Cyanide Wells

by Marcia Muller

  Something unexpected there. An odor. She sniffed, recognized it as bacon. An aroma she encountered frequently in her own kitchen on Saturdays and Sundays. One of the household bonds was a love of bacon, the crisper the better.

  She moved slowly into the room, taking in small details. Stove: clean, but some streaks showing where it had recently been wiped. Scattering of crumbs on the edge of the pullout breadboard. Purple smudge on the handle of the double sink’s faucet. She touched it, smelled her fingers. Blueberry jam.

  Ard was a neat freak in her office, but seldom in the kitchen.

  Carly went to the refrigerator and looked inside. Only a box of baking soda. But in the adjoining laundry room she found a damp and stained dishtowel inside the hamper.

  She started upstairs to the bedrooms. Stopped, remembering what she’d found there the last time, then steeled herself and went on.

  Guest rooms, three of them. Those who came to dinner parties here at the end of the long, winding road preferred to stay over, and Ronnie and Deke had provided accommodations. The first room showed no signs of occupancy; in the second the blinds on the two windows were closed in different directions—a mistake the realty people wouldn’t have made. And in the third the comforter on the bed hung lopsided—exactly as the one on Nat’s bed at home always did.

  Carly didn’t have the heart to search further. It was clear that Ard and Natalie had stayed here last night. Slept in a place where Ard knew no one would ever look for them, while Carly agonized and spent the night trying to find clues to their whereabouts.

  They’d gotten up this morning, and Ard had prepared their traditional Saturday breakfast: orange juice, bacon, eggs over easy, toast with blueberry jam from a mail-order house in Montana. Had Nat asked why they were staying at Uncle Ronnie and Uncle Deke’s house? Asked why Carly wasn’t with them? How had Ard explained that?

  And how had she summoned the courage to spend the night in this place where their friends were brutally murdered? Or had she visited here many times without Carly’s knowledge?

  Her breath came ragged and fast; then black spots danced across her field of vision. As dizziness overcame her, she sank to the floor, pressed her face into the comforter.

  After a few moments her physical reactions subsided, but her emotions swung wildly—from rage to despair to rage and back to despair. She pounded the mattress with her fists, twisted the comforter with vicious fingers, and finally wept.

  Why, Ard? Why?

  It was after seven when she left the house. Pink and gold streaks lingered in the sky over the coastal ridgeline, but shadows enveloped the valley, and to the east the foothills were dark. The temperature had dropped sharply, and a chill was on the air, along with the scent of damp earth and growing things…

  Movement in the underbrush—slow, stealthy.

  She stopped, listening.

  “Who’s there?”

  No reply.

  “Who’s there?”

  Nothing.

  She must’ve imagined it. Probably had caught Ard’s paranoia. Feeling foolish, she ran for the truck.

  Once inside she turned on the dome light and twisted the rearview mirror so she could see her face. It was blotchy, her eyes red and swollen. She looked, in short, like shit. But her emotional fit—something she hadn’t permitted herself in years—had proved cathartic: She was in control once more and hungry as a wolf.

  At home she fixed a huge sandwich from a leftover roasted chicken, took it and a glass of Fume blanc to the table by the windows, shutting the blinds before sitting down. She ate the sandwich, drank the wine, went back to the fridge for potato salad and more wine. She was back again, in hot pursuit of ice cream, when the blinking light on the answering machine caught her attention.

  Lindstrom: “Carly, I talked with Sam, and now you and I need to talk.” He gave a number.

  Mayor Garson Payne: “Have you given any more thought to what we were discussing the other day? Call me. You have my numbers.”

  Arts reporter Vera Craig: “Hey, honey. You looked kinda peaked when you and Johnny Crowe rushed in and out this afternoon. Need some of Aunt Vera’s TLC?”

  Sev Quill: “Hi, boss woman. What’s happening with Crowe, a.k.a., well, you know? I’ll be home till six, not back till morning, if I get lucky. Redheaded tourist, and she’s just fascinated with newspaper reporters.”

  She listened to Matt’s message again, then dialed the number he’d left. The phone rang ten times—no answer, no machine. The mayor’s message she deleted; she was not open to further discussion with him—now or ever. Vera’s message she’d ignore; if the big-hearted woman caught the slightest hint of something gone amiss, she’d be over in a flash to smother her with affection and eventually glean all the details. Sev, of course, was now busy charming the redheaded tourist.

  She went to her home office and—after stepping over a stack of environmental-impact reports, a paint-stained sweatshirt, three pair of athletic shoes, and an unabridged dictionary that Nat had been perusing last week—logged on to lii.org, a site created by librarians, which listed other sites to go to for a wide variety of reliable information. An hour later she had amassed a considerable amount of printout on Wells Mining and Denver Precious Metals, none of which appeared to be relevant to anything but the dim past.

  CR-92 continued to baffle her. A county road she’d never heard of, perhaps? She hurried through the still night to her truck, consulted her local map. No numbered roads; Soledad County preferred more colorful appellations. A road in another county? Another state? A search would take hours, maybe days.

  She returned to the house, consulted the list. Moratorium 10/00 puzzled her as much as CR-92.

  Noah Estes? A glance through the phone book showed plenty of Esteses in the county, but no Noahs. This was something on which she could turn loose her best researcher of local matters, Donna Vail, but it was now close to eleven, so that call would have to wait till morning.

  Again she went to lii.org and scrolled through the categories listed there. A few that she hadn’t yet tried seemed relevant to her search, so she clicked on them and visited a couple of sites, then followed links to other sites. And as she did, a feeling stole over her…

  She sat up straighter, listening. Nothing but a tree branch tapping against the house’s wall. She glanced at the window, saw only her own reflection. Her face bore the expression of a deer caught in the glare of oncoming headlights.

  Imagining a watcher again, McGuire? You’re getting as bad as Ard.

  She turned back to the computer, clicked on yet another link, but the feeling persisted. Finally she left the office, went to the darkened bedroom, and peered out at the fringe of oak trees at the meadow’s edge. Motion there, but it could merely have been caused by the wind or an animal. Raccoons, deer, opossum, even kit foxes coexisted with humans here in the country.

  She went back to her office and drew the curtains, then sat, propping her feet on a broken-down desk chair she’d been meaning to get rid of for more than a year now, and contemplated the framed movie poster on the opposite wall. The Last Picture Show, a film based on a novel that had had a profound effect on her as a teenager. Larry McMurtry’s vivid portrait of life in a poor, windswept West Texas town mirrored the emotional poverty of her youth and had elevated that condition to the universal. She’d taken comfort in the story’s bleakness, because after reading it she no longer felt so alone.

  Loneliness had been the hallmark of her childhood. When her brother, Alan, was nine and she five, their father, a successful insurance agent, had accepted an executive position with his company’s home office in Cleveland and moved the family north from a small town in Georgia. While their new home in suburban Ellenburg was lovely and the neighbors hospitable, their mother refused to adapt and instead turned to the tenets of the fundamentalist church in which she was raised—a faith so out of the mainstream that even the most conservative of Christian sects viewed it with skepticism. While Stanley McGuire’s job took hi
m farther and farther afield, his wife, Mona, attempted to keep the outside world at bay; her restrictions on Alan and Carly quickly isolated them from the community, made them freaks in the eyes of their schoolmates. Even the well-meaning teachers who asked Mona to come in to discuss the children’s poor socialization eventually gave up in the face of her refusals.

  Alan was four years older and soon figured out how to circumvent his mother’s strictures, but Carly was at her mercy. She couldn’t understand why she had to return home for lunch rather than eat in the school cafeteria. She was repeatedly disappointed when her mother refused to sign permission slips for field trips. There were no after-school sports for her, no extracurricular activities; no sleepovers, birthday parties, ballet lessons, or trips to the mall. In sixth grade, when her mother tore up the permission slip for a class trip she desperately wanted to make, she complained to her father. The bitter quarrel that ensued between her parents made her vow never to do so again, but even without complaints on her part, the dissension between Stanley and Mona escalated.

  A few days before she was to start junior high school, Alan sat her down and taught her his mantra: “Everything ends. Everything ends. When things get really bad, like when they’re screaming and throwing stuff at each other, you say it over and over. But when he’s gone and Mom’s not looking, you slip and slide.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Say you want to go to the mall with some of the kids—”

  “Nobody wants me along.”

  “That’ll change, once you’re in junior high—if you stop being Mama’s baby girl. The other kids’ll like you if they think you’re getting away with something.”

  “So how do I do that?”

  “Okay, Mom has her rule about being home fifteen minutes after school lets out. But you tell her, ‘Mrs. Smith asked me to stay to help her set up a display. Nobody else got picked, just me. Can I?’ ”

  “She’ll say no.”

  “Uh-uh. She’ll think it’s an honor, so she’ll say yes.”

  “What if she calls the teacher to check up?”

  “She won’t. Here’s the key to Mom: She’s afraid of people, especially people like teachers, who she thinks are better than her. Why d’you think she’s never gone to PTA or Parents’ Night?”

  “Mom, afraid?”

  “She’s one of the most afraid people I know.”

  Carly thought about that for a moment. “Your science project, the one you have to work on after school in the chemistry lab, it isn’t for real?”

  “Nope. Same with the math study group on Saturday mornings.”

  A new world was opening up before Carly’s eyes.

  Alan added, “When you start high school and want to slip out at night, I’ll show you my escape route.”

  “You go out at night, and Mom hasn’t caught you?”

  “Not once.”

  “But what if she checks your room?”

  “I’m good at bunching up pillows under the covers to make them look like me. I can show you how to do that, too.”

  “But she might come in, to straighten the covers or kiss you good night.”

  “When was the last time she did that to you?”

  “…When I was really little.”

  “Here’s another thing you should know about Mom, Carly: She liked us when we were little kids, but she doesn’t like us now that we’re growing up and turning into real people. That makes us just another thing in her life that she can’t control. Trust me, she won’t ever come into your room.”

  All of a sudden Alan sounded angry. Carly asked, “D’you hate her?”

  He shook his head. “No. She’s my mom, and I love her, and I suppose in her weird way she loves me. If I hate anybody, it’s Dad, for not standing up to her. I don’t feel good about the stuff I’m doing, but I’ve got to have a halfway normal life, and so do you.”

  Alan had placed a gently worded farewell note on the kitchen table and left home the day he turned eighteen. He attended college at Cornell University, took a job with an accounting firm, married, and had a child. He had created a completely normal life for himself, until it was abruptly cut off on that icy road.

  Carly, on the other hand, had left home under far more dramatic circumstances and had never striven toward normalcy—at least not of the sort Alan achieved. Her definition of normalcy was self-acceptance, satisfying work, and love—and for a while she believed she’d found all three.

  That belief had been an illusion, of course, but sometimes our illusions sustain us.

  What, she wondered, was going to sustain her now?

  Sunday, May 12, 2002

  Not one of us…not one of us…not one of us…

  Carly jerked upright in bed, hands gripping the edge of the comforter. She was sweating, her heart pounding. Someone moved close by in the darkness—

  And thumped on the bed. A voice said, “Ur? Ur?”

  “Oh my God, Gracie!” She fumbled for the switch on the lamp. She and the little white cat squinted at each other in the sudden glare. Carly gathered the animal in her arms, lay back against the pillows. Gracie resisted at first but quickly settled down.

  Cats were such habitual creatures, sensitive to every change in their daily routine, and Gracie’s had been altered big-time. She usually slept with Natalie, but Nat had been gone two nights, and by now the cat had also noticed Ard’s absence. Her questioning sounds amounted to “Where are my people, and will you go away and leave me, too?”

  Carly stroked Gracie absently, still in the grip of the dream. Dammit, why was she having it again, after all these years? She’d thought last night’s appearance an anomaly, but apparently it was not.

  Unlike many of her dreams, this one required little interpretation; it was a symbolic reenactment of the most humiliating experience of her life—one that had caused her to sever her ties to Ellenberg, Ohio, forever.

  As her brother, Alan, had predicted, once Carly devised ways to circumvent her mother’s restrictions, she attracted a circle of friends, and in high school hung with a wild crowd who gathered late at night to drink beer and smoke grass at a secluded spot by the Chagrin River. She had a reputation as clever and crazy, a girl who’d try anything. Wily C. McGuire, her crowd called her. Other, more elite cliques were not so kind; they called her a slut.

  By now Carly was used to being different, so she ignored their taunts and did her best to live up to the reputation; if they were going to call her a slut, she’d be the best the town had ever known. But a series of less-than-successful heterosexual experiences undermined her confidence and finally forced her to face what it was that really set her apart from the others.

  It was 1976. The sexual revolution had transformed American society; gays and lesbians were openly holding hands on the streets of the cities—but not in Ellenberg, Ohio. There, homosexuality was usually the subject of smutty jokes, and teachers of the high school’s euphemistically titled Practical Living Course branded it an aberration that could and should be cured by counseling. Carly kept her secret, withdrew from her friends, and developed a case of depression so severe that her homeroom teacher insisted she talk with the school district’s staff psychologist.

  Victoria Sherwood was a wise woman who quickly intuited Carly’s problem; through their sessions she enabled her to accept her sexual orientation, while cautioning her against coming out while she was still living in Ellenberg. Given Carly’s family situation and the conservative views of the community, Ms. Sherwood felt such a move would prove disastrous. Instead she put Carly in touch with a support group, and before Mona McGuire put a stop to that and all other forms of counseling, Carly had met her first female lover, a woman from a nearby town, Dierdre Paul. Soon she was slipping out at night to meet Dierdre, and though they tried to be discreet, eventually a classmate of Carly’s spotted them together and figured out the nature of the relationship.

  As the rumors began to circulate, the situation turned ugly. The veiled glances and sudden s
ilences as she passed groups in the hallways were nothing new; they’d started long ago and increased along with her bad reputation. But graffiti in the women’s lounge—McGuire is a lesbo—was harder to take, and a note stuffed inside her locker—We know what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with—brought on a panic attack. The boys who considered themselves studs set up a betting pool to see who could score first with “the dyke,” and reacted angrily when she rebuffed them; the girls who had been catty before were now downright cruel. Some of her friends stood by her, but passively, never directly confronting her tormentors, and the school’s faculty looked the other way.

  Victoria Sherwood had by then transferred to a district in another part of the state, and Carly had no way of getting hold of her. She called Alan several times, thinking to confide in him, but found she didn’t have the nerve. Finally she broke off the relationship with Dierdre, sank once more into depression, and went back to hanging with her old crowd. But nothing was the same; even with them she felt like an outsider.

  When Eric Baer, a popular member of the student council who had always treated her kindly, asked her to their senior prom at the last minute, she saw accepting the invitation as a way to lay the rumors to rest. And it was important that they die, because, much to her disappointment, she would be forced to stay in Ellenberg for another four years; her mother had decreed that the family would pay for her college education only if she attended Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland and lived at home. The week before the prom Mona was in Georgia, caring for her ailing mother, and Stanley was easily persuaded to allow Carly to go on the date—factors she mistakenly took as good omens.

  The evening began well enough, with dinner at a pricey restaurant with two other couples, and a limo to ferry them to the country club where the prom was being held. She was a good dancer and actually enjoyed herself. When the band took a break, she and Eric went with a number of couples onto the golf course, where they shared wine and joints; as she laughed along with the others at their own wickedness, she felt they accepted her. The remainder of the evening might present problems, given the way Eric was already pawing her, but as she sailed along on a grass-and-alcohol high, Carly felt confident she could handle him.