Rafer laughed. “Thomas is the son of wife number one. She's wife number three. She doesn't care about her stepson. She wants her lake paradise back.”
“And how do you know this?”
Rafer gestured to the island with his beer bottle. “You think the folks over there wash dishes? Or change bedding? Or vacuum the rugs? The hell they do. They hire some gals from Milton, and when they're working, they're invisible. So they see and hear things. And that's what they see and hear.”
“Thanks for the good news,” Zach said.
Rafer eyed him over his beer bottle. “How long can you do this?”
“Until the ice comes,” he said. “Or he breaks.”
“Might be a long time.”
“For Carol, I don't care.”
* * * *
He read a lot more, swam around the boat, and got better ear protection as the summer went on. At night sometimes, in his dreams, Carol would come to him. It wasn't spooky or strange or upsetting . . . it was reassuring. She would just be there, in little snippets of time, of memory, and no matter the weather, the hot sun, the driving rain, the taunts from the other boaters, he would always wake up, knowing he was doing right.
And one night, she saved him.
* * * *
The dream was like before, of Carol in their living room, doing her homework and looking up and smiling, and he woke up smiling too, and then raised his head. Something was wrong. The music was off, but there was . . . a hissing noise. Gurgling. Bubbling. Was the boat sinking? His first impulse was to stand up and turn on the lights, but no . . . take it easy. He rolled off one of the long padded seats and got on the carpeted floor. He moved to the bow, raised his head. A nearly full moon was up, illuminating the lake. There. A disturbance in the water.
He found the boat hook. He stood up, thrust the long hook into the water, twisted it about, felt it snag something. He yanked up with both hands, and a man broke the surface, wearing a wetsuit, mask, and air tank. He tugged and tugged, until a hose snapped free, releasing a burst of air. The man flopped on his side and started swimming away. Zach felt like grabbing at him again with the boat hook, or getting the shotgun, or cutting the anchor line free and starting up the motor and running him down.
He took a breath. Flicked on the lights. Turned on the sound system again, and Celine Dion woke up the cove.
* * * *
As August came to an end, Rafer came by for another visit, motoring up in a small aluminum skiff. There were no bags of groceries, no bottles of beer, nothing save a newspaper, The Milton Transcript. Rafer silently passed the newspaper over and Zach read the front-page story, of a cottage along the shore and a business in town that had suddenly and mysteriously burnt to the ground. Zach gave him the newspaper back.
“Guess someone's playing for keeps,” Zach said.
“I'd say you're right about that.”
Zach said, “And so am I.”
* * * *
The week before the long Labor Day weekend, Zach took some time off. Sleeping at a motel, relaxing, and resting up. And when the weekend came, with boats visiting the island, two helicopters coming by, he kept it up, playing the music, the other sounds—he now included speeches from presidents, from Carter to Reagan to Bush, father and son—and keeping the lights on, all night long. People on the island kept watch on him, and with his binoculars, he saw Malcolm Preston twice on the front deck. And both times, a young woman was next to him, yelling at him, poking at his shoulder.
Then the summer was over, and autumn began.
* * * *
On a crisp fall morning, the door to one of the boathouses slid up, and the Chris-Craft came out, clumsily piloted by Malcolm Preston. Zach turned down some Mozart. Preston came up to the pontoon boat, his face red, and after about ten minutes of threats and obscenities, Zach said, “Is that it?”
Preston seemed to take a deep breath and said, “You think you've won? Do you? Do you think you've won?”
Zach said, “I'm still here, so I'd say I'm winning.”
“You . . . peasant. That's what you are. A peasant. You think I'm going to let this go? Do you?” Another torrent of obscenities, and when there was a pause, Preston said, “Well?”
Zach reached over to the volume knob. “Give my best to your wife, will you?”
* * * *
A week later, he gassed up at the marina and bought that day's newspaper. As the boat was fueled, he leafed through the pages, until something caught his eye. He read the story three more times, and then went back to the island. And there on the side lawn was a metal sign from a local realtor. FOR SALE.
He turned the boat around and went to one of the empty docks, and expertly moored the boat. He spent awhile walking around the empty grounds, knowing this place was now his daughter's island. Zach then stretched out on the soft grass and fell asleep.
* * * *
The sound of an approaching motor woke him up. He got up and went down to the dock, and Rafer was there. Rafer moored his skiff and came up, grinning. “Got here as quick as I could.”
“Good to see you.”
Zach stood on the dock with his friend, looking about the hardwood trees in the distance, their leaves finally changing color. It was a pretty sight.
Rafer said, “You won.”
“Maybe so,” he said.
Rafer said, “What the hell do you mean by that?”
Zach passed over the newspaper he had just bought at the marina. Rafer looked it over and then read out loud, “ ‘Mr. Preston said that he expects his island home to sell soon, and he plans to use the proceeds to assist in the building of a new home in Aspen.'”
Rafer lowered the newspaper. Zach turned to him and for the first time in a very long time, smiled.
“You know, I've never been to Colorado,” Zach said.
Copyright © 2012 by Brendan DuBois
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Fiction: DEATH IN THE TIME MACHINE
by Barbara Nadel
-Barbara Nadel's stories for EQMM cover a lot of ground, geographically, in subject matter, and in time. She is best known for her Silver Dagger Award-winning series about Istanbul policeman cetin Ikmen, which is thirteen novels strong and includes a 2008 story for EQMM. Her current story for us spans the period from World War I through the latter part of the 20th century; something this winner of an award from Jury Magazine for historical fiction handles easily. Readers won't want to miss her latest Ikmen novel, Dead of Night.
My grandfather said he found the body in the backyard on the Wednesday night when he went to the outside toilet. It was by the fence in the old pen where the chickens used to live. But because my grandparents didn't have a telephone, my father didn't get to know about it until he went round with their shopping the following Saturday. My grandparents never went out.
This all happened over forty years ago, but I can still remember that day very well. We drove over in Dad's latest acquisition from his dodgy brother-in-law, Brian, a 1950 Vauxhall Victor. Grandma and Granddad lived almost opposite Upton Park, West Ham United's home ground. So the streets were full of football fans all dressed in the teams’ colours of claret and blue. We'd picked up the shopping at the grocers near our own house in East Ham and just had to stop at a hardware shop on the Barking Road to pick up some gas mantles. Although this was 1967, my grandparents, unlike most people even in the impoverished East End of London, didn't have electricity. Year after year they hung on to the gas lamps that had been in their house on Green Street since they'd first moved in back in the nineteen aughts. Every so often these lamps needed the mantles, the bit that contains the gas and converts it into an incandescent light, replaced. And so we stopped at the one hardware shop that still sold the things, bought the mantles, and then, inevitably, my father's car broke down.
I was only six years old and short for my age but I had to drag my share of bags down the Barking Road, into Green Street, and up my grandparents’ garden path. My f
ather, furious about “bloody Brian and his bleeding old wrecks,” carried everything else, a limp roll-up cigarette hanging from his lips as he muttered his anger. When we got to the house, which was a battered Edwardian terrace with an overgrown front garden, Dad was further infuriated by the fact that someone had broken the door knocker. “Sodding hell!” he exploded. And then he looked up at the window that was above the door and yelled out, “Mo! Mo, you up there? Get down here and open this door, for Christ's sake!”
Grandma and Granddad didn't rent the whole house. They'd always been too poor for that. They lived downstairs while upstairs was occupied by a man with a wooden leg called Mo. Unlike my grandparents, Mo did go out from time to time and it was nearly always he who answered the door. But Mo liked a drink and sometimes he would range about his flat in a drunken stupor, falling over and breaking things. When he left the building he could get into fights; he'd broken parts of the front door down in the past and the poor old knocker was always fair game. Eventually Mo, red-eyed and, as he put it, “as stiff as a board” with arthritis, came down the stairs and opened up.
My grandfather was in the hall with a shovel in his hand. The coal cellar was underneath the stairs and he'd left what they called the parlour to go and get some coal.
“Hello,” he said. “Cold out, is it?”
My father ignored him and said, “Car's buggered. Me and kiddo had to walk from the hardware shop.”
Granddad began to shovel coal, when Mo, halfway up the stairs, called down, “Here, George, tell them about the murder.”
“The murder?”
My father's already white face blanched. My grandfather looked away.
“Some bloke. In the backyard,” Mo said to my father. “Your dad found him. Dead.”
Whether my grandfather would ever have told my father about the body in the yard had Mo not said what he did is something I still ponder occasionally, even now. From what I remember of that day and others that later proved significant afterwards, I think that he probably wouldn't.
All he said as he shovelled coal was, “Your mother didn't want you bothered with it.”
“Bothered with it!”
Dad went out of the hall, into the parlour and through to the scullery where my grandmother was washing up dishes. I followed, fascinated, as I always was, by the way in which the passage from the dingy hall into the darkness of the parlour plunged one into a world of browns and blacks. No outside sounds of football revelry or chatter of local shoppers entered here. Only the crackle of coal as it burnt inside the range, the hiss of the gas lamps, and, sometimes, the whistle of steam as it escaped from the big metal kettle.
My father talked to a small, thin woman in a long black dress. My grandmother was in her late seventies then, the same sort of age that my own mother, who favours jeans and T-shirts, is now. I had only once seen my grandmother's hair not piled up on top of her head. One morning we turned up early and she had just got out of bed. Her hair, which was as grey as an afternoon in November, reached all the way down to her feet. But this time it was in a bun and, as usual, held up with pins made of silver and onyx and jet. She spoke to my father in low, angry tones, the long silver chains around her neck and wrists jangling as she did so.
I was looking at the many framed photographs of my ancestors that sat on the mantelpiece above the range when my grandfather came in and said, “You all right, are you, my love?”
One of the photos had been laid down on its face. I said, “Granddad, one of the pictures is down.”
He looked up and frowned. My grandfather was a big man. Tall and broad and completely different in build from my skinny father. A dock worker by trade, he was also a veteran of the First World War, a conflict that I knew even then haunted him always. He opened the door of the range and threw the coal on with the shovel. He stood up with difficulty and then looked at the mantelpiece and said, “Your grandmother was cleaning. It must've fallen down.” He ruffled my long, mousy hair with his coaly fingers and then stood the picture up again. I knew it well. It was a portrait of his brother, Harold. He had died long, long ago during a battle called the Battle of Mons. Uncle Harold had been my grandfather's only male sibling and his memory was sacred not just because of who he had been but also because he had died so young and in service to his country. This portrait, of a young, thin, and unsmiling man who was really little more than a boy, sat alongside others depicting my grandfather's many sisters, his parents, and my grandmother's mother and her three brothers, David, John, and Patrick. In between all of these photographs were scattered plaster images of the Virgin Mary, the suffering Christ, and the saints. This proximity to the divine told us all, had we not already known it, that everyone depicted had sadly passed away.
I sat down to wait for the cup of tea and plate of bread and jam that always accompanied any visit to the grandparents’ house. My grandfather put the kettle on the range and then, although I do remember wanting to ask him about what Mo had said about the dead body in the yard, I know that I didn't do so. My father and grandmother went out into the yard, which was not what usually happened, because neither of them had gone out there to go to the toilet. My grandfather just smiled and I asked if I could please play with my Box of Things. The Box of Things was in fact an old carpetbag. It contained all sorts of “treasures” that were played with by my grandparents’ many grandchildren. We all loved it. There were wooden camels which had once belonged to my Great Uncle Sidney who had been in the army in Palestine, shells from a beach somewhere in the west country, model cats made out of Bakelite, old bits of broken costume jewellery, a tiny New Testament, dolls and small religious statues, and two photograph albums. These two brown, heavily stuffed books were my favourites. Full of small black-and-white photographs, some dating back to the latter part of the nineteenth century. They showed me my forebears in funny clothes and doing things like picking hops in Kent that I had never seen and would never do. Involved in the Box, I recall nothing more from that day except a snatch of conversation between my parents when I got home.
My mother said to my dad, “So do the police know who he is, this man your father found?”
“No,” my dad replied. “No one seems to know anything about him.”
* * * *
The following Saturday my father and I made our usual trip to see my grandparents in West Ham. This time we didn't go in the car because the police had apparently taken it off my father and were currently looking for my Uncle Brian. Although he had promised never, ever to sell or give my father any dodgy goods ever, Uncle Brian just hadn't been able to resist the Vauxhall Victor.
We arrived in the afternoon, which, in November, meant that it was dark, and as we walked into the parlour the gas lamps hissed and hummed in time to the boiling kettle. I smiled at my granddad, who was in his usual position, in his chair by the side of the range. He and my grandmother were not, however, alone. Sitting on the far side of the large dining table that was wedged into the square bay window was a policeman. He looked to be about my dad's age and he was in uniform, his helmet placed before him on the table. The adults began to talk and I remember my grandmother, who was sitting next to the policeman, asked, “So, he doesn't have any family, then? Not come forward to claim his body?”
“No,” the policeman answered. “No, nothing.”
Then I said, “Is this about the man who was murdered in the backyard?”
No one spoke at first. They all looked at me and then it was the policeman who began to smile. “Well,” he said as he bent down in order to speak to me across the table, “what do you know about . . .”
“It was our neighbour, Mo, who said the word ‘murder,’ “ my grandmother said grumpily. “He's a cripple and a drunk, and he dramatises everything. She heard him and picked up on it.”
“Oh, I know old Mo,” the policeman said and then he looked at me again. “The poor man in your gran's yard just died, sweetheart,” he said. “No one killed him.”
“It was his time. God t
ook him,” my grandmother added.
“Sod God,” my grandfather, who had absolutely no time for religion, muttered over by the fire.
“Can I have my Box, please?” I asked then. Kids move on very quickly, and I was already bored by the notion of murder, by God, and by my grandfather's routine blasphemy.
* * * *
My father went and got the Box and when he returned I spread all of the treasures out across the table and then began looking through the photo albums. The adults talked and I clearly remember my grandmother going on about a possible funeral or cremation. Not that that was anything unusual. Funerals and how ornate or religiously observant they were formed frequent topics of her conversation. Of course, what I didn't know then was that all of the ceremonies she spoke about had taken place in the 1950s at the very latest. My grandparents did not, after all, go out.
When I opened up my albums I was sitting beside my father with my grandmother and the policeman sitting across the table opposite. I knew that after a little while my grandmother was watching me more intently than usual, but I just smiled at her and then went back to what I was doing. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever about what I was looking at in the album when my grandmother ripped it and the other book away from me and put them back in the old carpetbag. I do remember that I started to cry but that the look on my grandmother's face was such that I felt compelled to swallow my tears and hold my peace. She looked fierce; she could do that, like an old, old toothless cheetah.
No one asked my grandmother why some of my treasures had been suddenly denied to me. But I do remember my father looking angry and I can recall how he very obviously picked up the carpetbag and then began to flick through the album himself. Sitting next to me, he knew exactly what I had been looking at when my grandmother had ripped the album from my hands. By this time the policeman was getting up to leave and so all of us got up from the table and bade him very politely goodbye. Once he had gone, my grandfather, who was about as good with authority as he was with God, muttered, “Fascist!” and then promptly went to sleep in his chair.
EQMM, July 2012 Page 3
