What Rose Forgot

by Nevada Barr

  “Who are we meeting?” Rose asks, trying the door handle and finding it still locked. “Where’s Daniel?”

  “Other people being here is not part of the plan,” Stella says calmly.

  “What plan?” Rose and Mel demand simultaneously.

  “Mine,” Stella replies, pulling on the parking brake. “Don’t get freaked. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just need you two to be out of sight for an hour or two. Not even that long probably. Then I’ll let you out. You can report me to anybody you want. It won’t matter by then.”

  “Why? Why out of sight? Why won’t it matter? What are you doing?” Rose’s voice is rising with each question.

  Stella’s calm shatters. “Shut the fuck up! Melanie, do I have a blue-and-white tote in my lap?”

  “What does—”

  “Do I have a fucking bag on my lap?” Stella snarls.

  “Yes,” Mel answers.

  “Is my hand in the bag?”

  “It is, but—”

  “Tell your fucking Gigi I have my hand in the bag,” Stella snaps.

  “Gigi, Stella’s got a blue-and-white bag on her lap, and her hand is in it.” Mel sounds confused, and a little scared. Rose doesn’t blame her. Suffering is boiling out of Stella like ants from a burning nest.

  “In this bag is a gun,” Stella says.

  Rose wonders if she is bluffing. “What kind of gun?”

  “A big fucking gun, you stupid old bag. That’s what kind of gun. My hand is gripping the butt of a big fucking gun that is aimed at your darling little Melanie’s head. You hear me?”

  “I do,” Rose says, ice forming in her belly.

  “If both of you don’t do precisely as I tell you to, I could accidentally pull the trigger. Since it’s in a bag, I might not hit cute little Mel, but in a small space, short range, a bullet could splatter your darling little Melanie’s adorable little brains all over my nice clean dashboard. Are you listening, Rose?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “I do.”

  “Then nobody has to get hurt. That’s what we all want, right? Nobody getting hurt. Right?” When neither Mel nor Rose says anything, Stella jerks her right arm, and Melanie cries out.

  “Right,” Rose says quickly. Shock is slowing her wits. Rose can’t think of any way this can end without her death—and now Mel’s—that will further Stella’s interests. Unless she isn’t after a marital share of the inheritance.

  But she is.

  There is nothing else. Nothing that locking Rose and Mel away for a couple of hours can facilitate. “Alma called you, didn’t she?” Rose asks. “Told you when to be there so I wouldn’t call a car. Mel was bait to guarantee I got in.”

  “Whatever you say, Einstein.” Stella opens the driver’s door.

  “Okay. You got me,” Rose says. “No need for bait. Let Mel out. She’ll leave. All she knows is you gave me a lift home. Nobody believes kids anyway. Then you lock me up by myself for a couple of hours, and then come let me out. If you do that, I won’t yell or be a nuisance.” Rose tries to sound as if this situation is perfectly normal. She is just bartering. I’ll give you ten cents a pound for those carrots. All good. All sane.

  Stella ignores her. “I’m going to walk around the back of the car. If I see either head move, that head gets shot off. You get out of the car when I say.” She climbs out, slams the Jeep’s door, and presses the remote locking device. Her right hand is still in the tote bag, a bit of it crumpled as if she holds a wad of bag along with the gun butt to keep it covered.

  “Do you think she really has a gun?” Mel asks without turning her head.

  “I don’t know,” Rose says. “We better assume she does.”

  The locks thump open. “Get out,” Stella says. In the side-view mirror, Rose can see her gesture with the bagged gun.

  “Wherever she’s putting us has to be better for her and worse for us,” Rose whispers hurriedly. “Otherwise she wouldn’t bother. On three, we open our doors. I’ll distract Stella. You run.”

  Rose sees Mel’s head nod once.

  “Seat belt off?”

  A second nod.

  “One, two, three.” Both passenger-side doors fly open. Mel leaps out and darts toward the hedge and the house. Rose stands and whirls around. Stella is not where she’d been a moment before. As they’d opened the doors, she’d moved up next to the vehicle directly behind the rear passenger door.

  Rose catches a flash of blue from the corner of her eye, then is driven to her knees, hanging on to the door to keep from pitching onto the concrete. Her brain is knocked to the far side of her head. Consciousness scatters onto a gray plane; vision works but doesn’t connect things to thoughts.

  The blue bag comes up. There is an odd phwump and a ping. Mel pitches forward, striking the ground with tremendous force. Stella’s gun has a silencer.

  A silencer, Rose thinks stupidly.

  Mel has been silenced.

  CHAPTER 30

  “No!” Rose thinks she screams, but she emits only a pathetic bleat. Cheek on the concrete, she can see the bottoms of Mel’s running shoes and one knee, scraped and oozing blood. Grabbing the armrest, she drags herself up. Despite the blow to her head and the shredding of her own knees, there is no physical pain, no bodily sensation at all. Vision narrows to a long tunnel. As Rose peers over the bottom edge of the car’s window, only Mel is visible in her eyes. Mel, looking no bigger than a cat, curls in the only sunlight in the world.

  Rose tries to get to her feet. Her legs are as unresponsive as the cloth legs of a rag doll. Letting go of the door, she falls to her side, blackness beating in great raven’s wings against her eyes. Rolling to all fours, she holds her neck rigid, her head still, trying to make sense of the images. Her eyes find Mel. Rose starts to crawl.

  Groaning and clanging, as if all the ghosts who’ve ever trod the boards are having a jamboree, fracture the air. Behind Mel, the earth moves. Rose shakes her head. This time there is pain, sharp where the pistol struck, dull behind her eyes, flickering in her skull as the scattered cerebral matter falls back into place.

  The earth is not moving. The garage door is opening. Stella, using the rusty old pulley-and-chain the original owner installed, hauls it up. The racket is short-lived. When the door is a foot and a half from the concrete, Stella lets go of the chain and starts shoving, then kicking Mel’s body under the door into the garage.

  Mind and body stunned, Rose is paralyzed. She can’t even draw breath.

  Then Mel whimpers. A mewl, scarcely louder than the whine of a mosquito, but Rose hears it. Mel has not been silenced. Mel is alive.

  The toes of Izzy’s ballet flats find the concrete; Rose launches herself at Stella. Her shoulder slams into the younger woman’s knees. Stella reels back. Rose hears her hit the door and hopes she’s cracked her skull. She hasn’t. A fist strikes Rose on the side of the face. Holding tightly to Stella’s bare legs, Rose tucks her chin down and sinks her teeth into a ropey calf. Fists hammer at Rose’s cheek and neck. She focuses on one fact: The jaw muscles are the strongest muscles in the body. Rose hangs on like a puppy with a sock, biting and shoving, hoping to knock Stella off her feet so she can sink her teeth into her jugular.

  Blood bubbles around her nostrils. A little trickles into her mouth. If she swallows, she really will be a cannibal, finger or no finger.

  Doubled fists pound her temple. Rose’s body topples, lax and senseless. Another blow, and her vision fades. The only sense that doesn’t abandon her is hearing, Stella muttering “… got to pry the damn thing open. Mouth like a badger trap.”

  Rose does not completely lose consciousness. There is a vague awareness of her body being kicked and rolled, the sound of chains, a sharp banging, then silence. Rose is on her back on the concrete inside the garage. The only light comes from a two-inch slit between the bottom of the door and the ground. Rolling to her side, Rose tries to get to her knees, but cannot.

  “Here,”
Stella says from outside. A piece of paper is shoved through the opening. “Read this. Bite me, you bitch. Jeez!” Rose looks at the paper in the narrow spill of light. Thick creamy bond, her signature at the bottom. The upper half has been cut away. On the bottom half, above her signature are the words I can’t go on. Life is too hard. I’m taking Melanie with me.

  “This is so trite!” Rose hollers. Then she realizes what it is. “No one will buy it. Mel’s got a bullet in her foot. That’s going to blow the whole scene. Let us out. Let’s talk. It’s about money. I’ve got lots. Don’t you think I’d gladly give you a few million for my life and Mel’s? Don’t be an idiot.”

  “A little late, Gigi,” comes a sneering voice. “Maybe you and Harley should have thought about Dan and me five years ago. You forgot he had two sons. We didn’t have a little grandchild to dandle on your arthritic knees. A week in the mountains, a vacation at the beach. Nothing too good for little Melanie.”

  “We invited you!” Rose wails.

  “Right, like we were going to come be an audience to the perfect family, while you and Izzy warbled over Miss Cutie-pie. Melanie, Grandma was going to cut you out of the will. Good old Gigi was going to leave you high and dry.”

  Something metallic clatters to the ground. “Doggone it!” Stella grumbles. Rose puts her eye to the crack, ear to the concrete. The magazine of the gun has slipped through Stella’s fingers and lies on the cracked paving near her feet. A hand clutching a gun enters Rose’s field of vision. The gun slides under the door. Before Rose can react, the door falls with the finality of a guillotine blade.

  So sudden and complete is the darkness, she can’t tell if her eyes are open or closed. Reaching up, she touches her face. Open. The sturdy, windowless little brick bunker has no chinks where ambient light might penetrate.

  “Mel,” she breathes. “Grasshopper?”

  “Gigi?”

  What a wonderful sound. “Are you okay?” The stupid question. It is the only kind Rose can think of.

  “Aunt Stella shot me!” Mel sounds more aggrieved than dying. That gives Rose heart. “I didn’t even hear a bang.”

  “The gun has a silencer.”

  “That’s icky professional.”

  “I saw you go down. You weren’t moving. I thought…” Rose decides not to tell her what she thought. “Where are you hurt?”

  “My foot. It felt like somebody hit the side of my foot with a crowbar. I hit my head when I fell. I think I passed out for a minute. Are we in the garage?”

  “Yes.”

  Harley’s truck is idling, the metallic rumble familiar, almost reassuring. For a moment, Rose is confused. The truck, the darkness, the door, the engine running: It hits her with unnerving force. Carbon monoxide gas. Stella is going to gas them, make it look like suicide.

  “Stay here,” she says to Mel. “No, wait. Keep talking. I’m going to have to find you by sonar.”

  “I bet Aunt Stella got Dad’s keys to your house. She got in, did the drug switch. Made you seem crazy. I should have seen it.” Mel’s voice is thin, more air than sound. She is probably in shock: gunshot, blow to the head, kicking. The kicking bothers Rose—though probably not Mel—almost more than the gunshot. It betokens such a visceral form of hatred.

  “Ack!” Mel squeaks as Rose shuffles into her.

  “It’s me,” Rose says, and reaches down. “What part of you have I got?”

  “My right elbow.”

  “Hang on. I’ve got to get you away from the exhaust pipe.” It might buy Mel a few seconds or minutes, but the garage is full of fumes, and more pumping in. She grabs the girl under the arms and uses all her strength to drag her away from the back of the truck. Mel makes muffled whimpering noises. Rose knows she is doing her best not to scream like a scalded cat as her wounded foot is dragged and bumped over the uneven concrete of the old garage floor. Rose talks to distract both herself and Mel. This is one moment she does not want to be in.

  “How bad does your foot hurt?”

  “Not like it was shot exactly. It burns. It hurts, but not screaming hurts.” Mel’s voice is full of catches where pain snatches at her breath.

  “I heard a ping. I think the bullet ricocheted off the pavement. Might not be all that bad.” Rose knows that half of surviving is thinking one will. Gunshots are considered deadly even when they’re not, then they are. “Stella was shooting to scare us.”

  “You just want to believe she was only trying to scare us,” Mel mumbles.

  “True.”

  “Should we yell for help?”

  “In a minute.” Rose doubts the sound will carry through brick and heavy wood. Or that anyone can reach them before they succumb to the fumes.

  “Stay low,” she says as she abandons her granddaughter near the front tire. “Breathe as little as possible.”

  “No breathing,” Mel manages.

  Rose wraps her fingers around the door handle and tries to thumb down the button. It doesn’t move. Old trucks are as stiff and hard to manage as old women. Rose backs up one thumb with her other fist.

  “It’s locked,” she says. “I’m going to try the other door. Don’t let me step on you.”

  There is no hint of dawn or dusk, no spark of sunlight through a chink in walls or roof. Shuffling so she will not accidentally stomp on Mel, or trip and fall, Rose makes her way around the hood of the truck, her hand on the smooth metal for guidance. The garage is so small, there is barely room for her to squeeze between the front bumper and the back wall. Moving in the darkness—stygian, she thinks, absolutely stygian darkness—is peculiar. If she didn’t hurt in so many places, Rose would feel disembodied.

  For a moment there is only the rumbling of the engine, as oppressive as darkness. “Talk to me, Mel. I need to hear your voice,” Rose says as she half floats around the bumper.

  “What about?” Mel is hard to hear.

  “Anything,” Rose says. Fear that Melanie will fall asleep and never waken is making her insides cold.

  “Why don’t you ever want to talk about how Granddad died? Because it was so awful?” Mel asks after a moment.

  No light, little hope, and this is what Mel wants to know. Rose didn’t realize she made such a mystery of it.

  “No,” she admits. “It’s stupid, really.”

  “I like stupid,” comes Mel’s reply.

  “Okay.” Rose feels the headlight against her middle. “Your dad might know some of this.”

  “You tell me.”

  “You knew it was your granddad’s eightieth birthday?” Rose thinks she hears an assent, but she’s not sure. She goes on. “Well, for his big day he and some of his old hiking buddies—and I mean old; Phil is older than Harley, and Alex has to be at least late seventies—decided to do a trail in Glacier National Park.”

  “Gigi! Granddad was eighty! Why didn’t you stop him?”

  Mel’s voice is strengthened by outrage. Hope flutters in Rose’s chest.

  “It’s a park. These guys have been hiking together for half a century. They all have cell phones and Apple Watches. One call and they’d have rangers running from every direction with the latest carry-out gear. Phil and Alex are—or were before they retired—doctors. Mostly, though, Harley and I didn’t cotton to making the other guy curtail his activities because it scared us.”

  “I bet you pushed that. It doesn’t sound like Granddad,” Mel says.

  “Mouths of babes,” Rose says. Her hand slides along the hood, the round smooth metal soothing. “It was on the day of your granddad’s birthday. They were high up, camping in a valley. After dinner Harley walked to the stream to wash, and a grizzly bear attacked him.”

  “Dad said he was mauled by a bear. That’s bad, but not like something yucky, dying in flagrante delicto with a goat or something.” Mel’s voice is both husky and air-filled. Rose can feel her head beginning to lift, to float above her last cervical vertebra.

  “Ish,” she says.

  “You can’t blame the bear.” Mel’s words
barely clear the mutter of the engine this time. “Granddad got between her and her cubs, Dad said. Do you feel bad because you let him go and he got killed?”

  “No. Bears are not ageist. Young people get mauled and eaten, too,” Rose says, the foggy drift of carbon monoxide poisoning feeling unpleasantly familiar. “It’s that Harley being … you know … it’s just not real to me. I doubt it was real to me then. Harley was killed and eaten by a bear.” Rose laughs. “See? Not real.”

  “Because you didn’t see the body?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe because that is how Harley would have wanted to go. You know how he loved the wilderness, the animals. It was too perfect: eightieth birthday, best friends, good food, then a bear. It’s like a deus ex machina. Except in reverse. Too perfect. I can’t make it real.”

  “I bet Granddad gave that bear as good as he got,” Mel says stalwartly.

  “I bet he did,” Rose agrees. “Except for the killing-and-eating part.”

  “And you didn’t want to talk about it because nobody would understand why you thought your husband being eaten alive by a carnivore was some kind of wonderful?”

  “Exactly,” Rose says. A weight lifts from her chest. Somebody understands her. She is not alien to all humankind. “That is it exactly.”

  “Or why you find it excruciatingly funny.”

  “That, too. That more than anything. I was afraid I’d laugh, and people would think I was crazy.”

  “I guess that whole not-looking-crazy thing didn’t work out for you.”

  “Karma.” Rose lifts her shoulders in an invisible shrug. Her fingers find the door handle. Nothing moves.

  “The passenger door is locked. Are you still there?” she calls to Mel. The smell of exhaust is strong. Rose knows it’s poisoning her. The only symptom of carbon monoxide poisoning she can remember is red lips. In the dark, that’s not a big help.

  “Still here.” Mel’s voice trickles over the truck’s low rumble. “What can I do to help?”

  “Sit tight. I’ve got to bust out the window.”

  “With what?” Mel asks.

  That’s a good question. Rose is clad in faux ballet slippers. No kicking the windshield out. The truck is vintage, mint condition, without the safety glass that will politely shatter if a window is tapped firmly with a ballpoint pen in the proper corner. Closing her eyes to see through the choking darkness, Rose “looks” around the garage. Harley’s toolbox is in the house. Nothing but an inflatable mattress has been stored in the building. The garage is scarcely big enough to contain the truck.