No Woods So Dark as These

by Randall Silvis

  Seventy-Four

  “I can tell you how they did it and everything,” McNulty said. She wore a carefree, foggy-eyed look and spoke in a lilting, almost musical voice wholly unlike the belligerent Micki whom Jayme and Boyd had first encountered. McNulty’s face was relaxed, her body loose, eyes unfocused as her gaze drifted from one pale-green wall to another in the interview room at the women’s section of the Mercer County Jail.

  The change was so curious to Jayme that while Boyd informed McNulty of her right to have a lawyer present, Jayme went to the door and asked the female guard if McNulty had gotten hold of some drugs somehow. “She got her epilepsy medicine with breakfast,” the guard said.

  “That’s all?” Jayme asked.

  “No way she got anything else,” the guard said.

  Jayme returned to her seat beside Boyd. McNulty smiled at her and said, “I wish I had hair like yours. It’s so thick and pretty. You should wear more makeup, though.”

  Jayme said, “Thank you for the advice. And now let me give you some. We already took a statement from Mr. Jakiella, and one from Amber before she passed away. And they both told us the entire story, start to finish. And it’s a different story from the one you’re telling. So, right now you are looking at charges for prostitution. And let’s see, what else? Obstruction of justice, defrauding the government, conspiracy to commit murder, accomplice to murder…we can stack up the charges as high as we want.”

  “Okay, sweetheart,” McNulty said.

  Boyd said, “Do you still want to blame it on Jakiella?”

  “Do you want to know how he did it? Skinny little man that he is?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Okay,” McNulty said. “So Sully and Suzi, they did not like each other, not one bit. Especially after Sully caught her and Sonny going at it.”

  “Why would Sully care?” Jayme asked. “She and Sonny weren’t lovers.”

  “He wanted it worse than anything, though. All she wanted was a big brother. And she didn’t like seeing her big brother banging a little Vietnamese whore.” McNulty opened her mouth and laughed, a deep hunh hunh hunh rising up from her chest.

  “So then what?” Boyd asked.

  “Sully made him promise to get rid of her. Which meant getting rid of all three of them, of course. They were all of a piece. So Sully knocked them out at dinner one night. I watched them falling over in their chairs, one two three, just like that.” She tried to snap her fingers at the word that, but made no sound.

  “How did she pull that off?” Boyd asked.

  “Sully?”

  “How did she knock them out?”

  “She had some syrup she used. Soaked some of those little orange slices in it and fed it to them as an appetizer.”

  Chloral hydrate, Jayme thought. And asked, “And where did she get her hands on that?”

  “Oh I don’t know. She had it around somewhere. She put some more in a pitcher of margaritas she made.”

  “All right,” Boyd said. “And then what?”

  “Then she wanted me to help carry them outside to the car, but I said unh uh, don’t involve me in any of this.”

  “Did Luthor help?” Jayme asked.

  “Luthor? He wasn’t even there.”

  “Where was he?”

  McNulty wrinkled her brow, scratched behind an ear. “I don’t remember where he was that time.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Jayme asked. “He wasn’t even in the house when it happened?”

  “We had chicken fajitas that night,” McNulty said. “I made a big platter of them. Choo Choo bought the groceries and I cooked them up.”

  “You remember that,” Jayme said, “but you can’t remember where Luthor was?”

  “He’s always coming and going. Got a business to run, you know. Collectibles. Household stuff mostly. Now and then a religious statue or two.” And again she laughed, that same deep-chested grunt.

  Boyd said, “Tell us how they got Choo Choo and the women out to the woods. And what happened out there.”

  “I wasn’t a part of any of it,” McNulty said.

  “But you know what happened,” Jayme said.

  “She bragged about it afterward, Sully did. She could be a mean little bitch when she wanted to.”

  Again Boyd asked, “How did they get them into the woods?”

  “In a car, of course. Kept them taped up till dark, then made the girls help drag Choo Choo out and cram him into the back end. Same thing once they got where they were going. Stood him up against that tree and tortured the poor man. For what? For bringing those two girls into our lives. Personally, I liked them. I liked them all.”

  Boyd rolled his eyes at Jayme. To McNulty, he said, “Okay. And then what?”

  “Then they drove home. Sully and Sonny.”

  “Drove home in what?” Jayme asked.

  Again McNulty’s brow wrinkled. “Oh, okay. Yeah. They walked out, didn’t they? That’s what they done.”

  Jayme leaned back in her chair. Shot a glance at Boyd, a tiny shake of her head. To McNulty, she said, “Is this the way the Tegretol always affects you, Micki?”

  “What way, honey?”

  “You seem a little too happy to me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be happy?”

  “You’re in jail,” Boyd told her.

  “Oh, you know. Everybody has to be somewhere, don’t they?”

  Before leaving the facility, Jayme stopped at the infirmary to speak with the RN, a tall, sturdy, fiftyish woman in a navy-blue pantsuit with white piping around the pockets and the tunic’s short sleeves and mandarin collar. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun.

  “I’m curious about the Tegretol,” Jayme said. “The epilepsy medicine? What exactly are its effects?”

  “Are you asking about the side effects?” the nurse asked.

  “No, just the overall effects on the patient. How do they manifest themselves?”

  “Well, the active ingredient is carbamazepine. It comes with a long list of possible but generally rare side effects, but the desired effect for epileptics is to manage seizures. It is also prescribed for bipolar disorder to manage mood swings. Why do you ask?”

  “Is it ever used recreationally?”

  The nurse cocked her head and looked puzzled. She turned away and stepped up to a table on which lay several open folders. Skimmed the names on the tabs and picked up one folder and glanced at the patient’s sheet inside. “You were here to see Cheryl McNulty, correct?”

  “We just now finished talking with her.”

  “She gets a 200 milligram chewable at breakfast and dinner. Prescribed by Dr. Sanjay Narang. Was she having a negative reaction of some kind?”

  “Negative?” Jayme said. “I don’t think so. In fact, just the opposite, considering where she is. She seemed a little dopey to me. In a euphoric kind of way. Have you seen that reaction before?”

  “I haven’t, no.”

  “Was she administered Suboxone today? Could that have done it?”

  The RN looked at the file, then said, “No, none. She gets that only as needed. And no withdrawal symptoms have been reported.”

  “Hmm,” Jayme said. “Okay. I was just wondering.”

  “It’s not uncommon for Suboxone to be abused,” the nurse told her. “Some people crush it up and snort it. It isn’t terribly effective except in those who don’t use opioids.”

  “But there’s no way she could have gotten hold of some this morning?” Jayme said.

  “No. I’ll go have a look at her, though. Just in case.”

  “Give me a call if you notice anything usual.”

  Trooper Boyd was waiting for her on the other side of the metal detector in the lobby. They walked together to the State Police SUV in the parking lot. Boyd agreed that McNulty’s behavior did not fit
his expectations, given their first meeting, but attributed it to her guile. “She had her story down pat,” he said. “Knew we’d be coming sooner or later. I think she was just having fun with us. Her kind of fun.”

  “You didn’t think she seemed a little spaced-out and dopey?”

  “They all seem dopey to me,” he said. “Or else they wouldn’t be in there.”

  Seventy-Five

  Leaving Boyd and Flores to write their reports, DeMarco unlocked the front door to find Hero on the threshold, tail wagging. “There’s my boy,” Jayme said, and knelt to kiss his skull and rub his fur. “We owe you a walk, don’t we? You want to take a walk?”

  “I’ll get the leash,” DeMarco said.

  “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. You seem tired.”

  “Frustrated is all. Be right back.”

  Jayme sat on the edge of the porch, her hand gripping Hero’s collar, until DeMarco returned. As he fastened the leash, he said, “No phone messages. Do you think we need to change real estate agents?”

  “It’s a slow market, babe.”

  “We’ve had two showings since the sign went up. At this rate you’ll be a…”

  “I’ll be a what?”

  “We’ll both be old before this place sells.”

  “That isn’t what you were going to say.”

  “Never mind, baby.”

  “No secrets, remember? I’ll be a what?”

  “I was going to say that you’ll be a widow before this place sells.”

  She looked at him with sad eyes. “Don’t you ever die on me, DeMarco.”

  “It was a stupid thing to say. That’s why I didn’t say it. Until you made me.”

  She stood there for a moment looking at him. Then Hero shoved his head between her legs. “Okay, boy, we’re going.” To DeMarco, she said, “Let’s go somewhere he can run free. He deserves that after being left alone all week. And not the dog park. Somewhere there’s just the three of us.”

  DeMarco nodded. One stupid word and now both of them were sad. Now both of them were heavy with presentiment and fear. He said, “Let him pee first while I give it some thought.”

  Seventy-Six

  As he drove he was thinking about how difficult it was to keep his promise to have no secrets from her. It was an impossible promise to keep, even excluding the secrets he had burned, those dirty secrets about the war and his father and the things he had done when he was drinking too much. And there were always new secrets to take their place, memories that returned to him unbidden and made him wince.

  His father had possessed all of the usual weaknesses of a man and none of the virtues and that was why DeMarco would always despise him. Nor would he ever be able to rub out the memory of him. At least once each week as a state trooper he had come across a man identical to his father in his behavior, a man who was mean, petty, and weak, a man either too stupid to recognize his own flaws or merely devoid of any concern for the damage he did to others. His father would always stand as DeMarco’s best model of what a man should never be.

  Thomas Huston, on the other hand, had been the perfect counterpoint to his father’s example. Huston had made his family a priority, even after they had been slaughtered. Went half-mad with grief yet managed to track down the killer. Huston was as fine a man as any DeMarco had ever known, a man deeply troubled and flawed, as every man is, yet a man who did his best to face each day with courage and kindness and love and resolution and an understanding that he alone was responsible for everything he said and did. DeMarco had loved Huston in a way he had always wanted to love his father but never could. It was strange that a younger man coming so late into DeMarco’s life should finally show him the full measure of what a man should be. DeMarco’s father had died a coward and a liar and a parasite on society, a drunk and abuser, but Huston had died bravely, in a self-orchestrated way that only he and DeMarco would ever know and understand. And that was only one of the secrets he could never reveal, not even to Jayme.

  The Pymatuning Reservoir straddled the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, with their nearest point of access just outside the village of Jamestown, Pennsylvania. DeMarco turned into the gravel lot above the dam and was glad to see only one other vehicle parked there, a black pickup truck. He parked in the rear corner of the lot, away from the road. Two young people, one male and one female, stood fishing side by side in the pool below the dam. He said, “I think we can turn him loose in the woods here. There’s nobody else around.”

  He glanced at his cell phone: no service. Placed the phone in the glove box, took out his weapon and Jayme’s.

  “You really think we need those?” she asked.

  “No. But let’s take them anyway.”

  Released from the back seat, Hero immediately bolted for the spillway, ran full-out for twenty yards, wheeled around and returned to where they stood watching, wheeled around them and completed the same route another four times before Jayme called for him to stop. “He’s so happy,” she said. “I guess he’s recovered from the surgery.”

  “A dog has to run. If we head into the woods here we can pick up a trail down the slope a little.”

  Should he tell her that after his mother died and he had beaten up the neighbor Paul—who was almost an old man then but still detestable—he had not been able to stay in the trailer where she died, but had packed a duffel with canned fruit and crackers and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and had hiked into those woods with nothing else but a tarp and blanket? If he kept that information to himself, did it become a secret and yet another violation of his promise? Should he tell her that he had remained in those woods until he ran out of whiskey, and that he fully intended to go AWOL, but outside the liquor store had a change of heart and telephoned his squad leader and apologized because he would be returning half a day late and then broke into helpless sobs? Or that his squad leader cleaned the mess up for him because DeMarco had always been such a good soldier and followed orders and killed when he was told to kill and sometimes when he was not? He had burned those killing secrets but not the part about almost going AWOL and he did not ever want her to know that about him, that he now saw his entire time in the service as a time of mindless weakness, and that everything he had done since then was an attempt to cauterize that wound just as joining the army and being a dutiful soldier had been a failed attempt to cauterize his youth.

  She took his hand as they entered the woods, with Hero running ahead to sniff every tree and fern and to chase every chipmunk. When she paused to gaze into the stream, DeMarco stopped beside her and looked at the water too and said nothing. When she gazed up through the canopy at the browning leaves and the bright broken sunlight and the uneven patches of blue, he paused and looked too. And when she slowed and then looked up at him with tears in her eyes, he slowed too. And when she turned and leaned into him and began to cry, he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her hair and said nothing because she had been remembering too, had wandered upon painful memories more recent than his, memories not yet scarred over but so fresh that every time her mind quieted, those memories washed into her as chilling as ever. And, knowing this, he was ashamed of his own misery over long-past youthful behavior, those memories he should have jettisoned long ago. It was time to hold the good and throw the rest away. She was all and everything that mattered or should matter to him.

  So he held her and said nothing and smelled the sunlight on her hair, and when her body trembled against him he held her even closer, and with his eyes closed and his mind quiet he could hear their Hero racing through the leaves. He could smell the forest and the stream, the shadows and the light. He could hear the ugliness back home scratching like dry leaves, like brittle twigs twitching against the sky. But that was there and now was here, and, for a while longer, her love and grief and his love for her were all and everything that mattered.

  Seventy-Seven

  The sun was lo
w when they came out of the woods. They emerged a couple of hundred yards from the parking lot, and as they walked back up along Dam Road the sun was to their right, throwing a glassy sheen of gold across the quiet water and shining red through the trees along the horizon. “The magic hour,” Jayme said. She was holding the leash but had wrapped it around her hand several times so that only the last foot or so hung limp as Hero trotted along beside her, his snout high and ears perked as if he was taking it all in, absorbing all this new territory through his eyes and ears and nose and tongue. DeMarco took it in too but with an appreciation that did not want to possess, only experience. He was aware of a kind of contentment he had known only rarely in life, that absence of desiring anything more, which he had not experienced since holding Baby Ryan asleep on his chest.

  The pickup truck was gone from the parking lot and the young couple who had been fishing in the pool below the dam were gone too. Everything was still except for two people and a dog moving through the stillness like the world’s last survivors, the reservoir flat and long and peaceful to their right, the woods hushed and dim to their left. He wished he could freeze it all in that moment and never have to go home again. And with that thought, the contentment faded away.

  At the car, while Jayme opened a bottle of water and held it dribbling onto Hero’s lapping tongue, he pulled the holster and Glock from his pocket and stowed them in the glove box. Then he sat on the edge of the seat with his feet outside the car and used a large chunk of the limestone gravel to scrape mud off his shoes.

  “Anybody hungry?” he asked.

  “We’re starved, aren’t we, boy? We need sustenance.”

  “There’s an Italian place back in town. Plus the ice cream and burger place. And a few other choices back in Greenville.”

  “But it’s not exactly Charlotte, North Carolina, here, is it?” she said. “I don’t want to have to leave him in the car while we eat.”

  They returned to the little brightly colored ice-cream shop on Main Street, where they ordered chili dogs and cheeseburgers and a basket of fries. A retired couple was enjoying their sundaes at the round table on the porch but the grassy patio area was empty, traffic sparse, the town settling into a Mayberry somnolence. DeMarco picked up their order on an orange plastic tray and followed Jayme to a shaded picnic table along the side of the building. He was halfway through his first chili dog when he remembered that he had left his cell phone in the car. He retrieved it, came back to the table, and sat, placing the phone between himself and Jayme. “Voice message from Joe,” he said, and tapped the speaker icon.