Zed

by Jason McIntyre

  Nothing from Karen. Then a huffy, throaty voice. “Yeah, Zeke. You got me. You brilliant detective, you. Been watching so much TV with Smitty and Dar. And now you got it all figured. I didn’t ever think I’d be in this spot. I had a plan, see. While they thought I was in the dining room, wasting away, I’d be here, destroying everything. No one would know that me and Christopher, we didn’t always do things right.” She managed the strength to throw one arm up at Zeke who hovered above her. It fell back to her body and to the dirt just as fast as it shot up at him. “Okay? Is that what you want to hear?”

  “Uh-huh,” Zeke said, still lugging the axe, fingering the long, faded handle now dry and grey like it was before he’d doused it in the bathtub of his upstairs—his daddy’s upstairs.

  “I took this axe to Daddy’s acre t’day,” Zeke said, a note of confiding, as if he was telling secrets to the dead.

  Karen said nothing, only panted in exhaustion.

  “He didn’t know I was even there. Just sleeping in his chair like he always does in the afternoon. Being smart makes a man mad. Did you know that, Nurse Karen? Did you know that having all the answers, seeing all the angles, makes a man mad?

  “Makes im mean too. The meanest.”

  Zeke turned the axe around in his hands, spinning it so the old dull blade caught glint after glint in the fading light of that fire.

  Still nothing from Karen.

  “I decided me sumpin,” he said. “I don’t wanna be smart no more. Not if it means I might come to be like you. You did bad things. Just to keep what you have. I don’t have anything, Nurse Karen. Nothing but me and Mary. And she likes me dumb.”

  He picked up the axe and held it over his head, just as he did at his Daddy’s house this afternoon. “Now, you gotta know. I didn’t kill my daddy. I’m dumb enough to forget being mad. To forget being mean. I let it go. He loved me. In his way.

  “But you didn’t, Nurse Karen. You didn’t at all. You ain’t nothin but mean.”

  The blade hovered in the air.

  Karen shouted. With her last bit of strength, summoned from somewhere—maybe the same place where she thought she could get away with all this—she shrieked. “I’M SORRY!”

  But it was too late. Zeke let the axe drop.

  This afternoon, he let his daddy live.

  And tonight, in the dark of the basement, he did the same for Karen Banatyne. She cringed. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and waited for the instant of the axe splitting her into a sloppy set of two spurting parts. But it didn’t connect with her. It clanged into the chain that lay in the dirt before her—the chain that she had used to bind her husband to this post like a filthy dog for too many nights.

  She started to bawl. Zeke turned. He picked the bottle of ipecac up again, turned it over and studied the label one more time. Exhaustion claimed the sounds of Karen and her sobbing faded. She lay back in the dirt, covered in filth and grime. Zeke threw the bottle into the fire and it gave a small explosion and the sound of combustion.

  Zeke went up the stairs, not looking back. He didn’t carry a bed this time, nor a human body wrapped in a blanket. He went out into the cool dark air of the night in the Banatynes’ backyard.

  Below ground, Karen reached one last time for something—for anything—and then she gave up. Sleep came and claimed her fully.

  39

  Tom had sworn he would not go back in that house.

  But he did. When the chief had said there was nothing there, he had to go. He had to see.

  In the back bedroom, fully lit after Birkhead had trudged down to the basement with his flashlight to reset the main breaker, it was now an oasis of light in the middle of the empty night.

  That back bedroom wore nothing. No stains, no black flecks, no waves of tiny insects swarming the floor and the walls. It was empty except for two long rods of old steel tubing and several smaller pieces, all of them broken apart and laying in a haphazard pile of bolts and metal plates.

  The mattress was gone. Bedsheets gone. Stained pillow and blankets: gone.

  No remnant of Chris Banatyne. None of his fluids, skin, hair or teeth. He was a ghost. Vanished and not saying a word now that the lights were on.

  Tom moved through the room with his eyes wide. “He was right here,” he said. “Right here, in a bed with long side rails and these leather straps that held him to it. He had these gross, long fingernails and he peeled himself open and out poured—out poured...” He trailed off as he saw Farrah and her father in the doorway waiting for him to make some sense. He rushed to the pile of metal pieces and picked one up. It was warm, but not burning hot.

  Even the stink he remembered was gone. The smoke, that acrid putrid stuff—all trace had vanished. If he didn’t know better, Tom might have looked at the room and thought that the world had chewed up Chris Banatyne and swallowed him like a meal, only leaving behind the parts too solid for digestion.

  Hey, maybe not so ridiculous. The world had teeth, didn’t it? And it could bite you with them whenever it wanted.

  He thought of the pictures, the photos he’d taken with his Pentax K1000. But he’d never taken any. Well, not tonight. It had been too dark and Zeke and him had fled without snap-snapping anything at all. And the original negatives, they were somewhere that his faulty, misfiring mind couldn’t place. Maybe they were still at the high school dark room. And maybe not. It didn’t matter. He didn’t want to show anyone shots of Mary Smithson in her birthday suit. It didn’t feel right. And the shots of Chris Banatyne? Why stir that up? Let the man rest in peace. After all, Tom had never really met him. Maybe he was a fine man, only with hopes and dreams that caught up to him and got the best of him.

  The negatives could stay lost.

  Maybe Karen had found them and burned them. Or maybe they were in her suitcase. She was either halfway back to the mainland by now or mouldering on the rug under the dining room table at Ocean View.

  Either way, tomorrow was to be his last day on the island and Tom Mason couldn’t wait to get on that ferry and leave everything about DC behind. Anything he said now about those shots of Chris Banatyne would paint him as a crazy college pho-tog with nothing but fanciful dreams in his head. He’d already made Farrah believe he was damaged goods, he didn’t need to add to her argument.

  He knelt down in front of the pile of rusted metal. Those were the parts of the bed alright. All of them, it looked like. But without any of the fabric or leather. He thought he saw the coiled up mattress springs in there, but couldn’t be sure; it was all a mishmash. He couldn’t figure out who had been in here to dismantle the thing—or why they’d bother. But none of this made a lick of sense.

  Then, he spotted it. There in the pile was the lens and the housing of his brand new Asahi Pentax K1000. He reached in for it and picked it up, disturbing all the rest of it. Like the bed, it was taken apart, meticulously down to its smallest diode. It was just a mound of meaningless pieces now, like the building blocks he had as a kid when Godzilla came in and destroyed whatever he’d built. The housing and the lens, they were both as shiny as the day he’d picked it up on the mainland in town. But they were useless. Worthless. It broke his heart to suddenly catch a flash of the case’s strap breaking as he hurried from the black bedroom and all those creepy-crawly things. But he remembered it—just like maybe Zeke had started to remember the axe in his father’s hands after he stopped taking those benzies.

  Tom felt a guilt deep in his bones now. He remembered the feeling of wanting that camera, then the raw satisfaction of getting it. He remembered how good those pictures of Mary looked in shades of black and grey and white. He remembered the wind in his hair riding in Chief Birkhead’s convertible Porsche—even though he didn’t know it was the police chief’s car.

  And he remembered Zeke. And everything that man had inadvertently taught him.

  And what could you say to that?

  The three of them—Farrah, her dad and Tom—turned off the lights in that house north of the creek, but not
before Tom pocketed the expensive—and now useless—lens ring from his prized camera. A keepsake, he supposed. Or maybe it would languish in the bottom of a drawer until one day it was forgotten and thrown away. Time would tell.

  They drove back to the town proper with Tom assuming Chief Birkhead would type up the lot of this in some kind of report, file it, and maybe forget about it. He’d never read it. He didn’t need to.

  He thought that even more completely when they returned to Ocean View and learned that the deputy had finally forced his way into the house and then into the dining room of the manor on Lannen Lane. The deputy found absolutely nothing—except a gaping hole in the floor where Nurse Karen had presumably slipped out while they all counted houseguests and fretted about guns that never existed.

  Zeke came back during their post-mortem on the front yard. He yawned and said, “I ain’t cut out for all this cloak and dagger stuff, Tommy.”

  “Oh yeah?” Tom said, with a smile of genuine pride—and, yes, even love—for the man.

  “Uh-huh. You all can be the smart ones. Smart people just lie and cheat. I ain’t never going back to the hot pool. Not no more. Not ever.” He turned, looking as tired and as spent as Tom felt. “M’kay?” he said dreamily.

  “Okay,” Tom said in tired but happy agreement. Sounded fine to him. A brain in one’s head was cause for all sorts of problems. Looked like they both learned that lesson. He smiled after his friend and reached out to pat him on the shoulder as he trudged off. Zeke didn’t flinch or shrink back from the touch. He seemed to linger in it, if only for a moment before Tom watched him disappear around the side of some thick foliage. A minute later, he heard the familiar rattle of the municipal truck coming to life and driving off in the dark.

  He said goodbye to all the houseguests, not certain if he’d see them again before tomorrow. He didn’t know if they understood this was a real goodbye instead of a ‘see you tomorrow’. They had Nurse Anne now, at least for a while as things were sorted out. The gang trod across the lawn from the direction of the Dean house, accompanied by their new director and nurse. Farrah, it turns out, knew Anne and spoke highly of her. That would have to be good enough for Tom, had to be. When the crew reached Tom, he surveyed them like a mother bird.

  To Ingrid, he said, “Keep trying new things, Ingy. I’ll miss your patience.” She nodded quickly without making eye contact. He gave her a hug and she felt very stiff, as if this was an alien custom and a completely fresh experience.

  He got down to Smitty’s level and put his arms around the small man. “Share the TV remote every once in a while, kay, Smit?” Smitty smiled and showed lots of his uneven teeth. “I’ll miss your stories, Smitty. And you’ve taught me the value in being precise about things.”

  Next to Smitty was Dar in his wheel chair, just a touch higher than Smitty. When he realized it was his turn for Tom’s attention, he clapped wildly, then put his pinkies in his mouth to try and whistle. The whistle failed. He only managed to get his hands wet. “Tommy-Tommy-Tommy!” he said.

  Tom smiled. “I’m going to miss you too, Strawberry. I have always loved your enthusiasm. And your willingness to try... anything. Please, buddy, you need to either finish that puzzle or get a new one out. Promise me?”

  Dar beamed a wide grin at that. “You shure are good-good boy, Tommy, and I shure love it when yer lookin after us. Gonna miss Tommy, I am!” Dar said. Tom wasn’t sure but he thought Dar’s eyes might be wet. Even so, he didn’t linger.

  He got back up from his knees and stood before Mary.

  “Mary,” he said. “I’m going to miss that smile of yours. You light up a room, you know.” Mary rewarded him with a big one.

  “Gon miss you too, Tom,” she said.

  “Mary?” He said. And he was about to say, “I’m sorry“ but Mary clapped a clammy hand over his mouth before he could get the words out. She giggled some more.

  “Everything’s gon be okay, Tom,” she said. She gave him a more serious smile and, in that moment, Mary looked older than ever before. She pulled her hand away and Tom could only look on wordlessly as she gathered back with Anne and the rest of his former charges.

  Tom turned and let Nurse Anne wheel Dar away. He did his best not to look back as they all went with her, but he peeked once. He was pleasantly surprised when they each gave him one last wave.

  Tom spent what was left of his last night in DC at the Birkhead house. By ten a.m. he’d heard the news that the deputy had found Karen in the basement of the Banatyne mansion on the avenue. She’d died of an overdose of pills, just as the chief had predicted, but Tom wouldn’t hear that for a few weeks. He got those results by mail from Farrah who kept in touch for a few months with letters that had funny lines in them from her favourite TV shows. The rest of her letters recapped what had happened back on the island after Tom left on the 2:30 afternoon ferry for the mainland.

  Dear College Boy,

  By now, you are in the thick of your second year. I hope you are getting laid—by whichever persuasion you have decided on. I’m good either way and I hope you have settled on one side to play for. Even if the women of the world will miss out on a spectacular (if troubled) guy who has washboard abs but skinny wrists... oh and a smile that had me right from the start when I saw you helping those friends of yours at the hot spring.

  An update on the Ocean View goings-on. It’s quite the saga but I know you’ll appreciate this. I get all the news I can from my dad so I know it’s (mostly) reliable.

  They found lots of strange stuff in the papers at Karen’s place. She had sold her house to Mary Smithson, one of her houseguests—for a dollar, can you believe that? It’s all legit and the lawyers are having fun re-telling that at coffee row down at the Highliner Cafe on Main Street. It was a tax-avoidance thing. The whole place is the biggest property in town, built on four lots, but with all their money woes, Karen found out that a ward of a care home, like Mary, would be immune to property tax demands. Some loophole, huh? She took advantage of that, I guess thinking that she could have Mary sell it back after their deal for the power plant went through and some of that investment paid the Banatynes back.

  But the power deal went due south. The company they formed has said it’s on indefinite hold, pending more study of the area and potential risks, blah, blah, blah. I think that’s just fancy sales speak to say it’s sunk.

  The Banatynes lost everything the last few years. They were insolvent. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but I think they were flat, busted broke. They only had some farmland up north and the two properties left in town. Some cash. A few stocks. That all went into a trust account managed by the municipality since Karen had no heirs and Chris hasn’t showed up anywhere after ninety days. Chris’s daughter hasn’t shown her face in town. We have no idea if she was in his will and the lawyers won’t unseal it while he’s still classified as a missing person. The municipality has decided to share a chunk of Karen’s sole holdings among the houseguests: Smitty, Dar and Ingrid. Chris’s and their shared stuff will stay frozen, I guess.

  None of your houseguests need to stay in a care home. They’ve gone back to their families after they all learned that their test scores weren’t as abysmal as everyone thought. Smitty and Ingrid even live in the same town and are taking classes. Both are in a work program where they do odd jobs. Dar has care at home and is studying astronomy and world geography. He’s building a map with a team who uses this fancy computer at a university. Can’t remember which one.

  Zeke is back with his dad. I guess he was only put in Ocean View when his dad thought he couldn’t look after him anymore. There was some kind of mix up with a tourist girl and Dad said that Zeke didn’t really do anything wrong. She just got weirded out.

  Zeke’s still working for the municipality. I see him picking up trash now and again. I wave... but I don’t think he remembers me. I try to talk to him, but he just carries on working away. I wonder if he misses you.

  Mary keeps the house for now. Isn’t th
at wild? From nothing to the owner of the biggest, best digs on the island... literally overnight.

  Oh, the maid and housekeeper, Fidela. Karen did a similar deal with her and her husband Miguel. They were sold the Ocean View property for five bucks so that Karen could avoid the taxes. Miguel has even quit his job as a fry cook and the two of them are so happy. They’ve turned it into a bed and breakfast and are getting it ready for the summer tourist season. I think breakfast is a safer bet for her... remember that awful food poisoning everyone got?

  That’s about it from here. Write me back some time, okay?

  Dad says hi. Not really. I think he’s just glad you’re not my boyfriend. He says, “Trouble follows that kid.” He’s right! Haha!

  Take care. Come visit.

  The island won’t forget you. Neither will I.

  xoxo

  -F

  P.S. Up ya nose with a rubber hose.

  Farrah Birkhead,

  December, 1975

  Dovetail Cove

  ~ fin ~

  The Dovetail Cove saga doesn’t end here. In DEATHBED (1971), go back in time and discover how the madness began in Dovetail Cove. In BLED, journey to 1972 with Frank Moort and Teeny who serve up more than pineapple cheesecake at the Highliner Cafe. In ZED (1975), Tom Mason learns what evil truly looks like. In UNWED (1976), Bexy McLeod faces off against the entire town. In SHED (1977), we find Simon and Rupert dealing with the trials of a new stepfather. And in DREAD (1978), Mac and Dave McLeod return home to the island and embark on a murder mystery of sorts, revealing even more terrible truths about the island.

  *All Dovetail Cove books tie to each other but can be read in any order.

  DEATHBED (Dovetail Cove, 1971) LEARN MORE >

  The Dovetail Cove saga begins here—in July, 1971. Farrah’s on summer break and she’s sure to tell you she’s NOT twelve, she’s TWELVE-AND-A-HALF, thank you very much. And tonight, she’s sneaking out to visit her Gran and show her a ‘mystery box’ she’s stumbled across at the Main Street Summer Market, dead certain there’s a story hidden within. And she’s right. Events reach back to 1956 and a shadowy ‘incident’ that started the darkness on the island. Only a handful know the true details of the incident. And even fewer have witnessed this new darkness, but Farrah will catch a glimpse of it tonight…at the edge of her Gran’s DEATHBED.