Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  “So you’re going to tell me what happened up in Big Bear?”

  She nodded at him, saw most of the beach empty, and felt the same way inside. Only Delagopolis knew the whole truth. She’d even spared Mommsa the worst of the details. If Hark hated her after this, if he walked away leaving nothing but his footprints in the sand, then she’d spare herself years—possibly a lifetime—of hiding her worst secrets from a man she loved. And if he listened and stayed by her side . . . well, in these intensely pressurized moments his continued presence in her life seemed almost unfathomable.

  They sat in the sand facing the ocean, and she gnawed her lower lip before checking her most intractable childhood habit. Then she realized that what she wanted most from him was also childish: an assurance, before she spoke, that the truth would not damn her in those eyes of his.

  Tell him, she urged herself. What you did then is who you are now. That’s just the way it is, like it or not. For better or for worse. The vows of murder, like the vows of marriage, broken only at great risk.

  Still, as difficult as it had been to reach this decision, she found it even harder to act on its stark directive.

  Hark rested his hand on her knee.

  How do I even start? she asked herself. With words.

  “He’d been beating Mommsa all of my life.”

  And then you keep on going.

  “My earliest memories are of him hitting her, I mean really punching her. So hard I could hear his fist. It wasn’t every day, but it happened enough that I could never relax. It was like I was constantly plugged into a wall socket.”

  “Did he hit you?”

  She scooped up sand and let it spill back to the beach. “A few times, but not like Mommsa. She was the main target by a long shot, but she’d totally go to pieces when he hit me, and I think that’s the real reason he’d do it. So she was always trying to make peace. And sometimes she could get him to back down, but it was like living on a fault line all the time, always waiting for the big one.

  “By the summer when I was sixteen, it was really bad. One night he came home after we’d gone to sleep and dragged her out of bed by her hair and made her fix him dinner. Then he knocked it off the table and went after her.”

  Hark took her hand and soothed away the fidgets. Her fingers were so moist with sweat that sand stuck to her skin.

  “That was a horrible night,” she said. “Something broke in all of us.

  “A few days later I came home from hiking and couldn’t find Mommsa. I was totally scared. It was late afternoon, and she was always through working by then and getting dinner ready. She didn’t dare get off his schedule. But she wasn’t in her studio or anywhere in the house, and the breakfast dishes were still piled up by the sink. He wasn’t around either.

  “I ran outside shouting her name. It’s like I already knew he’d done something terrible to her. I was running past the root cellar on my way down to the pond, because sometimes she hung out down there, when she said my name so softly I almost didn’t hear her. I didn’t know where she was until she said, ‘Over here. In the root cellar.’ Something like that. The important thing is that when I came over, she said in that same voice, ‘Don’t open the door.’

  “I asked her why, and she told me about the snakes. He’d locked her in the root cellar and come back with a big bag of them. Then he took his time telling her what they were going to do to her when he threw them inside, just to torture her. Mommsa was petrified, but she’d been carving them for years and knew a few things about rattlesnakes. One of the things she knew was that when Mexicans are sleeping out in the desert, getting ready to cross the border, they put tobacco or garlic all around them to keep the snakes away.

  “She didn’t have any tobacco, but it was a root cellar and there was a whole bunch of garlic. So when he was scaring her half to death by saying what he was going to do, she was frantically splitting open the garlic and rubbing it all over her legs and feet, and then she took every clove in the place and made a circle around herself.”

  “And it worked?”

  “It sure did. He opened the door just enough to throw the bag of the snakes in, and then he locked it. She was so scared she almost passed out when the snakes got out of the bag, but they stayed away from her.”

  “And then you came along?”

  Gwyn nodded.

  “How’d you get her out?”

  “Very carefully. There were no windows in the cellar, and it was almost pitch black in there. She didn’t know where the snakes were, and I sure couldn’t tell from outside, so I got a flashlight and shined it under the door; there was about a quarter inch opening. One of them was curled up sleeping right in front of her, but they can go from sleeping to biting in less time than it takes to blink your eye, so I told her I’d open the door on ‘three’ and she’d have to move.”

  “Did you think she would?”

  “She was so scared I figured it was a damn good bet that she would. And she sure did. I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. Me, too. I closed that door and was shaking so bad I could hardly stand it.”

  “What about Mommsa?”

  She noted his use of the familiar, and despite her story it made her smile. “She fell down on her knees, really shaking. She’d been standing absolutely still for three hours.”

  Gwyn looked at the waves, noticed cirrus clouds streaking the sky, and started crying.

  “Go ahead, Gwyn, you can tell me.”

  “I went crazy. I was standing there seeing all the times he’d beat her and dragging her around by her hair, and I remembered a varmint gun he’d been keeping around for as long as I could remember.

  “I never told Mommsa what I was going to do. I just got her back to the house and made her go upstairs and lie down. She was in shock, but I didn’t know it then. What did I know? I was sixteen. All I knew was she wasn’t talking and had trouble walking, so I thought she needed to lie down for a while.

  “The gun was out in an old shed, and I made sure it was loaded. I’d shot it once when I was ten doing some target practice with him, but that was the only time I’d ever used it.

  “He drove up around 8:30. The sun hadn’t gone down, but there were lots of shadows, and I was in one of them. When he got out of his old Jeep, I told him I’d kill him if he moved another step.

  “He looked at me and said something like, ‘Well, if it isn’t Gwynie with her pop gun. You seen your Mommsa?’ He was totally drunk. I told him I’d found her in the root cellar, and I could see it all coming back to him.

  “I also told him he wasn’t getting anywhere near Mommsa ever again, and to start backing up. He tried to tease me. The ‘pop gun’ thing again. I said it was plenty big enough to kill him.”

  “Did that have the desired effect?”

  “Oh, yeah. He sobered up real fast, and he backed up all the way down to the root cellar before he figured out what I had in mind.

  “He wanted to know where she was, and I told him she was up at the house. ‘You got her out?’ he said. I could tell he was having a hard time believing she’d got out okay. I sure did, I told him. ‘She get bit?’ He asked me that like he was asking if she’d had dinner or done the food shopping. Not once, I told him. And then he started swearing and called the guy with the reptile farm a lying son-of-a-bitch. All these years, I never knew what that was all about. Then when we were up in Big Bear, the sheriff said that Appleton had specifically asked the guy if the snakes still had their fangs. See, he thought the guy was lying when he’d said they did. He couldn’t imagine any other reason for her not getting bit.”

  “So he went into the root cellar thinking they couldn’t bite him?” Hark asked.

  “No, it wasn’t that easy. He still refused, and I had to aim right at his heart and tell him I wouldn’t stop shooting till he was good and dead if he didn’t get in that cellar.

  “He opened the door and I screamed at him to get in there. I didn’t want any of the snakes getting out. He took a step forward,
and I knew that he was probably thinking no big deal. If Mommsa could handle it, so could he. But I was still worried about those damn snakes getting out. He was turned away, so I slammed the door on him. It caught his hand, and he clawed me. I was pushing as hard as I could to close it, but he was pushing back and getting it open when all of a sudden he screamed and fell away from the door, and I was able to slam it shut and lock it. It couldn’t have been a split second later he hit that door so hard it was like he’d been thrown against it by a monster, and he was screaming and pounding on it.

  “I started backing up the trail. I was too scared to turn around. All the way back to the house I saw that door shaking horribly, and I heard him screaming for help and beating on it. Sometimes I still hear him.”

  She looked at Hark, held his eyes. “I murdered him.”

  He nodded slightly, never letting his gaze stray from hers. She wanted him to say that he was glad she’d finally told him, that what she’d done was the right thing. She wanted his approval, exoneration in those unmoving blue eyes; but mostly she wanted to know he still loved her.

  What she got was a question. “What do you think he would have done if you hadn’t killed him?”

  She scooped up more sand, spilling it again to form more pyramids. Then she looked up and saw the clouds thickening over the water. “He’d have killed her. Every year it was getting worse and worse. He’d have killed her in that root cellar if she hadn’t happened to know some quirky little thing about rattlesnakes. It would have been just like OJ and Nicole, which is why that case has always haunted me so much. I know what happened to Nicole would have happened to my mother if I hadn’t killed my stepfather.”

  “Then it was fully justified.”

  “But what if he hadn’t? What if he’d woke up one day, even the next day, and said, ‘That’s it. I’ve been an asshole. I’m going to A-A,’ and cleaned up his act?”

  “I had a patient last week, and if you’ll let me play shrink just this once, I’d like to tell you what I told him.”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrists and looked at him. “Is this the cure, doctor?”

  “Not the cure, but it might help. I told him there’s never any predicting the future, but when you look at the past, it usually gives you a good idea of what someone’s going to do down the road. And that’s for the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

  “Case closed, then, because he was such an awful bastard?”

  “No, case closed because you’re such an amazing woman. Come here.”

  Hark opened his arms to her, and she snuggled carefully beside him, watching the horizon darken as the lights of the city brightened behind them.

  In the morning she was still by his side, rising from her bed like a free woman for the first time in memory. The burden of her beastly step father had been lifted, and though it felt unseemly in the aftermath of revealing such a murder, she smiled and laughed easily with Hark over breakfast.

  They made tentative plans to rendezvous later at her studio, and he went to work. She surfed, then wrote her resignation letter, wanting nothing more to do with violent men and their abuse of women. Never again, she assured herself.

  Then she hurried in her car and sped to the Santa Monica Freeway, making it all the way up the stairs of the old brewery by 4:00, accompanied by the Beach Boys blasting from deep within the building. An odd smell struck her within seconds of entering her studio, vaguely salty and rotten, redolent of dead fish in a distant dumpster. She locked the half-light door and sniffed herself, but smelled only the lemony fragrance of laundry detergent.

  Glancing around, she saw nothing amiss and tried to ignore the odor. Over the years the brewery building had belched up all kinds of smells, few of them winning.

  The big sketch pad and her tin of pencils lay on the drawing table, but she had to search carefully for her paints, which she hadn’t used since the cops had returned them. They’d left boxes here and there, and as she grimaced in exasperation she spied the first red drip on the wood floor.

  Paint? That’s what she wanted to believe. And it made more sense than blood because this was her studio, not a butchery.

  Then she saw more drips, and her eyes stalked the moist circles. Without realizing it she’d begun to count them—13, 14, 15—until she found herself staring at the feet of the manikin she called Claire, the creature she’d always kept tucked away by the commercial dumbwaiter.

  She raised her eyes to the figure’s black tights, where the drips swelled and lengthened into three inch teardrop-shaped splatters, tracks that forced her to look inches higher.

  The manikin’s black merino robe had been drenched, and the soft wool had pulled open. A squiggly red line ran down between its perfect breasts. She closed her eyes, but her head moved upward anyway. She was hoping to open them on Mommsa’s mask, the forbidding prototype for the Touch Wood series she’d stashed over Claire’s blank face long ago, the better to keep the mask’s eerie gaze off her. Gwyn wanted nothing more than to see Mommsa’s disturbing creation, to bask in the normalcy of its bizarre features. But this was not to be, for masks, no matter how unnerving, do not bleed.

  For a paralyzing instant, she looked into Jesse’s blue eyes, blank and unblinking in his decapitated head. His greasy blond hair fell limp with blood over his brow.

  A poem was pinned to the bottom of his chin, but she looked away immediately to escape the horror. Her gaze landed on the floor, and as her feet slid back she saw her sandals smearing the red drips, forming streaks of blood that appeared to track her retreat. She lifted her feet and took wooden steps, each as rigid and brittle as the bones of the long dead. Her eyes remained so fixed on the floor, so concerned with avoiding the drips, that she backed into her easel and knocked it over. The clatter, harsh and loud, was immediately eclipsed by a shout in the hallway.

  Her head swung toward the door as a large figure loomed up like a ghoul behind the frosted glass.

  Chapter 13

  A gunshot cracked in the hallway, and the silhouetted man’s upper body crashed through the top half of the door. Shards of frosted glass exploded into the studio and shot across the wood floor like dice.

  He hung from the waist over the jagged opening, one arm trailing lifelessly to the floor. A patch of blood the size of a plum swelled quickly and soaked the back of his white tee-shirt. Though he’d landed with his face against the bottom of the door, Gwyn recognized Hark’s beautiful sandy hair. He’d said he might come by, and he’d just been shot? She screamed in anguish, but before she could move, Detective Paul Jamison raced up, still training a revolver on Hark.

  “Stay back,” Jamison shouted, sounding much more commanding than the man she’d first known as Barr Onstott.

  “What did you do to him?” Gwyn repeated those words in a whisper as she sank to her knees several feet from Hark, feeling nothing of the shattered glass digging into her skin.

  “Do to him?” Jamison shouted. “It’s what he was going to do to you. Look at that.” The detective pointed his gun at the floor outside the door and backed away so fast he hit the wall behind him and almost lost his footing. But even his near fall couldn’t shake his frightened eyes from the floor.

  “Don’t come out here,” he shouted with no attempt to hide his fear.

  But she rose to her feet, both knees grated by the glass, and hurried to the ruined door, looking out to see what horrified Jamison. Hark’s folded body rested inches from her side.

  A thick burlap bag the color of desert sand lay at Hark’s feet. The serpents inside were twitchy, the rough fabric billowing, shifting, folding and unfolding, each movement spastic and sudden, their unique raspy, rattling sound now audible and unmistakable.

  “He had that goddamn thing in his hand. I almost stepped on it.” Jamison squeezed the butt of his gun harder, as if to get a better grip on his fear.

  All the men had been killed by the same means of violence they’d used on their wives or romantic partners, Gwyn reminded herself. And now
Hark had brought snakes here? She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut, refusing the facts before her.

  “I’ve been keeping surveillance on him,” Jamison said. “I tailed him all the way here, but I didn’t see that bag till a few seconds ago.”

  She looked at Hark’s wound, blood caking his tee-shirt, neck, and shoulder, and tried to make sense—excuses, explanations, anything—of the snakes by his side. She was so reluctant in these first few sinking moments to reconcile herself to any evidence that would indict the love that had bloomed in the past few weeks.

  “Is he dead?” Asking that question sickened her, and she had to choke down her surging stomach. But what she loathed almost as much in these pressing moments was the brutal betrayal by the man she’d loved.

  “I don’t know. I’ll see if I can get a pulse,” the detective said, still eyeing the sack of snakes.

  Gwyn stared at Hark. He looked still as a gravestone. The love of my life.

  Right, she said to herself bitterly. But she had said those words to herself as she straddled her board this morning. With the salty water beading on her lip balm, she’d spoken them cautiously, as if words so intrinsically precious held more temptation than truth. But she had believed them. She even envisioned Hark and herself building a life together, a family. And he’d come to kill her?

  She couldn’t reconcile this—she looked at the snakes and Hark—and she never would. But what she couldn’t fathom was the speed with which the body could recover the same fear and revulsion it had known decades ago, forcing her to relive the piercing pain when she wanted it least in her life—when its blunt unspoken language revealed that the man she’d loved so dearly was the killer she feared the most.

  The cruel irony stunned and silenced her. In the spatter of time it took for a bullet to sound and a sack of snakes to fall by his side, Hark had become a disease of her heart, and she knew she could never forgive him his trespass. Her desolation worsened and tears streamed down her cheeks when she saw what Hark had really brought here: retribution for the killing of John Appleton—after she’d told him all the secrets of the root cellar.