by Alex Dolan
“I’m fine.” I clipped my words, less comfortable jabbering away with him so frosty. “I didn’t see any cars stick with me on the trip up.”
“You have to be tired.” He rubbed his beard with a free hand. “You’ve been through something horrible. I want to make sure you’re healthy.” He forced empathy, earnestly wanting to care about my well-being, but the tone of his voice and the clench of his jaw told me he was anxious. Still, this was the first compassion I’d received in days. My eyes watered a bit.
“I’m all right.”
Before he published The Peaceful End, Dr. Jeffrey Holt was a pathologist. His wife developed breast cancer young, and after long treatments that failed, he attended her suicide six years ago. It shouldn’t have happened the way it did. Mina Holt was much younger than Jeffrey, and she should have easily outlived him. He was a pathologist, and yet all his medical expertise failed to save her. When recovery became impossible, she asked him to end her suffering. They used the helium-and-bag method, and he was acquitted when it came to trial.
They had two daughters, whom Jeffrey now raised alone. Around when I met him four years ago, at the height of his notoriety, a right-to-life extremist shot him during a university lecture in Baltimore and winged him through the fleshy part of the hip. Jeffrey had a mild limp, indiscernible if you weren’t aware of it. He stayed up here in Shallot, Oregon now, in a house tucked in the wooded part of town, more to keep his kids safe. Jeffrey was as outspoken an advocate as they came, but he’d learned to protect himself. As we drove, he scanned the road left to right and scrutinized the faces of the two people we passed: a mustached dog walker and a female jogger in pink. “I don’t know her,” he said about the jogger. “Probably visiting.”
He glanced across at me. “He knows your real name. But you don’t know his.”
“Leland Mumm is the only name I have.” I paused and gnawed on my chapped bottom lip. “I’m sorry, Jeffrey.” I was extremely sorry. I was, after all, a trail of breadcrumbs to his door.
“You suspect he isn’t related to this woman, Helena Mumm.”
“They know each other, but I’d bet there’s no relation.”
“You’re sure that her name is actually Helena Mumm.”
“No, but I have mail with her name on it. It’s more than I have for Leland.”
“You still think he’s a detective, even though you know he gave you a fake name? Did the badge look real?”
“The badge looked real enough, and he seemed to know how the law worked.”
“He tied you to a bed for a day—you really think he knows how the law works?”
“You had to be there.” The trees grew denser the farther we drove; their trunks often as wide as the minivan. The deeper into woodland we went, the safer I felt. “I’m really not sure what’s going on, Jeffrey. And I’m sorry I’m putting you in this. I didn’t know who else to call. If I could have done this on my own, I would have.”
“Speaking of calls.” He reached over and opened the glove compartment, finding an outdated flip phone. “Sometime today, call work and tell them why you didn’t come in. You’re sick, and you will be sick for the next week. Use it sparingly, but no one can trace you on this.”
It occurred to me that I’d probably lose my job. Even if the law didn’t get me, I could only be absent so long. Open slots in fire departments didn’t come up that often either. I’d had to wait two years to take the entry exam.
When I took the phone, he felt my hand tremble. Jeffrey observed, “You’re shaking. Did you know you were shaking?” I placed my hands and the phone between my legs. “We’ll figure it out. You’re a tough cookie.” His concern was as close to compassion as I was going to get right now.
The minivan pulled off the road into a shopping center. “Next stop.” To a stranger, his voice would sound calm as a yogi’s, but Jeffrey never followed a strict agenda like this. He liked to yak, and we’d said almost nothing to each other.
I bought a few days’ worth of outfits from a boutique athletic shop: butt-hugging yoga pants and layers warm enough for the woods. I changed in the dressing room, and we bagged my old clothes.
Jeffrey drove on until we reached a landfill, where he announced, “Final stop.”
Tractor tires piled atop a heap of paper debris and the occasional stray television. Herons picked at the detritus. Without a soul in sight, he doused my clothes in lighter fluid and tossed a lit match on the mound. He asked regretfully, “Your wallet.”
“You sure that’s necessary?”
“You were unconscious. You don’t know what he planted on you. I know you’d expect a recluse like me to wax conspiracy, but you’d be surprised how crafty law enforcement can be.”
I handed over all of my identification. I would have taken the cash too, but Jeffrey cautioned, “Only keep the money you withdrew after you left the detective.” The bank had given me an envelope for the few thousand I’d withdrawn, and I’d kept it separate from my billfold. I probably had sixty bucks in the wallet, but I didn’t know when I’d be at my next bank, and I couldn’t use credit cards.
“They’d mark the cash?”
He said, “You’ve just destroyed a car, and you’re worried about saving sixty dollars?”
I surrendered the wallet. He tossed it on the pyre and we watched my belongings reduce to ash. The only items spared were the syringe Leland gave me, still in the case, and the mail I’d stolen from Helena Mumm; and they were only saved because he wanted to examine them.
“Do you have anything else on you he might have touched?”
“No. I’ve got nothing.”
“Then let’s take you home.”
Redwoods curtained off Jeffrey Holt’s house from the street. The place was so remote he didn’t even get his mail delivered. The P.O. Box was back down on Main Street in Shallot. After the shooting, he’d bought an old sheep ranch and rebuilt on the land. Only someone with serious funds could have afforded this. The house was one long floor on the top of a hill with windows everywhere, looking out onto vast contours of pine tops. An aircraft carrier on a sea of conifers.
The house hadn’t changed much. In the four years I’d known Jeffrey Holt, I’d visited three times, when he hosted annual dinners for volunteers. I belonged to a group called Friends, a subset of a larger organization known as Gifts of Deliverance. Jeffrey had chosen the name because the acronym spat in the face of religious right-to-lifers like the man who shot him. When a client wanted someone like Kali to visit her, she would contact Gifts of Deliverance and ask for a Friend. About fifty Friends attended the last annual gathering.
When we pulled into the driveway, I ducked down in the backseat of the minivan while Jeffrey went inside. He hurried the nanny out and tapped the glass when I could come out of hiding. The girls were back from school. He didn’t keep the kids around while the Friends got drunk at his house, so I’d never met Stacy or Jess Holt. I recognized them from photos. Once we got inside, I watched them bounce on a trampoline in the backyard while Jeffrey examined my cuts and bruises in the bathroom.
We moved to the kitchen, and I started peeling carrots and yams in the sink. While I skinned vegetables, Jeffrey moved through the house and drew vertical blinds across the big windows. With every yank of the pull cord the blinds lurched until the striped sunlight cast prison bar shadows on the floor. Another twist and the room was dark. This was the first time I’d ever seen his windows covered. I’d once asked him if he ever felt exposed in a house this open, and he’d said the forest gave him all the privacy he needed.
The kitchen window gave me another view of his daughters playing. Both girls were under ten, smiley with long limbs and fingers like their dad. The older one, Stacy, had her mom Mina’s lopsided dimples. Unlike either of the Mumm’s homes, family photos lined the walls, allowing me to compare faces. Once Jeffrey made his rounds to every room and drew the blinds in each, he returned to the kitchen, gave a longing look at his daughters, then reached over my shoulder and pull
ed the shade.
When he called the kids inside, Jeffrey hugged them tight, almost to show me how much affection could be poured into an embrace when someone deserved it. Or maybe today he felt more protective. He introduced me as an afterthought, but didn’t call me over from the sink, and the two girls hesitantly waved to me from across the room. The older one, Stacy, asked why it was so dark inside, and her father said he was getting the house ready for movie night. The kids cheered.
He joined me in the kitchen while the girls changed. “On movie night they dress up like Hollywood celebrities.” He sliced the yams I’d peeled and kept his eyes on the knife. “It will keep them busy until we eat.” He kept his eyes on the counters while we cooked.
We roasted root vegetables and he stir-fried tofu with garlic and chili paste. With Jeffrey lost in thought, neither of us spoke. Cooking usually zenned him out, but he operated like an automaton as he prepared the food, and I pivoted to keep out of his way.
By the time we gathered the kids for dinner, the sun had gone down. Through the narrow gaps in the blinds, the night was the pure black only found in deep, dark nature.
The kids stampeded to the table in garish costume gowns and tiaras, Halloween costumes modeled after Disney princesses, with vinyl frills that imitated lace. Stacy wore her dress with Crocs, and Jess ambled in a pair of her mother’s loose-fitting heels. Jeffrey had held onto a closet of Mina’s clothing.
At the table, the girls fiddled with their napkins and kicked their legs. They were chuckling, blonde monkeys who hadn’t learned to sit still. Both of them eyed me curiously. From what I picked up, the girls seemed to know little about their father’s euthanasia work. He told them I was a friend from work, but not much else. While he forked his yams into mash, his restless leg quivered. The soft scrapes of steel against ceramic kept the room from going completely silent.
Stacy tried to piece together our friendship from the factoid her father fed them. “You work with my dad. Are you a doctor too?”
Jess couldn’t contain herself. “You’re tall. Are you a man?”
Stacy was at the age where she tried to act like an adult. She scolded her sister. “She’s not a man. She’s pretty.”
Jess pointed at my bicep. “Her arms are too strong.”
“Want to feel them?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Jess without hesitation. I made a muscle, and her eyes bugged when she felt it. “Awesome.” Her hand slipped down to my bandaged wrist, and I tried to be subtle about my wince. She saw the gauze. “Are you hurt?”
“Not that hurt.”
“What did you do?”
“Stunt girl. I fell out of a building for a movie.” Jeffrey had been stewing in thought, but this momentarily jogged him out of it. He smiled with a momentary eye twinkle.
“Really?”
“No, I’m just kidding.”
Stacy asked, “Are you a beaver or a duck?” I had no idea what she was talking about.
Jeffrey looked up from his food. “It’s an Oregon thing.”
“Neither?”
Jess tried to braid her own hair while she assessed, “Not a beaver or a duck, and not a doctor. Not a stunt girl. What do you do?”
Jeffrey didn’t offer much help—he was back to staring at his sweet potatoes. “I’m a firefighter—kind of like a stunt girl. I put out fires. Occasionally, I have to look for people and make sure they’re safe—it’s called search and rescue. And I work as a paramedic.” I asked her dad, “Do they know what a paramedic is?” This forced Jeffrey to acknowledge me, and he shrugged, managing a smile. “It’s someone who brings people to the doctors when they’re hurt.”
“You’re a fireman?” This wowed the older sister.
“I told you she was a man,” Jess said.
This pulled Jeffrey out of his ruminations. “She’s not a man.” To me, he said, “I’m sorry.” Either the delight of his children or the wine had begun to pacify him. He was unknotting into the man I admired, and now joined the conversation.
I took this opening to remind him. “Thank you for having me here. I know what you’re doing for me, and I appreciate it.”
“Is she staying over?” Jess asked her dad.
“She is,” he confirmed.
Stacy finished spelling the word “be” with her carrot segments, and her father judged that the meal had concluded. “You guys want to start the movie?”
Jess bolted from her seat and out of the room.
Stacy told her father. “We get to race with her tomorrow.”
“Fair enough,” he said to her, then to me, “Good luck. They’re fast and they know how to dodge trees.”
He left the table and started an animated movie while I cleared the plates. With the kids engrossed, we talked in the kitchen over running water. He washed and I dried.
He continued with the question that had been nagging him. “Why are you convinced he was real police?”
“When I go on calls I run into cops. He reminded me of some of those guys. Not the rookies, but the veterans who’ve been through it a thousand times over.”
“I need to ask. Does he know you know me?”
“It never came up, and I sure didn’t bring it up. If he knows, it’s not because I told him.” I didn’t mention that Leland chose to read Jeffrey’s book during my detainment. To win his confidence, I added, “I don’t keep anything on the organization in my apartment. He won’t find anything there.”
“Your computer…”
“My computer is registered to Pamela Wonnacott. The only place Kali got e-mail was my cell phone.”
“You know there’s a lot at stake here, right?”
“I’m not taking this lightly. I don’t want to put you in jeopardy.”
“Too late for that,” he snapped. “I’m sorry, but I can’t get over the fact that you didn’t consult the doctor face-to-face. You didn’t verify the records. We have those rules in place so things like this don’t happen.” He chewed on a fingernail. He was absolutely right, and hearing my mistakes aired aloud made me shrivel inside. In some ways, disappointing Jeffrey Holt was worse than fending for my own safety.
“Would it be better if I left?”
“No it wouldn’t.” Covered in a wet yellow canner’s glove, his hand covered mine. The way I held clients’ hands. “I knew a long time ago I’d be at risk doing this. Even before that little man shot me in Baltimore. The work we do inherently pisses people off. You piss off enough people, someone’s going to come after you. I knew that. But I’m not worried for myself. I’m worried about the other people in this house. The people in this house, and the people in our network. You know how many people this organization represents?”
“About fifty Friends,” I said.
He stared at the stream of running dishwater, perhaps wondering whether he should say more. “Gifts of Deliverance, as an organization, represents a network of about 2,600 people. And the potential for calamity is the reason you didn’t know that until now.”
I’m usually easier with words, but I was speechless.
He patted my hand. “We’re going to fix this. You’ll see tomorrow.”
I slept well. My bed smelled like cut wood and mildew, unfamiliar odors that promised refuge from the known, vengeful world.
Voices woke me in the morning.
Two new people sat in the living room with Jeffrey and the girls: a big oafish white guy with a beard orange as a campfire, and a petite Asian woman with honey skin and Malcolm X glasses. Both of them were in their late twenties. They occupied distant points on an L-shaped sofa set. The big guy absentmindedly plucked pentatonic scales on an acoustic guitar while they talked, even though it distracted the girls from watching cartoons on TV. The guitar belonged to Jeffrey—it came out every year during the parties.
Silence fell when I walked in. Jeffrey forced a cordial, “Ga’ morning.”
Christ, I was the class dunce.
“Where are the girls?”
Jeffrey said, “Drop
ped them off at school. Wouldn’t want them around for this anyway.”
He introduced the red-bearded guy as a lab tech named Morton Ross. “He’s done impressive work on drug interactions.”
The Gifts of Deliverance network conducted research. Hence, it made sense for Jeffrey Holt to retain a bullpen of researchers, people who could test forms of assisted suicide such as the helium-and-bag method. The term “drug interactions” had devolved into pharma jargon, but it referred to how one medication impacted the effects of others. For example, did Valium compound the effects of sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide? Researchers like Morton Ross helped Dr. Jeffrey Holt perfect the most painless ways to end lives.
Morton stopped plucking the acoustic. In glass-rattling baritone, he jollied, “Dr. Holt tells me you have a syringe full of a mystery fluid?”
I retrieved it from the bedroom. Morton cracked open the case and turned the hypodermic barrel up and down. Had it been a dirty novelty pen, a girl’s hula skirt might have rolled up to reveal her nethers.
Morton looked at Jeffrey. “No sweat. Two days, three tops. If it takes more than that, I’ll try drinking it.” When the other woman gaped, he assured her, “I’m kidding.”
Jeffrey introduced the woman as Lisa Kim. Five feet even and slim. Built like a ballerina, her haunches were slightly more developed than her bony ribcage.
I tried to be friendly. “You look familiar. Have we met here at one of the gatherings?”
Lisa Kim almost snorted. “No, we haven’t.”
“Sorry, I thought you might be another Friend.”
Her witchy cackle suggested that was the best joke Lisa Kim had heard in some time. “I’m Jeffrey’s general counsel. If I look familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen my photo on the website. Definitely not a friend.”
Jeffrey said admiringly, “Lisa helped put together several of our ballot initiatives.”
In the time I’d known him, the organization had lobbied on four euthanasia and assisted suicide bills in three states.
She said, “I do a lot more than that. I’m the hog that roots out truffles.” She sprang from the sofa and asked me, “I hear you got mail. Where is it?” I pointed down the hallway to one of the guest rooms, and she disappeared and reappeared with the junk mail addressed to Helena Mumm. She said to Jeffrey, “I can make this quick.”