Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  “You know it’s true,” she said. “You can see the blood.”

  I looked down to see blood smeared on my t-shirt. Some more of it had come off on the sheets. If this was a dream it was a real bad one, and all of a sudden it seemed important to remember the other guy’s name, because he was the one who’d come upstairs.

  Bren had a different story and she was relentless with it. She and Pete— Pete! That was his name Pete!— were down by the Tiki Huts. He’d passed out, totally hopeless, and she’d come upstairs where she’d found Doug. She knew just what had happened.

  “What had happened?” I asked. I didn’t understand anything. Rational thought was beyond me.

  “You caught him just right. Hey, I don’t blame you.” Bren put her arm around me. “You know what these guys are like. Spring break, drunk outa their minds. He thought you’d passed out. But you fooled him. You must of picked up the bottle. This one,” she said. She jumped off the edge of the bed and brought back a big green glass bottle of Apollinaris water. I watched it like a poisonous snake.

  “Bam,” she said. “You were absolutely in the right. Hit him in the temple. Bam!” she said again with a kind of contained relish.

  I was stunned. Could someone die that way? From a single blow with a bottle? I felt that the universe had made a mistake, that the normal rules had suddenly ceased to apply, that these new rules had never been intended for me.

  Bren didn’t have any doubts. “Just the same, you’re in trouble now,” she said, fixing me with her large wild eyes.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said. With the enormity of the thing collapsing on me like a psychic black hole, I couldn’t think of anything to do but start to cry.

  “Of course, you did it,” said Bren, roughly. She gave me a shake. “Or Sabine did it,” she said in a softer voice. “Yes, I think we’d better say Sabine did it.” She gave a little giggle, the first sign that she might be nervous, too.

  “The police,” I said. I was incapable of forming the rest of the idea.

  “Do you want to be arrested?” Bren thrust the bottle into my hand. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s what killed him.”

  I dropped it onto the sheets and stumbled off the bed. I wanted to be out of there, back home, safe in my other life, and I was headed for the door when Bren stopped me.

  “Don’t panic,” she said, suddenly calm again. “No one needs to know. I’ve taken care of you. I’ve taken care of everything.”

  And she had. I was amazed then; thinking about it, I’m even more amazed now. We were packed and the bathroom cleared, wet swimsuits stuck in plastic bags, cosmetics tucked away. She’d even emptied the wastebaskets and retrieved our discarded airline tickets, though I didn’t find that out until later. “Put on your jeans,” she said, “and take off that shirt. The sheet, too. We can’t leave anything behind.”

  “They’ll find out,” I said. You can probably see I was hardly thinking like a criminal.

  “Not if we’re careful. If we’re careful there’s no reason for them to come in here at all.”

  I didn’t believe this. “Anyway, we can’t leave Doug,” I said. He was lying on the floor wearing a remote expression. He had a little blood around one ear and a little more was smeared into a red moustache. Otherwise, he didn’t look greatly changed and yet he was already gone, transformed. The phrase “dead meat” came into my mind and I almost threw up.

  “Doug’s going to fall,” Bren said. “Doug’s going to have fallen off the balcony. You need to help me with him.”

  My disordered imagination presented sudden profane shouts, nosey management, humiliating and dangerous discoveries. “Someone will hear.”

  “The place is dead,” Bren said. She got up and grabbed Doug by the arms. “You gotta help me.”

  I opened the door and she pulled him out onto the balcony, then I picked up his legs, bare and hairy and ending in dirty sandal clad feet. He was heavy, limp and unconvincing, like an inadequate prop, and we struggled to hoist him onto the rail. We were dripping with sweat in the close, humid night, before we got him balanced the right way and tipped him over. He fell, crashing through the palms, banging a metal table, and overturning a chair, before he hit the cement with a sickening ripe melon thud.

  I remember that sound and how it was succeeded by a totally unexpected silence. Bren waited a moment, breathing hard, before she stepped back into our room and said, “Let’s get out of here.” She picked up the bags, stuck mine in my hand and stuffed the sheet and the bloody t-shirt into a plastic carry bag that she put into her own backpack. There were a few spots of blood on the floor and she pulled off a lot of toilet paper and wiped them up. She washed off the water bottle, too, and stuck it in my pack over my protests. “It’ll be hot today; we’ll drink it up.”

  I thought I’d gag.

  “Leave nothing,” Bren said.

  I looked around the room, sure that every atom would betray us.

  “Who’s to say he was here?” Bren asked. Nobody but Sabine and Danielle. They’re both gone now. Say good-bye to them.” She giggled again, before grabbing my arm and hustling me out the door.

  By the time we got to the bus station, the reality of the whole thing was beginning to sink in. The new reality, that is, where I’d killed a casual acquaintance, putting myself on the run, in disguise, in deep shit. The new reality had a distinctly surreal edge, visible in the greenish lights of the bus terminal, the mists hovering over the swamps and housing developments, and the gray early morning before the sun exploded like a searchlight out of the deep green Atlantic. We got out in Miami and sat exhausted with our packs under a pavilion on the boardwalk and watched ghostly white Caribbean cruise liners returning with festive strings of lights on their superstructures.

  Later, we waited out the heat of the afternoon in the shade of the big hotels and bought a cheap dinner, which I couldn’t eat, before getting on the bus for the airport. Thirty-six hours after Bren had waked me up to confront disaster, we were back on campus; Danielle and Sabine had never existed and, as Bren said, I’d “lucked out.”

  That was one way to put it, if you can call stomach cramps, near terminal anxiety, and attacks of terror and guilt luck. I spent three days in bed. When I got up, I haunted the library and the newsstand, checking the out of town newspapers, and for weeks I was on the Net every night, looking at the South Florida newspaper websites and at Wisconsin papers, too, because that’s where Doug’s hometown was. Even after the story died down, I kept waiting for “new evidence” to develop; for some Hercule Poirot to put together the significance of one missing bed sheet, two girls with noms de vacance, and a boy who’d tumbled, perhaps not accidently, over a motel balcony.

  During the next year, I changed my mind about what happened three times. I started out feeling innocent, then I was convinced I was guilty, and then, just recently, when I’d almost adjusted to being dangerous, depressed, and depraved, and had sworn off every known alcoholic beverage, I started to have doubts again.

  By that time, we were living in our new apartment, the top floor of an old three decker in town. Actually, I moved last summer, because I wanted to get away from Bren and bad memories. She wasn’t happy about that. First, she got mad and complained I was ungrateful, and then, when I moved out, she stopped paying rent and got herself evicted and showed up at my door with her wok, her backpack, and her sleeping bag. What she was also carrying, which I could see perfectly well, was a big load of knowledge— and obligation. Innocent or guilty, I’d of waked up in that motel with Doug on the floor and nothing but trouble ahead of me. I owed her and there was nothing I could do but open the door and tell her that the sofa was hers.

  Actually, it worked out better than I’d expected. I started some serious study, worked on my denial skills, and pretended I was still a normal student. Bren kept a low profile. Her share of the food budget was always beer, and she was out, two, three nights every week. Most weekends, she simply disappeared, leaving her textbooks untouched in
the living room.

  Bren’s absences kept my anxieties to a manageable level, until she arrived home one day a couple weeks ago all bright and happy. She’d gotten a ticket off some Frequent Flyer miles her brother had accumulated, and she was going to take a little pre-exam break. This was two weeks before finals, when even the party animals were getting reacquainted with their classes. “I need to get away,” she said, as if she’d been working non-stop, instead of blowing off the semester. “Away from school. I’m going to New Orleans! Party City, here I come!”

  I think it was right then that I began to doubt her version of events. I don’t know why but I did. Maybe it was just that disaster had made me more skeptical, so that I saw the nervous edge to Bren’s fascination and the way she both attracted and repulsed men. Maybe it was just because, for the first time since we’d come home, I’d seen her excited and careless again, and because her eyes seemed wild and secret and peculiar, the way they’d been on the beach and in those terrible moments when she’d waked me up to disaster.

  I didn’t say much more than “Have a nice trip,” but as soon as she was gone, I started to have questions, and then I started to have ideas. I began to wish I had Pete’s address, his last name, a way of checking events. I began to wish I’d believed in myself from the first and called the police and trusted to innocence. And since that was impossible and fear had, at the very least, made me an accessory, I did the next best thing and began to check the New Orleans Times Picayune.

  I found the item the day Bren returned : “Visiting Businessman Found Dead in Bourbon Street Hotel.” He’d fallen from a sixth story window and police were trying to trace a young woman known only as “Sabine.”

  The name jumped right off the page to hit me in the stomach. When I got hold of my self, the first thing I remembered was the motel room, with Bren leaning over my bed, saying, “Sabine did it. I think we’d better say Sabine did it.”

  I sat there in shock, staring at the screen, and I’d just barely gotten breathing again and the story printed out, when I heard Bren rattling open the door and dropping her bags on the kitchen floor. I could be wrong, I told myself; it could be a coincidence, some kind of cosmic error, but I had no time to decide. I snatched the sheet out of the printer and clicked off the website.

  “What you doing?” asked Bren. Her eyes were brilliant, dark and intense, and her hair, which she had prudently allowed to return to its non-descript sandy hue, was now a startling white-blonde.

  “What’s with the hooker hair?” I asked.

  Bren laughed and fanned out her pale mane. “Great, huh? New Orleans is for blondes.” She pivoted on one foot and did a couple dance steps. Bren, I’ve got to say, was a brilliant dancer. “So, what’s with the Net?”

  Right there I was nervous. Bren had tuned out school like it was a foreign language. Now all of a sudden she was interested. I wondered if she’d gotten a glimpse of the Picayune’s web page logo, or if she was going to reach over and snatch up the print out lying face down on the desk and ask “what kinda neat stuff is this”?

  “American Lit,” I said. I was getting better at lying. Much quicker. “Last minute paper. I was looking to see if there was anything new on the Whitman website.”

  Bren shook her head. “You gotta watch that stuff, Jen. Too much radiation; bad for the cells.”

  Was this a warning, or just Bren being funny? Maybe you can imagine my state of mind. But she turned away, bored with technology, and headed toward the kitchen. “We got any beer?” she asked. “God, I’m thirsty.”

  “As always,” I said under my breath and realized that she hadn’t been completely sober since we got back from Florida. I folded up the print out of the New Orleans story and stuck it into my desk drawer. I’ve taken it out every day since then and read it over, trying to figure out what Bren’s done and what she might do and what I ought to do about both.

  My big hope for a while was graduation: I’d graduate and leave school and never see her again. That seemed a reasonable plan, especially since she was going to have to take summer classes and probably another whole semester to get caught up.

  But since she’s come home, Bren’s been going on about how I ought to stay in the area or, better, get an apartment in the city. I’m an English major with a minor in graphic design. I’ve got computer and layout skills and should be able to get work. The subtext of all this is that Bren will be along for the ride at my expense. This is what she expects; this is what she thinks I owe her.

  Behind all this gratitude and obligation, there’s a threat of exposure, though Bren still makes like I’m her best friend, like she just can’t bear to see me go. What she doesn’t know is that since I’ve stopped feeling guilty, I’ve got a weapon of my own. In fact, I’ve got several weapons, courtesy of some extracurricular research on the Web and in the local newspaper files.

  The problem is that I may be too chicken to use them, because if I do, what will happen then? Bren’s brave— or maybe just reckless— and in either case, she’s bigger and stronger than I am. That’s why I’m sitting out here on the porch, catching up on Emerson and trying to define Transcendentalism and make sense of the Over Soul: I’m really waiting for Bren.

  Two A.M., I hear a car stop. A door slam. Bren’s feet on the stair. She’s an original, all right, marching to her own drum. Emerson would have approved the premise; I wonder if he’d have approved of her conclusions. Or of mine.

  I call through to her. She comes out onto the porch where I’ve been working. She’s been drinking, but I was counting on that. Has she had enough? I’ve got to decide quickly. I’ve got to act the way Bren did that night at the motel, decisive with no regrets. I decide. “Want a beer?” I says.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  I push over a bottle of Sam Adams and the opener, too. I’m well prepared.

  Bren notices and gives a funny smile and my heart begins to pound. I am basically not brave. I’m counting on fear to make me reckless. “You’re working late,” she says.

  “Finals,” I says, like she’s not a student, like this is all news to her.

  “You gonna pass?” she asks.

  My heart jumps again. It’s like she knows, like she understands the real test, the real situation. I gotta be sneaky. I gotta lie. “Probably,” I says. I go on for a bit about Emerson, about the difficulty of the essays and the wonderful lines. This is the kinda stuff English majors get to say, and Bren lets me babble, though she gets up and helps herself to another beer to get through it. That’s cool; I’ve laid in a supply. “His writing’s great in the details,” I says finally, “not so much in the big picture.”

  “God is in the details,” Bren says.

  “So physicists say. In literature, I’m not so sure.”

  “You like the ‘big picture,’” she says, “but the ‘big picture’ is just an accumulation of small stuff.”

  “Little lies,” I said like some kind of Freudian slip.

  “Is it?”

  “You lied to me,” I says then, right out. God that’s dumb, but I’m nervous as hell.

  “Everybody lies,” Bren says. “You lie, too.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with Doug,” I says. “I didn’t kill him. I know that now.”

  “You don’t ‘know’ that,” says Bren. “You don’t remember anything.”

  “I know I didn’t do it,” I says.

  She gives a funny, superior little smile; before she ditched school altogether, Bren took a lot of philosophy. For a minute, she looks tempted to go on about ‘knowing’ and ‘knowledge.’ But she doesn’t. Maybe she’s too drunk. That’s what I’m hoping. That’s my only chance. “Then you should of called the police,” she says.

  “There’s more,” I says. “That frat party two years ago.”

  “No one was killed,” she says quickly. “A cigarette fire. They’ve made them put in smoke detectors. That little fire probably saved lives.”

  “One was badly burned,” I says. “And you
were there.”

  “Was I? And what am I? Bren the Destroyer? Come off it!”

  “So, okay, that was an accident. A mysterious accident. What did you know? You were only a sophomore then.”

  Bren gets up and goes to the kitchen. She comes back with a half empty bottle of vodka and pours some straight into her glass. She doesn’t say anything. So I do.

  “New Orleans,” I says and I slide the Times Picayune story out from under my notebook and hand it to her. “You were in New Orleans. You were on Bourbon Street. He fell out of a window. You used the name ‘Sabine.’ How could you do that?”

  “Sabine’s a killer,” she says calmly. “You should know that.”

  The police in Florida,” I says, and then I run out of courage.

  “You talk to them?”

  “I might. I might talk to them.”

  Bren laughs and tosses her bleached hair. “You don’t have the guts.”

  “I want you out of the apartment; I want you out of my life. I want to graduate and never see you again and never hear the name ‘Sabine.’”

  She laughs. “Or what?” she says.

  “Or I will go to the police. I think I have enough.”

  “Okay, sure,” she says. “Deal.” And then she laughs again and says, “But can you trust me?”

  It’s all a big joke to her; she’s laughing again, and I reach down and pick up the phone. With an extra long cord, I’ve found it just reaches to the jack in the living room.

  Bren’s surprised. I can see it in her face. I pick up the receiver and she makes a grab for it. I should of known she wouldn’t wait; she always decides quickly. As I jerk the phone out of her reach, she lunges across the table and gets caught off balance. I drop the phone and push her with all my strength. When she stumbles back against the porch balustrade, I push her again. With a gasp of fear and surprise, she tumbles over the edge, then gives a terrible cry, which only I can interpret, as she hits the spiked iron fence below.