Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  Tammy Lou was just passing through Orlando. Her home, her family, her roots, were in Maypop, Florida. Bernie had moved there to court her, working for McDonald’s until he had married her, and they had lived there ever since. An uncle of Tammy Lou’s served as a deputy in the Sheriff’s Office. As soon as Bernie had obtained his citizenship papers, he had begun to do likewise. Now a balding, slightly overweight man who could have passed for an Italian if it were not for his accent, Bernie had grown to love the job. It seldom bored him, and sometimes it gave him a chance to help someone.

  Pulling off the road at the address he had been given, Bernie blinked and shook his head at the gaudiness of the small house’s neon pink paint job. But the moment he opened his car door to get out, the odor that assaulted his nostrils took up all his attention. He frowned. This was no mere case of dead fish.

  There was no need to draw a weapon, he decided; whatever had happened here was in the past tense. Still, it would be better, he decided, to enter the pink house some way other than by the front door, where the odor stank strongest and where, he noted, a package had been left in a plastic bag by the mail carrier who had called this in. Ducking under mimosa trees, he walked around back, stopping to stare at the Toyota parked out of sight of the road and out of place; what was it doing there?

  He tried the kitchen door, unsurprised when the knob turned in his hand. In the Maypop area, most people locked the front door to let friends know they were not home, but left the back one unlocked in case somebody needed to get in.

  Bernie entered. He did not pull his gun to point it various directions while yelling “Police!” He just walked in.

  What he noticed first in the kitchen was how the things on the table—saltshakers, napkin holder, a pink pottery catchall bowl, bottles of stool softener and Tylenol and Tums—how everything stood exactly centered, like soldiers ranked along an imaginary line. Yet in the sink he saw a heap of dirty, messily stacked dishes with bugs and cobwebs on them. Cobwebs on dishes—that said something. The dishes looked slimy, and they stank.

  But something else smelled far worse. Proceeding to the living room, Bernie found an unpleasantly dead dog on the carpet near the door. It looked like it had been a miniature dachshund, poor little thing, somebody’s pet.

  This was not good.

  Bending over it, careful not to touch, Bernie counted three bullet wounds.

  So where was the gun?

  Standing up, Bernie took a look around the room. He saw no weapon. Which was not a surprise, because Bernie very much doubted that the woman who lived here had shot her own pet and left it lying on the carpet.

  Still scanning the living room, Bernie noticed that all the books and magazines on the coffee table and the sofa’s end table were stacked exactly on top of one another, corners aligned, according to size.

  Also he saw from marks in the carpet that the furniture had been moved. Straightened.

  He shook his head and went to investigate his doubts, checking out the bedroom. There he found an unmade bed. And in the bathroom, talcum powder covered everything like that north Florida rarity, a thin snowfall.

  Bernie recalled the report: the mail carrier said a single woman named Liana Clymer, aka Liana Leppo, lived here. The flowery sheets in the bedroom, the cosmetics in the bathroom, and the Hello Kitty artwork on the walls tended to confirm this. The kitchen sink plus the bedroom and bathroom showed she didn’t care much about keeping things orderly. So who had rearranged the kitchen table, straightened the furniture, and put the mail-order catalogs in tidy stacks?

  An intruder?

  The same intruder who had shot the dog?

  A compulsively tidy person who had let the dog bleed to death on the carpet?

  Shaking his head, Bernie started muttering to himself in Spanish, as he often did when something stank figuratively even more than literally. Where was the woman who was supposed to live here, and why had she left her dog to rot? He needed to contact her or someone who knew her.

  Bernie roamed the small house, pulling out drawers and checking shelves, searching for more information. Old enough to remember how things used to be, Bernie missed address books, landline telephones with important numbers posted next to them, piles of snail mail. What he needed to find was the Clymer woman’s cell phone or, better yet, her handbag with a cell phone in it.

  He found neither purse nor phone.

  Which caused him to say something particularly profane in Spanish, because what the hell was going on? The Clymer woman took her purse and went somewhere, but without her car, and leaving her dog dead on the floor?

  Bernie had reached the point at which he should have left the scene, gone to file a Missing Persons report, and turned it over to the chief sheriff. What happened after that would be none of his business.

  What was most likely to happen was nothing. This woman had no kin in Maypop to pressure for an investigation. It was no crime for adults to go missing.

  Still swearing in his favorite language for that purpose, Bernie decided to fix one thing at least. He opened the front door, took what the mail carrier had left, and put it inside, so that it would not advertise the emptiness of the house. Then, not yet satisfied, Bernie headed back into the bedroom, where he had seen a laptop computer.

  He booted it up, knees jiggling with guilty impatience as he sat on a chair that was too small for him. The laptop hummed into beaming compliance, requiring no password. Bernie invoked the Internet symbol, then the e-mail envelope. Again, no need for a password; it seemed Liana Clymer stayed logged on. Bernie searched her contacts list for people with the names Clymer or Leppo. There were several. He addressed a single e-mail to all of them, scowling as he struggled to compose a suitable message:

  Hello family of Liana Clymer, aka Liana Leppo. This is Deputy Bernardo Morales of the Maypop County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office contacting you. I have been alerted by a mail carrier that Liana seems to be missing from her residence. She seems to have been gone for several days as there is a dachshund dead of bullet wounds and decaying in her living room, her car is parked out of sight in the backyard, and her purse and car keys

  Bernie stopped to think, then saved the draft, headed out into the backyard, and tried the Toyota’s driver’s side door. It was locked. Shading his face from the sun with his hands, he peered in through the window, then went around to the passenger side and tried again. He saw no keys in the ignition or anywhere else. Satisfied, he walked back into the pink house and resumed his e-mail.

  purse and car keys are unaccounted for. I will file a Missing Under Suspicious Circumstances report but beyond that I have no duty or authority. It is not in my job description to write this e-mail but where I come from it would be considered the honorable thing to do. How you respond is of course your business and not mine.

  Sincerely,

  Deputy Bernardo Morales

  He added the Sheriff’s Office’s phone number, complete with area code, paused to think again whether he might get in trouble about this, then shrugged and clicked Send. Tammy Lou, still after twenty years the love of his life, told him often that he had a bigger heart than any other man she had ever met. Bernie considered this meant he was a true Chileno. By sending the e-mail, he had maybe broken a rule, but before being a deputy of the sheriff he was first a caballero, a gentleman.

  THIRTEEN

  “Make sure you hide all of our tracks,” I told Justin, heading toward the pitiful hut we had found.

  “Make sure you watch out for snakes,” Justin retorted.

  “Like this one?” Pausing, gently I unwound one end of the oak snake from around my waist and coaxed the other end out of my shorts pocket. As I held her up, she hung between my hands in a catenary curve like an overly thick, gray and white telephone wire.

  Justin’s jaw sagged. I realized I was showing off and tried to retract.

  “You’re not afraid of snakes,” I stated, matter-of-fact, lowering my own specimen. “Not the way you took care of that cottonmouth
that was looking up my nose.”

  He succeeded in moving his mouth, forming speech. “What are you going to do with that?”

  “With her.” Actually, no way could I tell the snake’s gender, so I chose one. “Her name is Hypatia the Wise. If you don’t mind, I’ll take her inside to chase the mice away.” The oak snake flicked its tongue, then oozed up my arm and into my T-shirt sleeve.

  “Where is she going right now?” Justin inquired innocently.

  “Ha-ha.” Turning my back to preserve some dignity, I carried Hypatia to the shanty. Or hut. Whatever. Rudimentary and rotting. No problem opening the door; the knob and lock had long since fallen out of it. But I couldn’t see a thing inside, it was so dark. I pulled out the flashlight I had toted all the way from the blue pickup truck, clicked it on, and used its rather dim beam to reconnoiter. I saw mouse turds, mostly, and scuttling toward the shadows were some of those huge insects euphemistically called palmetto roaches, a cockroach by another name, still icky all the same. I saw no snakes but did not doubt there might be some underneath the few furnishings. These consisted of a picnic table in the middle of the splintery plank floor and a bunk bed standing against the rickety wall, the mattresses wrapped in thick plastic so the mice wouldn’t get into them, I surmised. Hefty Rubbermaid containers stacked in one corner probably served the same purpose, to protect the contents from varmints.

  A deer mouse, not to be confused with a dear mouse, scuttled out from under one of the bunk beds and dived into some firewood stacked beside an honest-to-God potbellied stove. I carried Hypatia over there and set her down on the floor, exhorting her, “Enjoy.” An oak snake, after all, is just a fancy-colored rat snake by another name.

  Next, with my heart beating a little faster than before, I pried open the Rubbermaid containers.

  Acute disappointment. The containers protected blankets and candles, not food.

  There were no kitchen cupboards or counter space. No kitchen sink. What did the people who used this place do for water, let alone food?

  Ah. I saw a screen door, much patched, leading to the backyard jungle, and toward the near side of the jungle stood an old-fashioned water pump.

  I barely noticed the gallon plastic milk jug squatting on the floor inside the screen door. The flashlight battery seemed to be dying just in time for dark. Quickly I scanned the back steps in case of snakes other than Hypatia, then the floor under the picnic table and under the lower bunk—

  I shrieked. Justin burst in at a run. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “What’s right!” My flashlight had picked up words in thick black marker—CANNED GOODS. Plunging to my knees, I laid the flashlight on the floor and began pulling out flat cardboard boxes crowded with cans and jars. “Peanut butter! Do you like peanut butter, Justin?”

  “At this point, who cares? Give it here!”

  “Wash your hands first.” Oh, how childbearing doth make mothers of us all.

  “How? Should I spit on them?”

  “Try the pump.”

  Then I had to show him how to prime the pump with the water in the plastic milk jug, left there for that purpose. As he scooped peanut butter with a relatively clean finger, the flashlight began to fade so rapidly I turned it off. It was getting dark outside, so I couldn’t read the labels on the cans that I was hauling out from under the bunk. Then I remembered the candles I had seen in the Rubbermaid containers, and with them I found, along with a black marker, a dish towel, and some other things, matches.

  That simply, like a butterfly fluttering its wings in India, the evening reversed itself and became nearly festive. By the light of candles stuck into the chinks of the picnic table, Justin and I used his handy-dandy multipurpose tool to open cans of Vienna sausage (which I loathed, but he wolfed down like a puppy), stewed tomatoes, baked beans, mixed vegetables, sauerkraut—at this point almost anything edible looked good, and wonder of wonders, I found some Pringles! An acceptable starch on which to load the other things and gulp them down.

  While Hypatia traced contented serpentines all over the cabin, Justin and I ate hard and fast. After we had gorged, we belched nearly in unison, laughed, and sat back to look at each other.

  “You feel better?” we both asked at the same time, then laughed again.

  This was, of course, too good to last. Every movie I had ever seen told me the bad guy should arrive this instant when we were off guard. I said, “We ought to douse the candles.”

  I saw a quick shadow of understanding cross Justin’s face almost as if I had taken the black marker and written “STOAT” there. He nodded, yet said, “Before we do that, could you cut these Goldilocks cornrows and braids off of me?”

  “You don’t like them?”

  “God, no, I hate them!”

  “Stoat the Goat’s idea, to draw attention to your hair and not your face, right?”

  “Right.” He handed me his pocket tool opened to rudimentary scissors. “He even made me dye my eyebrows.”

  “Now, that’s extreme.” As quickly as I could, listening all the time for the sound of any vehicle approaching in the night, I started shearing his bleached hair, proceeding at first around the base of his skull. As plaits of hair dropped away from the back of his neck, I saw two marks that wrenched my stomach.

  Trying not to sound as sick as I felt, I asked, “What are these, cigarette burns?”

  “Stun gun tracks. From when he first knocked my bike down and hauled me into his van.”

  Little kid. Stun gun.

  “That consummate bastard,” I said.

  “Overkill,” Justin agreed. “But effective. I didn’t even try to run when he got me home.”

  “And then what did the son of a bitch do?”

  He told me a little bit about it, not too much, and I did not press him with questions. By the time I’d cropped his dreads off, he’d fallen silent. I started on the cornrows, which were more difficult to cut off. After I’d been yanking and tugging for a good time, Justin complained, “Ow.”

  “It’ll be worse than ow if we don’t get our butts to the police station.” I kept hacking, piling shorn yellow hair onto the table. Finished at last, I jammed the grubby green baseball cap onto him. “Wow. You look completely different.” Then, quickly, I blew out the candles and at once felt safer.

  Justin’s voice spoke to me out of the darkness. “Lee, I don’t want to go to any cops.”

  Damnation, I’d hoped we’d gotten past his hang-up, whatever it was. “Why aren’t you in a lather to get home?”

  Silence. I flicked on the flashlight, and in its feeble remaining illumination I saw an answer of sorts in his face. He looked down, then to the side, then turned away from the light.

  More gently I asked, “Justin, what are you ashamed of? Nothing’s your fault.”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you said yourself, I could have called 911, or I could have told a teacher anytime I was in school, and—and now that I’m away from Stoat, I don’t know why I didn’t! I’m worthless. I—”

  “Stop that, Justin. You got drawn into an appalling situation, that’s all, and you dealt with it the best you could. You have to remember you’re a good guy. You’re a hero. You saved my life.”

  “But I let my parents down for two years. I’m a coward.”

  “No, you’re a survivor. Lots of captured people do what you did.”

  “Sure they do.”

  “No, it’s true. In order to go on living, people adapt to brutal situations and accept them as normal.” Belatedly, my brain offered me the name on a platter. “It’s called Stockholm syndrome,” I told him as if having a labeled disorder might help him.

  I think for a moment it did. He stopped looking at the ground; he looked at me instead. “You serious?”

  “Yes. Totally.”

  He stared at me for a while before he asked, “So you think my parents will forgive me?”

  “Justin, there’s nothing to forgive! The whole
world will welcome you back.”

  “Okay, but everybody will want to know—they’ll ask questions—especially the cops.” He sounded panicky. “Lee, I can’t face it.”

  “Face what?”

  “Just for starters, my—where he hurt me, Lee—I’m going to need to see a doctor.”

  “Not your fault. Are you scared?”

  “Mostly embarrassed.”

  “If I got raped and needed a doctor, should I be embarrassed?”

  “Lee, that didn’t ever really happen, did it?”

  Yes, it had. College. Date rape, although I didn’t have sense enough to call it that at the time, and I hadn’t reported the prick who did it, either. But this mustn’t be about me. “It happens to one in every four women,” I said. “Should we be embarrassed?”

  “No! That’s horrible!”

  “Exactly. Horrible is the word. What else did that effing pervert do to you?”

  Silence, and I thought I’d lost him, but finally he said very softly, “He—my body hair—he’s been making me Nair myself all over. Even, you know, down there.”

  Unexpected, that hit me in the gut. I banged the table with my fist. “That total creep!”

  “He wanted a little kid. He was going to find one soon. Replace me. You think I’m such a hero, listen to this: I snuck the baseball bat into the van because I was pretty sure that when he went to kill you, he was fixing to kill me too. Like, that letter you wrote, that was a farce. He would never have let me mail it. Which told me I wasn’t going to live to mail it.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice low.

  “You know?” His adolescent voice creaked up an octave.

  “I figured. Why would he bring you along to be a witness to murder? He meant to kill you too, and you’re smart enough, you knew it.”