The Narrows

by Ronald Malfi

  If she shot him…where the hell is he?

  Back by the cars, Eddie handed Ben a pair of latex gloves. “What are these for?”

  “So we don’t leave fingerprints and corrupt the scene.”

  Eddie frowned, his eyebrows knitting together. “Fingerprints on what?”

  “Let’s go check the house,” Ben said.

  3

  Yet, with the exception of a broken wineglass in the kitchen trash, the house was otherwise undisturbed. In the basement, Ben located a box of slugs that matched the brand of the shotgun shell he’d found out in the yard. After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, Ben and Eddie returned to the yard just as a light rain began to fall.

  “Let’s bag up the shotgun as evidence before the rain washes away any prints,” Ben advised, and the two men began wrapping the shotgun in a sheet of plastic tarp Ben kept in the trunk of his squad car.

  4

  The rain was coming down in sheets by the time Ben returned to the Moreland house. Eddie had already left in his own car to bring the shotgun back to the station and to write up the chain-of-custody form he would have to send to the county police, along with the shotgun, in order to have it dusted for prints. It was the most action Eddie had seen in a long time and, to Ben, he seemed both nervous and excited.

  Beverly Moreland was in the kitchen preparing dinner when Jed let Ben into the house. Jed looked utterly exhausted. He worked a toothpick around one corner of his mouth as he shook Ben’s hand. “She’s on the back porch,” he told Ben. “Didn’t want to come inside. Said she wanted to keep watch on whatever’s out there.”

  “Thanks for keeping an eye on her, Jed.”

  “Bev gave her a Valium. It seemed to calm her down. I hope that was okay.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Jed led him out onto the back porch but didn’t follow him out. Maggie was perched like a bird on the porch steps, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes trained on the downpour that was already filling up craters in the earth. Cornstalks heaved and swelled in the wind like ocean waves.

  Ben folded his arms and leaned against the porch railing. He was quiet for quite some time, watching the rainwater sluice down the eaves of the porch’s roof. Eventually, he cleared his throat. “What were you and Evan fighting about, Maggie?”

  She looked up at him, her stare as lifeless as a wax dummy’s.

  “Maggie?” he said when she didn’t respond.

  She turned back and looked out over the cornfield. “He accused me of sleeping around on him.”

  “Had you been?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Where’d the shotgun come from?”

  “It’s Evan’s. He keeps it in the basement.”

  “I meant, why was it out in the yard?”

  “Evan had it.”

  “Did he threaten you with it?”

  Silence.

  “Maggie? Did Evan threaten you with the gun?”

  “I…can’t remember…”

  “Think harder.”

  “He was yelling at me. He was sitting on the car with the gun in his lap, yelling at me.”

  “Did someone fire a shot?”

  Again, she said, “I can’t remember.”

  “There’s blood on the car, too.” When she didn’t respond to this, he added, “Do you know whose blood it is?”

  “I guess it’s Evan’s.”

  “Did you shoot Evan?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure you don’t—”

  “I didn’t shoot him. I didn’t kill my husband.”

  “At least one shot was fired from that shotgun, far as I can tell right now. Who did it?”

  “It must have gone off when…when he was being attacked…”

  “Evan, you mean? Attacked by who?”

  She trained her dark, vacuous eyes back on him. “I don’t know,” she said in a barely audible voice.

  “Didn’t you see the person?”

  “No.” She looked back at the rain.

  Ben sighed and leaned on the railing. “Let’s talk some more, but not here, okay?”

  Maggie stood up sharply from the stairs. “I don’t want to go back to my house.” There was genuine fear in her eyes.

  “We’ll talk down at the station,” Ben said.

  5

  She was silent for much of the ride from the Morelands’ house to the barracks. The only visible sign of life came when she turned her head to look out the passenger window at the carved roadway that was Full Hill Road trailing up into the wooded hillside. To assuage his discomfort, Ben turned on the radio. R.E.M. came on, singing about the end of the world. He snapped the radio back off.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  Though there was enough probable cause to lock her up right then, he said, “No, ma’am.”

  They got soaked going from the car to the station. Ben pointed to a restroom and told Maggie she could go clean up in there and he’d see if he could locate some towels. In the dispatch office, Shirley Bennice sat at her desk reading an issue of People magazine. She looked up at him as he came into the office and made a tsk tsk sound. “Lord, Ben, you’re soaked.”

  “It’s coming down in buckets now. We got any towels?”

  “There should be some clean ones in the storage closet. I’ll run and grab some if you want.”

  “Sit tight, I’ll get them. Did Eddie come back yet?”

  “He’s at his desk.”

  In the Batter’s Box, Eddie sat curled over his desk filling out the chain-of-custody paperwork for the shotgun in large block letters. He wrote with the intensity and concentration of a schoolboy, his tongue cocked into one corner of his mouth.

  “I brought Maggie Quedentock back, gonna ask her a few more questions,” Ben said, opening the storage closet. There was a stack of clean white towels on the bottom shelf. He bent to pull two out when the cell phone he’d found in the Quedentocks’ backyard fell out of his pocket and clattered to the floor. He had forgotten about it.

  “This whole thing gives me the creeps,” Eddie said from his desk.

  Ben flipped the phone open. The phone was on but the battery icon in the corner of the screen was red, indicating that it needed to be charged. Was there enough juice left to make a call?

  “I’m gonna dial your desk phone,” he told Eddie. “Tell me whose name appears on the Caller ID.”

  Eddie swiveled around in his chair and watched Ben dial. A moment after he hit Send, Eddie’s desk phone rang. Eddie leaned over and examined the narrow digital screen on the top of the phone. “That’s weird,” Eddie marveled. “It says Tom Schuler.”

  Ben ended the call and flipped the phone closed.

  “He’s my goddamn mechanic,” Eddie said, turning back around in his chair to face Ben. “How come you got Schuler’s cell phone?”

  And then it hit him: Tom lived off Full Hill Road, up the hill on the outskirts of town—the same road where Maggie’s accident had taken place last week. On the night of the accident, Maggie had claimed to have been heading home from Crossroads in town. Full Hill Road was not only out of her way, it was at the other end of town.

  What had she told him back at the Morelands’ place? He accused me of sleeping around on him. And when he’d asked her if this was true, she hadn’t responded.

  Things in his head began to turn and snap together with a series of nearly audible clicks.

  “Ben?” Eddie stood. “You okay?”

  “Wasn’t that Tom Schuler’s car that Dorr Kirkland had towed recently?” Ben asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “Yeah, Ben. What’s wrong? What’s that mean?”

  Maggie appeared in the doorway. Her face blotchy and her hair stringy and wet, she looked like a corpse that had just washed up on a beach somewhere.

  “What happened to Tom Schuler?” Ben asked her from across the Batter’s Box. Eddie’s eyes jumped in her direction.

  “Maggie?” Ben said.

  Maggie said nothing.
>
  Ben turned to Eddie. “Go out to Tom’s place, see if he’s home.”

  Eddie picked his campaign hat up off the corner of his desk. “Sure thing.”

  “You won’t find him,” Maggie said from the doorway.

  “Where is he?” Ben asked.

  “He’s gone, too. Just like Evan.”

  6

  After Eddie left, Ben sat opposite Maggie at a table in the small kitchenette that also functioned, when needed, as an interrogation room. He asked Maggie various questions—about her relationship with Tom Schuler, about the argument with Evan, about whether or not she believed Evan had done something to Tom or if Tom had done something to Evan—but she provided no responses. Her eyes grew increasingly distant. Ben began to think that she could no longer hear him speaking, that his words were barrages of nonsense that whistled uninterrupted and undigested through the hollow space at the center of her mind. After ten minutes of this foolishness, Ben told Maggie to stand up. He had to repeat this command two more times before she actually complied. It wasn’t that she was being deliberately insubordinate; to Ben, it seemed that some vital fluid was slowly leaking out of her, leaving nothing but a glaze-eyed zombie wearing Maggie Quedentock’s clothes.

  He led her into lockup. Poorhouse Pete still occupied the third cell, and as Ben and Maggie entered, Pete perked up and watched them intently, like an owl in a tree. Maggie said nothing when Ben led her into the first cell. She went and sat down on the bench and stared out at him with dead eyes as he closed and locked the cell door.

  I think I’m currently witnessing someone on the verge of losing their mind.

  “My baby did it,” she said, startling him. “That’s the big secret, Ben. That’s what got Evan and what got Tom, too. My baby.”

  “Who’s your baby, Maggie?”

  “He died before he was ever born, back when I was just a girl. But now he’s back and he’s making me pay. He got Tom and he got Evan and now he’s coming for me next.”

  From memory, Ben recited Maggie her Miranda rights. Then he went to Poorhouse Pete’s cell and unlocked it.

  “Hey,” Pete said, his old face suddenly slack and innocent. “What’d I do?”

  “Time to go. This isn’t a boardinghouse.”

  “You said I could—”

  “I’m not in the mood tonight, Pete. Please.”

  Pete rose and shuffled out of the cell. Ben gave him a few dollars and one of the rain slickers they kept in the supply closet then ushered him out the front doors of the station. The rain was coming down harder now, the sky deepening toward dusk. Before passing through the front door and out into the rain, Poorhouse Pete gave Ben one last doleful look from over his shoulder. Under his breath the homeless man muttered, “You really gonna make me go back out there, ain’t you?”

  Ben sighed. “Have a good night, Pete.”

  Pete shuffled out into the night, his body trembling beneath the rain slicker. His longish hair hung in wet ropes around his face as he peered up at the darkening sky. That was how Ben left him.

  He went back to the dispatch office and leaned exhaustedly in the doorway. The look on his face must have been one of pure misery, judging by the empathetic look Shirley gave him from over her magazine.

  “Maggie Quedentock is in lockup,” Ben said.

  “Maggie?”

  “I think she did something to her husband. And maybe Tom Schuler, too.”

  “What do you mean ‘did something’?”

  “She may have killed them.”

  Outside the windows, lightning lashed across the sky. A peal of thunder followed.

  Ben’s cell phone rang at his hip. He snatched it up and saw Joseph Platt’s name and number scrolling by on the digital screen. Ben answered. “This is Ben.”

  “Can you…Ben? Hello?”

  “Your phone’s breaking up, Joseph.”

  “…problem here…”

  “Come again?” Ben said. The worry on Shirley’s face increased.

  “…need to get out here…”

  “Where? Where are you? What’s going on?”

  Through quips of static, Ben heard Platt say, “Gracie Street…old farmhouses…we found…think we…the Crawly boy…”

  Ben’s left eyelid twitched.

  On the other end of the line, he thought he heard Platt say, “…dead.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  1

  Joseph Platt was in the middle of Gracie Street waving his arms when Ben approached in his squad car. Ben pulled onto the shoulder of the road and got out. He tugged a rain slicker over his uniform as he hustled across the swampy field, his boots driving craters into the soft mud. Platt met him halfway, talking fast.

  “He’s up here in one of the houses,” Platt said, rainwater streaming down his face. His hair was plastered to his head.

  “He’s dead?” Ben asked, following Platt between the skeletons of two run-down barns. Platt’s cruiser was parked in the mud before a square little house the same color as the storm-filled clouds above. Mel Haggis was wending around in the mud with an extendable baton in his hand.

  “God, yes.” It came out in a sickening wheeze. “Me and Mel were up here checking out a car that had hit a tree and this girl, she comes running up the goddamn street—”

  “What girl?”

  “The sister,” Platt said. “She found the body.”

  No no no no no, Ben thought. None of this is happening.

  “Brandy Crawly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “In my car,” said Platt.

  Indeed, as Ben hurried past Platt’s cruiser, he could see Brandy Crawly’s face staring out at him from the backseat. She was a ghost.

  “Hey, Sarge,” Haggis grumbled when Ben arrived at the foot of the little house. Rickety steps led up to a door that was partway open.

  “What’s with the baton?”

  “Bats,” Haggis said. “Had to shoo ’em away from the house.”

  “Terrific. Where is he?”

  “Inside,” Platt said, moving up the porch steps and unclipping a penlight from his gear belt. “I’ll show you.”

  Ben followed. Passing through the doorway was like being inhaled by the house. Inside, the air was stifling and musty, redolent with the stink of mildew, bat shit, and decay. Curtains of gauze crisscrossed the entranceway, strung up to the rotting beams in the ceiling and billowing gentle in the breeze. It took Ben a second or two to realize these were cobwebs.

  “Be careful,” Platt warned. “Floor’s spongy. Don’t break an ankle.”

  It was like walking on a mattress.

  “There,” Platt said, shining his light at one corner of the room.

  Ben thought, Holy Christ.

  Momentarily, Ben was back on the banks of Wills Creek, staring down at the unidentified corpse of a hairless child. This creature looked no different—a pale white form frozen in a fetal position on the floor of the abandoned house, the gleaming dome of its skull like a giant hard-boiled egg, patchy with strands of blondish hair. The corpse’s face was Matthew Crawly’s face, though just barely. His eyelids were swollen shut and his skin looked taut and nearly transparent.

  “What the hell happened to him?” Platt asked him. “I mean, Jesus fuck, Ben, look at him. That’s not…I mean, that’s…what happened to him?”

  “I don’t know.” Ben’s voice shook. Slowly, he advanced toward the boy. When Platt told him again to be careful, he wasn’t so sure he was talking about the floor anymore.

  Ben knelt down beside the body. The boy’s skin was colorless and practically translucent. Ben could make out the assemblage of veins and arteries, like fine blue cables, networked just beneath the paper-thin flesh. The joints—the kneecaps and elbows—were bony protrusions that reminded Ben of knots in a tree’s trunk. The fingernails and toenails were ragged and blackened; there was mud and some other grit beneath the nails. And, of course, the face…the face was a taut membrane of skin stretched across the
protuberances of the skull. Those horrific eyes bulged beneath purpled lids that had been seemingly fused shut. Within the slash of the boy’s mouth, Ben could see the protrusion of a tongue, swollen and black. When he reached out and touched the corpse—the skin was as cold and unyielding as the skin of a dead toad—Platt sucked in an intake of breath and moaned, “Ben…”

  Ben ignored him. The boy’s body rocked forward and Ben peered down at the boy’s back. Shoulder blades like dorsal fins. Four circular wounds ran vertically down the boy’s back. A suppurated, yellowish discharge had dried in crusty ribbons along the interlocking knots of the boy’s spinal column.

  Boy, Ben thought. This is no boy.

  “What do we do, Ben?”

  Ben thought for a minute then stood up. The corpse rocked back on its side with sickening rigidity. “We take the body back to the station. I’ll call the medical examiner’s office and see if Deets will come out tonight, but I don’t want to leave the body in here.” The abandoned house seemed to groan all around him. Ben shivered. “I’m gonna call the sheriff’s department over in Cumberland and have them send some guys out, too. This is beyond anything we’re prepared to handle.”

  Joseph Platt just stood there, unmoving. He still had his penlight trained on the corpse.

  “Is there a problem?” Ben said.

  “You want us to…”

  “Take the body back to the station for right now.”

  Platt still didn’t move.

  “Would you rather tell Wendy Crawly her son’s dead?” Ben asked.

  Platt gave no response.

  “I’ve got some tarpaulin and fire retardant blankets in the trunk of my car,” Ben said, tossing Platt his car keys. Catching them shook Platt from his stupor. Some color drained back into his face.

  “We better get Haggis back in here with his stick first,” Platt said. He was looking up at the ceiling where his penlight fell upon the wet, matted black fur of several bats. They dripped like ink from the ceiling.