Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  Which she had, just the sound of her name driving him crazy the whole time he’d been in prison, whispering in his head … and now here she was. Practically writhing in a spasm of fury mingled with panicky sixth-sense flappings of superstitious fright, he moved closer to the window. Her …

  The daughter of a fisherman and a well-known midwife—he skinny and silent, she massively motherish—Marianne had always been the witchy type, even as a young girl a brewer of odd teas and maker of weird, pungent potions.

  It was part of what had attracted Dewey to her in the first place. Marianne was always picking and drying the leaves of odd plants, bringing home mushrooms she’d found out in the woods and mashing them up with pinches of this and that. After her parents died, she’d lived alone for a while, marrying Dewey only after he’d courted her for a whole winter with smoked salmon, venison haunches, and firewood.

  And the result had been worth it: a warm house, a soft bed. One way and another, she’d been the prize in the box of Cracker Jacks, at first. But then the trouble began. Why did he have to drink, why couldn’t he hunt in season like other men instead of poaching … why, why, why?

  Some people had said Marianne could tell what ailed you by the pulse in your throat, or fix a barren woman so she could have children. They said she could predict your future from the way a few tea leaves lay drowned at the bottom of your cup.

  A grim smile twisted his lips at that last thought. Hell, she couldn’t really have been too great in the fortune-telling department, or she’d have seen ahead to her own choked throat, wouldn’t she?

  But his smirk fled when she looked up suddenly toward him. For no reason that he could tell, she strode to the window and yanked the shade down, then went around to all the other cottage windows and covered them, too.

  Shutting him out. Just like always. She’d thought she was so good, too good for the likes of him once she got to know him. But he’d taught her a lesson, showed her who had the upper hand.…

  Both hands, actually. Around her throat, choking the life out of her while she fought and sputtered. Cursing him all the while, even when she no longer had breath enough to make a sound.

  In the end, they’d gotten him for her death. His attack had left marks, the result of his temper getting the better of him. But only for manslaughter; no one could prove he’d been planning it, that he’d decided enough was enough.

  No one but her, and she wasn’t ever going to be able to tell, was she? Not after his thumbs had been pressed so far into her throat, he’d felt small bones in there cracking. No one …

  Not until now. Slowly he backed away from the cabin, his feet finding the small stones of the clearing and moving lightly on them to avoid making a sound. Suddenly the cabin door opened and he froze, certain that he had been detected.

  But then, framed in the glow of the open doorway, the dark-haired one named Jake only flung water from a pan at the bushes and went back inside again, closing the door behind her.

  Dewey let his breath out. Being imprisoned had taught him the value of his patience; he’d planned his way out, going over every step again and again, taking a couple of years to make sure he’d thought of every eventuality, plugged up any potential hole in his scheme.

  Thinking of it all again, pushing the hex she’d put on him determinedly from his mind, he crept away from the cottage. Back in prison, he’d had to gain trust, be a good boy so he could get a spot in the prison’s work program, in which inmates whose release was at least theoretically possible were encouraged to learn new, useful skills like cooking, laundry, or landscaping.

  Already planning, he’d told the counselor he wanted to be a healthcare worker, so in their wisdom they’d made him a janitor in the infirmary. There, silently pushing a broom, emptying wastebins, and wiping out sinks, he’d learned to control the fiery urgings of that temper of his. He’d become—on the outside—the kind of inmate the authorities wanted to see: the kind that everything alive had been systematically reamed out of, leaving only a husk who would follow rules and regulations to the letter.

  That was the first step; then there’d been a long period of waiting for an inmate to die naturally, which right there was a rare event. Usually if a guy got so sick that he might kick the bucket, they sent him out to a hospital for a tune-up, not out of concern for the guy but to avoid trouble from lawsuit-happy relatives, weeping crocodile tears while secretly relieved to be rid of the bum. And if they could squeeze a big payday out of a negligence claim, so much the better.

  But at last Sonny Sawtelle had clutched both paws to his barrel chest one morning while slopping gray oatmeal onto orange plastic breakfast trays in the cafeteria, and bingo, Dewey had his exit pass. Still, for all his planning, there wound up being a twist he hadn’t predicted.

  Sneaking down the dirt road away from the cabin in the woods where Marianne’s ghost—or whatever it was—now sheltered, he recalled the next part of his escape with a scowl. Faking up a body in his own bed hadn’t been any real trouble; prison guards were as stupid and lazy as anyone alive, and after a while of a guy’s good behavior they let things slide. If an inmate always showed up for roll call in the morning whether they’d done an overnight bed check or not, the guards got complacent, and their routines got even sloppier than they ordinarily were.

  So on the night when a guy wasn’t there at all, they didn’t notice. Not that he’d taken that for granted, though, either. On the night in question, he’d made sure that the pod staff thought he was supposed to be at work in the infirmary, and the infirmary guards thought he was supposed to be in his bed. That gained him a block of time when no one expected to see him.…

  Without warning, Marianne’s face loomed up before him; with a yelp he backpedaled in the darkness, then realized it wasn’t real and stormed forward angrily again. That face …

  It was the face of a woman who couldn’t keep her yap shut, who’d gone on choking out threats and curses at him even as her face turned blue and her eyes rolled up in her head. I’ll be back for you, she’d gagged at him, and Dewey had laughed.

  Only now it was starting to look to him as if maybe she really would. As if she had; after all, he thought nervously as he recalled her threat, what else could explain what he’d seen?

  There was just no getting around it, he realized. She was here, and if her big mouth had been trouble before, that was nothing compared to what it might turn into now, because the manslaughter he’d been convicted of was bad enough.

  But if she opened her mouth to tell what’d really happened, well, that could be a whole lot more trouble. First-degree-murder trouble, because she could reveal—in fact, she was the only one who could—that he’d been planning it before he did it.

  Threatening her, describing it to her, how he’d do it, what he’d do and why. And she hadn’t dared leave him, either, since by then she’d figured out a few things.

  About her parents’ deaths, for instance: both accidental and unwitnessed, one right after the other. And that wild animals, in season or out, weren’t the only things Dewey knew how to track.

  That he could track her … Yeah, he’d scared her, all right. Shut that mouth of hers … just not quite enough, apparently. Not permanently enough. So now … now he’d have to finish the job.

  When he figured he was far enough from the cottage to risk it, he snapped on the penlight he’d filched from one of the cars he’d stolen just after his escape. The woods appeared around him, spooky and silent, like ghosts of trees in a haunted forest.

  No doubt she was pretty mad. No doubt she would do what she could to hurt him, just as she’d promised.

  No doubt she’d tell. And although he didn’t intend to get caught—he planned to stay in the woods for a while, then sneak across the border to Canada—if he did get sent back to prison, she could make sure he stayed there for the rest of his life.

  Because dead or alive, he knew people would believe her. You couldn’t see that face and not believe.…

  Th
en it hit him. Of course; the answer was simple. He only wondered why he hadn’t thought of it sooner; man, being in jail had messed him up, head-wise. But his frown changed to a smile as he sauntered a hundred more yards down the dirt road, nearly to the place where the unfortunate hiker from the city had ended up.

  Dewey had dropped out of the dead tree like a bag of rocks, piggybacking the guy before he knew what hit him, the shock on the guy’s face barely getting time to change into something else before his expression faded entirely. There’d been food in his pack and money in his wallet, though Dewey hadn’t taken it all in case someone might think an empty wallet looked suspicious.

  After that he’d clothed poor old Bentley Hodell decently and arranged both bodies by the edge of the nearby stream that ran to the beaver pond; that way, both land- and water-dwelling animals could get at them.

  Flesh eaten, bones gnawed and scattered … in a short while it would be almost as if neither of them had been here at all.

  Or so Dewey had thought. Instead, those two meddling women had unblocked the culvert. He hadn’t dared stick his head up to see them doing it, but he’d heard them; worse yet, before Dewey could scramble back to undo the body arrangement he’d worked so hard on, the sudden draining away of so much water had collapsed the stream’s soft bank. After that, an upstream blockage of sticks and leaves washed in by the recent heavy rains had given way, and the next thing Dewey knew …

  Damn, Dewey thought, fingering the rabbit’s foot he’d found in Bentley’s pants pocket and shrugging Bentley’s warm jacket up around his shoulders. Squinting in the penlight’s thin glow, he searched around by the side of the dirt road for the place he’d seen earlier … there.

  Then, stepping carefully in the gloom, he sank into a bed of leaves and pine needles, where he settled down in relative comfort. This was a lot better than getting into that damned body bag, back at the prison; closing his eyes, he let his mind drift.

  Slipping out through the loading dock and into the ambulance had taken a mere thirty seconds. It was the only time he’d been worried at all about getting caught, but just as he expected, the guard and the ambulance guy sneaked out into the driveway for a smoke instead of sticking to the rule: no door or gate unlocked without a guard standing ready by it.

  But then, jeeze, what a fright he’d had. Because the thing he hadn’t thought of while he was planning was that there was no room in the coffin for him and the dead guy together, because there was no coffin. Instead it was a body bag they’d shoved the guy into, and Sonny Sawtelle was a big guy, not an inch left to spare. So Dewey had needed to improvise on the spot:

  While the guys were still smoking and yakking at the far end of the row of Dumpsters, he’d lugged the dead body to the nearest of the big metal bins and rolled it in. A soft thud was the only sound as the body landed in heaps of food waste, paper from wastebaskets, and who knew what else.

  In the next moment, Dewey trotted back to the ambulance, hopped in, and zipped himself into the bag. After that and a ride in the ambulance—that’s what they used at the prison, not a hearse—getting out of the hospital morgue had been a snap; who worries about an escaping corpse?

  One car stolen out of the hospital’s parking lot, a panel truck from Portland, finally a mommy van with the keys hanging in it outside a convenience store in Scarborough and bingo, he’d laid a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow.

  All the vehicles had some money in them: change, a few stray dollar bills. Food, too, and to his delight the mommy van had contained a nearly full fifth of vodka plus the orange juice to go with it.

  Finally, after cutting his hair and shaving—the panel truck had been loaded with health-and-beauty products bound, he supposed, for supermarkets and drugstores—he’d poured the vodka into the orange juice and brought it along with him, on the bus back up here to his familiar stomping grounds in downeast Maine.

  Easy-peasy. And taking care of the Marianne problem was going to be equally trouble-free, he reassured himself as he settled to sleep. The only hard part would be making it look like an accident, so no one would realize he’d been here at all.

  But a night’s rest and a little more thought, he felt sure, would take care of that. Breathing in the cool night air—free air, he realized, luxuriating in the smell of damp leaves, pine sap, and the dank mineral fragrance of the nearby lake—he gazed up at the sky through an inky-black lacework of bare branches.

  He would come up with a plan, a simple plan that would work flawlessly, the way he’d done getting out of prison. And then—

  Without warning, Marianne rose before him once more, against his closed eyelids: tall and slender, her wavy red hair softly glowing in the lamplight, warm and alive.

  Alive, alive, oh … Dewey shuddered, his memories of Sonny’s corpse all mingled up dreadfully with this phantasm, this …

  This impossibly living thing she’d become. And however she’d managed it, there was only one thing to do about it.

  He’d just have to kill her again.

  “Hey! Hey, buddy, are you all right?”

  Sam Tiptree blinked startledly as fingers snapped in front of his face. “Huh? Oh, yeah …”

  Sitting at a table in the Rusty Rudder café in Eastport, he shook his head to clear away the fog of daydreaming that had overcome him. Night-dreaming, rather; evening came early here in autumn, and although it was only 6 p.m., outside the restaurant’s big plate-glass front window, it was dark.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he told the pair sitting with him: Richard Stedman, owner of the ill-fated Courtesan, and his beautiful sister, Carol, had insisted on bringing him here to express their gratitude for his help—and their contrition over nearly getting him killed—by buying him dinner. They’d both gone back to their motel rooms to change clothes while he finished up at work.

  So now Richard wore a loosened silk tie with a collared shirt and blue blazer, his sister an elegant long tunic-type thing over leggings and metallic sandals, and even in decent chinos and the clean sweatshirt he’d pulled on, Sam felt seriously underdressed. Under-everything, in fact, with these two elegantly turned-out young people he’d somehow fallen in with sitting across from him.

  “What you need,” Richard pronounced, “is a drink.”

  “Uh,” Sam began, but before he could go on, Richard had done whatever it was that made waiters appear at his side as if by magic, ordered a double gin-and-lemon—“It’ll fix you right up,” Richard declared as Sam went on protesting—and whisked his hands in a “done and dusted” gesture as the waiter scurried off.

  From across the table, Carol smiled and reached over to touch Sam’s wrist briefly, a touch that lingered warmly on his skin. “Poor Sam. Take it a little easy on him, Richard, he’s not used to us.”

  Her eyes twinkled confidentially at Sam in a way that made him think that maybe he could simply tell them, just blurt it out the way he always did: “I don’t drink.”

  But somehow the moment passed. He looked around at the familiar dining room, glimmering with candlelight elegantly reflected in silver and stemware. Rarely anymore was he envious of people who could drink alcohol.

  But he was now. “So, Sam, what’s fun around here?” Richard asked.

  Sam felt Carol’s eyes on him as he fumbled for a reply. A minute ago Richard had been holding forth on the latest actions of the Federal Reserve, while Carol had mentioned the book she was reading, an eight-hundred-page novel that was all the rage, apparently.

  Sam felt thick and stupid by comparison. He got up. “Uh, I’ll be right back.” Crossing the dining room, he continued past the guitarists playing jazz tunes near the hostess station, and on into the bar.

  Instantly a feeling of déjà vu came over him. “Hey, Tony,” he said to the bartender, “leave the booze out of mine, will you? And be quiet about it?”

  He put a five on the bar. But Tony, an old buddy of Sam’s from high school, shoved the bill back toward him, not missing a beat as he mixed a trayful of martinis.
>
  “No prob, guy, I’ve already gotcha covered.”

  Relieved, Sam stopped in the men’s room, washed his hands, and eyed himself in the mirror over the sink. He looked haunted, as hollow-eyed as if he’d been out on a bender last night instead of home in his own bed.

  Nah. Never happened, he told the guy in the mirror. But the guy in the mirror knew better: Oh, yes, it did. You don’t want to believe it. But it most definitely did. He returned to the table just as the waiter set down his virgin gin-and-lemon.

  “You okay, Sam?” Richard asked again, and Carol tipped her head in concern. She’d taken her glossy, dark hair out of its elastic for the evening, and now it moved on her shoulders in a smooth, near-iridescent wave.

  “Yeah, fine,” Sam said, taking a sip of his drink. But he wasn’t. Six hours earlier, after he had seen whatever it was he’d seen down in that bilge—

  You know what it was. Or rather, who it was.

  —he’d woken, flat on his back on the dock. Peering down at him had been five worried faces: the three Nathans, their big ugly mugs pale with concern, and behind them Richard and Carol. Richard had been in the act of calling for help on his cellphone.

  But when Sam sat up, then got to his feet shakily, Richard had put the phone away. Now Carol smiled at him, touching his hand again with her cool, neatly manicured fingertips.

  “It was all I could do not to kiss you when I found out you were okay,” she said sweetly.

  Sam felt a blush climbing his neck. “Uh, yeah,” he muttered stupidly, swallowing more lemonade to cover his confusion.

  On the dock, she’d let him alone while he checked himself all over, finding no serious injury other than the bump on his head. The Nathans had backed off, too, so Sam could walk around getting his legs back under him. At the same time, he’d eyed the trailer with the winch mounted on it and figured out what must have happened.