End of Story

by Peter Abrahams

  And where would that other part be?

  Ivy gazed down at Harrow, lying in a diffused moonlight beam, the empty gin bottle on the ground nearby. She covered him up with his sweatshirt. He made a grateful little sound in his sleep. He looked peaceful in that pool of light, and years younger. The jeans he’d found in cabin one lay bunched beside him. Ivy felt around in his pockets, found the key to the pickup. She put on her own clothes and left the cave.

  Thirty-two

  The moon hung low in the sky, almost full, missing only a thin slice at the bottom of its left side. Ivy lowered herself over the ledge, got a foothold on the rocky path, started down, the sound of her steps muted by the inch or two of snow that had fallen. She corkscrewed down the island, half the time in moonlight, half in darkness. A few times she stopped to listen, heard nothing but her own breathing and once, the beating wings of a heavy bird, passing close by, invisible.

  Down on the pebbly shore, Ivy pushed the branches off the boat, flipped it over into the water, set the oars. Then she got in and rowed. A little breeze sprang up, rippling the lake, tiny reflected moons bobbing all around. The silhouette of the island shrank in front of her. She could make out the moonlit horizontal plane of the ledge. Nothing moved up there. Now, maybe because of the snowfall, the cross was visible, silver and sharply edged. Ivy rowed harder, rising off the seat with every stroke. Sweat was dripping off her chin when the bow grinded into the sandy beach in front of the cabins.

  Ivy jumped out of the boat, took one last look at the island, spiky, dark, distant. She ran to the pickup. It started with that explosive sound. She drove off, dirt road to the flat-faced rock, you and me caught for a moment in the single headlight, then up to the clearing and down the other side. She was on blacktop, five or six miles from the lake before she saw another car, coming the other way. It drew closer, very fast, then zipped by. A minivan with a white-haired woman hunched over the wheel and an alert dog poised beside her: Jean Savard and Rocky.

  The moon sank out of sight. As Ivy entered West Raquette, the night was at its darkest. She drove down the steep hill to the bottom of Ransom Road, parked in the carport behind Claudette’s rusted-out Beemer. Ivy switched off, listened. She heard a few pings from the hot engine, then nothing.

  Ivy got out of the pickup, walked to the side door. She raised her fist to knock. An alarm buzzed in the house, startling her. But it wasn’t a burglar alarm, only a wake-up from a clock radio. Then came a groan, and a minute or two after that the sound of a flushing toilet. A light went on in a side window. Ivy stayed where she was, in the shadows under the carport roof.

  A sneaker squeaked in the house, close by. The door opened, and Claudette came out, backlit from the light in hall, wearing her Wal-Mart smock. She saw Ivy and her eyes opened wide. Ivy put a hand on Claudette’s chest, pushed her back in, swung the door closed with her foot.

  “Oh my God,” Claudette said, covering her mouth with both hands. “You were on TV.” She glanced back into the kitchen, where a phone hung on the wall. That maddened Ivy; up to this point in her life she hadn’t done much hating, but now she felt it. She pushed Claudette again, the other way, down the hall. Ivy felt absurdly strong, and completely free from physical fear. Claudette retreated, backing into a tiny bathroom at the end of the hall, the kind with only toilet and sink. Ivy kept pushing until Claudette had nowhere to go.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Claudette said.

  “If you tell me the truth, nothing,” Ivy said.

  “Truth?” said Claudette.

  From the corner of her eye, Ivy saw something on the wall. It broke her concentration for a moment.

  “About what?” Claudette said, close to wailing. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  But Ivy had no control over the expression on her face. “Why did you want Betty Ann’s forgiveness?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said I forgive her.”

  “You also said, ‘Maybe she’ll forgive me, too.’”

  “I never—”

  “The night you were drunk, when you said my book wouldn’t work.”

  “Drunk? Then I don’t—”

  “I don’t care whether you remember,” Ivy said. “Why did you want her forgiveness? What did you do?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t do—”

  Ivy smacked Claudette across the face with the back of her hand, hard. “Stop lying.”

  Claudette started crying, sank down on the toilet. The seat was up and she went right into it. “I’m not lying.”

  Ivy raised her hand again.

  Claudette flinched. “What do you want me to say? That I told him?”

  Ivy stood over her.

  “Okay, so I did,” Claudette said; and Ivy knew, way too late, that nothing would ever be the same. “Vance had a right to know,” Claudette went on. “Just like you said before.”

  “This was the day of the robbery,” Ivy said.

  “The day of the robbery?” Claudette said.

  Ivy raised her voice; Claudette shrank away. “When you told Harrow.”

  “It turned out to be,” Claudette said. “That stupid fuckin’ day.” Her eyes shifted. “And I called Frank, too, right after, if you want the whole truth.”

  Ivy didn’t get that. Claudette had walked in on her sister and Frank: Frank knew she knew. “To tell him what?” she said.

  Claudette bit her lip. “That I’d given Harrow a heads-up about him and Betty Ann.” She avoided Ivy’s gaze. “Why should everyone else get off scot-free? I was lashing out, like anybody else. I was young. I still had hopes.”

  Ivy lowered her fist. It took an act of will. She stepped back, glanced at the wall again. A photo in an oval frame hung there, stained and old: two little girls in party dresses, one plain-faced and lank-haired, the other pretty and curly-haired. “Betty Ann had curly hair?”

  “She straightened it when she got older,” Claudette said, sniffling.

  Claudette’s house was old and unrenovated, the bathroom locking with a key. Ivy locked Claudette in and, once outside, threw the key as far as she could.

  Night was fading when Ivy drove up Ransom Road, turned right, kept going that two-point-four miles she’d measured before, found the dirt track into the woods. Around a bend, up a slope, and there was the small house with trees closing in, the fading For Sale sign out front: the house Harrow had shared with Betty Ann. He’d been busy vacuuming when Ferdie Gagnon came to get him.

  Ivy walked around to the back, tried the door. Locked, but with windowpanes in the top half. She picked up a rock and broke one of them: a broken window, just like the one that had appeared in cabin one, before Jean Savard’s shotgun entered the picture. Ivy reached inside and opened up.

  She went in, walked around the house, all the rooms empty and bare. She ended up in the kitchen. A spider was spinning a big web over the sink; the filaments caught the early-morning light. Ivy opened the door to the basement, gazed down the dust-covered plywood stairs. She flicked the switch, remembered it didn’t work; also remembered what she’d glimpsed down there before.

  Ivy went down the stairs, through pools of gloom. Weak light shone through a dusty window high on the wall, falling on that stack of cement blocks on the dirt floor: a stack four blocks high covering an area about seven feet by three. Ivy picked them up and threw them aside, one by one. Dust rose and swirled in the light. She got down to the bare dirt.

  Ivy looked around: no shovels, no tools of any kind, nothing to dig with. She knelt on the floor and dug with her hands, clawing away at the earth, warp speed. But after a while, her mind, so jumbled, in such a frenzy to prove herself wrong, to find a pattern she could live with, began to clear. Digging took over; she thought only of digging, became a machine for it, aware of nothing but this hole in the ground, its contours, moisture content, textures, colors, propensity for cave-ins. The hole widened and deepened, reaching a diameter of about five feet and a depth of about three, with Ivy down inside it. She crouched, bent over awkwardly,
scooped out a double handful, then clawed down for more. Her fingers touched something unearthlike, something hard.

  Ivy got onto her knees, brushed away dirt down there in the deepest part of the hole. A human hand appeared—a left hand, nothing remaining of skin and flesh but putrefying lumps of grayish stuff. But the nails were still painted, dull red, and a gold ring was caught in a cleft between the knuckles on the fourth finger.

  There was nothing more to see, nothing more to know. Ivy rose, slow and unsteady. Harrow was innocent of the Gold Dust robbery, just as she believed. Here was his alibi, oh, so unusable. Everything locked into place, the pattern final. She climbed out of the hole and vomited. Tears streamed from her eyes, but vomiting sometimes made that happen. She’d gone wrong, completely. And now? How could this be fixed?

  Ivy took a deep breath, turned to the stairs. Harrow was sitting on them, halfway down, the shotgun in his lap. For just a second, she took him for an apparition. But there were too many little details, like how pale he looked, and the bones in his face sticking out, and his clothes still damp. He was good enough to make this stuff up out of nothing, but not her. His feet were bare, completing the story of a long swim—heroic in another context—in cold water.

  “It doesn’t change how much I loved her,” Harrow said. “Proves it, in a way.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Ivy said. “Did you kill Jean, too?”

  “Who’s she?” said Harrow.

  “The old lady from the camp.”

  “Of course not,” Harrow said. “I borrowed her car, that’s all. And tied her up in a gentle way. She’s fine.”

  “And the dog?”

  “Not as fine.”

  Ivy was almost sick again. He watched her.

  “Me finding Mandrell,” she said. “That’s when you had to get out.”

  “I couldn’t resist,” Harrow said.

  “You should have done your goddamn time and counted yourself lucky,” Ivy said.

  “Exactly what I was doing, till you came along,” Harrow said.

  She vomited again. His eyes didn’t leave her.

  “So,” he said. “What’s next?”

  Ivy wiped her mouth. “I’m leaving.”

  “I can see us leaving together,” Harrow said. “But not you alone.”

  “Leaving together is out of the question,” Ivy said.

  He looked her up and down. “I thought we had a relationship,” he said.

  “It was false.”

  “You’re just telling yourself that now,” Harrow said.

  “No,” Ivy said. “It was false. You made yourself up. I fell in love with that.”

  “Now you’re getting too complicated,” Harrow said. “You know what we’re like together, the two of us. Think of how we could be in the future.”

  “The future?” Ivy said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Nothing bad has happened yet. We have to move fast, that’s all.”

  Nothing bad has happened yet? Ivy shook her head. “There’s nothing left between us.”

  “Don’t you believe in me?” he said.

  “Believe in you?” She almost laughed in his face.

  “My talent,” he said.

  His talent? What did it matter? “I was wrong about that, too,” Ivy said.

  Harrow’s face flushed. He rose, came down the stairs.

  “Say that again?”

  “I was wrong about your talent,” Ivy said. “It’s nothing special.”

  “I hope you don’t mean that,” he said.

  Ivy said nothing. He stepped off the last stair, stood on the dirt floor, the dust still swirling around a little.

  “Do you mean that?” he said. “That there’s nothing special about my talent?”

  Ivy remained silent.

  He came closer. “Do you mean it? Yes or no.”

  A strange situation, where the brave choice was to tell a lie. Ivy did the brave thing; a small, partial compensation for all she’d done wrong. “Yes,” she said. “I mean it. There’s nothing special about your talent.”

  His face changed, went pale and ugly, the teeth exposed. Had that been Betty Ann’s last sight of him? “Maybe you’re right after all,” he said, his voice not loud, but suddenly in a deeper register than she’d ever heard it. “About this being the end for us.” The barrel of the gun rose an inch or two.

  “Don’t,” Ivy said. “It’s enough.”

  He nodded. “But I can’t come up with a better scenario on the spur of the moment,” he said. “Can you?” For a second or two it looked like he might smile or even laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Just that you could save your life with a timely plot twist,” he said. “A real test of the writer’s skill.”

  Was he toying with her? Was he capable of that? How could she have been so wrong? That feeling of hatred: it came again, pulling at her face. Ivy tried to master it. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I never harmed you. Get out of the way.”

  But he didn’t move. The barrel rose an inch or two more. She glanced around. No exit but the stairs.

  “Shift to the side,” he said. “A tich.”

  Meaning closer to the hole. Instead, Ivy backed away, toward the furnace in the corner. Of course she didn’t want to die, but even more, she didn’t want to die down in that hole with Betty Ann. Harrow started toward her.

  “This is pointless,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Ivy said. “I’m not your problem.”

  “A loose end,” said Harrow, “is a problem.” His finger shifted on the trigger.

  “Don’t,” Ivy said.

  “I have very strong feelings for you,” Harrow said. “What’s about to happen doesn’t change that.”

  “It does,” Ivy said. “Completely.”

  “Maybe for you,” Harrow said. The barrel came up a little more, now pointed at her heart.

  “It will change you, too,” Ivy said.

  He looked interested. “Oh? How so?”

  Was there a right answer, one that would keep her alive? Ivy’s mind went blank. And she didn’t find out, because at that moment a tremendous crash came from above, as though something big had struck the house. Then a cop in riot gear burst through the doorway at the top of the stairs, followed by another, both of them with guns drawn.

  “Drop it,” shouted the first one.

  But Harrow didn’t. He was already turning toward them, swinging the barrel, so quick.

  Don’t, don’t. Ivy thought she was screaming at the top of her lungs, but no sound came. The cops fired, three, four, five, six times, more. Harrow fell, rolled to the edge of the hole, lay still, one hand dangling down.

  More cops came down the stairs, some in uniform, some not. One of the latter approached Ivy: Ferdie Gagnon. He took her by the arm.

  “You’re under arrest,” he said.

  Dragan tried and failed to persuade Danny to pay for Ivy’s defense. He organized fund-raisers at Verlaine’s. By the time that got going, The New Yorker had printed “Caveman” in its fiction debut edition. Partly as a result, the fund-raisers were a big success. Herman Landau found a good defense attorney, gifted in the science of jury selection. He also made an excellent summation that brought tears to the eyes of juror number ten, in the back row. Ivy got seven years, meaning out in four with good behavior.

  Corrections sent her to the women’s prison, downstate. She’d been there for a few weeks when a rising young editor at the one of the big publishing houses came to visit. Ivy told her about The Surveyor. She signed a contract not long after.

  Out in Hollywood, Joel teamed up with a producer and offered her fifty thousand dollars for her story. Ivy refused. They came back a few times, finally doubling the offer. Ivy stopped taking their calls. She read Dragan’s manuscript and didn’t know how to tell him.

  No laptop in prison, of course, but plenty of time to write. She used legal pads, wrote in longhand, soon preferred it to keyboarding. The Surveyor came together very fas
t. Once she’d sketched in an outline, Ivy wrote one hundred and nine pages in the first ten days; although she was hardly aware of time, completely lost in the story. And it was good, the best work she’d done by far, on another level from before.

  Then, one day at lunch, a new inmate took the seat beside her in the cafeteria. She was a big Hispanic woman with muscular arms like a man and tattoos all over.

  “Yo,” she said.

  “Hi,” said Ivy.

  “You the teacher?”

  “I don’t do any teaching.”

  “But you that Ivy girl, no?”

  “My name’s Ivy.”

  The woman smiled, pulled her chair a little closer. Her front teeth were missing but the incisors were sharp.

  “Hector says hello,” she said.

  “Hector?”

  “Hector Luis Morales,” the woman said. “Who wrote about that Camaro? He be hurt, if he thought you forgot him.”

  Ivy got stuck on page 109.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Captain William McManamin of the Falmouth, Massachusetts, police and to James Cummings, Sheriff of Barnstable County.

  About the Author

  Peter Abrahams is the author of fifteen thrillers including Oblivion and Their Wildest Dreams, as well as the Echo Falls mystery series for young adults. He lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with his wife and children.

  www.peterabrahams.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Also by Peter Abrahams

  Oblivion

  Their Wildest Dreams

  The Tutor

  Last of the Dixie Heroes

  Crying Wolf

  A Perfect Crime

  The Fan

  Lights Out

  Revolution #9

  Pressure Drop