Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  The police and forensic people would have gone over this place pretty carefully. I’d avoided looking at the bed itself, which was stripped. The last time I’d been in this room, a dead man was trussed up on it, missing a hand and a foot. I made an executive decision and didn’t move the mattress to look for diaries. The police had to have done that.

  The top drawer of the dresser was full of mismatched sports socks and white boxers, which I didn’t want to look at too closely. I was starting on the second drawer – oh my, t-shirts! – when Dave told me to come see something.

  He was looking through a yearbook. I felt a chill up my spine. The police wouldn’t have seen anything amiss in Dickie having Rose’s high-school yearbooks around, but the information inside was worth more than its weight in gold. At least to Dave and his hunches.

  He flipped to the grad pictures, the C’s. Rose Carlisle. Beautiful, black hair, red lips, not too much makeup. Full face without being fat. Healthy-looking, red cheeks matching the red rose in her grad gown.

  “Nice teeth,” I said. Dave looked at me, the headlamp shining in my eyes. “Hey.”

  “You are one weird sister, Cleary,” he said.

  “Why, thank you,” I said. I was debating taking the last bump of cocaine. It was burning a hole in my pocket.

  Dave read Rose’s yearbook bio aloud, quietly. “‘Rose may not be the best at math, but we all agree that she brings the best blueberry muffins to Trig! Rose was launched into the world at six thirty-two a.m. on May 29th, 1975—’”

  “May 29th,” I said. “So it was her birthday around Apple Blossom weekend.”

  Dave nodded and continued. “‘1975, at the old Wolfville Hospital. Her parents, Geoffrey and Pamela, were so taken aback at the beauty of their daughter that they immediately decided that perfection had been achieved and chose not to spoil things by having another.’”

  “Geoffrey,” I said. So Mary’s husband had been named after his father. “And I thought Rose’s mother died in childbirth.”

  Dave nodded. “‘Rose spent some of her younger years in the United States, which explains her bad taste in music.’ Whatever that means.”

  “Her father was from Connecticut,” I said.

  Dave continued. “‘Many men have tried to win her heart, but she has, like many young women before her, given her heart forevermore to the captain of the hockey team.’” I snorted. Forevermore, huh. But the prose reminded me of my own high-school yearbook, where the student staff wrote everybody’s profiles, with input from the person’s friends. “‘Rose’s greatest dream is to ride in the Olympics, and her greatest fear is to shovel manure for a living. Rose plans to head to Acadia, where she wants to study Early Childhood Education.’”

  Sad. Eerie. And wouldn’t she have known, near the end of her senior year, that she would be going to Bennington, and not Acadia?

  Dave was flipping through the yearbook quickly, and I could almost hear his heart beating faster.

  “Here,” he said. “The hockey team.” His fingers trailed over the names.

  Captain: Desmond Murphy.

  “Holy Fuckville,” I said. “Des.” Sergeant Des Murphy was Rose Doyle’s high-school boyfriend.

  We were silent for a second, the light from both our headlamps on the page, looking at a bunch of hormonal teenage boys, one of whom had been the love of Rose Carlisle’s young life. And who had also come back here, in later years, to live. They had socialized together, the two couples.

  I wondered if Dickie knew about Rose’s history with Des. I doubted it.

  I had to take this in. “Was this your hunch –” I started to say, but then I saw something at the back door. A woman in a white nightgown with long black hair, standing at the back door, looking through the glass.

  Rose.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Wait,” Dave said, but I was nearly at the door.

  I turned the lock and, my hand on the gun, copied Dave and stood to the side of the doorway.

  When I looked, I saw a white nightdress disappearing into the woods, maybe twenty yards from the door. The same woods where someone had thrown Evan’s head at me.

  I felt Dave drag me back by my shoulder. My sore shoulder. He was talking into his headset and pushing me out of the way. He started running toward the woman in white.

  I stopped for a second, moved behind the door and reached into my pocket. I wanted to do the line of coke that was there. I wanted it right now, to help fuel what was going to happen next. And I was irritated that Dave had pushed me out of the way.

  Just go, idiot. Just go, I thought.

  I ran after Dave, into the trees.

  If she hadn’t been wearing white, we never would have been able to see her. I thought I saw bare feet, and my mind rebelled. Rose was dead. Her body had been identified. And nobody could run through this dense undergrowth with bare feet.

  Despite the fact that I heard my dead sister talking to me almost daily, I’d never believed in ghosts. Humans could and did get up to enough evil on their own without bringing fairy tales into the mix. My parents were killed by a drunk driver. My twin sister and my husband were killed by an evil man and his brainwashed acolytes. I’d seen what had happened to Sarah Gilbert, and no ghost had eaten her hands and feet.

  Either Rose Doyle wasn’t dead, or this wasn’t Rose Doyle.

  I passed Dave. I was either a bit fitter than he was, or he was less reckless than I was.

  I was gaining on her. She was a fairly big woman, I could tell. My height, if not taller, and definitely with more girth. If it was Rose, she’d be forty or so, and even in her high-school shot she looked like she would lean toward being big. But she ran with abandon. Her feet were bare, and must have been torn to shreds. As I got closer – ten feet, maybe fifteen – I could hear her breathing hard.

  Ghosts don’t have cardio issues.

  When I was close enough that I thought I could take a shot, I unsnapped my holster as I ran. I could hear Dave behind me, but he was losing ground.

  “Stop,” I yelled. “Please. It’s over now.” I could see a cottage ahead in a clearing about fifty feet away. It was dark, and hopefully uninhabited, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  The woman stopped abruptly. With her back to me, she raised her hands in the air and slowly turned to face me.

  It wasn’t Rose. She had to be in her sixties, maybe seventy years old, but she moved like a woman who had spent her life outdoors in the woods. I didn’t recognize her. Her long black hair was matted, and streaked with gray.

  I had my gun pointed at her, but for once I found myself without anything to say. I wasn’t going to shoot this woman. For all I knew, she was somebody’s mother with dementia, lost in the woods. My brain was buzzing.

  “Hello, Pamela,” Dave said behind me. I let him pass me. He was moving slowly, his gun at his side. I put mine down. Her hands were in the air.

  “I don’t know who you are, young man, but I’m glad somebody has the sense God gave him,” the woman said. Her voice was clear and strong, and in an instant I knew it was the same voice I had heard in the woods a week earlier. Just before Evan’s head had come barreling at me.

  She started to walk toward us, very slowly, then she feinted to her left and dove into a thick copse of trees.

  Pamela. The name in Rose’s yearbook. Her mother. Who had supposedly died in childbirth. At least that’s what Rose had told Dickie.

  “Pamela, you must want this to be over by now,” Dave called. He moved very slowly in the direction she had gone, and before I thought about it, I ran ahead of him.

  Dave was here because I had come here. It might have been because he was looking for our mutual enemy Michael Vernon Smith, but if I hadn’t come to Nova Scotia, Dave would be wherever he had been before this. I didn’t know if Pamela had a knife or an axe or a gun somewhere, but I wasn’t going to let him be the first to find out, the hard way.

  I ran into the trees and entered a clearing about eight feet wide.


  Sitting tied to a tree was a man. A large man. I didn’t recognize him.

  Pamela had a gun pointed at his head.

  “Come on, don’t be shy,” she said. “You two are safe. Unless you try to stop me.”

  I looked at the man, who had duct tape covering his mouth. His eyes were open, but he didn’t look afraid. He looked resigned, and tired, and very sad.

  It wasn’t Des. It wasn’t anybody I knew.

  “Danielle, this is my son, Geoffrey,” Pamela said. Geoffrey. Mary’s husband. Rose’s brother.

  Where was Mary. My God, where was Mary?

  “Hello, Geoffrey,” I said softly. He nodded at me politely, as though we were being introduced at the hardware store. “Pamela, where’s Mary?”

  “Oh, she’s around here somewhere,” the woman said. “She doesn’t matter.” I looked at Geoffrey, who had tears streaming out of his eyes. I wanted to tell him to fight, to pull against the tape. He was twice my weight, probably. If he tried hard enough, he could do it.

  Then I remembered that he had multiple sclerosis, and my heart sank. Who knew whether he was symptomatic at the moment, whether he had any strength in him to fight. And his body language told me he had no fight left in him, either way.

  “She matters to me,” I said. “She’s my friend.” I put my gun down, slid it into the holster, which I didn’t snap closed. “Why are you doing this?”

  “He knows,” Pamela said. She had a huge smile on her face. She was smiling at someone behind me. “This one knows.”

  “I don’t know why you have Geoffrey tied up, Pamela,” Dave said. “I can guess about some of the others, but not your son.”

  “Where’s Dickie, Pamela?” I said. “My brother went to Bennington with Dickie. They were great friends. Laurence was Dickie’s best man. He’s worried about him.”

  “Dickie Doyle,” she spat out. “The precious Dickie Doyle.” She scratched her head with the barrel of her gun, hard, like there were things nesting in there. I knew Dave couldn’t take a shot, though. We still didn’t know where Des was, or Dickie. “What a pussy. He let her get sick, he didn’t take care of her. Not a single goddamn man has done anything but fail my daughter, from day one.”

  “She had an accident, right?” I was stalling. I was trying to send Geoffrey some strength. I was trying to gauge whether I could get to him before she could shoot anybody.

  “She was a fucking junkie,” Pamela yelled, and creatures nearby scooted away. “People get one chance. You got a chance, and you took it. You came here to get better. You’re a good girl,” she said.

  I didn’t want to tell her about the tinfoil in my pocket.

  “I saw you,” she continued. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You got up in the morning and got your exercise. You didn’t have sex with boys, and you didn’t go looking for any drugs.” Have sex with boys? And how did she know how I behaved in rehab?

  Cameras. There must have been secret cameras everywhere. That’s how she knew about Evan, and about Sarah. And Geoffrey was the handyman there. He must have installed them for her.

  I shot a glance to my right. Dave was parallel with me now, and I could practically read his thoughts.

  “She is a good girl,” Dave said. “So why did you try to kill her?”

  “Oh, that was a misunderstanding. I’m sorry about that, dear. But you were at the house asking questions, and Mary’s weak, and if there’s one thing we can’t stand around here, it’s a Nosy Nellie.” She started hitting Geoffrey around the head with the gun, lightly and absently, as though she didn’t realize what she was doing. His eyes were closed. He looked defeated, like he was waiting for the blow that would kill him.

  “So is Dickie dead, then, Pamela? Because if he is, I don’t blame you, really. I love my family more than anything, and if he’s to blame for what happened to your daughter, then he probably got what he deserved.”

  “Damn right,” she said. She looked at Geoffrey as though she had forgotten who he was.

  “But it would be a great favor to me and my family if you could tell me where I could find his body,” I said. “My brother is really fond of him, and he’ll never know a moment’s peace if I don’t find Dickie.”

  “Your brother’s a fairy, right?” Before I could answer, she put her hand up. “Never mind. That’s none of my beeswax. And I don’t mind the fairies. They’re good to their mothers. Not like this one.” She hit Geoffrey hard across the back of his head with a backhand that Venus Williams would be proud of. His head fell to his chest, his eyes closed. I couldn’t tell if he was knocked out, or if the blow was strong enough to kill him. Probably not.

  “I wasn’t the best mother. I know that. But my daughter was used and mistreated by every single man in this Valley,” she said. “This one didn’t protect her.” She put her hand on Geoffrey’s shoulder, not looking at him. “And God knows, Dickie Doyle didn’t have the stones to put a stop to it.”

  Dave inched forward. Literally, it felt like he was moving an inch a minute in Pamela’s direction. I could tell he wanted to take a shot, but she was moving quickly back and forth behind Geoffrey, one minute with the gun to his head, the next scratching herself with it.

  “I hope if you ever have a daughter, Danielle, I hope that she’s ugly.”

  “Oh?” I said. Really. My mouth can’t stop at the worst moments, but when I should be smart, I can’t count to ten.

  “I was beautiful once, and look at me now.” She paced back and forth behind her son, seemingly oblivious to what was underfoot. In bare feet. “Men fail you. Not all men. I don’t know about that one,” she said, gesturing to Dave with her gun, causing my heart to leap into my throat. “But they want to own you and then they throw you away, lock you up, ignore you.”

  Pamela leaned down suddenly and kissed the top of Geoffrey’s head.

  Then she put a bullet in it.

  And before Dave or I could move, she put the gun to her own head and pulled the trigger.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I bent over at the waist, trying my damnedest not to puke, trying to stop my brain from failing me, my blood pressure from falling – whatever it was that made me faint.

  Dave ran over to the bodies, and it looked like he was searching Geoffrey’s pockets, patting him.

  “Shit,” he said. “Danny, we’ve got to move. Keep it together.”

  I followed Dave. I didn’t think, I just followed him as he ran lightly back the way we had come. He headed into the cottage and told me to wait outside, listen for sirens or anyone coming.

  But I knew no one was coming. The lake seemed deserted, and if there had been cops close by, we would have already seen them. But my senses were on high alert all the same.

  All I could think was, she didn’t tell us where Dickie was. If we couldn’t find his body, Laurence would never rest. He could have been in the woods. At least if he was in the woods, tied to a tree – and I prayed he wasn’t; I stood and said a prayer that Dickie hadn’t met his end the way Sarah had – the police would find him. We would tell them where to look, at least.

  Dave came back with his bag across his body.

  “Yearbooks and shit,” he said.

  We ran back up the drive, faster than we had coming in. Dave was holding the walkie-talkie and saying something into his microphone to Ned. I couldn’t hear him over the pounding of the blood in my ears.

  This was who Dickie had been seeing in the woods. Pamela, Rose’s mother. Not Rose. But at night, with his head and heart consumed with mourning his dead wife, I wouldn’t blame him for thinking it was Rose that he saw. Hell, I had just looked at a picture of Rose and that’s who I thought I’d seen peering in the door, too.

  We ran back in the direction of the Jeep.

  It was either Pamela or Geoffrey who had hit me and tried to drown me. Or both.

  Mary was “around here somewhere”?

  “I’ve got to go back,” I said to Dave. I grabbed his arm to stop him. “I have to look for Mary. She could be t
ied to a tree back there. In here. Anywhere.” The thought of Mary, so small and vulnerable, suffering the same fate as Sarah, made me want to be sick.

  “Danny,” Dave started to say, but his walkie must have vibrated. He grabbed it and pressed the button, spoke into his headset. “On our way back to the meeting point,” he said. Why he couldn’t just say “car,” but whatever. He listened and responded with, “Ten-Four, Out.”

  “Ned has found Mary,” Dave said. “He needs help with her. Follow me.”

  “Is she alive?” Oh please God, let her be alive.

  “Sounds like it,” Dave said. He started running again, and I followed.

  A minute later Ned met us on the road, and we followed him into the bush. We all turned our headlamps on. It was black here, the moonlight not reaching through the tree cover. Dave took the rear, letting me follow in Ned’s footsteps, but I don’t think any of us felt any danger now. There were tangled branches and vines underfoot, and it was still muddy in here. In this part of the woods, it probably didn’t dry out until sometime in July.

  Ned held his hand up and I stopped short behind him, nearly tripping over him.

  In front of us was a metal door on the forest floor, like an old root cellar door. It was rusty with age.

  “Jesus,” Dave said. “In there?”

  Ned nodded. “There’s only room for two of us to get her out, and I think Danny should come down with me. She seems confused, and she knows Danny better than me. And she’s a woman.” Thank you, Captain Obvious.

  “Of course I’m going down,” I said. I watched as Ned and Dave opened the hatch. It was so loud, I’m almost surprised we didn’t hear it from Dickie’s place when Ned had found it before.

  “Thank God for Jonas,” Ned was saying. “A metal detector. Who’d have thought to bring a metal detector here with us?”

  “Jonas,” he and Dave said at the same time.

  “It was well-hidden, covered in debris. I would have found it if I had stepped on it, of course, but that thing went crazy.” He pointed at the small lawnmower-looking thing on the ground a few feet away.