“Why do you have your knife out?” he managed to ask.
Neither of them stopped climbing, though Lael leaned slightly toward him. “For the same reason yours is out,” said Lael, and Rudd caught between steps the flash of the blade in his own hand. He wanted to close the knife and put it away but did not, nor could he think of a reason he should be holding it; indeed, all he could consider was his sheer stumbling dizziness. He reached out to steady himself on Lael and realized that his knife had torn through his half-brother’s shirtsleeve, jabbing into his arm.
“Jesus!” said Lael, and stopped to examine his arm and shirt. Rudd could see a certain panic to him, perhaps even fear.
“Sorry,” said Rudd. “I mean, I didn’t—”
“I’ve trusted you,” said Lael. “I’ve gone along with you in all of this. Was I wrong to do so?”
“In all of what?” asked Rudd.
Lael shook his head and continued climbing, muttering under his breath. Rudd took a step forward, the ground rolling under his feet, and collapsed.
Then just as quickly he was crouching on a hillock over a nearly deserted camping area, a green ranger’s box at the end of a paved road, rutted dirt roads leading back to campsites. It was near sunset. Lael was holding onto his shoulder. The ground was steady for a moment though slowly starting to tilt and buckle again. He got down on his hands and knees and, as it grew worse, onto his belly.
“There,” said Lael. Rudd blinked, tried to focus his eyes, saw only trees, grass, dirt, the scars of fire pits.
“What?” he asked. “Where?”
Lael pointed and Rudd tried to follow his finger out. There was something below them, through the trees, a car of some sort, a station wagon, and around it bustling shapes.
“That’s it,” said Lael. “They’re the ones.”
Rudd lowered his head, smelled the ground against his face. Then Lael pulled him up to his feet and they were off and stumbling, Lael still holding him and helping him stay upright. They skidded down a scattered flow of shale, crouched behind some old, withered sage, the slight smell of it clearing his head. There they were, a family, about a hundred yards distant, three of them in all, a tent set up, an unlit lantern standing on the table.
“What do we do now?” Rudd asked.
Lael half-turned. “We wait for dark,” he said. He turned his knife around, beginning to strop it first against the side of his shoe then against a half-buried stone. Rudd didn’t know the family at all. They were tossing a frisbee, two of them anyway, a man and a young girl. A woman watched from beside a fire pit, poking the fire with sticks.
The ground wasn’t sloshing so much, and he thought at first it was because they had descended slightly and the ground had begun to level out. Then he realized it was because he was beginning to feel isolated, insulated, buried deeper inside his body. He was no longer so close to the outside. Even looking through his eyes it was as if he were looking from deeper within his head, his vision of the outside framed, a large darkness encroaching.
“What do we do?” he heard himself ask again.
“Be patient,” said Lael. “Night is coming.”
He took a deep breath, felt his vision grow dim. He felt himself slowly crowded out of his senses and into oblivion.
By scraps and bits I’ve in the past surrendered myself to strangers … but there he is with a dozen different faces moving down a hundred separate streets.
—TRUMAN CAPOTE, The Grass Harp
… people shouldn’t ever look closely at one another, they’re not like pictures.
—SHIRLEY JACKSON, The Bird’s Nest
PART II
LYNDI, ADRIFT
1
They showed up at her door to warn her, but it was too late, it was already on the news, the hiker having called the press before the police. She was sprawled on the couch, idly watching TV while working through her algebra homework: four bodies, not yet identified, a campsite, vicious slaying, three long and careful cuts across throat, breast, hips. Each body arranged on the ground to form a pattern: a V, a right angle, each next to each. And then, a little downslope, midway between the V’d body and the right-angled body, a corpse spread straight with hands to sides, a horizontal line; and another body, beneath the right angle but farther down the mountainside, spread straight as well: so that from the air (according to the artist’s graphic representation) it looked like:
Suspiciously resembling, the reporter went on to say, if you cared for an instant to block out the river disrupting the pattern, the distinctive markings of the Mormon temple garment.
Weird, she thought, and turned the channel. But the story was on the next channel as well. When she switched again she saw neither mountainside nor reporters but an old picture of her father. It was as if something were wrong with the television. It took a moment for her to understand, switching back to where she had started and seeing the picture there too. It was her father’s photograph, her mother’s face beside. Two men wearing plastic gloves, zipping a body into a bag, the photographs of her parents again, the name of her sister as well, spelled incorrectly, no photograph. We confirm, then, the names, and a shot again of the reporter, shaking her head, a tragedy, horrendous, no leads to speak of—one survivor. The doorbell was ringing, had been ringing for some time she realized suddenly, and she was walking toward the door with the remote still in her hand, once again we confirm the, and then she was opening the door: two men dressed in street clothes brandishing badges that flashed with light. Behind them, along the property line, a cluster of reporters beginning to shout the moment she opened the door. The plainsclothesmen, badges still out, moving their lips without her hearing a word. Or hearing, rather, but unable to string meaning through their words. I know, she heard herself saying, the remote clattering from her hand, I’ve just been watching. She turned and took two steps back toward the couch, found instead her cheek pressed against the floor.
They wrapped her in a blanket, kept asking her how she felt. A man holding a camera high above his head shoved his way toward her, flash fluttering, and was pushed back.
“Is she all right?” they wanted to know. “Is she ready to talk?”
Four bodies, she thought she heard, low and behind her. A ritual of some kind. They were forcing a cup of something into her hands, but she couldn’t unknot her hands from the blanket. Fluorescent lights, buzzing slightly. A desk, bare except for a pencil, another desk beside it, another desk beyond that.
“Perhaps we should take her to the hospital?”
“Linda, are you all right?”
“Is that her name?”
“Hell, I think so. Who’s got the file?”
“Is there a file already?”
“Linda, are you there? Can you hear me?”
Surging up: two faces to either side of her, the strange melange of their various aftershaves and respective fleshes wafting around her like webbing. Then fingers biting into her arm, her body propelled out of the police station, the sun bright in her face, a camera held toward her, her body spinning, strapped down to something, on the move.
Light, dark. Bring me my robe, she was sure a voice said. Needle in her somewhere upon the back of her wrist, an opaque tube looping away from it to a pole-strung plastic bag, swollen with pale fluid.
“Lyndi?”
She opened her mouth, felt over her lips with her tongue. Dry, cracked. Someone shining light into her eye. A hand resting on one side of her face, fingers holding eyelids apart.
“Lyndi?”
The light in her eye flickered off, the afterburn a significant fist in her head. She hooded that eye, opened another. Two dim-featured heads, indistinguishable, then slowly taking form, congealing into a doctor and a second man whose professional role wasn’t revealed through face or clothing.
Water, she managed. The second man left her sight, returned with a cup he held to her lips. Water trickling from the corners of her mouth, prickings of cold on her collarbone. He removed the cup, daubed
her lips with the corner of her sheet.
“How do you feel?” the doctor asked.
“I’m going crazy,” she said.
“Of course you are,” the second man said, smiling. “Metaphorically, I mean.”
“Now,” said the doctor. “This is nothing extraordinary. We’ve experienced a severe shock, haven’t we.”
He began again to shine light into her eyes.
“There’s a needle in me,” she said.
“That’s an I.V.” said the doctor. “Nothing to worry over.”
“I mean what’s in it?”
“In it?” he said. “Something to stabilize us, fairly mild. Look left, please.”
“Lyndi,” said the second man.
She tried to turn her head to face him, but the doctor held it in place. “Look left,” he suggested again.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Do you mind if I ask a few questions?” the second man asked.
“Questions?”
“Sure. You wouldn’t mind that, would you?”
“A moment, officer,” said the doctor. “Almost through here.”
“Right,” said the second man. “Beg pardon.”
“Officer?” she asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “As in police. Detective, actually.”
Then the calm voice of the doctor questioning her about things she didn’t see the point of: what the date was, whether she preferred eggs or cheese, what portion of her forearm was he touching, whether she remembered how she had arrived there. She could not tell if she answered in a fashion he approved of. He kept posing the same questions and getting the same answers until finally he was stepping away from her, writing on his chart all the way out the door.
“Well,” said the detective. “Just you and me now.”
She regarded him a little more closely, his eyes unblinking. Pale face, dark hair, somewhat puffy-featured. “I guess so,” she said.
“About those questions,” he said. “Was there anyone who didn’t care for your parents?”
“Enough to kill them?”
“Your father, did he have enemies?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you go camping with them?”
“I don’t know. I’m in college.”
He edged a little closer to the bed, regarded her closely. “Lyndi,” he said. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you kill them?”
“What?”
“Or arrange for someone else to do it?”
“I can’t believe,” she said, “that you—”
“Just between you and me,” he said, and muffled her hand within his larger own.
“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
He offered a flitting half-smile, patted her knee through the sheet. “I believe you. I’m glad we got that out of the way,” he said. “Now let’s see what we can figure out.”
There was a police officer stationed at a door down the hall. Inside, a man in a bed, arms strapped down, I.V. plugged into the back of his hand, tube down his throat, neck packed in cotton. A heart monitor clicked beside him.
“What’s he called?” she asked.
“Rudd something,” the detective said. “Troyer, I think. Not that exactly, but it’s in my notebook. I could look it up.” He made no move to do so. “Only survivor. Recognize him?”
“No,” she said. “Not like this anyway.”
“Not a friend of the family? He wasn’t with your parents?”
“No.”
“You’ve never seen him before?”
“No.”
The detective shook her hand, held out his card. “You’re free to go.”
Pocketing the card, she thanked him. Her head still felt thick. She started for the door, came back to look at the man again. She got close enough to see both sides of his face. Not a man really, a boy, her age or nearly. The detective was still there, behind her, asking was he familiar after all? No, she had never seen him before. Certain? Certain.
2
The bishop came by and tried to talk to her about what had happened, tried to comfort her. She was both grateful and resentful. Some ladies brought over casseroles, which she thanked them for but which she somehow couldn’t eat. They sat on the counters until they fuzzed over with mold and she threw them away. She wasn’t eating much of anything, she found.
For reasons she could not quite fathom, she began to clip out articles on the murders. She stored them in a shoebox beneath her bed until after the funeral and then taped them above the washer and dryer. The Devil’s Kitchen killings they were calling it, though the bodies had been found east and south of Devil’s Kitchen. The newspaper accounts contradicted each other. One article speculated that her father had been attacked first, others that Rudd Theurer had been the first, with his attack stumbled upon by one or more members of her family. Her family had been dead seven hours before their bodies were found, according to the Daily Herald. Or was it, as the Salt Lake Tribune suggested, twelve? The murder weapon was variously described as a knife, a razor, a sharpened rock, a shard of glass. In some accounts, they had died quickly; in others, they had suffered lingering, agonizing deaths.
As the dryer rumbled, she stood reading them, staring into the grainy pixilated photographs—the bodies from the air, the police rolling a body (her father, she was almost certain) onto a gurney. Rudd all but dead, a crowd of paramedics around him, only his hand and forearm visible.
What to make of it she didn’t know. What she did know was that her parents had gone up to the mountains, had either had Rudd with them or had decided to pitch camp close to him. Then a person or several people had killed her parents and sister by slitting their throats and cutting deep incisions from breast to breast, hip to hip. Then a person or group of people had carefully bent the bodies, arranging them on the hillside in a pattern that resembled the markings of the Mormon temple garment: the square, the mark of the compass, the navel mark, the knee mark. Too young to be allowed to enter the Mormon temple, she didn’t wear garments herself, and didn’t know their full significance. The markings were something sacred. The Church-owned Deseret News said they could not publicly speak of the symbolism of the marks but did state that a Mormon investigator on the team had the matter under consideration. The victims had all bled to death save for this Rudd, whose windpipe had been gashed opened but none of his major arteries cut. Still, he had been lucky not to choke on his own blood. Perhaps, the Tribune speculated, the killer (or killers) had been interrupted before he (or they) could finish the task properly.
Mormons came to her door, encouraging her to put her life back together—first two women from the Relief Society, then the Relief Society President. How was she? they asked, and she sensed in them a kind of hunger for any details that hadn’t been revealed in the papers. It showed as a gauntness to their faces, but yet they genuinely seemed to want to help her as well. Why wasn’t anything simple? They spoke about healing and God’s trials, and confessed their own trials to her. She both liked them and was repulsed by them. It was good she was going sometimes to church, Lyndi was told, but it would be even better if she attended every Sunday, especially at this time, especially now. There was comfort to be found there.
Most of the week, she was left alone to wander the empty house. She was drawn in particular, she found, to word of Rudd in the articles, since, though comatose, he was the only survivor. He was an only child, had lived alone with his mother until the accident. He was several months younger than she, still a senior in high school. He was described as solitary, as a reasonably good student with sometimes odd notions, afraid of heights, an unlucky boy who had apparently managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The articles reproduced a yearbook photograph in which he was at once smiling and trying not to smile, his teeth hidden, the resulting strained expression having the character of a death rictus. When she took out her own high school yearbook, she realized Rudd’s
was the expression most students had. Her own photograph was the exception, all teeth. He was disturbed, his English teacher said of him, obsessed with death. How ironic, the teacher was quoted as saying, stepping exuberantly into a parody of her professional role, that the one obsessed with death would be the only one to survive.
Her aunt Debby from southern California showed up on the doorstep, sporting four designer suitcases. She had tried to call, she claimed: wasn’t Lyndi answering the phone? She was concerned, she claimed. Sure, certainly Lyndi was of legal age, but with the shock and all perhaps she would like company for a few weeks, perhaps even longer?
The Open Curtain Page 10
