Dark Debts

by Karen Hall

  “You heard me singing?”

  “Yes. You were singing the ‘Kyrie,’ to some tune I’ve never heard before.”

  “You heard actual words coming from me? Not humming, but actual words?”

  “Yes, Michael. How else would I have known what you were singing?”

  God. Was I singing without realizing it? Or was I humming with someone else who was singing, a voice I didn’t even know I heard?

  “I want to lie down for a while,” he said, suddenly realizing how tired he was.

  “You really don’t look good. Maybe I should call a doctor . . .”

  “No,” he answered, too quickly. “I’ll be okay.”

  “I’ll get you a glass of ginger ale.”

  “Thanks.”

  As soon as she was gone, he lay down on her bed and pulled the comforter over himself, clothes and all. His teeth were chattering, and his muscles ached. He would have thought it was the flu, but he recognized it. It was the same way he’d felt on the train ride home from Danny Ingram’s exorcism. It was that, only ten times worse.

  “. . . you were no match for this one before . . .”

  Tess came in with the ginger ale and set it down on the nightstand. She sat on the bed beside him.

  “Why are you in New York again?” she asked.

  “Long story,” he said. He was too tired to say more.

  “Does it end with, ‘and so I flew up here to tell my provincial that I’m resigning’?”

  He tried to answer, but instead closed his eyes and surrendered to sleep.

  The next time he opened his eyes, it was still dark. The digital clock said 3:47 and Tess was asleep beside him. He got up long enough to take his street clothes off, then slid back under the covers, pulled her into his fetal position, and fell asleep right away.

  He came into the dream as if it had been going on without him. Joined himself in progress. He was in the meadow, sitting on the ground. The guy in the flannel shirt was sitting opposite him, leaning back against the same tree as before. His jeans-clad legs were stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. His eyes seemed darker than before—more gray than blue. The look in them was the same. Steady. Calm. Uncompromising.

  Michael was already talking when he became aware of being there. Somehow he fell into the flow of it.

  “I know this is the thing,” he said. “This is what I’m supposed to do. And Vincent set everything up so I could be near Jack. That’s why he wanted me in Barton.”

  The guy in the flannel shirt nodded slightly but didn’t speak. He was twirling a long piece of grass between his thumb and index finger. His skin was brown, as if from the sun. His hands were somehow sturdy and delicate at the same time. Michael had to work not to stare at them.

  “So that’s it?” Michael asked. “This is what my whole life has been building up to?”

  “You’re not happy about that.”

  It wasn’t a statement or a question. More like “Admit it so we can get on with this conversation.”

  “Well . . . I’d just like to think I came to the planet for something more than to save someone else.”

  The guy looked down at the piece of grass in his hand. He had an odd look on his face, which made Michael realize what he’d just said, and to whom.

  The guy smiled a little. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t get all choked up,” he said.

  Without warning, the guy stood up and walked away. Michael got up and followed him, eager to hear more. Suddenly, the meadow dissolved before his eyes; the guy went with it. Michael felt himself fall, then hit the ground running. He didn’t know where he was or why he was running. He just ran. The terrain under his feet was hard and uneven, and there was a fog so thick he couldn’t see anything around him. He caught a glimpse of something up ahead. A movement. A shadow. He ran faster, toward it. The fog grew thinner, and he could see the shadow more clearly. A person, moving ahead at a steady pace that seemed unhurried; yet running as fast as he could, Michael couldn’t catch up. He didn’t know why he felt so powerfully driven to run, except that everything in front of him felt safe.

  The person up ahead stopped and turned, and now Michael could see him. It was the same guy. Dressed differently now, in something loose and light colored. He didn’t smile this time. He had a stern look on his face. He motioned for Michael to follow him.

  “I’m trying!” Michael called. “Slow down!”

  The guy didn’t answer; he turned and moved forward again, at the same steady pace that Michael couldn’t keep up with.

  Michael suddenly stopped, his heart pounding, as he realized he’d almost stepped off into a bottomless gorge. He regained his balance.

  “Hey,” he called to the guy. “Wait!”

  He could see the figure in the fog up ahead. He watched it disappear.

  Michael woke up shivering, but not from cold. He sat up. Looked around the room, as if he might see something. He felt consumed by a gut-wrenching emptiness. Tess lay beside him, breathing peacefully. No hallowed convictions tormenting her. No enigmatic messiah haunting her sleep.

  FIVE

  Jack opened his eyes and had no idea where he was. It was dark and cold and he was lying on the ground. He looked around. As his eyes began to focus, he could see he was surrounded by woods.

  Oh, no. I did it again.

  He sat up; pulled a couple of dead leaves off his face and threw them down. The night was quiet except for the sound of a train in the distance.

  He smelled whiskey and looked down to see a pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the ground beside him. It was empty. Trying to stand left him no doubt as to where the liquor had gone.

  He steadied himself against a tree. He looked at his watch. It was nine thirty. Randa would be frantic. Either that, or on her way back to LA. Hell.

  His jacket was a few feet away. He crawled to it, managed to get one arm in a sleeve on the third attempt, and left it at that.

  He remembered sitting on Cathy’s sofa, drinking a glass of sweet tea. He had finished the gutters and was in the process of telling her the Randa story. The last thing he remembered was Cathy going to answer the phone. It had given him an opportunity to look at his watch. It had been 5:35.

  Where the hell have I been for four hours?

  Where the hell was he now, for that matter? He surveyed the landscape, started to move slowly in the direction of the most light.

  It didn’t take him long to clear the trees, and then he realized where he was. He was in the woods just down the road from Cathy’s. He could go back there and use the phone to call Randa. And maybe Cathy could shed some light on the missing block of time. Maybe she could do that while he worked on an explanation for why he smelled like a still.

  The road was deserted, which made everything feel even creepier. He walked back to Cathy’s as fast as his unsteady legs would carry him.

  When he got within sight of her trailer, he froze. From the other side of the trailer, he could see the reflection of blue light, traveling in a circular pattern that was all too familiar.

  He slowed down and edged closer. He made his way behind a dark trailer, then crept along the side of it until he had an unobstructed view of Cathy’s.

  His embryonic fears were instantly confirmed. Two cop cars and an ambulance were parked in front of Cathy’s trailer. A cop standing in the front door of the trailer, barking at someone inside. A semicircle of neighbors had gathered around, standing behind a line of yellow police tape.

  Jack’s breath left him in one acidic rip.

  Oh, no. Please God . . .

  The cop in the doorway stepped aside to let two attendants bring a stretcher through the door.

  Oh, God . . .

  The body (It has to be Cathy, there was no one else there.) on the stretcher was covered with a blanket, but Jack couldn’t see all of it. The cop was blocking Cathy’s head.

  Please be alive . . . How could I have hurt Cathy, even if I’m crazy how could I have hurt Cathy?

&n
bsp; He heard a noise nearby, the static of a two-way radio. Cops in the woods. Searching for a suspect. Searching for him.

  Maybe it wasn’t me . . . Maybe it was someone else . . .

  It was you. Don’t be an idiot.

  I don’t know for sure.

  You know who you are.

  He saw the beam of a flashlight, far too close to him. Whether he had done it or not, a Landry lurking in the woods near a crime scene was all it would take for the sheriff to consider the case closed. He had to get the hell out of there.

  He moved away from the sound of the radio, grateful for all the years he’d spent hunting, which had taught him as much as could be learned about moving through dead leaves with a minimum of noise, even given his current alcohol level. He also knew, from younger years, that the woods ran behind the Haskins’ dairy farm and came out just north of town. If he could make it to the other side, he could make it home.

  Home. And then what?

  Worry about that when you get there.

  He could hear the cops moving in his direction. They had the advantage of not needing to be quiet, so they could move at twice his speed. They’d be on him in a minute if he didn’t do something.

  He looked down at the ground. Found the right-sized rock. The moon gave him just enough light to see how to aim, though dodging the trees would have been a near-impossible task stone sober. He found the clearest spot, aimed, and sailed the rock directly in front of him. It cleared a good eighteen feet before hitting the trunk of an oak, but the sound was nebulous enough to be anything. He heard the feet and the radio noise begin to move toward it. He used the cops’ footsteps to camouflage his own, and got away from them as quickly as he dared.

  As had always been true in the course of Jack’s criminal career, Barton’s finest proved easy to elude. In ten minutes he had emerged on the other side of the woods. He waited until there were no cars coming, then trotted out to the road and picked up a normal pace.

  All the while, he knew he was only buying time. Half the trailer court had seen him at Cathy’s, he had no way to account for the hours since he’d left there, and his last name was Landry. The trial would probably take an hour. Not that it mattered. Whatever remained of his newfound will to live had disintegrated the second he’d seen Cathy on the stretcher. If she was alive, she’d wake up feeling hideously betrayed, as well she should. If she was dead, he didn’t want to live anyway.

  But he needed a chance to tell Randa what happened. He needed to tell her to leave quickly, before anyone knew she’d been at his place. She shouldn’t even be alone in a room with him, but he had to warn her. And maybe he wanted a chance to say “I told you so.” Hell if he knew. Not that it mattered. He was long past needing to examine the purity of his motives.

  In his cloudy and grief-infested mind, he knew one thing. He was going to do what Tallen did. He wasn’t going to argue when they came for him. He was going to shut his mouth, drop his appeals, and get this over with as fast as possible.

  SIX

  Randa stared at the clock and wondered what to do. By seven, she knew it was too dark for Jack to be fixing gutters, so she’d decided he must be on his way home. By eight, she’d decided he was dead, hit by a truck while walking in the dark; he was lying flattened on the highway somewhere, human roadkill. She was about to go and look for his remains when she heard him open the door.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, instantly sounding like a nagging wife. He closed the door and locked it.

  “Jack?”

  He was pale and shaking. She went to him and when she hugged him, she could smell alcohol. He held her so tightly she thought he was going to bruise a rib.

  “Jack, what is it?”

  “Something happened,” he said.

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I blacked out again. I woke up in the woods. When I went back to Cathy’s, there was an ambulance—” He had tears in his eyes. “I think I hurt Cathy.”

  “Are you sure the ambulance was at her place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, maybe she got sick—”

  “No. There were cops everywhere.”

  He went and sat on the couch, put his head in his hands. “Oh, God. What if she’s dead?”

  Randa tried not to panic. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe this was more of the same paranoia that had made him leave her at the Ritz-Carlton.

  “Jack, do you know anyone who lives near Cathy?” He didn’t answer. “Jack?”

  He looked up. “The old lady who lives next door.”

  “Where’s your phone book?” Randa asked.

  “Closet. But I can’t call—”

  “I’ll call. I won’t mention you.” She found the book. “What’s her name?”

  “Hardie. Mary, I think. Or Marie.”

  Randa searched. “There’s a Martha Hardie on Chalk Level Road.”

  “That’s it.”

  The old woman answered the phone on the first ring. Randa identified herself as a neighbor from across the street and asked what all the commotion was about.

  “What did you say your name was?” the old woman asked.

  “Randa.”

  “Amanda?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you live across the street?”

  “Well, up the street a little. In the . . . brick house.”

  “The one with the wagon wheel in the yard?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought that was Rufus Turner’s house.”

  “No. He’s next door,” Randa said. Martha sounded too old to run across the street and find out Randa was lying. She looked at Jack and rolled her eyes at how long this was taking.

  “Well, I hope you have your doors locked,” Martha said. “Because they haven’t caught whoever done it.”

  “Yes, I was trying to find out—”

  “And I’m here by myself,” Martha went on. “I called my son, but I guess he already left for work. His wife won’t answer the phone at night because she knows it might be me and she’s too stuck up to talk to me, ever since she started working for the school board. Jeanette Hardie. Do you know her? She used to be a Weatherford—”

  “No, I don’t know her. But—”

  “She thinks I’m tryin’ to move in with them, but I wouldn’t ask them for a biscuit if I was at death’s door starving—”

  “Mrs. Hardie, I’m a friend of Cathy’s and I need to know—”

  “Poor Cathy, I told her last week to be careful because we haven’t had nothing but problems since they built that apartment complex behind us, it’s just full of lowlifes and I knew it was just a matter of time before something like this happened.”

  “Mrs. Hardie, is Cathy dead?”

  Maybe the direct approach would work.

  “Yes, she’s dead. I thought you knew that.”

  Randa tried to keep it from registering on her face so Jack wouldn’t know until she could tell him. Martha was still going.

  “I know it’s true because the policeman was Billy Thomas and I asked him and he said she’d been dead for a couple of hours when they found her. And I was sitting right here by myself, it could just as easily have been me . . .”

  “Thank you. I have to go lock my doors now.” Randa hung up, looked at Jack. She’d rather die than tell him, but no one was going to offer her the option.

  “Cathy’s dead?” he asked.

  Randa nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Jack was quiet for a moment. Randa was about to go over and put her arms around him when he stood up. He walked to the door. He walked back to the sofa. He picked up a glass from the coffee table and hurled it against the wall.

  “Goddammit!” he yelled.

  “Jack, be quiet!” Randa grabbed his arm before he could throw anything else. “Jack! The last thing you need is the neighbors calling the cops.”

  He jerked his arm away. He sat on the sofa again, buried his face in his hands, and sobbed.

  R
anda went to sit beside him. She hugged him. He didn’t respond, but he didn’t knock her away, either.

  “Jack?” She shook his shoulder gently. “Jack?”

  He didn’t answer. But then, she had no idea what she’d say if he did.

  “It’s okay.” (It’s not okay.)

  “Don’t take it so hard.” (He killed a woman. He should take it hard.) “You weren’t conscious, it isn’t your fault.” (So what? The fact that he wasn’t conscious doesn’t make Cathy any less dead.)

  “Jack, you have to pull yourself together. We have to figure out what to do.”

  “There’s nothing to do,” he said.

  “If the cops come—”

  “I’ll turn myself in.”

  “No, you will not! You don’t even know if you did it.”

  Jack put his face in his hands again.

  “Oh, God . . . How can this be happening?” His tone was plaintive, as if she might have an answer.

  “What is the last thing you remember? Were you—”

  Randa was interrupted abruptly by the sound of pounding on the door. She gasped.

  Jack pulled the curtain back, just enough to see out. “Cops,” he said.

  “What do we do?” Randa asked.

  “Let ’em in. What else are we gonna do?”

  He reached to unlock the door. Randa took a deep breath and started to work on her lie.

  SEVEN

  Michael woke up. The nausea was gone. The dizziness was gone. The headache was gone. But the worst of it remained. The feeling of evil that seemed to taint everything around him, as if it were something he was causing instead of something he was caught up in against his will.

  Tess was standing in the doorway, dressed for work, looking at him. He reached for his glasses so he could see her.

  “Do you feel better?”

  He nodded. “Physically,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He sat up. Waited a moment to make sure he wasn’t dizzy. Most of his current fog was left over from the dream.

  “What, Michael?”

  “I don’t know.” He wanted to tell her. But he wasn’t even sure how he’d describe it to himself. “I’ve been having these dreams that make me feel bad.” It sounded sophomoric, but he couldn’t think of a more sophisticated way to put it.