Necessary Evil

by Killarney Traynor

  “Give up?” I breathed. “Just give up?”

  He studied my face for a moment, then shook his head with a sad smile. “I guess that isn’t in the cards yet, is it?”

  I withdrew my hand reflexively, regretting it in almost the same instant. “Not yet,” I said, and was surprised when tears stung at the back of my eyes. “No, not yet.”

  He nodded, then sighed heavily. “All right,” he said. “But promise me you won’t dismiss the idea entirely. Consider it. Some things aren’t meant to be saved.”

  “I promise,” I said, but the lump in my throat was so large it hurt to speak.

  “Promise that you also won’t go out chasing trespassers in the night anymore. You see something, you call the police. Or me.”

  “And you’ll be there, zipping all the way up from Cambridge?” I teased, and he turned sober.

  “Yes,” he murmured, and the look in his eyes had me floating in a cloud the whole way home.

  Despite missing him, I was glad to have the drive home to myself. I mulled over his words and found myself wondering – why did I continue? Weren’t two years proof enough that the farm wasn’t profitable?

  Yet the idea of giving up was so repugnant that I felt guilty for even thinking it.

  Perhaps, I thought, as I pulled into the driveway, the idea will grow on me.

  It was late when I got back. I let myself in the front door and Trusty ran over to greet me. We went out the back again - her to do her business and me to check the stables, as was my custom. There were a few whickers of protest when I snapped on the aisle light, but the horses were comfortably bedded down and all seemed well. My favorite, Greybeard, stuck his head out to greet me and seemed almost as impressed by my unusual outfit as Joe had been.

  I stayed a few moments with Greybeard, hugging his neck, stroking his nose, and breathing in the familiar scent of sweet hay. A thousand happy memories competed with the few negative ones connected with the smell, and I remembered the first time I’d led Greybeard into the stall. He had been ten years old then, a gelding who used to run the racing circuit, yet he was a gentleman of a horse: well mannered, calm, and hardly ever out of temper. I’d loved him at first sight, the deciding factor for Uncle Michael.

  When someone smiles like you did, he’d told me, you know there’s something special about the horse. A man would be a fool to let him get away.

  Trusty came running up to me, her ears streaming behind her, and I bid Greybeard goodnight. I felt refreshed as we walked up the porch steps. Time in the stables with my horses, on my land, had that effect on me.

  “Joe may be right,” I said to Trusty, and she cocked her head at me. “That’s a decision that I’m going to have to make someday. But not tonight, at least. Not right now. Right now, we remain.”

  By the wagging of her tail, I knew Trusty agreed with me.

  Excerpt from Mary Chase’s Diary

  July 5th, 1855

  There were fire-works in the town center today and Obadiah drove us all into town to view them. Naturally, Alexander would not ride in the wagon, but went on ahead, where he and Reuben H. met and played a few sly pranks on the good townsmen. I watched him dancing with the girls in the square and wished, not for the first time, that he would marry one and settle down somewhere near me, so we could visit and I could have conversation with my best friend.

  But I know Alexander, better than most, though that might be mother’s pride. He is a restless spirit, this son of mine, a man roaming a world that he persists in keeping at a distance. He has always been the stranger in the midst of the crowd, the sailor adrift in a crowded sea. He will not settle down, but only because he feels that there is no safe ground. It is not true – there are many that would see his good qualities, who would welcome them into their hearts and families, if only he would allow them to.

  I cannot help but feel that if he had not lost his father, my beloved Justice, he would not feel so alone. Obadiah is a good man, but has not the qualities that would draw a boy like my son. I feel great guilt about this sometimes...

  Chapter 19:

  The next morning, I tripped into a hole on my morning run.

  It was my fault that I hadn’t seen it. I’d been running on a cloud of giddy thoughts, memories of last night’s date running through my head like a musical montage scene from a romantic comedy.

  I dwelt longest on when we said goodbye. Joe had just told me that he was heading back to California in the morning, for a few weeks, for business. My face must have fallen, because he stepped closer and lifted his hand to trace it along the outside of my face.

  “Going to miss me, Maddie?” he asked, smiling, his eyes moving over my face and hair.

  He was so close that I couldn’t breathe. When I didn’t answer, he cupped my face and leaned in until his lips were close to my ear.

  “I’ll miss you, kid,” he said, and my heart stopped when he kissed my cheek.

  I savored that exciting, roiling feeling, when my foot touched air where earth should have been. I went flying, but I was sharp enough to catch myself with my hands and roll almost before I knew I’d been tripped.

  I landed on my back, bewildered, watching the flashing emerald of leaves dancing in the morning sun. I laid there for a long moment, allowing my surprise to cloud my mind and forbidding it from considering and processing reality.

  I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I wanted to lay on the ground, staring at the clean, clear sky, and believe - if only for a moment - that my life was every bit as fresh and comforting.

  But reality made no allowances for my mood. The ground was uncomfortable under my back and the growing, throbbing pain in my ankle competed with the stinging of my palms. When my breathing returned to normal, I rolled up onto my feet, brushed my knees off, and went over to sit by the hole.

  A hole is such a silent thing. It’s a danger unlike most others, where the absence of matter is its greatest weapon. I pondered that it wasn’t dirt that killed my uncle, but the lack of it.

  Lindsay had been broken by a tree, but it was because the path had been removed that her horse had fallen.

  We’d fallen on hard times, not because of a treasure, but because of the absence of one.

  Sitting there beside the trap that had so neatly caught me, staring into its shallow depths as calm as any Bhuddhist in his mountain top retreat, I thought: You could almost say that Uncle Michael was killed over nothing.

  It was a thought clear and detached, as remote from me as my emotions seemed to be at that moment.

  But the longer I stared at that shallow crevice - the nothing that was ruining everything - the volcano of fury that I’d been holding at bay for years erupted.

  I screamed.

  It was long and painful, ripped from the depths of my soul. The sound echoed off of the shimmering trees, silencing the chorus of forest sounds, and making Trusty jump and bark anxiously.

  When the first sound died away, I screamed again, longer and even louder than the first time, and Trusty was frightened into stunned stillness.

  After that, I was beyond noticing what else was happening. Ignoring my throbbing ankle, I jumped up and ran back and forth on the path, furiously kicking at stones, pounding on the trees, throwing branches, and finally - in a fit of pure fury - I grabbed my music player and smashed it against the trunk of a sturdy old oak. The screen cracked under the impact, and I counted it as victory. I threw it into the bushes and then returned to the hole.

  My rage didn’t abate until I had filled it by hand. I threw rocks into the hole, so forcefully that many bounced out again. I piled on branches and then used my hands to shovel dirt into it.

  By the time it was filled, my hands were bleeding, my face throbbed with heat, and my spirit was spent. It wasn’t until I was halfway to the house that I realized I was still sobbing.

  ***

  Randall was in the kitchen when I returned. He was yawning, rubbing his bleary eyes, and frowned when he saw my dirt-stained outfit. When his
eyes took in my bleeding hands and the mess that was my face, he jumped out of his chair and raced around the counter.

  “What happened?” he asked, alarmed.

  I waved him off with an impatient hand and wrenched the refrigerator door open. My throat was raw from rage, but I grabbed the orange juice from the fridge and reached for a glass.

  How Randall knew where the emergency kit was, I don’t know, but he had it out and open when I turned with my glass and jug. He presumptuously took them from me, insisting over my protests that I wash my hands. I did so, moaning when the soap stung my open flesh; but he paid no attention then, nor when I objected to his slathering on the antibiotic. The cuts were minor, but he put bandages on the bigger ones anyway, his mouth set in a line that was almost as hard as the look in his eyes.

  “Care to tell me how this happened?” he asked, when he was finally finished. “Or am I supposed to guess?”

  I was pouring orange juice into the glass, silently cursing as my shaking hands dotted the counter with spots of orange juice. I told myself that I shouldn’t have come through the kitchen. I didn’t want anyone to see me like this, let alone Randall. I had this half-formed idea that if I ignored him, he’d drop the matter, but he didn’t take his eyes off of me, not even as he moved to close up the emergency kit.

  Finally, I gave. As much as I didn’t want to talk, I couldn’t leave him standing there without some explanation.

  “I tripped,” I grunted, and he snorted.

  “On what? A landmine?”

  “On another hole. On the west trail.”

  He gaped at me. “On the trail? What is it doing on the trail?”

  “You’re the expert,” I snapped. “You tell me – that’s where they always are. Anyway, it isn’t there anymore. I filled it up, hence…” I held up my bandaged left hand. “Guess I won’t be playing the piano for a while. Damn hunters.” I drained the glass in one long swallow, and nearly choked on the lump in my throat.

  Randall rubbed his mouth, his face pinched with thought. When I finished my drink, he asked, “Are you sure it’s the treasure hunters that left the hole?”

  I heaved a deep sigh. “Of course it’s the treasure hunters. Who else goes about leaving open holes for people to fall into?”

  Despite my best efforts, my voice cracked on the last two words. I buried my head in my hands, trying to calm the whirling pattern of torturous thought.

  Let it go, let it go, let it go, Maddie...

  I thought I might as well try to stop Niagara from going over the falls.

  “They keep coming back,” I fumed. As I continued, my pitch grew, even if my volume stayed the same. “They keep coming back and they just. Keep. Digging. It’s like a game, where they dig the holes and I have to find them before someone else falls in them. And I can’t run fast enough. I can’t find them all. I planted a phony letter, pound my feet off in the morning, and ruin my hands filling the holes, and I still can’t keep up. There’s always more piles, more digging – if this is a game, I’m losing it. And if I lose this, I lose everything. Damn them!”

  I brought my fist down hard on the counter, taking perverse delight in the pain that radiated up in a spider webbing of nerves from the impact point.

  Randall gazed at me with a new understanding.

  “That’s why you run in the mornings?” he asked softly. “Because you’re looking for the holes?”

  I stared at him, disappointment almost supplanting my fury. Of all the people in my life, why is it that you are the first person to put that together?

  Aunt Susanna, for all her fretting, only ever questioned why I would run in extreme weather. Lindsay assumed I was doing it for my health and figure. And Joe didn’t know about my morning activities.

  I answered more abruptly than I meant to.

  “Yeah,” I said, and shoved the juice container back into the refrigerator. “Not that it helps much. I can only run about a third of the trails in the morning. This hole could have been there as long as two days, I don’t know. These amateurs treasure hunters don’t exactly keep regular business hours. I’m just lucky one of the girls didn’t ride into their latest excavation like Lindsay did...”

  The idea was like a physical blow and with it came anger. I slammed the fridge door, then I sank into the stool and buried my face in my hands to ward off the sudden images - memories that came hard and fast, falling figures and crushing accidents, and helplessness joined the anger in twisting my gut.

  I wanted to call Joe. I wanted to ask him to not get on that plane, but to come back to help me fight this. But as much as I wanted to call him, I wouldn’t. This wasn’t Joe’s fight. It was mine and mine alone. And I’d never felt more alone in my life.

  “Damn them!” I whispered into my hands. “Damn them all!”

  The silence stretched out. It was so quiet that I could almost hear the beating of Randall’s heart. I kept my hands pressed tight against my eyes, as though by doing so I’d keep the craziness at bay.

  I heard Randall shift, and I wished that he’d leave the room. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he moved closer, taking the seat beside me.

  I did not want to deal with him at that moment. I sat up abruptly, preparing to get up and leave; but as though he knew, he stopped me.

  “Madeleine,” was all he said.

  Live with a man for four weeks and you can’t help learning something about him. In Randall’s case, I’d learned to tell a lot from what name he called me. “Warwick” meant that he was thinking of me as a colleague and was probably going to tell me something in an impartial and informative matter and, perhaps, be open to my commentary. “Maddie” meant he was feeling friendly, or that Aunt Susanna was present and he thought he ought to be on his best behavior. “My dear Madeleine” preceded an admonishment of some sort, usually delivered in the tone of a father exhausted from the intellectual struggle with his two-year-old.

  But he’d never called me just plain “Madeleine”. For that matter, hardly anyone did, and none with a tone infused with such...

  I didn’t dare decide what his tone was infused with, but I looked at him. My eyes were bleary, but not too much to see the concern lines etched on his face.

  “Don’t give up now, Madeleine,” he said. He took my hand, which had fallen to the counter, and squeezed it gently, his thumb rubbing circles on the back of it. “You’re stronger than that. We just need a little more time. Don’t let them beat you. Not these people. Not yet. Not when it’s just starting to look like we’re on the right track.”

  “Right track?” I asked. My voice was thick and clumsy, affected by my emotional outburst. I was too worn to even remove my hand from his grasp. “How do you figure that?”

  There was no denying the glitter in his dark eyes. “Because their pattern has changed. They’re doubling their efforts, as though they knew I was here. I don’t think these are just amateurs, Madeleine - although they aren’t professional archeologists, if their holes are anything to go by. But they are serious and they are persistent, which means this is more than just a nightly recreation. They’re working at this. Think about it: they aren’t digging in the fields anymore. They’re digging in the trails. Why?”

  I groaned and shrank away, taking my hand back to cover my face.

  The trails…

  The whirling slowed and faded as the words came into sharp focus. Why the trails when all of the clues pointed to the fields? They ought to be churning up the paddocks and the hay field, places that were not only mentioned in the so-called clue, but also a good enough distance from the house that, with a little care, trespassers could avoid detection. Back when all of this started, that’s where most of the vandalism happened. Uncle Michael’s hole had been a singularity. Now the reverse was true. It was the path where they were digging, not the fields.

  Why?

  I asked it out loud before lifting my head to look at him again.

  “I think that, like me, they’ve realized that there’s more to that l
etter than meets the eye,” he said. “If a century of empty-handed searches of that field isn’t enough to convince someone that there’s nothing there to find, I don’t know what would. But there is something on this farm, Maddie. That’s what we both know, these intruders and I – Alexander did leave something behind and someone is going to find it. If we don’t move fast enough, it’s going to be them.”

  It wasn’t until that moment that I ever, even briefly, thought that there was anything to find. Randall spoke with such authority, such conviction, that I found myself sitting up straight with one loud thought flashing through my head: Over my dead body.

  He opened his mouth, but I waved him into silence, sorting through my racing thoughts. It was one thing if Randall and a few amateurs thought that there was something to find. I could dismiss the latter as amateurs, and the former as an academic desperate to re-establish his credibility with a big find. But if Randall was right and this was an organized effort by a group of intruders willing to risk jail time to find it… For some reason, that made the impossible possible.

  If there was an actual treasure, that changed everything. I wasn’t in a race simply against exposure of fraud. If Alexander Chase did rob the McInnis family, we had a chance to put it right, albeit a century and a half late, but only if we could prevent the cache from disappearing into the underworld. If it did, I would have lost the one chance we had to restore the Chase family honor.

  Even as I thought it, the word honor seemed so old fashioned as to be laughable. But this wasn’t just about some philosophical idea about family pride: this was about finishing what Uncle Michael had started, about making his death something more than just a tragic accident. This was about vindicating him as much as it was about completing Alexander’s condemnation.