The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  He checks to see if there’s more coffee in his cup—and without looking up he feels the kid’s stare adjust. That he’s registered the questions as rhetorical and doesn’t know what will happen next. Smart kid.

  “You were going to rob them,” he says, more quietly. “So the Ashburns are known to have a lot of money around the house?”

  “That’s what I wrote.”

  “You say they’ve got a safe.”

  “They do. They’re rich.”

  “Did,” he says. “They did have a safe.”

  “What?”

  “You murdered them. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “So, they had a safe,” he continues. “They kept a lot of money around. Because he’s a doctor, and doctors are rich.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, like how much money?”

  “I don’t know. Like ten thousand. That’s what everybody said.”

  “People said. How would they say it? ‘Hey, everybody, the Ashburns have ten thousand bucks lying around in cash.’ Come on.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no one else to rob? In a beach town? Isn’t Claymore full of tourists?”

  “So?”

  The idea is that you want to dribble out the facts, a few at a time, so they can’t know how much you know.

  “Well, that means a lot of cash businesses. T-shirts. Knickknacks. Bars, restaurants. A lot of cash floating around.”

  “What’s your point?”

  He thinks of the woman’s face. Her missing lip.

  He says quietly, to control his anger, “Nick, are you employed?”

  “I work in a tire shop. I do pizza delivery.”

  “I’ll assume that’s two different jobs. Do you like your work?”

  “Man, what the hell is this about?”

  “What it’s about, you piece of shit, is the fact that we found two dead people in your car.”

  His voice booms. It echoes in the room. The kid looks terrified.

  “So this is me asking you questions,” he says, more quietly. “Such as, why do you need ten thousand dollars? Of all people, with two jobs?”

  “I’ve got responsibilities,” Nick says, a beat behind the fear.

  “Okay. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  The kid tries to clasp his hands together, but the left one’s cuffed to the bed.

  “Can you take these off, please?”

  “Do me a favor,” Martin says. “Look at my hand.”

  The boy resists.

  “Look at my hand! Now, count for me out loud. How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Two.”

  “Two. Meaning one finger for each question you’re about to answer. Now, before you say anything, I’m going to get another coffee. So I want you to listen, right now, then I want you to think really hard. That way, when I come back, you can answer my questions perfectly, you understand?”

  He pulls out an envelope. They found it in the kid’s jacket. Addressed to one Nick Toussaint, at the same address on his driver’s license, 108 Oak Hill Road, Claymore, NH. Envelope still sealed.

  The kid strains forward, furious all of a sudden.

  “That’s mine.”

  “You think I care?”

  The handwriting is female. No return address.

  Martin taps his ear with the envelope. “So here we go. Question one, what’d you need the money for?”

  “That’s my letter!”

  “Question two, you’re going to tell me a little bit more about the doctor. Like, something simple: How does the doctor get into the back of your truck? You killed him in the house, you said. Dead on the floor. Big guy, no gun blast. You got him with the knife, the Puma, it was your dad’s. Nick, look at you. You’re no weightlifter. You’re not even a wrestling fan. How does the doctor get into the trunk? How does his big body get into the back of your Explorer? So that’s question two. I’ll leave you to it.”

  The kid’s about to say something. Martin walks out. Staircase, coffee, staircase. Ten minutes.

  “I’m finished,” the kid announces as soon as he returns.

  “Finished with what?”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “Well, I should hope so.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re a little guy, Nick. You need help. No offense. Most people do. Personally, I’m big enough I can muscle guys, but you’re the kind who gets by on his smarts. Am I right?”

  “Whatever.”

  “It’s a math question. The medical examiner told me Dr. Ashburn weighs two-forty. I asked her again, just this morning, to confirm it. Two hundred and forty pounds. You see what I mean? Let’s say you’re one-forty. I’ll give you one-fifty by dessert. Even then you’re not lifting him. So who puts him in the truck? Mrs. Ashburn? Does the wife carry him out? On the night she’s the most scared she’s been in her entire life? Even if it’s adrenaline, this woman—who’s a hundred and eight fucking pounds—who helps you drag out her dead husband and hoist up his remains—is that what you’re telling me? This woman whose face now is so badly smashed up, along with her husband’s, that it looks like someone ran them over with a dump truck, and you’ve got the balls to tell me you did that with a shovel? And shortly after that you can’t even do arithmetic? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? How stupid do you think I am?”

  Another nurse opens the door.

  * * *

  In the hours that follow the Cowgirl Crash, as it’s called, Martin works the phone from his desk and eventually reaches the Sheriff’s Department of Claymore County, New Hampshire, in the county seat, just a short ways north of Boston. But they’ve got no communications officer, simply a lady who says, in fact, a man had gone missing in Claymore recently. Two people, Dr. Nathan Ashburn and his wife.

  “He’s a popular physician.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He makes house calls. You don’t see that a lot anymore.”

  By lunchtime, New Hampshire files a request for rapid extradition. Three faxes later, the sheriff will arrive Monday, to escort Nick home. Normally Martin’s disinclined to a handoff, but they’ve established that the killings were committed elsewhere. New Hampshire will get the case no matter what. Also, his budget still aches from the cleanup for Hurricane Sandy. They’re a tiny department. Twenty-six sworn officers, seven traffic agents, five civilians, eight patrol cars. They’re better equipped to handle welfare checks than homicides. He’ll consent to stand down.

  But that doesn’t mean he likes it.

  Monday morning, a storm hits. At seven it’s still dark out, then grows darker, as if the morning decided to run backward. Martin wakes up in his office. He’d spent the night on the couch, a piece of crap, the threshold between living and dead matter. Probably not the best thing for his lower back. Not that he sleeps much anymore. He makes coffee. The pot’s not even done when the power goes out. Almost half of Eagle Mount is in the dark. The ocean waves bulge and swell while the storm does what it likes, plows the beaches, slashes trees, braids power lines around their junction boxes. Rain hammers the streets so hard the newsman insists that Sandy’s back, and Martin has to deploy nearly a third of his staff on traffic duty.

  At one-fifteen, the sheriff from New Hampshire arrives in civilian clothes. Blue jeans, muddy boots, a tan shirt. Can’t be more than fifty, Martin thinks, with hair that thick, like brush bristles. A man who doesn’t look at all unnerved by the rain.

  “Granville Portis.”

  “Sorry about the weather,” Martin says, and shakes hands. “I didn’t realize you were going to drive.”

  “Could’ve been worse,” the sheriff says. “I could’ve flown.”

  He shakes off his windbreaker.

  “You want coffee?” Martin asks.

  “Black, five sugars.”

  In the guy’s hands is a cowboy hat dark from the rain. Martin remembers the Westerns he used to watch as a kid. The High Chaparral. Alias Smith and Jones. He always wa
nted to be a cowboy, but his father said the cowboys were long extinct, like dinosaurs.

  He asks a junior officer to escort the sheriff back to the break room. He joins him ten minutes later and says quietly, “You know, we don’t exactly see the kid for this.”

  “What’s that.”

  “The boy. Nick. You saw the confession.”

  “We received it.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure.”

  They don’t say anything for a while.

  “He mentioned a girlfriend. Emily. Do you guys know this kid for anything?”

  “Let’s go get this done,” the sheriff says flatly.

  “We can do that,” Martin says after a moment.

  The previous afternoon, Lillian moved out. No warning. He was at the hospital with the kid. She left a note. Please don’t worry about me. I need to figure a few things out. I’ll be in touch when I’m ready. I love you. Lillian.

  It wasn’t the end of the world, or even completely unexpected, but what was it? What sustains a marriage, exactly? To the point: a second marriage? From the first night, they’d had an intense sexual bond. Even during rough patches, it didn’t falter. Maybe she’d made that connection with someone else?

  He felt like he’d been dismissed.

  And the more it sank in, the worse it felt.

  The same night, Martin bought a Snickers at midnight and went back to the holding cells. No plan in place. He found the kid staring at the ceiling. Bandaged ribs, dressing on his nose.

  “I noticed you’ve got a limp,” Martin said. “Not from the car accident. It’s tough to get a limp these days. Surgeons have gotten pretty good. You must really have screwed yourself up.”

  After a long quiet, the kid coughed. “Snowmobile accident,” he said.

  “You have a snowmobile? I used to have one.”

  “Congrats.”

  “A sergeant of mine has three.”

  “It belonged to my dad. He was driving.”

  “Where is your dad?”

  The kid looked up then, no expression. “No idea.”

  He broke the candy bar in two and passed the kid half.

  The kid asked, “I still have that phone call, right?”

  “You do.”

  “Can you make it for me?”

  “Sure I can. Who do you want me to call?”

  A long quiet. “Never mind.”

  Martin leads the sheriff down the corridor. He can’t decide how far to extend himself. A pair of officers part to let them through. Four holding cells, two and two, at the moment empty except for the kid. Martin turns the corner and nods to the officer at the door.

  Behind him, the sheriff from New Hampshire calls out, “Hey, Nick.”

  Martin rotates, watches the kid’s brow flatten, his lips withdraw.

  “Nick,” the sheriff says, cuffs the word. As if all of this has already played out somewhere else.

  Nick pushes back his hair.

  In twenty-five minutes, the kid’s prepped and processed, not a single additional word spoken. Portis leads the boy out the sally port like he owns the place. The rain is cold. It falls straight down. The sheriff loads the kid into a muddied white Charger and slams the door. Then he’s gone.

  Martin quickly returns to his office, shuts his door. Glass of water. Three ibuprofen. Out of nowhere, he pictures Lillian, her and the doctor in the rain. Two months earlier, she left for a Jimmy Buffett weekend with her sister Joan, who lived year-round in Beach Haven. Virgin margaritas, long walks, family gossip. He’d texted Joan at one point to hear how things were going: nope, no Lillian. Three weeks after that, the overnight bag was again on the front-hall table. A big design conference in Philadelphia, she said. So he tailed her. Embarrassed, angry at himself. What a lowlife. They drove across the Delaware, into rush-hour Philly, two cars among thousands as darkness fell. Logan Square. A one-way street. A posh hotel with doors of milk glass, flanked by torches. The lobby was so featureless, it could have been a prayer room in an airport. He’d stared at the flames as they sputtered, the visible fumes, and thought of a cathedral. He thought of anything except what was happening before his eyes.

  They’d had him over for dinner once, the doctor. Nice guy. With maybe a little too much self-assurance, too much shine in his eyes. But pleasant, smart, a good conversationalist. Martin made him his ravioli with sage-butter sauce. And later would see his wife press her body against the guy in the lobby of a fashionable hotel.

  Would feel in that moment like a corpse being covered over with dirt.

  The rainstorm is only a trickle outside his office. His retirement will arrive in two weeks. Everything should fall into place, but old habits say something’s wrong. He unholsters his Glock and sets it down on the table beside the keyboard like it’s just another item on his desk.

  He feels his loneliness. Feels himself dragged toward something against his will. Side by side, his irritation and his wretchedness. He rubs his face with both hands. Instructs himself, with doctor’s instructions, Simply breathe.

  But his nerves are all wrong. He can’t put his mind at peace.

  He feels in his sweat a dismantling suspicion.

  * * *

  A warm June rain taps the roof and veils shapes outside. Father is gone for work. Mother is simply gone. The days expand and still there’s no Nick, no word.

  She’s had enough, she has to do something.

  Next to the barn is the yard, the chicken coop, the snowplow blade. Below the yard is the mountainside, below the mountain is the valley and Claymore proper. The work truck lurches to a start. Emily’s teeth rattle in her mouth. Soon she’s in town, under the old trees of Nick’s neighborhood, Oak Hill, where the houses once were fancy, and now are bleached.

  She parks outside his house. Nick’s room is on the ground floor. The shades are drawn. The living room’s dark, where his mother hosts her students.

  She checks her phone. No missed calls, no texts.

  Her heart is a panicked horse.

  She drives to Tyree’s Tire Center and something’s wrong there, too. No lights on whatsoever, and Mr. Tyree isn’t even in his chair, Mr. Tyree who weighs almost four hundred pounds and is never not in his chair.

  She gets out. A handwritten sign’s on the floor, it must have slipped off the window. CLOSED—On Vacation.

  The night that Nick disappeared, she’d driven around town for two hours. She wound up parked under the Ferris wheel. Even in the evening, it rotated cheerfully above the sand, all teal and pink. Maybe a couple people were on it. She bought a ticket. At the top, she stood up, with the idea that she’d be able to see Nick’s car if it was parked near the beach. But it was hopeless, there were a million cars, she could see nearly all the way to Boston. She didn’t know where he was. The next time around, the pinnacle, a hundred or so feet off the ground, she climbed up on the side. Nick was gone, she was sure of it. He hated her. She’d ruined everything. The little car swung and tipped, she felt the wind run down her shirt, felt the darkness inside her start to rise. She let go of the pole with her left hand and almost slipped, lost her balance, swung out. The whole car swung, and her body washed through with waves of fear while her sneakers folded in half over the little door. But she didn’t care.

  When she was back on the ground, the operator woman called her a moron and said if she ever saw her around again, she’d call the cops.

  Emily laughed straight in her face.

  Across the street from the tire shop is the Angry Goat. It’s the restaurant where she and Nick first met, randomly, almost a year earlier. She needs to pee. Only a couple people are inside, including a man in a business suit. He watches TV at the bar, with his tongue clamped between his teeth and his chin pointed up. He turns and stares. “Come in, little girl,” he says. Eyes oblique like a cow.

  She angles for the bathroom, locks the door. Tremors of fear rattle in her chest.

  On her way out, the cow man calls, “Hey, girl, wait.”

/>   “Leave me alone.”

  “I know you.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “You’re Nick’s girl,” he says. He walks over. Up close his cheeks prickle with little white hairs. “I saw Nick this morning. I see him all the time. He works right over there.”

  He points out the window.

  “What do you mean you saw him?” she says.

  “At the station,” the man says.

  “What station?”

  “He showed me your picture once. That’s what’s funny about all this.”

  “Why is that funny?”

  “Well, you know, pigs.”

  Emily wants to run out the door, but his words sink in and paralyze her. A strange emotion weighs heavily on her arms and pins her there, when she knows exactly what he’ll say next before the words come out of his mouth.

  “Your dad’s the sheriff,” he says.

  “What are you talking about?”

  The man coughs up something and wipes it on his sleeve.

  “He was putting Nick in custody,” he says. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  THE MISBEGOTTEN

  Let us imagine that in the time of endless content and ceaseless optimization, the bulwark is somehow gone, she’s lost the only remaining wall to preserve her sanity. Leela Mann has never failed at writing or editing to her knowledge, everything she’s done is thoughtful and praised. She’s even been on CNN to talk about a story. But then on Friday, in lower Manhattan, New York City, the awful thing happens: She loses her job. Again.

  Two days later, Sunday, she wakes up to nothing, end of existence. Madbury, New Hampshire. Outside there’s only silence, nonstop, the thick white noise of New England forest. No man-made sounds, no car alarms, no truck drivers yell in Cantonese. The sunlight’s in her eyes, and it’s so plainly not New York City sunlight, she pulls her leather jacket over her face.

  And the moan that rises uncontrollably from her body comes from deep in her soul.

  Forty-eight hours earlier, everything had been as it should be. Existence. Career. Aspirations. She was twenty-four, she loved life, she was fully employed. Spring in Manhattan! And even the bog stench of Broadway-Lafayette gave her a lift. Then her boss, Randall, the managing editor of The Village Voice, announced another round of layoffs. Number three in seven months. Severances would be pitiful. Regrets, threadbare. This time she got the axe—no love from Randall. So she’d skipped the farewell day-drinking to go to the Starbucks on Astor Place, email everyone she’d met in the previous forty-two months that constituted her adult working life after college—two editorial internships and two copyediting jobs: Jambands and BuzzFeed, Deloitte University Press and The Village Voice, respectively—never mind practically everyone else in her address book, all to say, Hi so-and-so, I hope your morning is going well. I just got laid off, so I am sending out a shameless networking call. If you know of any job openings at all, please let me know. Thanks!