A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  “How?”

  “The day I was given the operation, there was a second operation. Somebody else got another set of eyes. Simon Bower was an organ donor that day too, like the people in these newspaper articles.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I think there was a mix-up.”

  “You think you got Simon Bower’s eyes?”

  “Did I tell you that only one of my eyes works?”

  “No,” she says.

  “I think the one that works is the one that belongs to my dad,” he says, “and I think the other one came from the man that killed him.”

  SIXTY

  Joshua and Olillia put everything back where they found it, switch the computer off, finish their drinks, and then hit the road. He feels numb, learning what he has about his dad, and even though he knows why his dad did it, he’ll still question it over the coming weeks as he tries to come to terms with it.

  They’re quiet as they drive. Joshua knows Olillia is thinking the same thing he’s thinking. They’re driving out to the cabin where Ruby died, and perhaps there’ll be evidence of that. Perhaps there’ll be blood. Perhaps there’ll be nothing out there, or maybe they can find out what happened to Ruby. His mom said to him in the beginning of all this that by getting his father’s eyes he would have to honor him by being the best man that he could be. He’s going to honor his dad by giving closure to a grieving family.

  The rest of it, finding the man who saved him, finding out if Dad and Uncle Ben really killed those people, that can wait. Perhaps it can always wait.

  They drive through parts of town he hasn’t seen before. They pass shopping malls and industrial warehouses. They enter suburbs where there are big homes and small churches and run-down homes and no churches. Before long, they’re on the motorway driving west, where there is faster-moving traffic and less of it, then they turn onto the Old West Coast Road, which forks off to take them in a similar direction. Farther to the west, storm clouds are gathering over the mountain ranges, but that part of the country would take another two hours of driving to reach. This part is flat, it’s mostly dominated by lines of trees and lines of fences bordering farms. There are fields of sheep, fields of cows, fields of animals he doesn’t recognize because he’s never seen them, but Olillia tells him some are deer, some are alpacas, and ostriches, and emus. The ostriches look so odd with their long necks and fat bodies they make him smile, but then that smile disappears when she tells him the ostriches get slaughtered and eaten like any other animal they’re driving past. His mom’s a vegetarian, but his dad never was, and nor is he, but right now he’s thinking it might be time to reassess that. There isn’t as much greenery as he would have thought. It was a hot summer, one that burned the ground out here in the Canterbury Plains, and that’s obvious now. Most of the fields are wheat fields, empty now, as they were harvested during the summer, and now some of those fields are being prepared for the next crop. He sees tractors plowing through them, leaving huge clouds of dirt in their wake.

  After a while the distance between the road and the Waimakariri River gets narrower; at times the only thing between them are rows of beech trees. There are moments during the drive when his breath is taken away by the beauty of it all. He’s lived in New Zealand his entire life but has never seen it, and now he wants to see all of it. The mountains in the distance will soon have snow on them, the rivers and the lakes, the big, open skies, miles of isolation, it’s no wonder people fly thousands of miles to come here.

  Olillia’s GPS tells them that the turnoff is coming up on the right. They’ve been driving for forty minutes. She takes the entrance and stops a minute later where the road branches off to the three different cabins.

  “We should go in on foot,” she says, “and we stay quiet.”

  “The cabin is still half a mile away,” he says.

  “Good point,” she says.

  They continue to drive. After a quarter of a mile they decide they’ve driven far enough. They carry on by foot. Before leaving Joshua’s, they had decided it would be wise to bring some dog food with them in case it was hungry. There was some at the house, as there always is, for when his mom brings her work home with her. Joshua carries the dog food. They can hear the river, and every now and then he can glimpse it between the trees. The river gets louder as the road angles towards it. They walk for five minutes. The cabin comes into view. He feels like he’s been here. They move into the trees and stay hidden so they can study it.

  “You recognize it?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  The cabin looks more modern than anything on the street where he lives. Bigger too. It’s two stories with a balcony up top that looks out over the river. It’s north facing, getting the sunlight, though that sunlight is going to be overtaken by the clouds fairly soon. Parked out front on a trailer is the boat. It has an outboard motor on the back, and the entire thing is covered by a blue tarpaulin, as they saw online. There are no signs of life. No car in sight. If anyone is here, they either walked, biked, or swam.

  “You think anybody is home?” she asks.

  “No reason for anybody to be,” he says.

  “Yet we still parked a quarter of a mile away,” she says, “and we’re whispering.”

  It’s a good point.

  They approach the cabin, both ready to run at the first sign of trouble. The ground is hard and dry and covered in leaves and pine needles. Joshua lifts the tarpaulin off the boat. The ice cooler is in there, but there’s no sign of the bike. They reach the cabin and press their faces against a window. They see furniture and potted plants and paintings. They don’t see a dead body or Ruby Carter’s mountain bike, and the walls aren’t covered in blood. They don’t see anybody inside. Of course, all that stuff could be upstairs.

  “So now what?” he asks.

  “Now this,” she says, and she knocks on the front door.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “To confirm there’s nobody here,” she says.

  Nobody answers. She tries the door. It’s locked. “We could smash a window,” she says.

  “Or we could look for a key,” he says. “Dad says people leave keys out all the time.”

  “Let’s look.”

  The first place they look is under the doormat. Nothing. They start walking around the cabin. They don’t find a key.

  “It’s possible they don’t have one,” she says.

  “They do,” he says. “Being all the way out here, you can’t risk locking yourself out. There’ll be one somewhere.”

  “Your dad would know where to look,” she says. “I know we checked under the mat, but I bet there must be somewhere else where people leave keys all the time.”

  “Under rocks near the door,” he says. “Dad said that once.”

  They check under all the rocks. Nothing.

  “Where else?”

  “Well, if it were a car key, Dad would say check on top of one of the wheels.”

  “People really hide them there?” she asks.

  “Apparently.”

  “Wait here,” she says.

  She walks over to the boat and the trailer. She crouches down and checks on top of the wheel of the trailer on one side and finds nothing, and then checks the other side. She comes back and smiles and holds up the key.

  “Your dad was right,” she says.

  She opens the door and he picks up the dog food and they step inside.

  “Don’t forget to breathe,” Olillia whispers, as they step inside.

  He realizes he’s holding his breath. “Why are you whispering?” he asks.

  “So the dog won’t hear me.”

  “I don’t think it’s here,” he says. “It would have come to the windows.”

  “True,” she says.

  “What’s that smell?” he asks, but he already knows what it’s going to be. The smell of something dead. The smell is the first thing that tells any character in any book or movie that they’re ab
out to find something bad. Only it’s not as bad as he thought it would be.

  “I kind of recognize it,” she says.

  “Maybe the dog died,” he says.

  “It’s not that,” she says. “It’s . . . it’s beer.”

  “Beer?”

  “Yeah. It’s fermenting. They must brew their own beer in here somewhere.”

  Now that she’s said it, Joshua realizes it is a yeasty odor, and not a decaying-dog odor. Still, he finds it unpleasant, but perhaps it’s the kind of thing you get used to. Vincent Archer must have. He wonders if the fermenting beer is masking any other smells.

  They step deeper into the cabin. Olillia has closed the door behind them. This place is as neat and as tidy as Vincent’s Archer’s place. Everything looks modern and the cabin looks fresh, as if nothing can be more than a few years old, from the appliances to the paint on the walls. The kitchen and dining room are open plan, with the staircase for the second story in the center. There’s a hallway ahead leading to more rooms. Other than the kitchen, which has a hardwood floor, the rest of the ground floor, including the stairs, is carpeted.

  “Upstairs or the hallway?”

  It’s a fifty-fifty call and he has no preference. “Hallway,” he says.

  The smell of yeast and hops gets stronger as they take the corridor. All the doors are open, revealing two bedrooms and two bathrooms and what looks like a TV room, since all it houses is a large-screen TV mounted on the wall with two over-sized armchairs in front of it. The views from the rooms to the right look out over the river; the rooms to the left look out on the forest.

  At the end of the hallway is the only closed door, and he puts the dog food down and opens it slowly in case the dog is locked in there. It’s a utility room with a hardwood floor and no windows. There’s a washer and dryer and a sink and a toilet and a dog kennel. There are two metal containers that he guesses must contain the fermenting beer. On the floor are two dog bowls, one half full of water, the other half full of dog food. Even over the beer he can smell the dog food. It’s almost enough to make him gag. He puts his hand up to his face as if he can block the smell. He’d open a window if there was one. Because the only source of light is from the doorway behind them, the room is dimmer than the rest of the cabin. He looks at the kennel. If there’s a dog here, then it’s either super shy or very dead.

  Olillia opens a bag of dog food and holds it out from her body. She crouches down.

  “Hey, big fella, hey, it’s okay,” she says. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”

  They both jump when they hear movement in the kennel. Then a low growling comes from it. Olillia drops the dog food on the floor and the biscuits go everywhere. They each take a step back.

  The growling gets louder, but the dog doesn’t come out.

  Olillia lowers herself again.

  “Be careful,” Joshua warns.

  She gets down on her knees. Joshua tenses his body, ready to jump in front of her if the dog strikes. She peers into the kennel. “Oh my god,” she says. “Oh my god. Joshua, you are not going to believe this.”

  Joshua crouches down and looks inside.

  Olillia is right. He doesn’t believe it.

  SIXTY-ONE

  “They were going to cut off my feet,” Ruby tells them. “But I convinced them I would die.” She laughs, a little hysterically. “I told them I’d bleed to death no matter what they tried to do! They said that they could stem the flow, that they’d burn the stumps and I’d survive but I told them they couldn’t know that for sure. I mean, how could they? Really, how could they?”

  They are still in the utility room. The chain around Ruby’s neck is thick and heavy and is held in place with a padlock. The other end is bolted to the inside of the kennel. There’s enough length to crawl out of the kennel and drink her water and eat her food from the bowls, and to use the toilet in the corner. She can reach the sink too, only the handles have been removed from the taps, meaning she can drink only from the bowl. She can also reach the freezer, not that she had any desire to—in the beginning the only thing kept in there was meat that would make her sick if she defrosted and ate it raw, but a while ago, perhaps a few weeks, Simon cut a woman up and put her in there, and more recently Vincent took her out and buried her. “He was the real crazy one,” she told them earlier. “They’re both crazy. Simon’s was an outwards crazy, but Vincent’s was inwards. Outward crazy is scarier because it comes with blood.”

  She’s wearing the same bike clothes she went missing in. On occasion those clothes would be washed, and she’d have to stay naked until they were returned, but she’s never been given anything else to wear. On day one they shaved her head, and now her hair is almost the length of his smallest finger. She’s lost weight, and muscle tone, and she reminds him of some of the people Joshua saw around the hospital, the ones who would shuffle along the corridors with their IV stands on wheels and not a lot of life in their eyes. There are sores on her neck and arms and rashes on her cheeks. There are small cuts on her hands, and her nails have been chewed down to the quick and there is blood under some of them. Her skin is pale white, except for under her eyes, where it’s dark, like a bruise, but isn’t, she tells them, a bruise.

  “They never hit me,” she tells them, “at least not much, and only in the beginning.”

  She looks nothing like the woman in the photograph Joshua saw earlier, and she’s nothing like he imagined she would have been. This adrenaline junky who traveled to faraway places plummeting towards her death only to pull a rip cord that would save her life, and how strong and how brave she must be, until Simon Bower and Vincent Archer took all of that away from her.

  But the worst . . . the worst is what they did to her feet.

  “Simon was a builder and an engineer, so he made them,” Ruby says, showing them the metal shoes. They wrap around her feet and ankles and are held in place with bolts. They look heavy. “There’s a spike on a spring inside of each one,” she says. “If I try to walk, the spike will go right through my foot. So I crawl around like a dog. That’s what they wanted—for me to crawl. To be their dog. That’s why I have to eat and drink out of the bowls. That’s why I have a leash, and why they wash me outside under the hose.” She laughs again, a laugh that gives Joshua the chills, the kind of laugh that people can’t always come back from. He glances at Olillia, who glances back. “And it’s better than having my feet cut off.”

  Her laugh peters out, and is replaced by a big grin. Then the grin disappears, and she cries. Her voice softens. “Help me,” she says. “Please, you have to help me.”

  “We will,” Olillia says, and she puts her hand on Ruby’s shoulder, only to have Ruby pull back and snarl.

  “Woof,” she says, then she cries again.

  “You’re safe now,” Olillia says, and her voice betrays her confidence, because she sounds scared. This isn’t what she was expecting, and she doesn’t know what to do, or say. Joshua can see her hands shaking. He was thinking earlier that Olillia was fearless, but he can see the fear is there now. Of course it is. How can you not look at Ruby and ask yourself, What if that were me?

  Ruby growls again. “Woof,” she says, then laughs.

  Joshua reaches over and grabs Olillia’s hand. She looks at him. He can see she’s close to crying. “We’ve saved her,” he says, “and it is going to be okay.” He looks at Ruby. “We’re going to get you out of here. We’re going to get you to a hospital, and your family are going to come and see you. The men who did this to you, they’re dead. Both of them. My dad, he was one of the detectives looking for you. He used to tell me about you, about the things you would do, about how courageous you are. These guys are dead, Ruby, and you survived, and your life and everything you had before this is waiting for you. I promise.”

  “Woof.”

  He squeezes Olillia’s hand and looks back at her. The tears are coming from his friend now, a mixture of emotions all bubbling over, but they still have work to do. She’s been the co
nfident one all day, and now it’s his turn. “Let’s start looking for a key,” Joshua says, “and if you can’t find one, maybe we can find something to undo these bolts.”

  “I’ll go. You stay with her,” Olillia says. She disappears. An uncontrollable sob escapes her throat as she moves through the door. A moment later Ruby is on her hands and knees drinking from the bowl of water. Joshua’s stomach twists into knots. Vincent Archer and Simon Bower were insane. The bad things he thinks his dad might have done, well, seeing Ruby like this, he forgives him. In this moment he accepts that the world needs people like his dad, like Uncle Ben, like the man who saved him on the train tracks. The world needs people to fight its monsters. They need vampires like Frederick. What it doesn’t need are people who chain women up in kennels.

  He no longer blames his mom for not letting him help Detective Vega. Nor does he need to find out who that man was. He’s happy knowing he’s out there.

  “I’m glad you came back,” Ruby says. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “Sometimes they walk me,” Ruby says. “They put me on a leash and take me into the woods. They gave me dog food. I refused to eat it . . . but in the end I had to. I was so hungry.”

  “I’m so sorry this has happened to you,” Joshua says.

  “You get used to it,” Ruby says. “It could have been worse. I know that. They showed me that with the other woman,” she says, looking around the room.

  “It’s going to be okay, Ruby.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she says, and she cries. “They took that away from me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They took my name away. You’re not allowed to use it.”

  “I’m giving you your name back,” Joshua says.

  She lowers her voice. “Can you . . . can do that? Do you think you’re allowed to?”

  “I’m allowed to.”

  “Can I tell you a secret?”