I.O.U

by Nancy Pickard

  I thought so, too, and was starting to cry again.

  “Stop that, and listen,” Geof said, as if he were impatient with me. “So the department thinks I removed the batteries last night, to make it look as if you couldn’t have lowered the garage door. How they think I managed to call for help and to give you CPR and to remove the batteries all at the same time, they haven’t told me.”

  “I could have gotten out of the car,” I whispered, arguing against myself. “I could have manually pulled down the door myself, and then got back into the car.”

  “That’s what they said, too. There’s only one thing wrong with that. You had your seat belt on.”

  It took a minute for the implications of that to sink in. And then I sat up and grabbed him as if I’d been shot through with lightning. “What? What did you say?”

  “That’s right, Jenny, you were still wearing your seat belt.”

  “Then I never left my car!”

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t the other cops know that, Geof?”

  “They didn’t find you. I did. And I had to unbelt you to drag you out of there. So it’s my word.”

  “Isn’t that good enough?”

  “I’m your husband, what are they going to think?”

  Neither of us spoke for a moment, and then I voiced the most chilling thought of all: “So who shut the garage door, Geof?”

  “That,” he said, grimly, “is what we’re going to find out.”

  “Oh Geof.” I began laughing and crying all at the same time, and I grabbed him again and started covering his face with kisses as I blubbered on. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! I was so scared I had gone off the deep end! But you know what! Of all the ways I could choose to kill myself, that’s the one I’d never pick! Really, I never would. And you know why? I spent my childhood getting carsick, Geof! When I was a kid on family vacations, I threw up in every state between here and Hawaii. Even today, if I get caught in traffic behind a bus or even a diesel Mercedes, I get nauseated. So I might shoot myself. Or slit my wrists. Or even put strychnine in my coffee. But I would never, never, never lock myself in a garage with the car turned on, because more than anything else in the world, I hate to throw up.”

  He laughed, as he held me and let me blubber into his shoulder. “It may not be the most convincing argument I ever heard, but I believe it.”

  Better than that, he believed in me.

  I was alive, and so lucky.

  Better than that, it was true: I wasn’t crazy. I hadn’t plunged so far into grief and guilt and depression that I had lost my mind and tried to kill myself. I wasn’t my mother.

  “I want to go home,” I said, a little while later, as I sniffed up the last of my tears.

  “Tomorrow,” Geof assured me.

  “Geof, you told me that Dad was here, and Randy was here, but what about Sherry?”

  He hesitated before he spoke. “Lars has called me several times since last night. He’s quite concerned about you, he sends his love, and the children’s. Sherry sent those flowers.” Geof pointed to a modest potted plant that sat on the window ledge. I asked him to hand me the card attached to it, and when he did, I read this message: “Get well soon, the Guthries.”

  I looked up. “Get well soon? The Guthries?”

  He shrugged. “As I said, Lars calls. He wants to come by to see you, but I’ve discouraged him from doing it.”

  “Lars is not my sister.”

  “You’d be better off if he were.”

  “Flowers,” I said. “Do you think—”

  “Do I think that the attempt on your life was related to those flowers that were sent to the funeral? And to the message in the guest book and to what happened to you at the grave? I don’t know yet, Jenny. It could even be connected to those letters you got at the foundation.”

  “From MOAC?”

  “They were threatening, weren’t they?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, and added, “I am suddenly all tuckered out.”

  “You sleep,” he said, comfortingly. But when he got up and I saw that he meant to go, I clutched at him. “You’re not leaving?”

  He patted my hands, before gently disengaging them. “Only for a few hours, because there’s something I have to do at home. Don’t worry, I’ve got somebody posted outside your door. A retired friend of mine. Starting tomorrow, I’m taking time off to keep an eye on you.”

  “They’ll let you do that?”

  “No.” The sudden coldness in his smile was not directed at me. “They won’t let me do that. But they can’t very well argue if I suddenly come down with a raging case of the flu, can they?”

  “Geof, your job—”

  “Is not as important as your life.” He bent down and kissed my mouth. As he walked out of the room, I smiled tearily to myself, and said, “Great exit, Lieutenant.”

  Before I could fall asleep, Dr. Calvin Farrell dropped by.

  “Your cousin almost didn’t let me in,” he complained.

  “My cousin?”

  “Wanted proof I was a doctor, for heaven’s sake.” Doc Farrell flipped his stethoscope at me. “What the hell’s he think I am, a car mechanic?”

  He was wearing a rumpled suit and shirt and his great shock of white hair was a mess, as if he’d been running his hands through it all day. He looked tired, and every one of his years.

  “Oh,” I said, finally remembering that Geof had stationed “somebody” outside my room to guard me. “That’s Clyde, on my mother’s side. He’s a little strange.”

  Doc Farrell stepped to my bedside and lifted my wrist. “How we doin’?”

  “Checking to see if I have a pulse? I think you could now light a match under my nose without fear of explosion.”

  He dropped my hand back onto the bed. “I’m going to consider it a personal insult if it’s true that you tried to kill yourself, Jennifer. I worked damned hard helping your mother bring you into this world. Suicides are a waste of my valuable time.”

  “I didn’t,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster lying there on my back with an IV sticking out of my arm.

  “Really?” His great eyebrows lifted. “Well then, what were you doing mixing alcohol and tranquilizers?”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “Valium,” the Doc said. “You had traces of benzodiazepine in your blood, along with whatever you’d been drinking.”

  “Beer,” I said. “Oh, damn, you know what I’ll bet I did? I thought I was taking one of your vitamins, Doc, but I must have taken one of the Valiums that Marj gave me. I had both bottles in my purse, and I was tired, and I didn’t look closely to see what I opened. It’s no wonder I passed out.”

  “Doctor Marjorie Earnshaw and her goddamned prescriptions!” Doc Farrell exploded. “One of these days…” He suddenly focused his anger on me. “And by the way, what the hell were you doing telling her you were in my office for an AIDS test?”

  “A bad joke,” I confessed.

  “It certainly was. Poor Marjorie was not amused when I told her it was poppycock, and I didn’t find it funny myself. You wouldn’t, either, if you were treating the AIDS babies I am.”

  In order to defend myself, I would have to disparage his loyal receptionist and tell him what a nosy, presumptuous old bitch I thought she was, and I couldn’t do that, so I just said meekly, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m really going to have to do something about that woman,” Doc Farrell said. “But she’s been with me forty years and if I fire her now, well, I can’t fire her now, how could I fire her now, after so many years?” He blew out a great breath that swelled his mottled cheeks. “I can’t do it. But throw those damn tranquilizers away, Jenny. If I think you need them, I’ll see that you get them.” His coattails flew as he turned to leave.

  “Doc? Can I see my mother’s medical records?”

  He stopped to glare at me. “What the hell for? This is getting to be an obsession with you, this business about your mother, and it’s no
t healthy. No, you can’t have your mother’s medical records.”

  “Why not?” I said, indignantly.

  “Because I said so,” he declared, and started to stalk out of the room.

  “Please!” I called after him.

  “Oh, all right,” I heard him mutter as he, like Santa Claus, flew out of sight. “I’ll tell Marj to take care of it.”

  Satisfied, I finally rolled over, and closed my eyes.

  13

  WHILE I SLEPT, GEOF DROVE HOME.

  He had already walked the half-mile length of the gravel road leading to our house, searching for some trace of the person or persons who’d either preceded or followed me home that night. He had also been over the garage itself carefully, looking for traces of something, anything. But it was a terrible disadvantage, working alone, without the detectives and technicians who normally would have gathered evidence. Because the department was determined to “help” him by labeling it an accident, there was nobody to make casts of tire prints or footprints, if any such evidence existed, and there was no lab available to him to analyze them if it did.

  He was on his own, as he told me later, a policeman turned amateur sleuth, and he hated it. He wanted the other cops around him, thinking of all of the possibilities he might miss, picking up traces he might not have the special expertise to find. He wanted a normal, everyday scene of the crime investigation, that was all. He would have settled for that, not even any special treatment because the victim was his wife. But the Port Frederick police didn’t think our garage was a crime scene, so he didn’t have help. They thought there was plenty of reason to believe that his wife was off her nut—wasn’t the whole town talking about how she’d behaved at her mother’s funeral, and hadn’t she suddenly up and quit her job for no good reason, and hadn’t she thrown some kind of conniption fit out on Duke Daniel’s front lawn, and didn’t her family have a history of mental illness? What Geof didn’t tell me, what I didn’t learn until much later, was that he had even been instructed to leave it alone. “There isn’t anything to investigate, Bushfield,” was how his Captain had put it to him, attempting to be both blunt and kind. “You’ll do your wife a bigger favor if you forget this imaginary killer, and try to get her some help. I think she needs it, Geof.”

  “That’s bullshit,” had been my husband’s reply.

  As a consequence, he was working alone and unsanctioned, and trying to believe the old axiom that “murderers leave tracks,” which he thought he ought to be able to find, even by himself. He tried to believe it, tried not to think of all of the other murderers who apparently had left no tracks, or of the tracks he had fruitlessly tried to follow in other cases.

  Because he had already searched in daylight, and found nothing, he decided to try it once at night, even though it didn’t make much sense. After all, who could see anything on a country driveway in pitch blackness? But it was night when the crime took place. And he was stubborn, my husband, and worried, and, God knows, he was the sort and always had been who’d try almost anything once.

  It’s a sharp left turn off the blacktop county highway to our road. Geof pulled in just past the stand of fir trees that marks the end of county property and the beginning of our acreage, and parked his BMW in the darkest shadows of the trees.

  He pulled his flashlight out from under the seat where it was attached to the bottom by a plastic sling. It was a truncheon of a light, eighteen inches long, sheathed in black rubber, capable of casting a beam of thirty feet. It could, he claimed, blind a burglar at twenty paces. Once outside the car, he used the light to look at the little thermometer attached to the zipper pull on his black ski jacket, and discovered that the temperature had dropped another ten degrees. Shivering, he stuck the flashlight between his thighs while he zipped and buttoned his jacket, pushed up the collar, and pulled the flaps of his black cap down over his ears. He felt like a farmer going out into the back pasture to check on Flossie. He didn’t put on his gloves, which he carried but rarely wore. He liked to be able to use his hands in an emergency without having to stop to remove his gloves or to fumble through leather.

  He used the flash to guide his feet to the gravel, but then he turned the light off. That didn’t make any sense, either. How could he see anything without sun or flashlight? But he wasn’t going by that kind of logical sense, he was going by his other senses, the intangible ones that cops—and mothers—develop over many years, the ones that whisper in the back of your brain, prick your fingertips, raise the hair on the back of your neck, burn your gut, guide your feet and your eyes and your ears and hands when you’d otherwise feel blind and deaf and paralyzed.

  He started walking up the half-mile drive to our cottage. Slowly. Quietly in his rubber-soled boots. Crunching a little on the rocks, but going fairly noiselessly for a man who was nearly six feet three and who weighed 185 pounds. What did he expect to see? He didn’t expect anything. He just walked, alone, the night closing in behind him as the fir trees cut off the passing car lights on the county highway.

  It was a very cold, very clear night, just the sort we’d moved to the edge of the ocean to find. The Milky Way looked so clear, so close that he thought he could hear the stars move in their orbits—swish, swish. But that was only the swish of the tree branches rubbing against other branches.

  He felt the ocean under his boots, although it was a full mile away— the half mile to our house and another half mile down the rocky slope to the beach. He could hear it, another swish, of surf upon rocks. And he could smell it, in the clear night air, along with the sharp tang of balsam, and a faint whiff of dead fish.

  We had moved here for peace and solitude and love.

  It was he who had found the cottage and given it to me, and the gift had felt to me as if he’d poured fragrant oil on my body and softly, smoothly, soothingly stroked it into my prickly skin and my bunched muscles.

  This property was ours. Our refuge.

  He was angry beyond words that it had been breached. Invaded. Violated. He felt as if our property had been raped and nearly murdered, as if the home he had presented to me as a private offering of love had been penetrated by a rapist who, in breaking and entering our domain, had left it stained with a secretion of evil. Semen. He felt as if he were looking for a rapist’s semen. His spoor. His inevitable trail, as if it were blood and DNA, as if it would glisten in the moonlight, like a slug’s trail, and as if he could follow it to its source.

  Geof continued up the driveway, finding nothing.

  Our garage was detached from the house, sitting ten yards to the south side and about the same distance back. Big enough for two cars and a few implements, it was constructed of the same fieldstone and timber as the house, although it was built fifteen years later than the house, which dated from 1940. Looking at the garage as we drove in, we saw fieldstone walls, a peaked roof of variegated slate and, if it were closed, a double door of wood, painted gray.

  Geof had stuck an orange wind sock at the very peak of the gable on the garage. (I’d tried to talk him into one of those quaint iron jobs with an iron man astride an iron horse, riding tail to the wind, but he’d said he was “the one who had to carry the damn thing up there on a ladder, and nylon’s a hell of a lot lighter than iron. You want quaint, Jenny, you carry it.”) So now we had an orange nylon wind sock, which, by the time Geof looked up and saw it on this night of increasing cold and wind, was completely filled with air and sticking straight out to the south like a fat orange erection, meaning there was probably one cold sucker of a storm on its way down from Nova Scotia.

  He looked up at it and felt a pang of regret that he hadn’t given me one of those damn quaint iron directionals, if that’s what I’d really wanted. He lowered his gaze from it—the wind was already biting the outside edges of his eyes—and stared at the open maw of the garage. He’d opened and closed it twice since he’d found me, working with excruciating care, not wanting to take the chance of screwing up even the slightest bit of evidence that might
have adhered to the door, to its handle, to the rope that manually pulled it down, or even to the cement floor where the intruder would have stepped inside. He had dusted for fingerprints, photographing and then lifting what he found on the pertinent surfaces. He had slipped those to a friend on the force who would run them through the computer for comparison with Geof’s own fingerprints and mine, which they already had on file (but those are other stories).

  So far he’d found nothing substantial, no sign, no spoor.

  He figured the bastard had worn gloves. It was winter, after all. The temperature the previous night had been 17 degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill factor of minus one.

  Now, looking into the dark garage, he regretted that he hadn’t fixed my door opener the first day I’d mentioned it to him. He’d known it wasn’t the sort of thing I would ever manage to get done for myself, he’d known that if it was ever going to work again, he’d have to be the one to replace the batteries. He knew that about me, that while I might change a light bulb at work two seconds after it expired, it might take me two months to change a bulb at home, where I was more relaxed— to a fault—about my responsibilities. He had known that about me, and still had procrastinated. All perfectly normal and natural and human. Only now he hated himself for it.

  The driveway was so dark, so empty, so lonely.

  Jesus, he berated himself, why didn’t I ever install spotlights that Jenny could activate as she drove up? Or fix them so they’d come on automatically at twilight, and stay on until one of us turned them off?

  Why was I satisfied with locks and bolts on the house and not with an alarm system on the whole goddamned property? he furiously demanded of himself. Why didn’t my wife, a cop’s wife for Christ’s sake, have a two-way radio in her car, an alarm of some kind, a way to reach me if she needed me…

  He thought of his wife driving up here by herself at night, and his heart turned over in his chest. Why hadn’t he ever realized how isolated and vulnerable she’d be? Why had he ever bought this goddamned lonely outpost of a place? Why didn’t he just take her and put her out in the Klondike somewhere, like some goddamned gold miner’s wife, and leave her exposed to the elements and to whatever evil passed by, while he went off with his gun and his badge and the security of his height and his strength, like some goddamned Canadian Mountie…