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He is out here too, somewhere. In the darkness, she thinks, very nearby. Perhaps under the bridge waiting for her or even closer. With the trees and the darkness and the snow, he could almost be close enough to touch.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks. She thinks reflexively of those girls in the 1-900 ads they run in the back of theBoston Phoenix and the comparison, though jarring, is not without validity.Hi, my name’s Sue. Tonight I’ll do whatever you want. Just name it. Sue can practically hear her friend Natalie rolling her eyes, saying,Please, but right now that’s how the voice on the phone has made her feel. Tonight she is his fear whore.
“Stop the car and get out. Keep the phone with you.”
Sue puts the Expedition in park and cuts the engine. Doing this she thinks only of Veda, but now apprehension for herself has joined her fear for her daughter. She opens the door and slides down and out into the cold air. Her jacket bunches up momentarily around her waist, allowing for the blade of the wind to graze her bare skin, and she shudders, an all-over tremble that spreads from her extremities inward to the base of her spine. Without thinking she puts on her gloves and stuffs her left hand in her pocket.
Her eyes water and her nose stings at the sharp temperature drop. Standing beside the car with the dome light on and the reassuring little chime of civilization reminding her that, whatever else is going on, the door is still ajar, she waits for the sensation to come back, the feeling of being watched.
She doesn’t have to wait long. She feels his stare pressing down on her from somewhere close. It is horrible, this feeling. The fear sinks to the pit of her stomach.
“Get the shovel and the canvas out of the back,” the voice on the phone says. “You’d better take the flashlight too. It’s going to be very dark where you’re going.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to go down underneath the bridge.”
“Is that where you are?” she blurts, although it’s not actually what she means. What she means is,Is that where my daughter is? But these questions—and any others she might care to raise—are met with such total preemptive silence on the other end that Sue realizes that he’s hung up again. And now she senses that there will be nothing more forthcoming until she does as she’s told.
And of course there is another problem. The items he asked her to get out, the shovel and the canvas, are not in the Expedition. They are not in the Expedition because she didn’t bring them. In the case of the canvas tarp, at least, the voice on the phone must know this, since he was the one who came and took the tarp from the garden shed himself.
She does however have the flashlight and for the moment the flashlight will have to do.
Now ankle-deep in snow, she begins edging her way toward the embankment, where the bridge takes over, with the phone in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Shining it under the sagging timbers she realizes immediately the light itself will do very little good since she has no idea how deep the snowdrifts are down there. On the third step her right foot plunges through the snow to her crotch, throwing her off-balance, and for an ugly, dizzy moment she is sure she’s going to go tumbling headfirst down the slope to land in a heap in the frozen swamp below.
Instead she grabs one of the timbers, hooks her left arm around it, and clings there for a span of seconds until her center of gravity is at least partially restored. Then, turning the edges of her feet against the angle of the hill, she inches downward once again, eyes riveted to the circle of the flashlight’s beam ten feet in front of her. As she descends fully beneath the bridge the drifts taper away to wet, bare ground. No amount of wind could blow snow down at this angle.
Then the smell hits her, not incrementally but all at once.
The ripe and boggy rot panting upward from the very pores of the earth. It speaks directly to her limbic system and suddenly it is a long time ago and she and Phillip are standing down here, with pieces of hay and grass and sticks stuck to their skin, sweating and filthy among the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. Staring at each other dead-eyed with the knowledge of what they’ve done and the work that is still ahead of them on that endlessly long afternoon.
You can’t tell anybody,he tells her.
Sue nods at Phillip’s ghost, his earnest, eleven-year-old face split down the middle by a single ray of sunlight falling from a crack in the bridge above their heads. A bird cries out with a cackling trill.
Now she is standing at the bottom of the hill. It is so dark down here that the very absence of light itself seems to swallow her up, consuming the flashlight’s illumination in a single gulp. Still, if she looks out of the corner of her eye she can make out the rough outline of wooden piling twenty feet to her right, its base implanted crookedly in the dirt. There is no wind down here, but it is cold and damp.
Her cell phone rings in her hand. She touches the button to answer but doesn’t say anything. For a moment neither does he.
“Are you in the place?”
Sue realizes she’s just nodding. Clears her throat. “Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
There is silence again. Only this time she knows he has not hung up. And not too far off in that impenetrable blackness Sue thinks she hears something moving beneath the bridge, a slow, moist rustle of motion against the clutter of decaying foliage. Something down here with her, moving steadily, unhurriedly in her direction. It might be a deer or some other kind of animal. It could be anything.
Abruptly she thinks of a line from another one of Veda’s board books,Big Red Barn, one line in particular that always struck her as a little sinister somehow.
And that is where the children play. But in this story the children are away. Only the animals are here today.
“Who are you?” she whispers into the phone.
But in this story the children are away.
The rustling sounds stop. Sue snaps her head around, breathing fast and hard. Blood pounds in her throat. It’s almost painful.
Only the animals are here today.
The flesh up and down her back feels like it’s going to leap right off her shoulders and run away.
And the voice on the phone says, “Start digging.”
9:42P.M.
Sue makes her way over to the crooked wooden post. She stares at it. She says, “I don’t have a shovel.”
It’s impossible to tell if the voice on the other end is still there or not.
“I didn’t bring the shovel,” she says a bit more forcefully. “I’m sorry. I left it—”
“Well then, you better do what you can with your hands,” the voice cuts in. “Your little girl has less than ten hours to live. Do you understand that?”
Sue sets down the flashlight, props it up between two big stones so it’s aimed at the post, and drops the phone in her pocket. It is time to get down to business. Dropping to a squat she sinks down to her knees, feels the moisture soak straight through the fabric of her pants to her skin, and leans forward.
She’s almost forgotten that she’s been wearing gloves this whole time, and as soon as she takes them off she starts to realize how bad, how truly awful, this is going to be. Her fingertips and knuckle joints immediately start throbbing with the cold. Still, she digs with her bare fingers into the slimy, clayey surface, prying up great slabs and clots of stinking, half-frozen muck and tossing it aside by the handful.
And she digs.
Time disappears. The only thing she has to compare it to is the three and a half hours she spent in labor with Veda, the epidural wearing off, the pain that could not get any worse, the hours that could not stretch any longer but somehow did. Phillip was there with her the whole time, Phillip who would be gone soon enough but for the time being was next to her bedside trying to help until she ordered him to stop telling her how to breathe.
And she digs on. Fingers long since numb, scraped so raw that when she finally does find it, it is the sound of the thing rattling against her hands
, rather than the feel of it, that makes her realize she’s dug it up.
The unmistakable synthetically slick surface of a familiar garbage bag, dirt-smeared and tattered, sits visibly in the cone of the flashlight beam. Several garbage bags, actually, taped in layers with packaging tape. And she remembers. Just the way they left him.
Tape it good, Sue,she hears Phillip saying, across the gulf of years.He’s got plenty of tape in here so just keep going.
Sue sits upward, gulping air, and jerks erect so sharply that her backbone gives a sharp zing of pain. The world beneath the bridge reels in her peripheral vision. She is enduring equal portions of nausea, horror, and pain. But the thing she’s unearthed, oblong and bulky, shrouded in garbage bags and bound up in packaging tape, tips the scale further toward horror—and the smell of it is beyond description. She vomits convulsively, twice, into the pile of earth she’s pulled up.
Coughing, she wipes her lips and crawls back from it, not wanting to be any closer to the thing than she absolutely must be, for any longer than is absolutely required of her.
In her pocket the phone rings. She hitsTALK .
“Are you finished digging?” he asks. “Did you find what I asked you to?”
“It’s right here.”
“Pick it up.”
At first she can’t believe she’s hearing him right. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why?”
“You’re taking it back to the car.”
“I can’t. Do that.”
He says nothing.
“I mean, I don’t…why do you want me to take it to the car?” The feeling is creeping back into her fingers and byfeeling she means pain, bright neon pain as if someone is crushing each fingertip between red-hot pliers. Faintly Sue is aware that at least one of her fingernails has torn almost completely off and there is blood trickling down between the webs of her fingers, the wound stinging with a crust of salty filth from the hole she dug. “I mean, haven’t I done everything else you wanted up till now? I haven’t called the police and I never tried to do anything except what you said.” She waits, needing this to be acknowledged even as she knows that it won’t be. “Can’t you just let me have Veda back?”
Still no answer. Except this time Sue knows, somehow, that he is still there, listening, waiting. She can practically smell him through the cell phone, his breath not unlike the stench rolling off the thing in the garbage bags.
“I’ll give her to you in the morning,” he says with soft finality. “I’ll give her to you in a little basket. And in another little basket I’ll give you her heart. And another for her liver. And her kidneys. And two very small baskets for her pretty bright eyes. All wrapped up in ribbons. Wouldthat be all right?”
“Stop. I’ll do it. Whatever you want.”
Now the slowness in his voice is the weariness of patience wearing thin. “I already told you that I’m a big believer in second chances, Susan. But I’ve given you enough of them already. We’ve got a long night ahead of us still and it’s not even midnight yet. I’m starting to feel like you’re taking advantage of my generosity.” Now comes the other version of the voice, the one that hooks and peels back the layer of mock civility like a serrated knife, and Sue feels herself tensing against its edge. “I’m going to have to punish you, do you understand that?”
“Please just don’t hurt Veda.”
“I’m going to have to punish you,” he repeats even more meticulously. “Now you do what I told you, pick it up and take it back to the car, or it’s going to be even worse.”
He hangs up, and Sue gives herself a second, literally, to try to pull herself together. Taking more time than that isn’t going to do her any more good.
Hauling in a deep breath she drops down on her haunches in front of the thing wrapped up in garbage bags and forces herself to find some kind of grip on the shape within.
Something inside crackles and pulls loose with a sickening snap and a pop and she has to fight back the urge to throw up again. But she tugs once, twice, and again, and the thing comes loose from the sucking maw of the earth so abruptly that Sue falls backward. She has time to think,This isn’t going to happen, and then it does, the thing in the bags falls on top of her, its unevenly distributed weight holding her down, seeming actually to almost grope for her, like it’s trying to feel her up. A whiff of putrid air pours out of the bags and up into her nose.
Sue screams. She kicks and twists sideways, contorting her body to propel the thing off of her with a great uncoiling shudder. She wants to keep kicking it, shrieking at it, but already a degree of rationality has come back to her—again this is what she does, what she in factis, an individual with the learned ability to find equilibrium in the most unlikely circumstances.
Sue takes another deep breath, bends down, and starts to drag the garbage-bag-enshrouded thing upward. It is lighter now, or feels lighter, no doubt because she is prepared for it. Rounded edges and jagged shapes press up against her chest and she is still distantly, unavoidably aware of the smell but a new kind of numbness has begun to take over for which she is nothing but grateful, grateful, grateful. In small, incrementally paced baby steps she drags the thing back up from underneath the bridge where she and Phillip buried it. Three-quarters of the way up she realizes that she left the flashlight down there and that she is now moving in almost total darkness, and this does not seem to matter to her much anymore either.
By the time she reaches the Expedition, she’s sweating and badly winded, gasping for air. She drops the thing on the gravel road next to the rear tires and opens the back of the vehicle. The headlights and taillights have gone out now, but her eyes have adjusted. Sue bends down to grab the thing but its weight is too much for her fatigued muscles.
No way am I going to be able to lift this higher than my waist.
You have to.
She gives herself a ten count, as ready as she’ll ever be, then sucks in a deep breath and leans down, gripping the shape with both arms. Straining with her arms, back, and shoulders, she hoists it upright. Something pops in her right knee. She can feel the vessels in her face and temples swelling with pressure. For one terrible moment she loses her balance and she and the thing in the garbage bags do an absurd little two-step around the back of the Expedition, staggering like a dance-hall girl and a cowboy too drunk to stand. Then she’s back on the balls of her feet again, where her balance is, and she shoves the thing into the back of the car, then slams the door shut.
Not until she opens the driver’s side door and climbs inside does she realize there is someone sitting in the passenger seat next to her.
And for the second time in ten minutes Sue Young screams.
As she screams, she scrambles backward away from it, half-jumping and half-falling back out, but her leg gets caught on the inside of the door and Sue gets one good look at the face staring blankly back at her from the other side.
It is Marilyn.
It is Marilyn the nanny.
Marilyn’s body is very still and silent. Marilyn’s hands lie on her lap. Marilyn’s head is wrenched around sideways to face her. Marilyn’s shoulder-length blond hair hangs damply over one side of her face. Marilyn’s hair is red and stiff with blood like doll’s hair. From outside looking in Sue sees the scooped-out sockets of her skull gape red and raw where her eyes once were. A sheet of paper has been stuck to the front of Marilyn’s blouse with dried blood, and Sue can see a single word scrawled across it:
PUNISHED.
And once more the phone begins to ring.
10:33P.M.
Sue doesn’t know how many times it rings before she answers it.
“I told you you’d be punished.”
“You didn’t have to.” Sue’s voice is drab, lifeless. It hangs in her throat like a tattered flag on a windless day. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Don’t beg. It’s pathetic. And you’re wasting t—”
“Who are you, you son of a bitch?”The words f
ly out of her mouth before she can stop them, borne along on a torrent of fury she never would’ve guessed she had.“If you’ve got something you want from me why the fuck don’t you come out and take it?”
“Come out and take it?” The voice lets out a chuckle, actually sounding appreciative. “Oh, I like that, Susan. I like it a lot. I see you’ve grown some balls since we talked last.”
“Who is this?”
“You’ll figure it out eventually. That’s part of it too.” The voice gets nasty again. “Now get back in the car. We’ve got some traveling to do tonight. Quite a bit, actually.”
