Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  I closed my eyes for a minute, but they flew back open a second later.

  Mary. Des was going to tell Mary about Colin, and Mary was looking at the records. I could find Mary’s place again. I just had to look for the butterflies. It wasn’t fully dark out.

  Laurence had fallen asleep. I tiptoed to the window, closed it, and locked it. I grabbed my bag, which had the car keys, MacLean’s freak-flag cottage keys, and my wallet. I grabbed the hammer and threw it in. Between that and the screwdriver, I’d be all set if I saw some emergency repairs that needed doing.

  I grabbed my jacket from the chair and let myself out. I whispered something about making toast, in case Laurence would register it.

  In the kitchen, two officers were chatting quietly. I had passed two more walking through the house, one with his gun drawn but at his side.

  “Hi,” I said. I pointed to myself, like an idiot. Walking into a roomful of cops was not something I would ever get used to. “Danny Cleary.”

  “What can we do for you, Miss Cleary?” They both looked jangly, and I didn’t blame them. I was glad they had all the lights on, though I wished Rose’s Place had more window coverings.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “I’m just going to go into town, buy some cigarettes, get my brother something for dinner.”

  “Don’t forget to leave your cell number with the…”

  “Officer at the gate,” I finished. I smiled at him. “I will. I won’t be long.” I was about to walk out the back door, but stopped. “Is the search going ahead?”

  “Law enforcement and auxiliary officers only,” one of them said.

  “Good idea,” I said. “Hey. Is Aussie Ru— Is the Australian guy still here, or did he leave? Was he okay?”

  “He’s here. He said he’s not coming out of his room until we take him for his statement tomorrow, and to the airport from there.” I nodded, and stepped outside. Maybe I should figure out what room Aussie Rules was in, pay him a visit, commiserate about our shared horrible experience earlier, and see if he had any nice, illegal narcotics he wanted to rid himself of, before boarding a probably international flight.

  The night was still young.

  It was warmer than it had been a few hours earlier, almost muggy. Nothing like the east coast for changeable weather patterns. I slowly walked to the Mustang, wishing that it was an automatic. I wasn’t in the mood to wrestle with the clutch. And once I got to town there would probably be traffic – not city traffic, but sightseers and the like. I stood outside for a second, debating asking one of the cops to give me a lift into town and actually doing what I just said I was going to – pick up smokes, some food, and come back and reread Jane Eyre until I fell asleep. Laurence wasn’t the only one who was exhausted. I’d become a bit flabby, as it turned out, both mentally and physically. And I was the one Constable MacLean thought was going to hunt down and kill Dickie Doyle? I doubted I had the wherewithal to hunt down a pizza at that moment.

  Something pale caught my eye against the dark fence next to the parking lot. I walked slowly toward it.

  Something pale and small, with blonde hair.

  Sarah.

  I yelled for help, dropped my bag, and ran toward her.

  SIXTEEN

  A lot of her was missing, but it didn’t look like a human had done it.

  I was squatting down next to where she had been tied to the fence, nude, her head down, hair covering her face, when I saw that some of her fingers and parts of her feet had been raggedly removed. It looked like they’d been chewed off. Someone had wrapped her to the fence around her waist and neck with wire, and I was grateful her hair was covering her face once I saw the rest of her.

  Then there were lights, lots of lights, and someone was pulling me away from Sarah. He didn’t have to pull very hard. I’d gone from a squat next to her, to landing backward on my butt and pushing myself away from her, scrambling to get to my feet.

  Oddly, I didn’t faint. Fourth body in twenty-four hours, if you counted poor Evan’s head being thrown at me in the woods. Perhaps I was building up immunity.

  I almost hoped not. No one should get used to this. Not even me.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and shone the flashlight away from the cops, away from Sarah. Someone had left her there, and it had to have been in a very narrow window of time. He had to still be close. I wanted a machete. I wanted a gun, not a fucking hammer and a screwdriver. I started screaming into the darkness. Not words, just rage and frustration. Someone was trying to hold me, restrain me, and without checking who it was, I jerked my head back, hard, to hit his face – he was an inch or two shorter than me – and went limp so I slid out of his arms, elbowed him in the groin on my way down, and crawled a few feet away.

  It was a cop, and he was howling, and there was blood all over his face as he lay curled in a ball on the ground. And I was glad. He really should have known better than to try to restrain someone from behind in the current situation, with a woman’s desecrated body fifteen feet away and a killer in the vicinity. Especially since all these police apparently knew what I was capable of.

  If I’d had my screwdriver in my hand, it would be lodged in his scrotum right now, and then we’d really hear screaming.

  Then somebody was saying something to me. Laurence was there, and he was speaking to me. I wasn’t screaming any longer. I was just sitting on the ground cross-legged, watching the cop writhe around in pain, shout obscenities at me, and then puke onto the grass. Laurence started toward where all the cops were gathered around Sarah’s body. I was on my feet again, covering the ground between us.

  “No!” I was yelling again. My primordial crocodile brain took over and I grabbed Laurence’s arm as hard as I could and pulled him back to me. Don’t let him see that, was all I could think. You can do this, at least. Two of the cops came toward us, trying to block Laurence from getting too close. Aside from anything else, it was a crime scene. “Don’t look. Don’t look. Do not look at her.” I couldn’t seem to stop yelling. Even as I was doing it, I knew this wasn’t me, this wasn’t the way I behaved. I hadn’t fainted, but I’d lost control of myself nonetheless.

  Then I thought, Ginger. Sarah had long blonde hair like my twin sister. Someone had killed Sarah, killed her horribly, and I had done nothing to stop them, nothing to help look for her earlier. I could have grabbed an energy bar from the kitchen after getting off the roof, instead of going to the dining hall, and insisted on joining the search then. And if they hadn’t let me do that, I could have gone to see Mary and talked to her – and maybe if Colin hadn’t gotten up from the table at that second to come talk to us, he would still be alive. Or I could have driven to the lake and searched the woods, where Evan’s head had been thrown at me. Instead, I’d sat on my ass, had a stupid sandwich and felt sorry for insipid little Janet, when Ginger was dying.

  Sarah. When Sarah was dying.

  I was crying. I think I was crying. Laurence picked me up in his arms and carried me to the porch and set me down out of sight of the commotion.

  Even though I’d made a total hysterical fool of myself, I was glad, later, that I did that. Laurence never saw Sarah’s body, not really. By the time he’d fully woken up and run downstairs and outside, there were several cops around the body and more running toward us. He just wanted to get me out of the way. He said he registered a bit of a shoulder, maybe some blonde hair, but that was it. And that was good, because you can’t unsee things like that. Better me than him, any day.

  It had become my mantra.

  “Come on,” I said to Laurence. I walked toward the Mustang, grabbing my bag from the ground as I went. “We’re getting out of here. Now.”

  Laurence didn’t try to stop me, or make any sounds about going back inside to grab his things. He just followed me to the car, but when I headed to the driver’s side, he held out his hand.

  “Keys,” he said, and I knew he was right. I fished them out of my bag, tossed them across the car to him, and we changed sides.
None of the cops tried to stop us, and at the foot of the drive, the one cop left guarding the front gate was talking on a walkie-talkie.

  “We’re going to find somewhere else to stay,” Laurence said, not coming to a full stop. “We’ll let Sergeant Murphy know where we wind up.”

  The cop just nodded, and mouthed what I thought might have been “good luck.”

  We peeled out of the driveway and drove.

  I was never to set foot inside Rose’s Place again.

  SEVENTEEN

  I could tell how worked up Laurence was by how calm he seemed.

  “Good thing you didn’t have a knife in your pocket,” he said. He rolled down our windows as he lit a cigarette. He didn’t ask me to do it, I couldn’t help but notice. Probably thought I might set fire to the car, in my crazy frame of mind.

  “Oh, snap!” I said. “I was thinking the exact same thing before. When the cop was puking.”

  “So what did he do? I missed that part. I just got there in time for the aftermath.”

  “Gave me the old reverse bear-hug,” I said. “I was being a hysterical female.”

  “Gracious. How dare you?” he said.

  “That’s what he said.” Laurence grinned. We couldn’t have been more than three-quarters of a mile from Rose’s, and I already felt better. I wanted to drive all night. Maybe drive right back to Toronto. Between us, we could do it in about twenty hours, I thought. See some Canadian countryside. Embarrass ourselves in French in Quebec on the way. I could call Detective Paul Belliveau in Toronto, my guardian angel, and get him to smooth things over with the RCMP out here. Shouldn’t be too hard, seeing as how my brother and I had been stalked by a murderous psychopath for the best part of twenty-four hours.

  This was not in the Nova Scotia guidebook.

  I saw that Laurence’s cigarette pack was nearly empty, just as we were about to pass a tiny wood shack that seemed to double as a convenience store. “Stop here.” Laurence swung in and for the first time I saw why he liked driving his Porsche so much in Manhattan. With barely a check in the rear view, he pulled in front of the store and stopped about half an inch short of hitting the building, but with such ease and grace that I, Queen of Carsickness, barely felt it. Laurence patted his pockets.

  “Hope you’ve got more than good intentions in that bag, little sister,” he said. “Wherever we’re going, it’s on you.”

  “I got you covered, sunshine,” I said. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head.”

  I went into the store just as the teenage boy working there was about to flip the Closed sign. “I’ll be two minutes,” I said. He looked at me with a total lack of expression on his face, which felt a bit weird. Every other person I’d dealt with in this part of the world had bent over backward to be friendly.

  But at least he didn’t shut the door in my face. It would not have bode well for the road trip I was pretending we were on.

  I walked to the back of the tiny store and grabbed a few bottles of water and a few huge cans of energy drink. I dumped them on the counter and then grabbed big bags of chips and nuts and even some dried cranberries, as a concession to vitamins. The packet of cranberries was very dusty, and I decided not to check the expiry date.

  “Can you give me a carton of something? Do you have Marlboro Lights here?”

  “Nope.” The kid looked at me, not moving. I doubted he was going to be photographed for the Nova Scotia tourism brochure.

  “Okie dokie then,” I said. I smiled. He seemed unmoved. “Just give me a carton of whatever’s your most popular brand, I guess.” The kid looked at me for a long moment, during which I was torn between chucking a chocolate bar at his head to get him to move or walking out the door. It was dark outside, and only a couple of cars had passed us. But Laurence was out front in the car – I could see the light of his last cigarette.

  In a few minutes, the kid was taking my money and he even gave me a bag to put the stuff in, after I asked him twice. Before I left I grabbed a lighter from a display and left a five-dollar bill on the counter. “Buy yourself something pretty,” I said. “Cheer yourself up.”

  The kid winked slowly at me and nodded as I turned to leave. He was either the driest comedian of all time, or I was in The Twilight Zone.

  In the car, Laurence was excited about all the junk food. “Antonio says I should gain a little weight,” he said. “What, no licorice?”

  “I, too, am fond of a larger guy,” I said, throwing the bag of cranberries at him, “but leaner is better for your health.” I ripped open a bag of chips. I couldn’t believe I was eating. And suddenly ravenous.

  “I was reading about donairs,” Laurence said. “It’s a local junk food delicacy. But I don’t know if they have them outside the city.” We were going to drive through Wolfville, and if anyplace was going to have easy, cheap food, it was a university town.

  “Okay,” I said. “But we’re getting them to go.” I could feel my brother looking at me, but I shoved chips in my mouth. Chips: okay. Pasta, carbs, egg salad sandwich: whatever. Anything with meat, I was going to give a pass. Possibly forever, after what I’d seen tonight.

  “You have a plan?” he said. “Because if it involves leaving the province, you can forget about it. Aside from the fact that we have to be around to give statements, we still have to find Dickie.”

  I had to find Dickie. At the moment, as far as I was concerned, Dickie was just as likely to be involved in all this as not, and I didn’t want Laurence getting to him before I did. “I know,” I said. “I have a plan. Trust me?”

  Laurence grunted something that I guessed was supposed to be his assent, and as soon as we hit Wolfville – all two or three blocks of the downtown Main Street area – the traffic was bumper to bumper.

  “Tourists,” I said. “I almost forgot about the festival.” The parade would be tomorrow. Or had it already happened? Time seemed to be so slow. I wanted to sleep for a month. Correction: Smoke crack for a couple of hours, then sleep for a month. I looked around the streets of Wolfville and thought about how trying to score crack here would probably (and hopefully for the residents) be futile. Halifax might be different. Dickie’s wife Rose had done that at the end, I remembered: gone to Halifax to be alone with her drug. And she’d died there.

  “Wait,” I said. “Did I dream it, or did you tell me that Dickie had mentioned to you that he thought he was seeing his dead wife following him around?”

  “You didn’t dream it,” he said. He reached for the chips, as we were at a standstill while a young couple kissed goodbye in the middle of the street – with no one honking their horns. “Look at that,” he said, nodding at them. “Young love.”

  “Do you think he was going crazy? Seriously. Did he sound like he was mentally ill?” After what I’d gone through with Jack, my family had had a crash course in mental illness.

  “He’s never been the same, since Rose died,” Laurence said, after a long pause. “Well, after he figured out that she’d become addicted to the pain meds, and he didn’t know how to deal with it.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s awful what addiction can do to couples.” Not to mention mental illness. Jack’s had come long before my drug use. If I hadn’t been so devastated by leaving Jack, in so much pain and guilt, I wouldn’t have sought out that escape. Or been as self-destructive.

  “To families, Danny.”

  “You don’t have to remind me,” I said. “I’m very aware.” Without a word, I pointed to a sign ahead, in front of a pizza joint, that advertised donairs. And by some miracle, someone pulled out of a spot right in front of it. I handed Laurence a couple of twenties, asked for a veggie slice, and sunk down into the seat to wait. And think of the plan I had promised Laurence.

  I checked my bag, just a medium-sized nylon tote I carried around a lot in the city. My fanny pack was inside, with the screwdriver and extra cash, and my wallet with cards and emergency numbers. My phone was in my pocket. The hammer was at the bottom, giving the bag a bit of e
xtra heft, which I appreciated.

  And where we were going, there was going to be at least one gun. And beds to sleep in, because I was going to need to get my head down. The adrenaline was wearing off a bit. I’d get us settled in, and I would tell my body to wake up just before dawn. I was able to do that, if I needed to.

  I kept glancing at the pizza joint, checking to make sure Laurence was still in there, safely in line. He stood out among the young students, ready for their summer session, and the town kids, who looked a tiny bit tougher but with whom I immediately identified.

  Maybe someday I would go back to school. I’d always thought of Ginger as the academic, both Ginger and Laurence. Skipper, Darren, and I had been more streetwise, more eager to start our real lives, no matter how ephemeral those lives had seemed at the time.

  Now, my brother Skipper owned a few car lots and was living a happy, comfortable life with his wife Marie back home, marred only by their infertility. They were starting the process of becoming foster parents, and while nobody had said so to me, I knew that what had happened in their home in December – the fact that I, Skipper’s crack addict sister, had murdered a cop in cold blood in their foyer – might affect their chances. Everybody knew that Harry Miller was a murderous cop, but that’s a pretty high hurdle for potential foster parents. Helping them somehow was on my to-do list. It was a long list, and at least with the money Jack had left me, maybe I could actually do some good.

  The night was pretty now, warm, the cold rain of the afternoon behind us. I leaned my head out the car window and tried to get the same joy from the smell of the air that I’d had only, what, yesterday afternoon. All I smelled was donair, pizza, and the faint but unmistakable tang of skunk weed. My fantasy of twenty-four hours earlier, of buying a summer property here, had dwindled markedly after the events of the last day. Being shot at and being in close proximity to so many dead bodies will do that to a girl. But I looked around and envied the people walking by, the cars full of teenagers with their windows rolled down, enjoying their Saturday night. Wolfville was a lot more cosmopolitan than Downs Falls ever was – we didn’t have a university, and that changes a place. And even now, Downs Falls didn’t have places advertising organic fair trade coffee and poetry slams.