A Short Time to Die

by Susan Alice Bickford

  “I won’t forget the Springs,” Vanessa said. “Look at this.”

  She pulled a sheaf of papers, copies of yearbook pictures, from her bag. “Second grade, forty-four years ago. Seven boys, eight girls. Here is Beanie, Marly’s father. He disappeared and is presumed dead. Here’s Max Redman. He’s the one who became an ATF agent and was killed by Larry and Del. And there’s Ollie Fardig. Presumed dead. There’s Larry. In prison doing life for killing Max. And there’s Louise—dead. And that’s Elliot Harris, Denise’s second or third husband, depending on how you count. He died of cancer, miraculously. Five people met violent deaths, one is in federal prison doing life, and one died from cancer. That defies the odds. And you know that pattern is repeated in a lot of these class pictures.”

  “This is you, pissed off at the Avalon police again, isn’t it?”

  “It’s me, pissed off at them all. Even Mrs. Nancy Haas. She helps but she still hides them.”

  “Are you crying for anyone in particular?” Jack asked. He fidgeted with his napkin.

  “Johnny, Beanie, Ollie, Max. All those people who must have been so terrified and all those left behind.” Vanessa mopped her eyes as her second beer arrived. “And no help in sight. No wonder Denise was such a slut.”

  “I suppose whoever led Del and Zeke on that final chase was terrified. I wonder if Louise and Troy were terrified in the Santa Cruz Mountains.”

  Vanessa leaned forward and reached for more of Jack’s fries as Jack pulled his plate out of her range.

  “So, Jack. I see you’re not wearing your wedding ring today. Aren’t you afraid that might terrify the locals?”

  Jack studied his burger and rubbed his left ring finger. “I’m getting divorced. I mean I got divorced. I tried like hell to save this marriage for five years, but we’ve been separated for over a year and now the deed is done. I’ve just started experimenting without the ring.”

  “No girlfriend?”

  Jack gave her a wistful smile. “I’ve dated a little. Maybe now that things are final I’ll feel that I can move on.”

  Vanessa gave an appreciative grunt. “That doesn’t sound like a pleasant parting.”

  “It wasn’t easy, speaking for myself. It didn’t seem to bother her very much. My wife—my ex-wife—has a booming career in high tech corporate marketing. She decided I was an underachiever.”

  “That is so Silicon Valley,” Vanessa said. “What about your parents? Do they care that you’re a cop?”

  “My parents own a couple of dry-cleaning stores. They believe my job is a sign that we’re real Americans. Lucky for me, my brother has come through in the income department. He’s a corporate lawyer in high tech. They wish I could speak better Chinese. I did the whole Chinese school thing every Saturday, but I wanted to play soccer and baseball. Chinese went in one ear and out the other. I did master the abacus.”

  Vanessa chuckled. “I live with my parents, believe it or not. I had a relationship with this guy for almost eight years, but he did not want to get married or have kids and I had to call it quits. The house was his, so I moved home for a while. You know how expensive things are and I wanted some time to plan my next move before I decided where to land. Once I’d been there a couple of months I realized my parents had major health struggles that I knew nothing about. They hadn’t wanted to worry me because they wanted me to feel free to forge my own way. But if I lose them, I lose everything. We don’t have any other family in this country. So I stayed.”

  Jack shoved his plate back to the middle of the table and offered her two French fries. “Good for you.”

  14

  Marly: The Mind of Winter

  December 2000

  When Rosie, Louise, and Troy were arrested for Laurie’s death on December fifteenth, Marly figured her best Christmas present ever had landed in her lap.

  A cold front moved in overnight, and by the time Marly left to pick up Elaine for their regular Sunday study time blended with startup work at the library, a thin layer of ice and snow had blanketed the Springs.

  Given the weather, Marly was tempted to stay home, but they had a software delivery deadline by the end of the day. She found the coding challenges of their email security application to be like solving one delightful puzzle after another, but the user-facing parts were tedious and boring. Happily, it turned out that Elaine enjoyed working on those components.

  At the top of the hill, a horizontal wind tried to push the car into the right-hand ditch, but Marly made a smooth turn into the Fardigs’ driveway, where Elaine waited outside, dancing a bouncy jig.

  “Did you hear?” Elaine asked, adding a high-pitched squeal as she climbed into the car. “I can’t believe it.”

  “It was on the news last night,” Marly said. She turned the car around and they inched back down the hill. “Plus, our phone has been ringing nonstop.”

  There wasn’t a car in sight, but Elaine leaned toward Marly and whispered as if revealing a major conspiracy. “The police chief called us yesterday. Paul Daniels stopped by too. Louise and Troy are in deeper shit than Rosie. They’re accused of my assault in addition to Laurie’s death. According to Paul, they told the police that was a misunderstanding and unintentional.”

  “Fuck that,” Marly said. “The only thing unintentional was that they were too stupid to realize they’d be caught.”

  “Yeah. Rosie’s been arrested as an accomplice after or before the fact of whatever in both cases.”

  “I’m not sure that amounts to much. Plus, I’d bet my laptop that she was there in person.”

  “Paul says Troy and Louise will get high bail, so they might stay in jail until they go to trial. He thinks they’ll get up to ten years, but that may come to about three to five in prison.”

  “It’s a sad day when you have to trust Paul for legal advice. Sounds optimistic to me. What about Rosie?”

  “She’ll probably get lower bail. Maybe no one will post for her. I can’t imagine she has many friends these days. Even worse, she might not get much jail time. Maybe none.”

  “That sucks. The wheels of justice have a flat tire.”

  “Mom says that at least this is better than what happened in my dad’s case.”

  Marly pumped the brakes of the old Honda Accord as they approached the base of the hill and hoped she wouldn’t smack into a car that had emerged from their right and turned onto the hill road in front of them after ignoring the stop sign.

  Some people drive like they own the road.

  “Shit,” Elaine said. Carl Harris cruised by their bumper in his gold Lexus. Rosie sat in the passenger seat.

  Marly’s car swerved to a full stop, and both girls swiveled to watch Carl’s car disappear up and around the next bend.

  “Jeez. That didn’t take long,” Marly said. She swallowed hard to push down the icy pain that filled her chest. “We’re going to get out of this place before long, but meanwhile, we keep up our guard.”

  “By the way, Mom said to watch out for black ice,” Elaine said as Marly put the car in gear.

  * * *

  The next day, Marly and Elaine drove to Andrea’s house in Avalon to work on their college applications together. The three compared their choices, proofread one another’s essays, and provided moral support, fortified with a steady stream of snacks from Mrs. Melville. Submission dates were closing fast.

  “I am not going to wait until the last minute,” Andrea said. “I hate being rushed. I want to be able to polish these. Mom wants me to go to Williams, but Middlebury is still my first choice.”

  “State schools for me,” Elaine said. “Probably Albany. I’m just glad I’ll be able to graduate and go.”

  Marly stayed focused on her application for Brown. If it fell through, she had her fingers crossed for Boston University. Her third choice was SUNY Stony Brook, which she figured was the State University of New York school farthest away from Charon Springs.

  If she did get in to BU, Brown, or Stony Brook, she would have to figure
out how to pay. Applying for financial aid had introduced Marly to a new form of torture, but Helen Fardig had stepped Marly through the daunting process. One more hurdle completed.

  Now she was almost done. Marly offered a silent blessing for Mrs. Haas, who had sorted through the forms and reviewed every answer and essay, and offered Marly the use her own credit card to pay for submitting the applications.

  One more pass. Marly adjusted another sentence. She held salvation in her hands. She couldn’t afford to relax yet.

  * * *

  Marly’s brother-in-law, Greg Harris, was released from the county jail two days before Christmas. As holiday presents go, Greg was a mixed blessing.

  First and foremost, he was a Harris. Until Marly had started junior high school in Avalon, she hadn’t realized that cousins marrying cousins would be considered unusual. She endured many tedious jokes about birth defects and low IQ due to intermarriage, and vowed at thirteen that she would never ever marry anyone from Charon Springs.

  Greg was not smart enough, tough enough, or ill-tempered enough to make a good living as a criminal. He had been picked up numerous times on minor offenses for stupid reasons. Hence his recent sentence spent in the county clink. Marly worried that Charlene allowed herself to be pulled into his schemes.

  Marly could feel her shoulders tense every time Greg entered the room. He laughed too much, tickled the children too often, and ate like a convict, hunched over his plate surrounded by his forearms.

  In spite of that, Marly couldn’t help but like the guy. He seemed devoted to Charlene, adored Alison, and treated Mark and Pammy with cautious affection. He hated Rosie and considered himself to be part of Carl’s branch of the family, the lesser of multiple evils in Marly’s book. Greg was also a moderate drinker by Harris family standards. He only got drunk a couple of times a month.

  He didn’t stay long, as it turned out. Greg’s mother lived in a double-wide on the road to Avalon, and she was about to head to Florida for the winter. Greg, Charlene, and the kids moved there before New Year’s and planned to stay through spring so Mark would be able to finish first grade without changing schools.

  Left alone with her mother, Marly wished that they would all move back right away. Without the noise and distractions, Marly’s anxiety expanded, unfettered, to fill the drafty old house, lined with the accumulating residue of cigarette smoke, black mold, the stench of half-digested booze, and the ghost of Del in every corner.

  After a prolonged flirtation, winter moved in for an extended stay. Marly tried to complete wrapping her mother’s house in plastic—a job left unfinished by Del. The plastic kept the house warmer, but looking for any weakness, the bitter winds would often slip in behind her clumsy workmanship and make the plastic snap and rattle, while mysterious drafts of cold air swirled along the floors.

  Snow began its steady accumulation. Plows and trucks spread the corrosive mixture of sand and salt, and rumbled up and down the roads, day and night.

  * * *

  Marly decided to live at the library until school restarted, paid or not, and go home only for required meals and sleep. She read books to preschoolers, reorganized the nonfiction section, and worked on her startup, adding more rules and features to protect email users against prying outsiders.

  During quiet times, Mrs. Haas would let Marly start a fire in one of the four fireplaces on the first floor of the library. Marly preferred the fireplace in the office, which Mrs. Haas explained had been a parlor for entertaining guests or family when this building had been a private home. Like the main room, the cozy corner space also had matching walnut trim around the doors, windows, and the mantel.

  “Did you really live here growing up?” Marly asked, as they sipped tea one afternoon before New Year’s.

  “From time to time. This house belonged to my great-uncle Henry Judson when I was small. We would stay over at Christmas and Easter.”

  The comforting growl of a snowplow rattled the windows in their frames. Marly mounted her Christmas gift to Mrs. Haas—a framed print of “The Snow Man,” a poem by Wallace Stevens.

  “I don’t know why you like this poem. ‘A heart of winter.’ That’s what was wrong with Del and all the Harris family. Maybe they caught it from living in this place.”

  Mrs. Haas held the framed poem while Marly placed the mounting fixture. “That may be so, but that’s not what Wallace Stevens meant in ‘The Snow Man.’ He wrote about the mind of winter, meaning that when you slow down and pay attention, the world is vibrant and beautiful. That’s what happens when your chattering self-talk and imposed emotions drop away.”

  “If you say so.” Marly hung the frame on the wall, stepped back to check the alignment, and adjusted the poem so that it hung straight and true.

  * * *

  Paul Daniels was right. Louise and Troy had to stay in jail after the district attorney asked for a very high bail for each of them. Larry was never going to see the light of day for the murder of Max Redman, the ATF agent, if the reports were true. Rosie showed unexpected self-restraint and stayed out of sight.

  Not everyone was thrilled with the turn of events. On the night of December twenty-seventh, Rosie was leaving the pharmacy in Fayetteville’s upper village when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and received a full blast of hot coffee in the face followed by several fast body punches. Her assailants remained unidentified.

  “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person,” Elaine said on their ride to the library. She and Marly snickered into their mittens.

  15

  Vanessa: Larry

  January 31, 2013

  Vanessa insisted on taking the backseat of Paul’s car for the drive to Pennsylvania to visit Larry Harris in prison. Craving some alone time, she closed her eyes in fake sleep. The snow stopped falling from the sky. Now it flew horizontally, carried by the wind and splashed up from the road as brown slush that coated the windows. She could hear Paul’s wipers beat a steady rhythm in between applications of windshield washer fluid, sliding the mushy mixture back and forth across the windshield. Outside, it was a wonderful twelve degrees—above zero.

  She opened her eyes in narrow slits from time to time to study the back of Jack’s head as he talked to Paul. She had suffered from worse partners over the years. Jack didn’t reek from halitosis, cologne, or the lingering stench of cigarettes on his clothes. Visits to his hotel room showed no sign of dirty laundry on the floor. Practical jokes were not part of his repertoire, and he didn’t laugh too long or too loud. Best of all, he was competent, smart, and respected her desire to call the shots—most of the time. Refreshing.

  “Hey, Vanessa. We’re in Binghamton. Not much longer.” Paul swiveled around in his seat and turned back to give the windshield another squirt.

  Vanessa sat up, studied the leaden sky, and glanced at her watch. She must have fallen asleep.

  “It’s odd that all these cars are kind of the same color,” she said, and yawned.

  Paul gave a laugh of appreciation that made his shoulders shake. Jack turned around and grinned.

  “That’s the salt and sand,” Paul said. “You won’t see many cars over ten years old either. The salt eats them apart. Anyone with a good car puts it away for the winter because this never lets up.”

  Thirty minutes later, they rolled through the gates of the federal prison and went inside to sign in. They were shown to an interview room where they met first with the warden, a tall, broad-shouldered man with gray hair and a world-weary squint.

  “I’m skeptical that you’ll get much help, so don’t be disappointed,” he said. “Larry’s a big guy who only likes white people, and not many of those, either.”

  “His sentence was twenty-five to life,” Jack said. “Does that mean he’ll be up for parole soon?”

  “He might have gotten out within a year or two, but he killed another inmate about ten years ago. It was a bit unclear as to whether that was self-defense, and that added another five to ten, concurrent. There is
the issue of his less-than-stellar attitude. No sign of remorse or change in behavior. I’d like to say he’ll go the full twenty-five and die here. But it won’t be up to me.”

  “We can always hope he continues to call this home for a long time,” Vanessa said. Some people might be unhappy to see Larry Harris a free man. She wondered what Carl thought of that.

  The warden left and the trio waited another twenty minutes for Larry to arrive.

  Vanessa wished that Paul would calm down or at least stop pacing the room and popping his finger joints. She caught Jack’s attention and tilted her head toward Paul. Please help, she signaled.

  “Do you remember Larry?” Jack asked Paul.

  “Larry. Oh yeah. I remember Larry real well. I was in Del’s class. Larry and Louise, they were a couple of years ahead. Everyone said Larry looked just like Zeke, but Del was more like him. Del always told Larry what to do. Del and Larry, they always said Carl was a wimp.”

  Vanessa looked at Jack and raised her eyebrows to let him know his approach wasn’t working.

  “Okay, Paul,” Jack said. “Sit down over there. You don’t need to say anything to Larry. You just drove us here.”

  “Right. Chip told me to drive you,” Paul said. He stayed on his feet and bobbed his head up and down.

  They were spared more of Paul’s reminiscences when the door opened and a manacled Larry Harris was escorted into the room. Paul sat down with a plop and clamped his mouth shut.

  Vanessa had to admit that Larry cut an intimidating figure. He looked like someone had taken Carl Harris and pumped him full of air to add another thirty percent. Larry stood half a head taller than Jack, with a massive barrel chest and broad shoulders. He wore his white hair long and slicked back, with a matching Vandyke beard. The sleeves of a white T-shirt had been rolled up to reveal beefy arms covered in prison tattoos of the racist kind. His eyes may have been listed as blue on his rap sheet, but they were dark and hooded now. Those eyes were fixed on Vanessa as he eased himself into a chair on the far side of the interview table.