Her Last Scream

by J. A. Kerley

  “Huh-uh,” Cruz said. “You had your turn, now it’s mine. I need to fill everyone in on what we know, and where we’re going with this thing.”

  After we’d eaten, Cruz drove us to our lodging. We’d hoped to stay near the Boulder women’s center, and Cruz had reserved a cabin in Chautauqua Park, a community of cabins on a hill angling up to the Flatiron Mountains, which resembled the back of a gigantic stegosaurus pushing up through the earth.

  “Can we take a peek at the women’s center?” Rein asked. “It’s close, isn’t it?”

  We passed the center on our way to the cabin, a nondescript house in a business-residential zoning, a bar across the way, a shoe store down the street. The University of Colorado was centered a few blocks distant and students wandered the street, some looking hip, some looking studious, others looking lost.

  “There it is,” Cruz said to Rein. “Your door to the unknown.”

  “There’s still time to change your mind, girl,” Harry said quietly. “Say the word.”

  Rein either didn’t hear Harry or pretended not to, watching the small brown house as if dissecting its secret intentions, turning her head to study it even as the house fell away into the distance.

  “What do you think, Rein?” Harry prodded, an under-tone in his voice saying, You can still bag the assignment.

  Rein said, “This is all so cool.”

  Chapter 24

  Liza Krupnik entered the scarlet-carpeted, high-ceilinged room at seven-fifteen p.m. The bar had opened at six-thirty, perhaps a hundred people in attendance, more entering every minute. It was one of several such gatherings during the year, an opportunity for the social sciences departments to display collegial conviviality and monetary benefactors to be fêted. “The contributors need to feel a connection to the U,” someone had once explained to Liza. “They like to be recognized and patted on the head. It helps loosen their wallets and pay our salaries.”

  “Salaries?” Liza said.

  Liza smoothed down her black dress and ambled to the bar table, grabbing a glass of wine, something better than the usual U-whine, as she and Robert termed the boxed swill normally set beside the platters of cheese, crudités, chips and salsa. She bantered with colleagues for several minutes, keeping an eye on the door for her colleague.

  Or Sinclair.

  She looked up to see Robert crossing the floor, one side of his shirt tucked, the other fluffing halfway out. He finger-pushed his glasses up the bridge of his long nose and his eyes found Liza, mouth arching into a smile. He pointed to the bar, meaning he was going to pick up a drink. You? he mouthed, and Liza lifted her full glass to indicate she was fine. He nodded and angled toward the bar.

  Robert had been gone for a few days, something he did every couple of months, heading to Montana to care for family. Liza had missed her colleague during his absence. Robert Trotman had become her only confidant in the department, perhaps owing to the proximity of their cubbyholes, or maybe being in disparate sociological fields. Academia offered far fewer jobs than there were applicants, turning teaching assistants into fierce competitors.

  Though the soft-spoken Trotman wasn’t much of a conversationalist, he was a good listener, interested in Liza’s latest musical purchases and her volunteer efforts, and a more-than-willing helper when Liza’s unruly civic-volunteer schedule conflicted with academic duties. Recently receiving an award for her work at a local agency, Liza had tried unsuccessfully to get Robert to hang the plaque in his office, since she felt it equally his. Trotman’s help even went so far as keeping a copy of her calendar in his office, prepared to step in should a conflict arise, usually in the guise of Professor Sinclair.

  “Roberto? Uh, his nibs just said he needs a hundred handouts copied by …”

  “You’ve got a staff meeting in an hour, Lize. I see it on the calendar. Go to your meeting, girl. I’ll put everything together for His Highness.”

  “You’re a lifesaver, Roberto. It’s a training meeting and I have to –”

  “You can tell me everything in wondrous detail tomorrow. Go!”

  There was another aspect to their relationship: Despite the time the pair spent together, Robert Trotman had never hit on Liza. At first she’d thought him gay, then decided he wasn’t, then decided she didn’t give a shit either way: he was her friend … disheveled, prone to poutery, a bit paranoiac about perceived slights – usually from Sinclair – but bright as a whip, interested in her life, and always ready to step in and lend a hand.

  Liza had tried to encourage her anxiety-prone amigo to ask Sinclair for a regular schedule so he could actually plan ahead, but Robert had gone white at the prospect of confronting the Famous Sociologist. Liza felt irritation at Trotman’s lack of backbone, and then realized she hadn’t set a regular vacation schedule either; both slaves to the professor.

  Robert appeared a minute later, a can of beer in hand. With his beardless complexion and languid eyes, he looked almost feminine, and closer to a sophomore than a grad student.

  “How was your vacation?” Liza asked.

  Trotman pushed a comma of black hair from his forehead. “I only had nightmares of Professor Sinclair twice in four nights. So pretty good. How was your volunteers’ meeting? Monday, right? Did the committee change anything?”

  “Nope. As figured. The training sessions are still once a month, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Carol’s still in charge, but she’s been training Charlotte to run things.”

  “Training the trainers,” Trotman nodded absent-mindedly, his eyes searching the room. “Is the king here, Lize?”

  Liza shook her head. “His Majesty always arrives late and leaves early. He’s not social. He’s only here because someone has to represent the department with Dr Bramwell gone.”

  “When’s Bramwell back from her sabbatical?” Trotman asked, his tone hopeful.

  Liza chuckled. “Would you stop asking me that! Dr Bramwell’s been gone less than –”

  “Think we could write and beg her to come home and save us?”

  “Where would we send the letter? She’s in constant motion.”

  “Hiding from Sinclair,” Trotman said. “A happy woman.”

  Liza pointed across the room. “There’s his nibs coming in the door.”

  “He looks angry,” Trotman said. “Let’s move across the room.”

  “We have to greet him, Robert. You know the protocol.”

  Sinclair was talking to Robert Morgenthall, the head of the Psychology department, and Liza inched to Sinclair’s side as Morgenthall nodded and turned away. “Fuck behaviorism,” Sinclair said instead of goodbye, Morgenthall waving farewell over his shoulder.

  “Hello, Doctor,” Liza said, stepping in front of the Great Sociologist and fighting her feeling that she needed to bow.

  “Liza Krupnik,” Sinclair said, as if reading a name from a Rolodex. “Tell me, Miss Krupnik, do you feel the desperation?”

  “Pardon me, sir?”

  Sinclair waved his hand, meaning the crowd, everyone in the room and maybe beyond. “Desperate souls jockeying for position near someone noteworthy, the frozen smiles of false bonhomie, the sharpening of knives awaiting unsuspecting backs?”

  “I guess I’m too busy enjoying the free food, sir,” Liza offered.

  “Good evening, Dr Sinclair,” Trotman said from the side. Sinclair turned as if expecting something interesting, face falling at finding the jittering Trotman.

  “Oh, Robert, you’re here.”

  “Y-yes sir. I got back from Montana just a couple days—”

  Sinclair turned to the sound of his name trilled across the room. Liza looked over her shoulder to see Dorothy Balfours, a slender and stately woman she and Trotman had named the Dowager Fundraiser. In her early sixties, Balfours was the widow of the infamous “Timber” Bert Ellison, a man who’d made his money in logging businesses from the sixties into the eighties. She’d spent her early life accompanying her husband from logging camp to logging camp, a quiet woman who walked her husb
and’s footsteps like a shadow.

  “The Dowager Fundraiser crooks her finger and he runs to her,” Trotman whispered as Sinclair turned and crossed the floor. “I’ll bet the Famous Sociologist hates being a woman’s wind-up toy.”

  Liza watched Sinclair greet Balfours, barking out a greeting. The Dowager’s timber-baron husband had been cut down twenty-three years ago while poaching virgin timber from government land. He’d been standing atop a donkey engine and cursing his workers when a dragline snapped, a recoiling cable slicing Timber Bert in half as neatly as a buzz saw, one side falling east of the engine, the other dropping west. Sierra-Club types – and folks who’d had the misfortune to work for Ellison and get shorted on a paycheck – dubbed the incident “The Revenge of the Trees”.

  Ellison died childless and intestate, the bulk of his money invested in strip joints and legal brothels in Nevada – the swaggering lumberman bragging that “pussy was where the money was”. To the surprise of everyone, and as if a yoke had been thrown off, the quiet wife somehow found her voice and – with the help of a feisty lawyer – blunted efforts to buy her off for pennies on the dollar, standing defiant until standing atop one-point-six million dollars.

  As if in penance for her husband’s often-illegal denuding of forested mountainsides, Dorothy Balfours – reverting to her maiden name a month after her husband’s demise – began studying investments in the future, green technologies that were at the time barely pencilings on engineer’s desks.

  Avoiding more fantastical concepts, Balfours invested in structural advances: improved home insulation, less toxic coolants, energy-efficient electrical motors. As the ideas and inventions of the non-glamorous companies in her portfolio quietly become mainstream technology, Balfours found her net worth increasing to what many whispered was a fortune surpassing forty million dollars.

  Nonetheless, her mountainside home in northeast Boulder was modest by local-wealth standards, a half-hidden assemblage of local stone and glass and solar panels, nestling like a bashful gem in the magnificent setting of the Front Range.

  “Oh God,” Trotman said, looking across the room, face drained of color and his voice weak as wet paper.

  “What, Robert?”

  “Sinclair yelled your name. He’s waving us over. What’ll we do?”

  “We go as summoned, Roberto,” Liza said, taking her companion by the arm and pulling him toward their boss. “Whatever you do, don’t piss your pants.”

  They darted around a tipsy, overdressed professor from the theater department who slit his wrists annually – very shallow cuts; the university kept it quiet and waited out the next yelp for attention – who made a flamboyant twirl as they passed, bumping Liza’s glass and sending wine splattering across her right breast. She dabbed frantically with Trotman’s proffered napkin before arriving in Sinclair and Balfours’s company.

  Sinclair raised an eyebrow at Liza’s dampened breast. “Are you lactating, Liza? I didn’t even know you were pregnant.”

  “No, I mean … uh, there was a bit of a spill and –”

  Liza caught herself in mid-apology and looked at Sinclair. He was grinning. Was the Famous Sociologist joking with her?

  Sinclair nodded toward Dorothy Balfours, dressed in a simple green sheath, natural gray hair piled atop her head like it had been the easiest way to deal with it. The Dowager Fundraiser looks like a real person, Liza thought, not like certain pampered-poodle benefactors who needed royalty-level pampering to keep the largesse flowing. Balfours seemed genuine, whatever that meant any more.

  “Ms Balfours wanted to see where her money is going,” Sinclair said, “so I’m humoring her.” He nodded toward Liza. “This is one of my most promising apprentices, Liza with a Z. Please don’t ask her to sing.”

  Liza extended her hand. “Liza Krupnik.”

  Balfours’s handshake was dry and firm. “Pleased to meet you, Ms Krupnik. Anyone who works in the Sociology department has both my respect and condolences.”

  Sinclair grinned past the barb and nodded to Trotman. “And here’s Robert, another toiler in the vineyards. He crunches numbers. Positively massacres them.”

  Balfours leaned forward. “I’m sorry, what was your last name, Robert?”

  “T-Trotman.”

  “You’re a statistician, then?” the woman asked, her head canted as if actually interested. Trotman stared at the graceful woman like he didn’t understand the question. Liza bumped Trotman’s ribs with an elbow, restarting his brain.

  “Y-yes, Statistics. Volumetrics involving consumer choices based on data derived from –”

  Sinclair held up a hand. “Please, Robert. We have to stay awake until the soirée is over. Was that enough, Madame Balfours, or should I introduce you to the departmental dog?”

  “Do you really have one?” Balfours asked, a wry smile on her face, as though long accustomed to Sinclair’s antics.

  “Yes, and it’s probably the best TA I have.” Sinclair looked at the pair and nodded. “Thank you, kiddies. You may now return to anonymity.”

  Chapter 25

  “You have your action clothes?” I asked as Rein pulled garments from her suitcase. We were kicking off the action tonight, turning Rein into a threatened lady. Normally a woman might make several visits to a center – like Rhonda Doakes – before the threat level made the vanishing act a possibility. Disappearing into the system was a red-alert condition, and we had to get past the ramp-up colors in days, not weeks.

  “I’m thinking something spangly.” Rein held up a low-cut sleeveless shirt with gold sequins.

  “No, dammit,” Harry said from the couch, turning a thumbs down on the selection. “You’re out of the life, right? That’s the role.”

  Rein took a deep breath. “My character is used to glittery clothes, Harry. I can’t go dressed in business casual. It’s not what she’d wear.”

  “It’s too revealing,” Harry argued.

  Rein cocked her hips and rolled her eyes. “It’s what people my age wear, Harry. Stop being so old.”

  Harry froze. Rein realized what she’d said. “You know what I mean,” she backtracked. “I’m dressing in a contemporary manner. The top came from Wal-Mart.”

  “I’m taking a walk,” Harry said. The door slammed behind him.

  “It’s OK, Rein,” I said. “He’s having a hard time.”

  “This operation is the kind of thing he’s told me about since I was a kid. Putting yourself out there to help others. I’d think he’d be – he’d be …”

  I saw tears come to her eyes. “What?” I asked.

  “Proud of me. I just want him to be …”

  Her voice failed and she fell into my arms. “He’s very proud of you,” I said. “But the pride is hidden so deep under his fear he can’t find it. It’s why he pushes so hard, gets so angry. He’s scared.”

  “It doesn’t seem to get to you, Carson,” she said. “His moods. Snapping at everything.”

  I shrugged. “Mostly I find myself studying the power of his feelings.”

  She looked at me in puzzlement. “Why?”

  “It’s foreign to me, Rein. No one ever loved me like that.”

  Treeka slipped from the compact car into the dark country park, pulling her suitcase behind her. The only sounds were the burring of crickets and a growl of semis from the distant interstate. A gibbous moon hung low in the sky.

  “The road circles behind the playground,” Marge said through the window, pointing past shadowy swings and slides. “Your next helper should be parked behind those trees. Wait for lights to blink three times.”

  Treeka nodded. Everything about the system – the ‘underground railroad’ several had called it – was spooky.

  “Walk to those trees and wait for lights to blink,” Marge said. “Don’t dare get close if there’s no lights.”

  They’d been on the road for hours, Treeka’s heart in her throat every mile of the way. Though she was sure Tommy couldn’t have tracked her, she was still frighte
ned. She reached into her purse and found the blue bird in her wallet, safe. She squeezed her wallet for luck.

  The woman beside Treeka said, “Time to go, Darleen. God be with you.”

  “Bless you,” Treeka replied, pushing tears from her eyes and waving a forever farewell to the woman with whom she’d spent three days. Treeka had stayed in a spare bedroom in the woman’s home, never venturing outside unless it was night, and only then in the back yard. Marge’s husband, the trucker who picked her up at the truck stop, had left the next day, running a load of electronic parts to Detroit.

  Treeka crossed the small roadside park, feeling cool grass on her sandaled toes as she passed swings and a slide. She looked into the cluster of maples behind the playground. There, on a pull-off, was a large truck, black in the shadows.

  The lights made three brief blinks, like Morse code: flashflashflash. Behind her, Treeka heard her temporary savior drive away. The hand-over was made.

  Treeka pulled her cardboard suitcase tight and walked to the SUV. “Darleen?” asked the driver, a voice a dozen feet away, behind the wheel. It was a whispered rasp.

  “I’m Darleen,” Treeka replied.

  “Hop in, dear. Toss your stuff in the back seat. Hurry … The police patrol the park every half-hour. They’re almost due.”

  Treeka climbed into the front passenger seat as the diesel engine rattled. She aimed a prayer toward the moon and held her breath as the truck roared toward the anonymity of the interstate.

  In the low light of the truck’s instrumentation, Treeka shot glances at her new protector. A lesbian, almost surely. No trace of make-up, rugged, lined face of someone in her forties who’d seen time outdoors. It was actually a rather handsome face, slender and well proportioned, cheekbones high, nose straight and aquiline, the jaw firm. The brown-toward-blonde hair was close-cropped and mannish, with just a touch of feminine shag and highlighting. The woman wore faded blue denim, shirt and jeans. Cowboy boots below. She drove the truck with a solid authority, blowing past slower traffic, settling into the center lane, the engine at a steady rumble, like a powerful ship cleaving through deep night.