The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  Rachel placed her notes, the document, and Dan’s letter to his father in her briefcase and carried it out to the car. A fine drizzle hung in the air; it was hard to say whether it was going up or down. It didn’t bother Mrs. Candy’s gardener, busy replanting a rose bush under the darkening sky. He looked up as Rachel drove away.

  The library was deserted except for a student librarian with corn-colored hair gathered in uneven pigtails. She stood behind the long wooden counter chewing gum. Rachel broke her rhythm by asking to use the copier.

  “Copying facilities close at six o’clock,” the girl said, pushing the gum into her cheek.

  “But there’s the Xerox machine right behind you.”

  The girl didn’t bother to deny it. She just put her gum back in action. The little popping sounds she made with it did her talking for her.

  Rachel opened her briefcase and took out the document.

  “I only want to make one copy,” she said reasonably. They looked at each other for a while. Finally the girl held out her hand.

  “I’d prefer to copy it myself,” Rachel said. “It’s not in good condition.”

  Rachel could see that the mere thought was causing alarm. Boldly she pushed open the waist-high swinging door that divided the counter in two, entered librarian territory, and marched on the machine. It was a master stroke. The enemy sued for peace.

  “It’ll cost you a dime.”

  Rachel dug two nickels out of her pocket and dropped them in the girl’s hand. She made her copy and departed in modest triumph.

  She climbed the broad marble staircase to the top floor of the library where most of the space was used for senior and graduate student carrels. The doors to the little cubicles were set closely together along both sides of long corridors. The students had named it the Ant Colony. From somewhere in its depths Rachel heard frantic typing, punctuated by low groans. She found three ninety-one and slipped the copy of the document under the door.

  When she descended to the main floor she saw pigtails in urgent conference with a fat gray-haired woman wearing half-spectacles. They watched Rachel out of the corners of their eyes. All the signs indicated they were girding their loins. She left before they were ready to do battle.

  She spent the evening in the study, searching through Dan’s files for anything that would explain his interest in the document. She found information on Bosnian politics, a series of letters from a nitpicking professor in Australia and classroom notes going back to the tenth grade. She was relieved when Andy finally telephoned. She heard restrained excitement in his voice.

  “Rachel? I think I’m making some sense out of this thing.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ve got to find an atlas and a few other books first. Why don’t you come by in an hour?”

  “Okay.”

  “And by the way, what did you do to Mrs. Mallow?”

  “Who?”

  “The chief librarian. A fat old lady. I asked her if she’d seen a tall dark-haired woman and she almost bit my head off.”

  “It must be the way you said it.”

  Rachel went into the kitchen to fix dinner the way Garth liked it. An inch of kibble at the bottom of the bowl, canned dog food in the middle, and an attractive topping of fried eggs and cottage cheese. She opened the front door and called him. In a minute or two he bounded out of the darkness, gave her face an extravagant lick and trotted into the kitchen.

  Before she drove to the library Rachel wrote a note to herself: “Talk to Ed Joyce first thing in the morning. Call Trimble, FBI.” Garth was savoring the last morsels in his bowl so she left him behind. She took her briefcase from the kitchen table and left the house.

  11

  Rachel opened the heavy oak door of the library. Across the large entrance hall Mrs. Mallow and the pigtailed girl were drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups. Rachel’s presence turned them to stone. Before they were transubstantiated back to flesh and blood Rachel had turned and gone up the marble stairs.

  The long corridor on the top floor was very quiet. The groaning typist had given up for the night, or forever. Most of the ceiling lights had been turned off, probably by an automatic timing device, Rachel thought. One in every five burned dully. They bracketed the shadows between like blurred parentheses.

  The door to three ninety-one was closed. Rachel knocked softly. There was no response. Dan had often said that the carrels were ideal for sleeping.

  “Andy?” she called.

  She opened the door. It was almost completely dark in the windowless room. With her hands Rachel felt along the walls until she found the switch. She turned it on.

  Andy sat at the gray metal desk in the corner with his head resting in his arms. Like bedposts on either side of him were a typewriter with a little notebook balanced on the carriage and a pile of books which included a large atlas.

  “Andy?” She nudged his shoulder. His head lolled to one side. His eyes were open wide. They bulged. A broken vessel in one had turned the white bright red. His face, so bloated that the skin looked ready to burst, was a deeper crimson. Two sluggish red trickles ran out of his snubbed nose, over his upper lip and onto his protruding tongue. All this was caused by a guitar string wound so tightly around his neck that it almost disappeared in the flesh. Andy was dead.

  Rachel backed slowly away, toward the open door. When her leg brushed the doorjamb she whirled with a start, and looked quickly in both directions along the dark corridor. The only sound she heard was the beating of her heart. And she could hear it, distinctly, the same way she could hear a fly buzz. It was no figure of speech.

  Rachel wanted to run away, down the stairs, to be with Mrs. Mallow and the pigtailed girl, but she forced herself to reenter the carrel. She had to see if the copy of the document was still there. She searched through the books, and among the pages of the notebook on the typewriter. All the pages remaining in the notebook were blank. She got down on her hands and knees to look under the desk. She found a plastic wastebasket. The balls of paper it contained were now ashes; she smelled traces of the fire. As she replaced the wastebasket she saw a wet smear where she had grasped it and it occurred to her that she was leaving her fingerprints on everything.

  One possibility remained—the part of the desk hidden by Andy’s head, chest, and arms. She tried to lift him carefully with a hand under his arm, but she could not control her jerky movements and ended by using too much force. Andy came straight back in the chair, sat squarely for a moment, then slowly slumped to one side and fell heavily on the floor. Rachel’s hands went to her mouth and her eyes opened wide with fear as if she had accidentally killed him herself. It was a high price to pay for nothing on the desk.

  Fifteen minutes later Rachel and Andy were still in the little cubicle but they no longer had it to themselves. Two policemen in uniform were sprinkling a white powder like icing sugar here and there. Another was taking photographs. A doctor was sitting beside Andy making notes in a black book. And a campus cop rocked on his heels in the corner. Ed Joyce had arrived and shooed Mrs. Mallow into the corridor. When she went out she gave Rachel the kind of look people must have given Lizzie Borden. Anyone who could make unauthorized use of the Xerox machine was capable of anything.

  Joyce had a pink blazer on his beefy torso and liquor on his breath, but he had left his party mood outside. He looked at Rachel and his eyes were grim. They were telling her that he didn’t blame her for any of the trouble, but it seemed to find her. He was barely a month from retirement and wading in unsolved capital crimes. Rachel didn’t know about his retirement plans; she sensed in him something close to kinship with Mrs. Mallow. But she remembered the way he had looked at her teacup, and changed her mind. There was no malice in him. It was frustration—he was a toothless, clawless bear forced to go on living in the wild against his will.

  Partly for this reason she omitted any mention of the document. Instead she decided to inform Trimble of it in the morning, with the
thought that the FBI was better equipped to deal with it than the town police. She did tell him that the body had been in the chair when she found it. She had assumed Andy was asleep, and the gentle poke with which she tried to wake him had knocked the body to the floor. Joyce asked her a few simple questions, listened to her answers and rumpled his hair.

  When Rachel left she passed two ambulance attendants carrying a stretcher along the corridor. For a moment their faces seemed familiar. She thought she had seen them before, and then she remembered when. They didn’t seem to notice her at all.

  A few small clouds sailed in state across the night sky. Standing on the broad lawn in front of the library Rachel watched them go. Fish must watch the hulls of ships in the same way, she thought. Like a gossamer seine net dragged by the clouds, a soft breeze touched her skin. It almost felt warm: the first night in months that she couldn’t see her breath.

  Rachel stayed there for a few minutes, until she began to hear the distant throb of jukeboxes from different parts of the campus. Like tribal drums in the jungle they brought a clear message, and it threatened to spin somewhere inside her for a long time, the way a tune in the head sometimes refuses to go away. It was guilt. Guilt for involving Andy, who should now have been drunk and happy. She sighed deeply a few times, but she couldn’t blow it away.

  Rachel drove home with the window rolled down. A few students were walking unsteadily to the next party, following a route through the night that led from oasis to oasis. Her headlights exposed a boy and girl walking together along the road. They were talking loudly but their minds were on the other’s buttocks where each had placed a hand.

  Rachel felt very tired, but the night air streaming in the window revived her. As she neared home it began to carry a scent like burning leaves; but when she pulled into the driveway she saw smoke billowing from the upstairs windows, and behind the smoke occasional bright flashes like dancing revelers at a costume ball.

  Halfway to the house Rachel remembered her briefcase on the front seat, and ran back to the car. She didn’t want to leave it there, or risk bringing it into the house. She slid it under the chassis.

  When she opened the door the house coughed hot smoke on her face. The cough was very contagious. From within she heard the popping and cracking sounds of the fire’s movements. She couldn’t see it but it was near: she could feel its breath on her skin.

  Rachel knelt on the threshold, keeping her head below the main stream of the smoke.

  “Garth,” she called, “Garth.”

  She thought she heard a muted whimper under the noise of the fire. She called again and waited, but he didn’t come. Rachel crawled into the house.

  She crept slowly through the hall, stopping every few feet to call Garth and listen for his reply. She was sure she could hear his whimpers, but they seemed to come from different parts of the house at the same time.

  She felt her way to the staircase. Her eyes could see nothing in the thick blackness. They had become organs of touch instead; they felt the greasy smoke and it made them water.

  Rachel reached the staircase and tried to go up, but waves of heat flowed down the stairs like lava and drove her back. She was coughing uncontrollably and her clothes were soaked with sweat. From above she heard a loud cracking followed by a tremendous crash, as if someone had driven an enormous poker into the house. It seemed to madden the fire. Rachel heard it raging around her like a wild beast. On the second floor the bannister suddenly burst into flame. In its light she saw files and papers scattered on the blue runner that carpeted the staircase. They too caught fire, and then the runner, like a blazing tongue reaching for her.

  Rachel scrambled toward the front door.

  “Garth,” she shouted. Again she heard whimpers that came from all sides. Then she remembered the trick of the pipes, remembered standing by the snowshoes and hearing Joyce and Trimble in the living room. She crawled into the kitchen, where the melting tile burned her hands, and opened the door to the basement.

  “Garth,” she called down the stairs. From below she heard him whimper, very distinctly. “Come,” she said. She heard the nails in his paws scraping frantically on the cement floor. She started down.

  The heat was less intense in the basement and the smoke was not as thick. At the bottom of the stairs she felt for the light switch on the wall and pressed it. To her amazement the naked bulb in the ceiling came on.

  Garth was in the corner. A length of plastic-coated clothesline wire was tied in a slipknot around his neck. The other end was fastened with a simple granny knot to a vertical copper pipe that came through the ceiling and joined a main under the floor. Rachel untied the granny knot and knelt to slip the line over Garth’s head. As she did he tensed and growled angrily. Behind her she heard a footfall on the basement steps.

  A man wearing a gas mask stood on the stairs. He was massive, so broad that he had to stand sideways on the staircase. In one hand he held a large aluminum pail. In the other he had Rachel’s briefcase. He swung the pail forward and let it go. With a dull ring it fell on the cement floor, splashing a honey-colored liquid across the room. Some of it wet Rachel and Garth. The rest formed a pool on the floor. Rachel smelled gasoline.

  As the man reached into his pocket Garth snarled and sprang up the staircase. He hit the man at knee level, just hard enough to make him lose his balance. He rolled to the bottom clutching the briefcase. Garth yelped and lay panting on the stairs.

  Rachel grasped one of the snowshoes that leaned against the wall and went for the man. He bounced to his feet with incredible speed. Now that he stood on common ground she saw that his body had a freakish density: he was not much more than five feet tall. As she raised the snowshoe he darted sideways with quick crablike steps. She brought it down at his head with all her strength. Without releasing the briefcase he lifted his left arm to block the snowshoe, stepped forward and smashed her in the face with his right fist. The force of the blow lifted her off her feet and knocked her against the wall, where she fell in a pile of skis and poles.

  Her mouth filled with blood. She was dimly aware of loud cracking sounds very near, and fingers of flame creeping down the basement stairs. The man moved slowly toward her, his face unreadable behind the mask. Rachel grabbed a ski pole and got to her feet. She backed away from him until she was in a corner. She brandished the ski pole in front of her with both hands. It made the man laugh—she could hear him behind the mask.

  The sound acted like a signal on Garth. He leaped down the steps and sank his teeth into the man’s thigh. The man twisted around and brought a corner of the briefcase down very hard on the top of Garth’s head. At the same time Rachel drove the ski pole at the man’s side. But he was already turning back to face her and it caught him in the chest. She felt the steel tip push through bone.

  The man dropped the briefcase and staggered back, taking the pole with him. He put his hands around it and pulled it out. It was like uncapping a well of red oil. Pointing the ski pole at Rachel he took a step forward and toppled onto the floor. His blood flowed into the gasoline that was already there. It also stained Garth’s coat, but that didn’t matter anymore.

  The flames probing into the basement had now engulfed the stairs. They brought smoke so thick that she could barely see the hanging light bulb. Quickly she bent over the man and removed his mask. At first she didn’t recognize the broad face, the blond hair. But then she remembered the gardener on Mrs. Candy’s lawn, and his black tool box by the telephone pole.

  Rachel patted the man’s pockets. In the back one she felt paper. She reached in and found Andy’s copy of the document and some notes in his handwriting. She didn’t stop to read them. The flames had almost reached the pool of gasoline. Rachel picked up the briefcase and ran into the furnace room.

  There was a small window at the top of one of the walls. Rachel dragged a trunk underneath, stood on it and opened the window. She lifted the briefcase through and set it on the lawn. With her hands on the sill she lifted he
rself up, but her shoulders were an inch too big. Behind her she heard the roar of the fire. She retrieved the briefcase and struck it against the wooden window frame until it split from its hinges, giving her the extra space. She tossed the briefcase outside, pulled herself through the opening, picked it up and started running.

  The explosion caught her like a tidal wave and blew her over the lawn until the earth’s gravity reasserted itself and sucked her back down. She lay on her back struggling for breath. Around her the night turned red. It made a siren scream, far away.

  12

  Rachel awoke in heaven. Someone had made a mistake. They had sent her to the wrong section. She was in thirteen-year-old-girl heaven. The walls were pink, the ceiling was pink, and so were the sheets on the bed, the quilt, and the silk fabric on the headboard. What clinched it were the posters. They all showed skinny young men with translucent skins and yearning faces covering their groins with electric guitars.

  Heaven hurt her eyes. But they hurt anyway. Her face hurt too, and her neck was so stiff she could barely move her head. She hurt all over. Gingerly she touched her nose with the tips of her fingers. Once was enough.

  Rachel pushed back the covers, releasing an odor of smoke, sweat, and gasoline that made her feel sick. Her toes gripped the thick pink broadloom and she stood up. Through a pink haze she caught a brief mirrored glimpse of a bruised and grimy woman. She sat down hard on the bed, and remained there for a minute with her head between her knees.

  Someone tapped on the door.

  “Rachel, dear. Did I hear you up and about?” The door opened and a plump manicured hand entered, followed by the plump made-up face of Ethel Dawkins. Rachel sat up.

  “Oh, God,” said Ethel. “You’re a mess. I’ll get a hot bath going on the double.”

  It was exactly what she needed. Ethel helped her into the tub.

  “My, where did you get such a lovely figure, Rachel?”