A Short Time to Die

by Susan Alice Bickford

  Now, she was headed back.

  The cold medicine and aspirin kicked in. The weather turned chilly and bright. The crisp, sunny air soothed her throat, but she suspected she would regret it later. She rode without stopping for twenty minutes after leaving the library. She avoided the main roads and followed dirt tracks. She hated riding on dirt roads. The stones played havoc with the bicycle tires and she had to concentrate.

  She felt almost normal and cold-free by the time she hid her bike, just off the deserted dirt track that led to this place.

  She slipped on Beanie’s old boots over her tennis shoes. The people who would come here soon would be hunters. She had already left enough of her own footprints around Beckwith’s potato field.

  Avoiding the overgrown driveway clogged with burdock, she climbed into the bushes and slid down the steep shale to the creek bed that ran along the edge of the property. She walked uphill in the shallow water, following the creek bed. As she climbed, the high walls of shale shrank until the water flowed at the same level as the woods. She climbed out and edged her way toward the clearing from the back.

  Marly loved walking in the woods at this time of year, when all the brilliant leaves from the trees carpeted the surfaces of the rocks and fallen trunks. Soon the leaves would turn brown, but for the moment, the forest floor was a riot of color.

  The boots were too large and they leaked. Once she reached the kitchen door, she slipped them off, put them beside the back porch, and unlocked the door.

  She had gotten this far before. Getting this far was easy.

  The house had deteriorated since her last visit. There were holes in the kitchen floor, and daylight shined in through the roof upstairs. The Harrises would have to find a new home for their treasures before long.

  The door to the reinforced closet in the first upstairs bedroom was as sturdy as she remembered it, with two deadbolt locks. Last time, she had tried to punch through the walls. This time it took several tries to find the right keys.

  She did a quick assessment. Cash in ziplock bags. Gold coins in plastic sheets. Some papers that looked official and might be interesting. She took about half of each without counting, shoving handfuls into her backpack, including some of the papers.

  She locked up and moved on to the second bedroom, which had a similar closet, where she found more money and coins and followed the same routine. It was tempting to be greedy and take it all, but she knew that would be a clear sign of robbery.

  Marly moved the dust around with an old broom to obliterate her footprints and returned to the kitchen on the first floor.

  Time to go. Perhaps it was just the fever, but she was jumpy. If Rosie was holding a meeting with all the women and children, that meant the men and boys might be out hunting, checking the secret places.

  Her hand was on the door to the back porch when she noticed that she could see the basement through cracks in the floor under her feet.

  She opened the basement door and peered into the gloom. The basement stairs were treacherous. Every third or fourth step was missing.

  The basement was empty, aside from a great deal of dust and crumbling wood on the concrete floor. Bright October light filtering in through the tiny windows.

  Marly cautiously moved from the main basement room to a second space under the front of the house. This room had a dirt floor and a ceiling so low that someone had dug a sunken path for those over four feet tall. At the end of that path, Marly found another fortified door.

  The door opened without a sound when she unlocked it, revealing a set of stairs that led to nowhere. The top of the stairs must have been sealed off at some point, she realized. Each of the lower treads was loaded with bags, overall offering about four times what she had found upstairs.

  She put handfuls of bags into her duffel bag, barely pausing to look, but still careful to take only a portion of each pile. She did note that the dollar amounts in some bags seemed larger. There was more gold. There were also individual bags of what looked like identity documents.

  Finished, she picked her way up the stairs to the kitchen. A metallic sputtering sound caught her attention. All-terrain vehicles—ATVs. She dragged the broom and rushed to the front of the house.

  A quick glance out a front window showed a group of five men gathering at the far end of the clearing, at the weedy patch that must have once been the front yard but was now claimed by milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace, and burdock. Milkweed silk drifted through the air offering a hint of the snows that would arrive all too soon.

  The men split up. Two started to approach the house. One was Larry, Del’s brother, and the other was Troy, Louise’s son. The other three fanned out. She knew they would start wide and move in.

  Marly studied them. She pushed back her rising panic. They were moving at a slow pace, slapping their way through the brush. She was sure they were there to check for Del and Zeke and to see if the treasures were intact. So far they weren’t looking for her. I hope. She rushed back to the kitchen.

  Inhaling in gasps, Marly locked the back door and pulled on Beanie’s boots. She waited for the man circling to the right of the house to pass by in the woods, and she slipped under a tangled mat of vines, hoping that none was poison ivy. Without leaves, she couldn’t be certain, but an itchy rash would be nothing compared to what would happen if Larry’s team caught her. Her bags weren’t particularly heavy, but they were bulky. At least they were dark green and dark blue, like her clothes.

  Once Larry and Troy started following the logical path to the back door on the opposite side of the house, Marly crawled through to the front end of the vines, pushing the duffel bag and the backpack in front of her. At the far end, she crouched to survey the yard and woods. She took a deep breath and dashed to the right side of the clearing and into the woods. She hoped she would be out of sight once the searchers reached the dilapidated porch.

  After a furtive glance over her shoulder, she scuttled down a short slope, praying the men would take her scuffling marks in the leaves for tracks left by deer or coyote dogs. She circled outward, turned, and headed back to the road once she was certain she had outflanked the searchers.

  She was about to rejoin the old dirt driveway that led to the clearing, when she heard a cough. She caught the smell of a cigarette.

  She froze. Elliot Harris, Zeke’s nephew, stepped into view. If he looked to his left, he would see her, standing at the edge of the woods. Instead, in a simple stroke of luck, he turned right and went back to the ATVs.

  Marly waited, fighting her nerves, before she crept away, certain that Elliot would hear her heart pounding.

  Her bicycle was still tucked out of sight on the opposite side of the dirt road and had not been moved or uncovered. She pulled off Beanie’s boots and shoved them into the duffel.

  The trip back seemed both faster and longer. She felt more miserable as the brisk air now scoured her throat. She tried to breathe through her nose because it seemed less painful, but that was hard to maintain when going uphill. The wind chilled her. My fever must have spiked. She needed to stay calm. She needed to get home and crawl into bed.

  Marly stopped first at the library. The keys went back into their place behind the tampons. The bags were stuffed upstairs in a storage space concealed behind a low wall where the ceiling sloped steeply toward the floor. She hoped the miniature tables and chairs of the children’s reading area would provide additional camouflage.

  The last push to her house was the hardest. It would have been easier on the road, but she couldn’t be seen and that meant taking the off-road paths, with more rocks.

  She pulled into their muddy parking area at five o’clock. The bike went to the barn. She crept into the house, grateful that Denise, Charlene, and the kids weren’t back from Rosie’s.

  Marly dosed up again on aspirin. She didn’t dare take her temperature. Two glasses of chocolate milk mercifully coated her throat. She shivered through a piping hot shower, brushed her teeth, crawled back into bed, an
d slept through the entire night without so much as rolling over.

  5

  Vanessa: The Empire State

  January 23–27, 2013

  As they waited for their travel approvals, Vanessa and Jack researched as much as they could about Louise and Troy. At Nick’s suggestion, Vanessa took Jack on a tour of the crime scene in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

  They started on the Santa Cruz County side, driving up rough, unmarked roads until they had to get out and walk the rest of the way. At each turn, Vanessa’s irritation increased. The steep terrain did not invite intimacy, guarding many places where humans could not go. Or not go easily—like this one.

  “Look at this,” Jack said, spreading his arms as they clambered over a set of rocks and entered a ravine. “Gorgeous. I love working this beat.”

  “Yeah, well, you just grabbed a bunch of poison oak to haul yourself up over that rock. I don’t know why it’s not the state plant. There’s so much of it around here. I swear I don’t even have to touch it and I get a rash.”

  “No problem. I seem to be immune to the stuff.”

  “That figures,” Vanessa said, muttering under her breath.

  After about thirty minutes of scrambling, they stood at the base of a cliff, littered with boulders and the deposits from rockslides. The orange trunks of madrone poked through the debris, and the odor of bay trees perfumed the damp air. The concave cliff face was carved out of densely packed dirt and rock, arching to a ledge over two hundred feet above the base.

  Guarding against poison oak, Vanessa kept her gloved hands tucked in her jacket pockets and gestured with her elbows.

  “This is where the bodies landed. Their first stop. Pretty much on top of each other, as best we can tell. After they were eaten or fell apart, pieces washed down that way.” She raised her chin downhill, toward Silicon Valley.

  “Do you think they were alive or dead when they got here?” Jack asked.

  “No way to tell, but I’m hoping dead. That would be a terrifying fall. I’m not sure anyone deserves that.”

  * * *

  They hiked back to the car and wended their way through dark, dense stands of redwood trees pressing in over rutted dirt tracks. They lost GPS signals and used their detailed paper map until they found the road that they hoped would take them to the top of the cliff.

  Abruptly the trees receded and the climb leveled out. They found themselves on a narrow plateau of mud and winter grasses. To their left, the land fell away toward the Pacific Ocean, hidden behind a sea of trees and lesser ridges. To their right, the cliff offered spectacular views of the South Bay and the Diablo Range in the far distance. There were no signs of human habitation nearby, only the glittering fungus of Silicon Valley in the distance. A spectacular place to die.

  Jack inched his way to the edge of the cliff and peeked over.

  “Don’t get too close,” Vanessa said. “That ground is soft dirt and it’s wet. Come over here, where the cliff curves. You can see better.”

  “Barely enough room to turn a car around,” Jack said. “A couple of feet either way and they’d slide off the hill toward the ocean or fall hundreds of feet on the other side. This would be an odd place to meet.”

  “Maybe they weren’t meeting anyone. Maybe they were brought here and thrown over,” Vanessa said. “I wonder if they camped here. It would have been late spring or early summer and not rainy.”

  “No way to tell now,” Jack said. “Stand there and guide me as I turn the car around. I don’t want to become part of the scenery.”

  * * *

  Several days later, Vanessa claimed the window seat and studied the suburbs and the multicolored bay as their plane climbed out of San Jose. She resigned herself to spending a long day in the air. There were no direct flights from the Bay Area to Syracuse. They had taken Nick’s recommendation to fly through Pittsburgh as the least weather-risky connection at this time of year.

  The plane banked and offered spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay and surrounding geography. She scratched the puffy rash on her right wrist as she tried to pinpoint the scene of their crime in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

  Scratching her left wrist and cursing poison oak, she looked over at Jack, already asleep with an inflatable cushion wrapped around his neck like a gray goiter. He wasn’t as cute with his mouth hanging open.

  Before long, the pilot announced that those sitting on the right side of the plane had a spectacular view of snow-shrouded Yosemite. Vanessa picked out Half Dome. There was no denying that the Sierras were more majestic than her Bay Area mountains. Vanessa wondered what secrets they held. She asked the attendant for a glass with ice, no water, and pressed the ice against the torturous rash.

  Hours later over Ohio, the plane flew into a snowstorm and made its landing in Pittsburgh International Airport. By the time their connecting flight headed to the runway, the winter night had closed in around them.

  The weather cleared for their connecting flight, and they flew sandwiched between brilliant stars overhead and the lights of towns and cities embedded in the white landscape below. She could tell that she would need all of her haphazardly assembled snow gear.

  * * *

  “Did the pilot really just say that it was minus twenty-five degrees?” Jack asked. He pulled down his carry-on backpack and ski jacket from the overhead compartment. “That must be a mistake.”

  “I wish I’d checked the weather site,” Vanessa said. “Not that it would have made any difference, I guess. We would still have to make this trip.” She hoped the padded jacket, gloves, hat, and simple hiking boots from Walmart would provide sufficient protection.

  They picked up the keys for their car and crossed the snow-covered road to their vehicle in the covered parking garage. Even that short walk left them breathless, their lungs protesting the frigid air.

  “My nose hairs are frozen,” Jack said. He loaded their bags into the back of the car. “Okay if I drive? I drive to Tahoe all the time in the snow.”

  Vanessa hesitated, but agreed. “Sure. I’ll thaw out and navigate.”

  The car had snow tires, a GPS, and heated seats. Chuckling at their own lack of winter weather experience, they found their way south to Syracuse.

  “Chip said to take Highway Six Ninety to DeWitt and through Manlius. What are you doing? This is the exit,” Vanessa said.

  Jack pointed to the GPS screen. “No, it’s more direct this way, V. Look. We go straight south and pick up Route Twenty East. Much simpler.”

  Vanessa slumped down and studied her paper map. “Call me crazy, but I’m thinking Chip had his reasons. Please remember that my name is Vanessa, particularly when we meet Chip and company. Our kind of work is not the place for cute nicknames. It’s bad enough that I can’t cure Nick of calling me Nessa.”

  Jack waved his hands over the steering wheel. “Okay, peace. Point taken.”

  The land had been quite flat near the airport, but now started to rise and fall, gaining elevation. Vanessa felt her shoulders tense with the unfamiliar terrain and icy road conditions. In the open areas, stiff winds carried wispy undulating waves of snow that hovered above the surface of the road.

  “Can you see the road?” Vanessa asked. She noted how Jack leaned forward and his hands squeezed the steering wheel.

  “Yes, Vanessa. Yes, I can see the road just fine.”

  Vanessa ground her teeth, noting that the car tended to slip now and again on white icy patches up and down the steep hills and especially along the high ridges. However, she had to admit that she was no better a winter driver than Jack.

  After they turned east on Route 20, she pulled her gaze from the road to study the small towns along the route—islands of civilization illuminated by streetlights with houses of clapboard, brick, and stone, interspersed with more generic double-wides.

  Beautiful and quaint, if a bit bleak, she thought. It certainly doesn’t look anything like home.

  Jack broke her train of thought. “Another hill. I wish
we had chains. In the Sierras, we’d have chains.”

  Vanessa stared out the side window, her lips pressed together. Shut up and deal with it. You picked this route.

  Tired and frazzled, they rounded the southern end of Lake Avalon and pulled onto the main street, where they found they had been transported to the nineteenth century.

  “Founded 1793. Look at these houses!” Vanessa said. “It’s gorgeous. And this main street is amazing.”

  “Amazingly cold.” Jack pulled into the hotel parking behind the three-story brick structure facing the main street. They hauled their bags out of the back. “The car thermometer says minus thirty and it’s only nine o’clock.”

  The hotel was as charming as the town itself. Vanessa noted that the ground-floor public rooms sported hardwood floors covered with Persian rugs and were furnished with what looked like genuine antiques. Chip’s friend Rob greeted them by name at the desk and escorted them to their accommodations. Vanessa’s eyes widened with pleasure at the sight of the four-poster bed, matching dresser, and desk in her room.

  They dumped their bags and went down to the basement pub for beers and burgers.

  “Adequate hamburger,” Jack said.

  “Oh, come on. It’s very good and the fries are great. And it’s cheap. And we don’t have to go outside.”

  “You know, Vanessa, it’s not like I asked for this assignment. I’m a good cop and I know what I’m doing. In a few weeks, with any luck, I’ll be back in Santa Cruz for good, and I’ll be happy to give you all the credit. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t take issue with everything I say.”

  Vanessa stared at her plate. She hadn’t intended to confront Jack, but now she didn’t dare back away. She looked up at him. He seemed to be very engrossed in his burger, but she could see a flush moving up his neck, much like the one she could feel on her own.