The Good Neighbor

by William Kowalski

  They left the dirt road behind and got back on the county high way. The truck gave a final lurch as it heaved itself up onto the

  268 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  pavement, like a sea creature making the evolutionary transition to land. Colt groaned aloud as his stomach protested this latest outrage to his equilibrium.

  “Not that I give a shit, but you don’t look so good,” said Fleb berman.

  Colt didn’t answer. He was still sweating, not from exertion but nausea. He’d tried to throw up four more times, again with no results. Now his ribs ached as if he’d been in a wrestling match, and his throat burned with stomach acid.

  “Please,” he said. “Do you have any water?”

  His voice was as ratchety as a bullfrog’s. Flebberman, after a dubious moment, reached behind the seat and retrieved a half- empty plastic bottle of soda. Colt guzzled the entire thing in sec onds. The soda tasted as if it had been in the truck for two or three months, but it was the best thing Colt had ever drunk in his life.

  “Whatsa matter with you?” Flebberman asked. “You sick?”

  “I told you,” Colt said, tossing the empty bottle to the floor and wiping his mouth. “I have this—thing about bodies. I can’t deal with them. They freak me out.”

  “You mean yer scared of ’em.”

  He shook his head. “Not just that. Different. I can’t explain it. I just—you know how people have irrational fears of things? Like spiders? Or water?”

  “Yeah,” Flebberman said, settling back in his seat with a self- satisfied air. “Yer scared.”

  Colt fumed. No, he was not scared of bodies. He just hated them. Ever since that day with his mother ’s body, when he’d had to look at her, he couldn’t even so much as walk into a funeral home without breaking out into a cold sweat. When loved ones of friends passed away, he sent a bunch of flowers and stayed well clear. The only funeral Coltrane Hart would ever attend again was his own.

  The Good Neighbor

  269

  The roads were deserted, and wet with melting snow. Colt drove slowly.

  “Yep,” said Flebberman. “Not near so big and tough as you think, Fancy Pants. Izzn’t ’at right?”

  Colt gritted his teeth and said nothing. He squinted; up ahead, cresting a rise, he could see a car coming in the opposite direction. They had passed plenty of other cars so far, and he had hoped against hope that one of them would be a cop—all to no avail. But this one looked like it had emergency lights on top of it.

  Be a cop, he thought. Please be a cop.

  Flebberman had seen it, too. He sat up straight and pointed the gun at him again, keeping it low.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said.

  Colt turned to look at Flebberman, letting scorn show on his face. Suddenly, he felt as if he really didn’t care what happened to him; he had had it. That was it. He was not going to take any more. Everyone has a breaking point, and Colt had reached his. Now, even though there was still a gun pointed at him, he felt as if he had the upper hand, because he suddenly no longer cared whether he lived or died. He only wanted to make this little man suffer before he missed his chance.

  “Is that thing even loaded?” Colt asked.

  “What?” Flebberman shouted disbelievingly. “Of course it’s fuckin’ loaded! You wanna find out the hard way?”

  Colt grinned. He gunned the engine. “Yeah,” he said. “I sure do.” Flebberman’s eyes grew wide.

  “Go ahead, shoot,” said Colt. “I don’t give a shit.”

  He stepped harder on the gas and looked again at the car that was coming at them. It was indeed a police car—a state trooper, from the looks of it. Hallelujah. Colt hoped the trooper was wear ing his seat belt, because he was going to need it.

  “Hang on, cop,” he muttered. “Sorry about this.”

  270 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  In the moments just before the collision, he looked at Flebber man again. The little man’s mouth was open wide with panic. He looked like he was trying to yell, but nothing was coming out. Colt grinned again.

  “Who’s afraid now?” he asked.

  Then he swung the wheel hard to the left. There was the bone- jarring force of the vehicles colliding, not head-on but front to end, in the shape of a mason’s compass. The noise was so loud that Colt’s ears rang with infernal bells, in the split second before he was knocked out against the side window. This was the last thing he was aware of, for a length of time that he could not mea sure.

  25

  ‌

  The Confession

  Later, after the excavators had left, Francie sat in her new wing- back chair, reading the diary in an effort to soothe her nerves. She

  had covered most of the early years already, trying to read be tween the understated lines to get a sense of what Marly had ac tually felt, or at least what she had thought about—but there were precious few clues to go by. None, in fact. Marly reported the events of her life as matter-of-factly as if they were happening to someone else, and as far as her inner life went, the world of her emotions was as mysterious as the surface of Pluto. As the years went by, large gaps of time began to appear between entries— they were still made only on Sundays, but intervals began to oc cur: first weeks, then months. Francie, frustrated, skipped ahead in the hopes that some great epiphany would have come over Marly Musgrove, or that some kind of authorial instinct would have finally taken over after her own personal pump had been primed; but there was nothing beyond the usual style of entry. “Chopped wood—planted garden—made butter—mended socks.”

  272 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  Francie was beginning to discover, to her disappointment, that there was no literary genius lurking behind the apron, no out pouring of the soul, no feminine wisdom to be passed down through the ages—which was, more than anything, what she’d been hoping for—some kind of connection between hearts that would span the decades and show her how to be a better woman. But there was nothing except socks and butter. Marly Mus-

  grove was just a person, nothing more and nothing less.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  Francie closed the diary and rubbed her eyes, yawning. It had somehow become afternoon, and the orange sunlight angled thinly through the windows and warmed her slippered feet. The house creaked and moaned as usual, as it did every time the wind shifted or the temperature changed. Just like a ship. Weigh anchor, Francie thought. Set a course for the open sea.

  On a whim, she opened the diary near the end. Marly had kept the journal for almost twenty years, finally allowing it to peter out in the early 1870s. The date on her tombstone was 1888. So, that was that. Francie was disappointed to realize that she would never know what Marly’s thoughts had been in the days before she died. Nor would she ever know how she had died. Would there have been anything revealing in those final moments, perhaps? A deathbed awakening of higher consciousness? Some kind of state ment that it had all been worth it, that one had only to surrender to life’s pain to find its sweet reward?

  There was absolutely nothing like that. On the last day Marly had seen fit to record, she had helped a cow give birth to a calf and begun to empty the house in preparation for spring cleaning.

  But then Francie saw, to her surprise, that there was one final entry made in a different handwriting. It slanted the other way— which Francie recognized immediately as being made by someone left-handed. She sat up straighter, her interest renewed.

  The Good Neighbor

  273

  It was a single entry, but a long one. Someone had finally writ ten her true thoughts in this book—but it wasn’t Marly.

  The entry was dated May 16, 1888. She read:

  I must unburden myself here, in this book, in which my de parted Mother had undertaken to tell the simple story of her days, and allow it to bear silent witness to what I have done. I cannot go to my grave with this secret, for its weight is too much to bear, though it was not myself as a grown woman who committed the crime I am about to relate, but myself a
s a little girl. I hope that this fact, more than any other, will give the Reader reason to seek some room in his heart to for give me, although I know that even the allowance which we accord the carelessness of youth knows its limits, and that I have far, far surpassed those, generous as they may be.

  Nearly thirty years ago, we had a brother, Henry, whose remains are buried in the family plot next to his brothers and sisters. When he was just a year old, Henry wandered away from the house and drowned in the stream. I had been watching him, though my parents had not instructed me to do so and did not know that I did this. I was watching him not to protect him, but to wait for opportunity. Evil child that I was! Whence came this black-heartedness in me? I shall never know, nor shall I ever forgive myself. It was a childish notion that took root in me and grew in twisted fashion, a demon plant whose seed flourished because of something I saw, and one that poisoned all the rest of my days. If I had the courage, I would have taken my own life years ago. Oh, but that I had! But I shall live out my ap pointed days and meet my judgment when the time is right. Having taken one little life already, I cannot take another— though it be a life that has no value to it.

  274 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  I drowned little Henry. Now it is written, I cannot un write it. Why I did this is hard to tell, even to myself. But I must try. I had thought something happened, a year earlier, to get my mother with child. A man had come to Adencourt, a man of dark temperament and unhealthy character—and I had seen evidence of this in both his body and his soul. He was the medicine salesman, McNally, and he brought great harm on my family, and might have brought more, had my mother not seen fit to bring her own punishment on him. I will not write that deed here, for that is a matter for her own judgment, and it is not for such a one as me to condemn her, for what she did was no doubt right

  I thought, simple, foolish idiot that I was, that Henry was the child of McNally, not of my father. He was the only child of us to have yellow hair, like McNally’s. The rest of us were dark. And so I decided that something must be done to get rid of him. All was not right in our house. We had been plagued with misfortune after misfortune. Something was eating away at us, I knew not what—until McNally came, and Mother did what she did, and then Henry came some months after. And I, nine years old, reasoned that Henry must be done away with. When he was a year old I took him to the creek and held him under, until he stopped his strug gles, and saw that another Musgrove child had left this earth and gone on too early to his reward; a year in which I had hesitated, and planned, and waited for confirmation that this plan was either right or wrong. I waited also for my courage to gather itself, and on one dark day, after Henry had already learned to walk, it did. When his little body surfaced and collected in the eddy of the great boulder across the road, I had already come back to the house, and taken pains to conceal the evidence of what I had done—for already I knew that I had made a terrible mistake, one that could never be unmade. Hamish was the one who found him, and Father

  The Good Neighbor

  275

  brought his little body up from the river, and we laid him to his rest. The shame that burned in my heart from that day to this has left a mark on my soul that I feel must be visible to all.

  Oh, Henry, Henry! I hope, when we shall meet in the hereafter, that your little soul has the wisdom to look into my heart and see what purpose hid there, not out of a desire for evil, but for good, and that you shall not judge me too harshly. But I know also that should your desire be for vengeance, it shall be yours. I shall not attempt to escape my fate. Nor could I leave this house for the last time, on the oc casion of the funeral of our mother, without dropping, if only for a moment, this weight that I have carried for so long. Evil is the heart of woman! Evil is the heart of a girl child who had seen too much, and become affected by it, through no design of her own! How I have suffered, will continue to suffer, all the rest of my miserable days, and throughout eternity!

  Ellen Musgrove

  Well, thought Francie.

  She closed the book and set it quickly on the floor beside her. Her heart was racing, as if she’d been running; she realized that she’d been holding her breath as she read, and she let it out.

  Henry’s tombstone would have been one of the illegible ones, she thought. And Ellen’s name wasn’t to be found in the cemetery either, unless it too, was, illegible—but then, she was one of the few children who had survived into adulthood. She must have been buried somewhere else, then. Not here.

  And she was a murderer.

  Francie picked up the diary again and reread the entry. She thought she had it after that: Ellen had believed, at one time, that her mother had been raped by this McNally. And there was

  276 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  something about McNally the girl feared—maybe something more than the childish fear of strangers. So Ellen had drowned her little brother because she thought he was McNally’s child, and because she had hoped this final sacrifice would bring an end to the suffering of the Musgroves. Francie thought she under stood what that meant—it was all for the children, the others that were lost. So many had died that it must have seemed to the little girl as if they really were being punished for some thing—as if, lurking behind the clouds, there was a host of irrita ble deities who had to be appeased, or they would make their wrath felt in terrifyingly random ways. It was not the first time in human history that the ignorant had made this desperate bid to assure their own futures, she thought. Think of the Aztecs, cutting out the hearts of the best and brightest of their youth; think of the Puritans at Salem.

  Ellen had written that Henry’s body had collected in the water near the “great boulder.” Francie hadn’t yet been to explore the river, but she remembered a large rock peeking up over the road. She put her boots and jacket on now and traipsed down the drive way, to visit the scene of this crime.

  In Indiana, Francie remembered, Michael and she had played on the banks of a creek much like this one—for this was truly a creek, not really a river, at least not anymore. Somewhere near the source of this water, a dam must have been installed, for it seemed inconceivable that such a feeble trickle of water could have carved out this whole valley. In Indiana, they’d caught crawdads and minnows, and made little boats out of leaves, and waded back and forth in exploration of the creek’s bed. It was easy to imagine the Musgrove children doing the same thing, one hundred fifty years ago. Less easy to imagine was herself doing to Michael what Ellen said she had done to Henry. To see that little face looking up at her from under the surface, terrified and uncomprehending, and feel the thrashing of his chubby limbs growing weaker and weaker,

  The Good Neighbor

  277

  until finally they stopped—no. Not even in her darkest moments could she ever have imagined herself doing such a thing.

  Ellen Musgrove was a monster.

  The river was about fifty feet wide, though once, she could see, it had been wider, and probably deeper. Rocks like dinosaur eggs lined the bottom, having tumbled over each other these last ten thousand years to end up here. It wouldn’t have been comfortable wading—there would have been a lot of twisted ankles. The trees flittered like the hands of a mute, their dry finger-bones clacking in the wind. She found the boulder Ellen must have meant—no one could ever have moved it, not without setting men and equip ment to the task. This rock would have been sitting here long be fore the first people appeared, in the path of the receding glaciers. It would have seen everything. Francie dug her toes into a crevice and pulled herself onto its back.

  It was a great, large, warm rounded rock, its top clear of snow, and if the water had been deeper it would have made a perfect div ing platform. From her perch, feeling like a princess on an ele phant, Francie looked down into the stream. Indeed, the current swirled into a pool that had carved out a place at the base of the rock, and only in this place did the water lie still, becalmed, filled at the moment with small sticks that had followed the same path as Henry’s body.


  How horrible it must have been for them all. She could imagine the boy, limp and dripping, being plucked from the water, carried across the road and into the house, the wailing of the family mem bers filling the air—yet again. Each young death would have been a fresh blow to them, each one more than they could bear. And Ellen, the nine-year-old murderess. Would she have cried, too? Did she know what she was doing, or was she just responding to some ancient and unconscious urge to save her tribe from yet more suf fering, fulfilling a need to eliminate the strange and the unwanted? She had done what she believed was right. Francie understood that much to be true. Beyond that she understood nothing.

  278 WILLIAM KOWALSKI

  This poor family, she thought. How these people must have cried. They had all suffered—but no one but the diary knew of the burden that Ellen had carried all her life. The diary—and now Francie.

  Suddenly, Francie remembered the butterfly pin she’d found in the secret room under the stairs. It had been woven from blond hair. She had assumed it was a girl’s, because it was so long and pretty—but she realized now that it must be Henry’s. His had been the only blond hair in the family, Ellen wrote. It would have been cut from his head before he was committed to the earth, and woven into a remembrance of him. Ellen must have been the one who placed it down below the stairs—along with the diary, and her old rag dolls, and that strange bottle of snake oil. She must have done so in the hope that someone would find it someday. And when that happened, what did she hope for then? Did she hope that finally her spirit would be released, because her guilt had finally been revealed? Had she lacked the courage to confess to anyone before her own death, choosing instead to let the diary do the confessing for her?