for the irony to occur to him—quite literally they had no way to move on—but Doug simply continued to sit beside her in the dark, awaiting her reply.

  “You can’t tell lie after lie, Doug, then expect a do-over, like life is an Xbox game. You don’t get to start from scratch just because you confessed, which, by the way, you might never have done if circumstances hadn’t forced it!” She finished, breathless.

  “Okay,” Doug said. “I get that.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve been used to doing everything on my own for a long time now. You know why… You see how my mother is.”

  Natalie waited, in part because she lacked the energy to do anything else.

  “And that doesn’t work in a marriage. I’ll have to change,” Doug went on raggedly. “Because one thing I know—one thing that has no part of a lie in it—is that I love you, Natalie Larson. And if we get out of this, and we will, then I promise. I will never lie to you again.”

  She stared off into the night, where she would’ve sworn she saw a form moving, her vision wavering in and out, her eyes playing tricks on her. “How do you know if a liar is lying?”

  Even in the dark, she could see Doug’s eyes blaze.

  “Don’t tell me a riddle, Natalie! This is our marriage! This is our life!”

  “I know that.” Her retort came out low; she could no longer muster much volume. “And you know what, Doug? Maybe my past is at work here too. Does my father seem like a strong guy, someone you can count on? How did I manage to trade one man in my life for another who would only let me down?”

  She feared she had pushed Doug too far, that he would simply stalk off and leave her in these woods. Instead, he seemed to calm. He reached through the dark for her hand, holding tightly when she tried to withdraw it.

  “See, Nat?” he said. “These are the kinds of things we can talk about now that we’re married. We c
an have deep conversations like this. And they’ll bring us even closer together.”

  For just a second, the spark that had nearly been snuffed out—by betrayal, starvation, thirst, pain, and exhaustion—kindled. This was the reason she had really fallen for Doug. Not their mutual enjoyment of relatively surface things like restaurants, drinking, or even sex, but because from the moment that they’d met, they had spoken to each other from the deepest, partially empty recesses of their souls.

  Then she slid her hand free. “They would have once,” she said sorrowfully. “That was the kind of marriage I always wanted to have.”

  “Okay, then—”

  “But not anymore, Doug,” she went on, speaking over him. “Now it’s too late. We can’t exchange confidences when there have been so many lies. It’d be like trying to build a house on a rotting foundation.”

  Doug faced her. “Nat, please, that’s not true,” he said. “It isn’t too late. I love you, and that’s what matters, honey. Don’t you believe me?”

  She was sinking back down, or maybe the ground had risen up to meet her. It seemed to take forever to settle into a prone position, and once there, she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed. Had Doug stayed? Would he hear what she said, presuming her words were even audible?

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she murmured, or mouthed, or maybe just thought before she began floating away. “But I don’t. I can’t. Not anymore.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  In the dead of the night, despair settled like a cloak over Natalie. Her marriage was over. There would be no divorce, but that was only because they weren’t going to make it back to the land of such things—courthouses and paperwork and second starts for anybody who wanted one.

  Their bodies would be found, and the story would be tragic: newlyweds who’d perished before they had even gotten a chance to begin their lives together. Her own sister wouldn’t know the truth about Doug’s betrayal, or that if he and Natalie had lived, they would’ve failed to survive in an altogether different way.