Dig Two Graves

by Kim Powers

  TJ whipped off his glasses and started rubbing at his eyes. Surreptitiously, so as not to scare him off, I saw Mizell quietly nod to one of the women in the station, who brought over an Etch A Sketch sort of gizmo to start pulling together pieces of a sketch.

  “Maybe 45, late 40s,” TJ started. “He doesn’t look like a weirdo. More like . . . half the profs at Canaan. A nerd in a bad suit.” On his own face, TJ pointed to his nose. “He needed to clip his nose hairs. I was that close. I could see. Pale skin. Ginger hair, but it’s gray at the sideburns, like a bad dye job. And glasses. He wore glasses. And he . . . ”

  The sketch woman pulled in a portal of different eyeglass shapes and waited for TJ to point to one, but he was lost, somewhere else, with that short stop he’d made.

  “What?” Mizell knew when a stop, when silence was just like another word. I recognized it too, from class.

  Zaccaro prompted him. “You’re looking at withholding evidence, so if you know something else . . . ”

  “We should take this into an interview room.” That was the other one. Michaelson.

  “No. I wanna hear. I deserve to. He did this to me.”

  TJ picked back up, lost in his memory. “Most people were avoiding me, the way people do . . .”

  “Tell me about it,” I sneered at him.

  “Holt. You’re here on good behavior,” Mizell said. “So shut it.”

  “ . . . I mean, the way anybody does, when a stranger sticks something in their face. But this guy . . . he seemed like he was actually coming up to me, like he wanted what I had. Like he wanted to say something. And his eyes . . . you know how your eyes get when it’s cold outside? They sort of sting? His eyes were like that. I thought maybe he was drunk, or high, so I move out of the way. But then he pushes two things in my hand and keeps walking. The rhyme on the back of one of the flyers and . . . something else.”

  What the fuck?

  “He gave you something else and you didn’t give it to us? You have another clue and . . . ” I wasn’t even yelling anymore. I could barely talk. “You have to arrest him. You have to put him in jail and . . . I can’t take this. I can’t take this anymore.”

  “Let’s see what it is first,” Mizell said, holding her hand out like a teacher confiscating a cell phone in class.

  TJ dug in the pocket of his sweatpants and pulled out a folded piece of paper, damp around the edges with sweat from his body. He handed it to me. “I swear, I was gonna give it to you, just make you . . . wait a little bit.”

  I opened it up, and before I could actually take in what it said, I saw who wrote it.

  Skip. Her handwriting. Shaky. Uncertain. Scared.

  My baby. My “I love you more.” Scared.

  He made her write it.

  “Fui quod es, eris quod sum,” I read out loud, in Latin. “I once was what you are, you will be what I am.”

  The words were there, but not what they really meant. Not what a real classics scholar would pick up. This was even worse than it sounded. I looked at TJ. He understood. We both did.

  “What does that mean?” said Mizell. “Sounds like gobbledy-gook. Is that a common phrase or . . . ”

  “It’s advanced. Not just the translation, but . . . what they used it for. They used to put it on the tombs of Roman soldiers. An epitaph about death, like . . . we all die. We all end up in a grave. Nobody’s immune. But there’s more to it, almost like . . . a Roman would understand it like, ‘We used to be the same. We knew each other. And now we’re going to trade places.’”

  “Wait. That’s wrong,” TJ said.

  “Since I’m the one who taught you how to translate, I think . . . ”

  “Not that. Up there.” TJ went up to the evidence board, pointing a finger at the blow-up of the last rhyme. “‘So far so good, but you’re still in the wood. The Arcadian Deer is next; where is in this text.’ That’s a mistake.”

  “What?” Michaelson jumped up after him.

  “Right there.” TJ pointed to the word Arcadian. “It’s not the Arcadian Deer, it’s the Ceryneian Deer.”

  It was staring me right in the face and . . . oh my God. I ran up to join them; now all of us were clustered around the evidence board. It was just words to them, but not to me. Not to TJ.

  “He’s right. I completely missed it. The Third Labor is to capture the Ceryneian Deer. Not Arcadia. Ceryneia was in Greece. Why would he . . . ”

  Mizell got to it first. “Wow. He’s playing hardball. This is no mistake. He’s telling you, ‘Think you’re so fucking smart? Then catch my mistake, which is no mistake at all. Which is deliberate.’” Now she was picking at other phrases in the poem. “‘You had the body, I had the brains.’ He’s daring you again. ‘I’m smarter than you. Figure it out.’”

  “So where are you supposed to go now?” That was Michaelson. “Greece? Everything’s been local so far. The lion, the hydra . . . ”

  Fuck. I had it. “Arcadia. That’s what they called that old ski resort on the way to Pittsfield. I used to go there with Patti.”

  Mizell started taking command. “Get me a map. That’s Route 248.”

  It was all making horrible, sick sense. I forced myself to keep reading aloud. “‘Start running numbers, or else she slumbers.’ Run the numbers together.” The kidnapper hadn’t missed anything; the riddle kept on going. Nothing wasted, nothing just for show. “Two forty-eight. Route 248. Two days. Forty-eight hours. That’s where I’m supposed to capture the deer. That old ski resort. Arcadia.”

  Mizell looked at me, desperate. I could smell it on her, just like I could smell TJ. She thought I didn’t see her look up at the clock on the wall, but I did. The countdown. I did the math too. Nine and a half hours gone, since the kidnapper gave me his ultimatum.

  “What about me?” TJ said, as we got ready to leave. The sniveling, the tears, the snot. Rubbing it in his hair as he took off his glasses and wiped his face. “I’ll die if anything happens to Skip.”

  “It already has,” I said, pushing my way past him, the last to leave. I never wanted to see him again.

  I never wanted to hear another rhyme or read Latin again either, but I had to, if I wanted to find Skip. And now, this was the last thing I had to go on, the only thing in my head anymore:

  If all’s not done in forty-eight hours,

  You’ll next see Skip pushing up flowers.

  If a mere two days seems unduly cold,

  It’s what you had to win the gold.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “Once upon a time, my dear Skip, I came to see my birth. After my birth. My . . . afterbirth.”

  “What do you mean?” Skip asked, too caught up in how bizarre his story was to stop herself. She didn’t want to know, but she had to. “How can you see your own birth? You mean, like a home movie?”

  “No, not with a camera. With my . . . imagination. Or memory. Take your pick. It’s quite a riveting story, actually,” her kidnapper continued, his voice warmed up now and relaxed, from whatever was in the syringe.

  Skip had teachers like him, teachers she didn’t like, who liked to hear themselves talk, and didn’t like to be interrupted. They talked at you, but you could tell, from where they were looking, that they didn’t even see you anymore; they were telling stories they’d already told a thousand times before. But with her kidnapper, it sounded like he was starving to get the words out.

  “Roberta DeGuilio was her name. A professional ‘rebirther,’ to guide you through remembering how you came into the world. Rebirthing. Quite the fashionable thing to do, back in the day, in some circles . . . my circles.

  “You could say I was on a . . . journey, a spiritual path. To find out . . . what had gone wrong. Whose fault it was. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. That makes me sound so . . . angry. And I don’t think I was. Not all the time. Angry. That only came later. Well, it actually came that day, at Roberta’s apartment.”

  Just twenty-five minutes away from the Canaan campus, it was a different worl
d, I thought, desperate and derelict. Forty thousand bucks a year to go to Canaan, with its Gothic stone buildings and perfect lawns, and this is what you saw, on your way out of town: a racetrack, for greyhounds. Strip bars, already full by mid-afternoon. Gun shops. Rows of “For Rent” or “For Sale” signs, scrawled across windows in whitewash paint. Houses that were almost leaning, that had seen their last good coats of paint years ago. New England winters up in the mountains ate up paint, turning everything gray and chapped. No wonder the Arcadia ski lodge had closed up. The snow was too erratic to attract tourists who wanted to ski, and they sure as hell didn’t want to drive through Hoovervilles on their way to do it, in their fancy North Face parkas. A road trip I’d made dozens of times before, but somehow, seeing it from the back of a cop car—thinking my daughter might be out there somewhere—it felt like I’d never seen it before.

  It felt like it had never been this ugly or foreboding. This scary.

  Mizell drove in the front seat, with one of the FBI guys next to her; I was in the back, with the other one. A mesh grill was in front of us; doors with no indoor handles on either side. I felt like the criminal.

  On our way out, we’d made a pit stop at the hospital, to check in on Wendy. In the chaos of the last few days, she’d had to make do with just phone calls from me. But even that stop I felt guilty about: it wasn’t just to see her, to find out when she was getting home, but to have her call the zoo so I could pick up something there. A weapon I was going to need, in Arcadia.

  That had been our second pit stop.

  “Take a right here.” I remembered it from when I had come a few times with Patti; the turn off Route 248 up into the mountains, marked with a homemade cross, two boards nailed together and hammered into the ground as a makeshift memorial, where a car had gone off the side of the road and crashed into a tree. Someone’s name was written on the cross in Magic Marker, a fraying ribbon wrapped around the tree trunk, but the ribbon was so faded it was impossible to tell whose name, or what color the ribbon had originally been. Yellow, pink?

  It had been fresh, the last time I’d come with Patti.

  The ribbon was almost white now, the same as the sad plastic flowers that were stuck in the ground around the cross.

  We came to another turnoff, onto an even smaller dirt road. A barrier gate guarded the way, but a fallen-down, splintering sign told us we were at the right place: “Arcadia Ski Resort: Where Winter Is Fun.”

  “I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and I walked. Better than now. Canes, instead of crutches. I still had some balance. I was never whole—don’t get me wrong—but at least I just needed two canes to . . . amble along. At a gait. Wait, is that something . . . fast?”

  Skip had gone through her horse period. She knew. “It’s slow, like a canter. Sort of . . . loping.”

  “Then what do you call it when a horse tries to walk on broken legs? When you need to . . . put it down? Maybe that’s a more accurate description. I moved like a . . . Slinky. Do you play with those anymore? That thing you can . . . push down stairs? And it still survives?”

  “I had one. When I was little.”

  “Good. Then I’ve painted a . . . portrait. Something you can visualize.” He took a deep breath.

  “So. Roberta. Middle-aged, graying at the temples, she greeted me in her slippers and housecoat. A rose pattern, if memory serves. She navigated me down her tiny hallway into her apartment: a narrow little passageway, much like a birth canal. She had set the scene well, whether she knew it or not. Either side crowded with shelves and books and coats hanging on the wall. But I did it. I made my way through, without knocking anything over. I was so proud of myself!”

  His hands working the wheels, he moved his chair closer to Skip.

  “Roberta got in her Barcalounger, then instructed me to lie on the floor . . . and breathe. That’s all. Just breathe. The lying down part was easy. I was used to being on the ground, from falling so much, or being pushed. But the breathing . . . all I had to do was breathe! In. Out. Fast. Slow. However she directed me. And I thought, if ever there’s a job I could do, that was it. Just breathe! Who needs a college degree for that?”

  Even if Skip couldn’t see him, she could almost hear the expression on his face. For once, he wasn’t being sarcastic. Or ironic—Skip thought that was the word, that she’d heard adults use a lot. He sounded . . . in awe.

  “Roberta must have been very skilled, because I did begin to . . . just breathe. And even more, I began to see my birth. My . . . pre-birth. In the womb. That place where I hid from the world, before it was time to make my . . . grand appearance.”

  A quarter of a mile into the woods, and for some reason, I was thinking about seeing Bambi as a kid—that line somebody in it says, “Man is in the forest, man is in the forest.”

  I said it now, to try and break the spell of gloom, to send out a warning. “Man is in the forest.” But which one? Him, or me?

  “You say something?” Michaelson asked.

  “Nothing important.”

  The trees were mostly bare up here. Peeling silver birches, and maples, but after that brilliant burst of color is gone, and all that’s left is brown. The color was leeched out of everything; a sort of gray fog hung in the air. The whole mountain seemed like a cemetery—not just of trees, but machinery. I was following the path Patti and I used to take to the ski lift, and everything I saw was a reminder of what used to be, when “Arcadia” was in full swing: giant rusted poles and ski lift cable wheels littered the ground. Gondolas teetered in the air, covered with graffiti from some kids who risked climbing up there somehow, to tag them.

  Mizell dropped back, alongside the FBI guys: near enough to get to me if something happened, far enough to stay somewhat hidden. It was me the kidnapper wanted, me who was supposed to complete the task. I heard the crunch crunch crunch all three of them made in unison, stomping through the leaves.

  And then—something else. I held my arm up to halt them . . .

  . . . a skittering sound. Something that didn’t belong in the woods. Not nature, and not natural. Like high-heels clacking on a concrete floor, but fast. The sound seemed to echo around us, and then a different sound joined it: thwacking. Something strong but hollow—tubes, maybe?—hitting each other. It went on for a while, then stopped. Then the other sound started again—somebody running across a slick floor?

  It was coming from the old chair lift platform ahead of us, thirty, forty yards up the hill. It was a narrow enclosure, like a faux-Swiss railway station picked up on lifts. I remembered Patti and me riding up the chair lift to it, our skis dangling in mid-air. Even from this distance, I could see that the big double wooden doors in front were padlocked, through holes where their doorknobs used to be; the heavy metal chain picked up the little bit of sun that was peeking through the gloom.

  Now everything was silent. Was I wrong? Maybe the sound was coming from somewhere else, and the echo just made it seem like . . .

  No.

  Something ferocious—something terrified—was banging against those doors now, a battering ram pushing them out a few inches, as far as the straining chain would allow.

  Something was attacking, from inside.

  And it could only be one thing: the hind I was supposed to find. Labor number three.

  “It was like a ballet; an amniotic ballet, but something else. A battle, in Mother’s belly. I moved in that warm bath of blood and fluid that had been my home, and thought, don’t make me go, don’t make me leave, something’s not right!

  “I was squeezed out anyway, through that narrow birth canal. And . . . well, what ya see is what ya get. Or you will, soon enough. A perfect storm of birth defects, caused by an umbilical cord being wrapped around my neck. The oxygen cut off, for a few vital seconds. A brain that worked, but a body that . . . didn’t. And I relived it all.

  “I looked into Roberta’s eyes, and she looked into mine. I had seen my birth. I knew my truth. Even she was a bit misty-eyed. Our work together was fi
nished. Roberta, God bless her soul—and I do mean that—asked what I had seen—this is the important part, Skip, so listen carefully—and told me that what I ‘saw’ might not represent my real birth. It might just be a metaphor. Have you studied ‘metaphor’ at school?”

  “We haven’t, but . . . I know . . . I read a lot on my own . . . ”

  “Well, this was no metaphor. I knew what I saw. Pushed out, too early. A cord around my neck, like a noose. I gave Roberta my hard-earned one hundred dollars. As my hand touched hers, transferring the money, she said, and I’ll remember these words until the day I die, she said, ‘I hope this brings you peace.’”

  “I assured her that it would, as I tried to stand on my own, pulling myself up onto my canes. But I was wrong about one thing. Our work together wasn’t yet finished.”

  Up on the ski lodge platform, all of the windows were boarded up. Shutters with Alps-like cut-outs on them were shut tight, hammered closed against plywood on the inside. I walked around the perimeter of the platform, wood creaking with every step. Up at the top of the hill like this, I felt the wind in a way I hadn’t down below; the upside-down metal Ts that used to hold the chair lifts were like a wind chime, writ large. Still attached to the sagging cable and clanging in to each other, thudding.

  Even with a wall between us, I could hear the thing inside keeping in step with me, as I made my way around to the back of the building. One window there was still open, almost waiting. Inviting me in, just like the basement door in the science building, which led to the hydras.

  And that’s where I saw it. A four-point buck, its antlers literally shining gold with glitter, banging its head against the walls, pawing at the floor. The poor creature had been trapped inside that long lonely room, droppings of excrement all over the floor.

  The first thing I thought—how did the kidnapper get the poor thing up here? It would have been kicking with everything it had, unless he had doped it first. Put it to sleep, to awaken later. Left for me.