by Brian Hodge
In the end, Kimmy agreed: told Andrei that he would be welcome to come. That she, too, was curious to lay eyes on who’d been on the other end of their conversations. A final, brief follow-up from Andrei told her that she’d made his day, and he would be in touch soon about travel plans.
That was where it ended. Not much time to react, but a moment’s thought was all he needed: divide and conquer. He clicked the Reply button for her last e-mail and a new outgoing message appeared, addressed to Andrei and by all indication having originated on her end.
Is it 2 late 2 change my mind? he typed. Sorry. I let u talk me in2 this & that was a big mistake. We were better off the way it was, but u went 2 far & ruined it. I can see what u must want from me & it’s 2 much. Right now I have 2 many problems of my own & don’t need yrs on top of them. OK? We helped each other 4 awhile but let’s just say goodbye. PLEEZ don’t write or IM me again. Have some dignity, don’t B pathetic.
SEND NOW…*click*
Within the hour he’d set up a free, off-site e-mail account in Andrei’s name and fired off a quick message to Kimmy: With everything else going on, I spaced out and forgot to tell you that I’m dropping my old e-mail account. Use this one from now on. I’ll have to get a new IM account, too, but there’s no rush on getting that set up, not when I’ll be there later in the week, hopefully. Travel news soon. I’m still working on it.
An hour later he followed up to inform her that he would be seeing her the day after tomorrow.
* * *
He waited until she worked past the first feathery flutters of consciousness, and when she no longer seemed to be weaving in and out, he joined her at the wall.
“…can’t move my arms…” It was barely a mumble, and she sounded mystified more than anything, her fingers jittering in spastic twitches. “…can’t feel my hands…”
“Don’t worry. They’re still there.”
While she’d been out, he’d twice popped them with Novocain, around each nail head jutting from her palm. Both arms were raised, angled together with fingertips touching, as though she were at the peak of a jumping jack. It had been no small feat, getting her positioned while unconscious, pressing his body close to hold her upright while he hammered each hand overhead, but he’d wanted to avoid any blatant mimicry of crucifixion. Once her palms were pinned to the pine, the legs had been easier. Each ten-inch nail had gone in above the knee and at an angle, inner front to outer back, through the muscle and meat behind the femur. It was very secure. She still had a skier’s legs.
“Can’t…see anything…”
“Then thank the God that made you.” He reached up and slid the black silken pad over her eyes back and forth on its elastic band. “It’s the blindfold.”
Beneath it, her tongue pushed out to wet the dry leather of her lips, and she coughed with a sound like a sick dog. Her breath began to quicken and her voice to climb. “Andrei?”
“Bruce, actually.”
“Where’s Andrei?”
“Sleepless in Pittsburgh, I’d guess. You let him down awfully hard. You don’t remember?” When he saw her lips tremble, trying to form some word that eluded her, he stopped her with a fingertip. “Don’t ask how. I don’t understand it all myself, and I have a feeling it would take too much time even if I did.”
She began to panic, at least as much as the haze permitted, the GHB hangover a gauzy cocoon she was struggling to fight her way through. Anesthetized and numb, but not too numb, dull aches nibbling like piranha at the ragged edge of sensation. Perhaps she had a muddled curiosity about the smell, the frustrating inability to step away from the wall, maybe a cold sensation in the pit of her stomach. She knew she was in trouble—he could tell. She just didn’t know why, or how deep, or where to find the way out.
“You died,” he said. “Right?”
“…uh huh…”
“But you were resuscitated.”
“…you know that…already…”
“Because they lost their grip on you on the other side,” he said, and grabbed for one of the papers he’d set aside from the main stack. “I read your conversations with Andrei. ‘They lost their hold on me and I think they were mad about that. Furious, if I’m remembering accurately.’”
He’d gleaned a partial summary of what had happened to her, and even more about how the delayed memory of it had derailed her life. Such woes comprised the bulk of their correspondence, a support group of two. Pity me, you’re the only one who can understand, everybody else thinks I’m crazy, all I could do was shut down and not say anything to anybody. As for the underlying causes, they hadn’t spelled everything out. Maybe they’d done this before she started saving their chats. Overall, reading their exchanges was like listening to a couple discuss a movie he hadn’t seen, working from a frame of reference he didn’t possess.
“Who are you?” she panted.
“The better question—who were they, exactly?”
Her breath was coming fast and shallow now. “P-p-please don’t hurt Punky.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got no interest in him. You’re the one I want to talk to.”
There was no benefit to be gained from telling her so, but he couldn’t recall hurting an animal, ever. Animals had only the will to live, not the intellectual capacity to understand what was happening to them and, given time, to contemplate the moral and mortal terror of it. But his reticence went beyond that. The idea of harming such a lesser creature was repugnant to him on a fundamental level, and always had been.
The summer he was nine, he’d come upon a boy at an algae-thickened pond a half-mile from home; the boy was using firecrackers to blow up frogs netted from the water. Bruce had found a stout branch and swung it like a bat until spatters of the boy’s blood outnumbered the red and green scraps littering the bank.
Unless his memory was faulty, that was the first time he had begun to sense what he would later think of as his calling.
“Let’s try it again,” he said. “Who were they?”
“I don’t know for sure, I don’t know…angels, God, I don’t know, whoever’s there to meet you when you die…they were glad I was there but they didn’t love me, they weren’t nice.“
“How do you know you didn’t just go to Hell?”
“’Cause I believed.” Her throat was starting to strangle her words. “But it’s all the same…or all there is…you know that after you get there.”
“What did you see?”
“Don’t remem–member…I wasn’t there long enough…I just remember their faces…their mouths.”
“So how could you forget a thing like that in the first place?”
“They lose you, they want you to forget…it’s the last thing they can do to you, they make you forget…what’s wrong with my hands?”
“Then why would you remember at all?”
“I don’t know why, it just happened, it broke through,” she snuffled. “Why can’t I move, I’m hurting, make it stop, please make it stop…wanna bend my legs…please…why’s it hurt all over?”
He’d been standing beside her, syringe in hand and ready to pop her wounds with another round of Novocain, but he recapped the needle and slipped it into a shirt pocket. He sensed that she couldn’t give him anything more of use, but it was enough. Between what Kimmy had told him and the files she’d kept, he was already beginning to suspect what was really going on here. It had little to do with her, and everything to do with him—his place in this world and the next.
It felt as if he were being, in the most honorable sense of the word, promoted.
“I’d tell you all this anyway,” she groaned from the wall, pinned there like an ignorant butterfly and starting to wriggle upon her spikes. “You don’t have to hurt me, pleasepleaseplease stop it…”
He’d stopped hurting her a long time ago, before she even knew he had begun. It was only now catching up with her. Moreover, she misunderstood the sublime role of pain here, although he couldn’t fault her for that. Still, questio
ning her, hurting her…these served two entirely separate purposes.
Her answers belonged to him alone.
Her suffering belonged to the town, and everyone beyond who would hear of it.
“Whoever they are,” he said, not without envy for her knowledge, “I’m sending you back to them. I’m sure you’ll find them waiting for you with open arms.”
He yanked away the blindfold, the elastic band snapping against his fingers. Her reaction was just as he’d expected: During those first few moments, as she blinked sluggishly against the light, she was beyond comprehending, beyond making so much as a single sound as she tried to make sense of what she saw—lies, she would hope, a prank, a dream, hallucinations. Anything but the reality of the rent across her belly and her entrails pulled out, displayed before her in two twisty, dangling loops.
The small intestine only: He’d removed it with care, doing no more damage than necessary, cutting it away one fold at a time from the mesentery that held it in place. After most of the full twenty feet or so was uncoiled on the outside, he’d bisected it in the middle and nailed each glistening rope out to its full loose length, one end to the coffee table, the other to the top of a chair.
Alongside each, in mismatched holders, stood the candles that she’d fetched for him shortly before lapsing into unconsciousness. He’d lit them only when she first began to show signs of rousing. They wept wax, slow and silent, and in a few more minutes they would burn down to the level of meat.
When Kimmy finally opened her mouth to scream, as he knew she would, as he knew she would have to, he lifted the washcloth taken from the bathroom and jammed it into her mouth before she could make much of a sound at all.
Next: tape, just enough to hold the gag in place awhile. If she worked at it with her tongue, and he hoped she would, Kimmy could force the whole wad out, and really let her lungs rip.
For now, though, he had to wonder how much presence of mind she had left, the washcloth soaking up the sound of her throat shredding its lining, and above each distended cheek her eyes looked huge and poached, and seemed to rove in a frantic search for meaning, for reason, for salvation.
He gathered her papers, repacked the sledge mallet and leftover nails that he’d bought at a hardware store on the way in from the airport. Checked the level of the candles. Five minutes, give or take, before things would start to cook.
Finally, before he removed the nitrile gloves that he’d been wearing ever since he went to work, Bruce took a look at her on the wall, nails and all, and knew what would cross the minds of the investigators that would converge here. They wouldn’t be able to help it. Their imaginations would take the path of least resistance.
Might as well throw them a silly bone.
He dipped his fingertip into the congealed blood welling from the worst wound he’d dealt her and traced block letters on the wall:
The nailwork is sound.
Jesus was a carpenter too.
Any resemblance ends there.
And when he left, pacing without hurry back to his rental car as evening took hold and the sky deepened to the color of Antarctic seas, he was sure that anyone who might see him would fail to remember him quite as he was.
IV
Andrei guessed that she had been gone for five days before he learned about it, the investigator from Wyoming showing up to quiz him on his role in Kimmy Matteo’s life and death.
Before that, he’d spent an unhealthy eight days hating her; or, when listening to the better angels of his nature—feeble creatures, admittedly—trying not to hate her, because Kimmy was screwed up too, and he knew better than anyone what it was like trying to contend with this strange new outlook every waking hour. Seven days spent telling himself that she was a flake and he was better off without her. Six days trying to convince himself that even if she had told him to piss off, it was only because she was afraid of letting herself live again.
And so on. In trying to sort through getting dumped by someone he’d never seen, every day got a little more complicated than the day before.
The visitor from Wyoming changed everything. A tall, rawboned man with a Marine-issue haircut who looked as though he lived to put the final lock on case files…when he and his local PD backup hadn’t found anyone home at Janika’s, they’d headed straight to Global Village. How had they known where to go? Andrei had provided everything but a map. It was all there in the chat files Kimmy had saved.
A moment’s panic even before he understood the situation—you’ve got the wrong guy—but it took only a few minutes to make a strong case that he’d never left Pittsburgh the day Kimmy had been dying 1,800 miles away. He didn’t lack for witnesses: Janika, of course, and Manon, plus a couple of part-time clerks at the shop. One of the baristas at the coffeehouse down the block. Nor would there be any paper trail of him booking or boarding a flight, and these days, you didn’t step onto a plane without proving who you were.
After an hour of talk and nightmarish assimilation, he’d given the investigator no more than what they could’ve covered in a phone call. No, I didn’t travel to Wyoming. No, we never even met. No, I have no idea who might’ve showed up instead, and no, I didn’t tell anybody I was planning on going, because between the time we first agreed to meet and when she turned around and shot me down was maybe three hours, tops.
Except this wasn’t technically true, he realized later. He’d told Manon of his intentions, although nothing too specific—the town, but not Kimmy’s name. Anyway, if Manon had been at the shop last Friday to vouch for his presence, she obviously hadn’t traveled anywhere either.
In the end, he had taken the investigator home to show him the final e-mail he’d gotten from Kimmy.
Is it 2 late 2 change my mind? Sorry. I let u talk me in2 this & that was a big mistake.
For some masochistic reason he hadn’t deleted it yet, letting it sit in his In Box like a scab to pick at, or a reminder to never put himself out there like that again.
PLEEZ don’t write or IM me again. Have some dignity, don’t B pathetic.
Nothing like a murder to put humiliation and disappointment into perspective. The investigator printed out a copy to keep, forwarded the e-mail to his work account, and called it a day. Sorry for your news, call me if you think of anything else, goodbye.
After showing him to the door, Andrei wandered the house awhile, lost in a silence that seemed staggering, lifeless without his sister, without Corey’s boisterous laugh on the nights he stayed over. No room seemed right to linger in, as though each one read his heart and told him to move along, wanting nothing to do with him and the news he was still trying to absorb.
Eventually he trudged upstairs to his room again and did the most stupid thing he possibly could: went back to his computer to seek out the local newspapers in northwestern Wyoming, and whatever details of Kimmy’s murder he could find that the cop hadn’t shared.
* * *
She was through the door in moments, a secondary entrance around the side of the building. For the past three hours she had been observing the main entrance from the shelter of her rental car, watching the languid drift of an early snowfall and getting a sense of the comings and goings in the middle of the night. Not much. They died by day here, apparently. About all she had seen was an attendant who stepped outside for a smoking break once every hour or so. Two cigarettes, reliably, the second lit off the smoldering stub of the first. She was hoping that it would give her enough time to get from the car to the door, then find her way around inside without having to deal with the attendant.
The graveyard shift, Manon had heard Americans call it when they earned their wages at this time of night. Did they still call it that when they worked at the county morgue? Or was that just a little too obvious?
Out, and in—it had been ages since a locked door had given her any trouble. Overall, it was much easier to get past locked doors now than when she grew up. When she was a girl, they barred doors with oak beams stout enough to stand up
to battering rams, or serve as one. Today they thought their buildings so secure, and it was true that their locks were precise things, but this made them vulnerable, too. She had had a long time to learn about them, understand them, defeat them.
On the inside, she kept her set of picks palmed, gliding quietly down a hallway of tile and fluorescent lights, an ugly and detestable environment, constantly looking ahead and back over her shoulder until she found the double doors to the morgue itself. These too were locked, but slowed her for less than half a minute, then she was through, and closed and locked them behind her. She stepped to one side and slid to the floor to wait until her heart calmed and her breath felt as slow and even as sleep. Listening until the attendant returned to his post outside—the opening and closing of the main door, the scrape of his chair, the sound of him loading a fresh tape or CD into a player.
Good. She need not worry about stepping so lightly in here now.
Even in the dark—or near dark, some light bleeding in through a small wire-mesh window in the upper half of each door—the Teton County morgue was an assault upon the senses. Any morgue would be. Her nose crinkled at the astringent stink of disinfectants and other chemicals that failed to mask the soul of this place. The smell of death was never pleasant, but there had been a time when it was at least natural. Not so, in this age, this workshop. They scorched or perfumed it from the air, scrubbed it from every surface, shunned the mention of it in polite conversation. They entertained themselves with death until even genocide was just another diversion, then pretended it would never happen to them.
Oh, but it would. She had seen the inside of more bodies than she ever wanted to tally.
