Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  He lit the sparkler. “I set the sparkler here,” he said in a singsong, explain-it-to-children voice, placing the small wax block in a puddle of the flammable liquid. “Eventually, it will burn down low enough to tip over, or a spark will fall.”

  “Jesus, Mike, what’s wrong with you?” Willow hissed at him, kicking at the sparkler to try to knock it out of the liquid.

  Her foot didn’t quite reach it, but the sparkler teetered, its bright chemical-flare head tipping dangerously low toward the spreading pool.

  I held my breath. The sparkler teetered up again but now the wax cube was melting, the burnt sparkler wire sagging dangerously downward…. Mike caught it, extinguished it. “Uh-uh. Not yet.” Then he finished placing sparklers into the cubes, set them around.

  “Outside, Molly,” he ordered. “Start walking. I’ll catch up to you where we left our car. Get in and wait for me there.”

  “But, Dad …” The child gazed around unhappily, seeming only now to understand fully what was about to happen.

  “Out,” Mike snarled, turning on Molly, whose eyes widened in fear. But she stood her ground bravely. “Dad, I don’t want you to hurt them. Now let them go, this is bad.”

  Mike’s voice went frighteningly flat. “You do what I say or I’ll make you wish you had. Understand?”

  Molly didn’t; not quite. But I did, and the knowledge made my blood run even colder than the sight of those sparklers set up in the puddles.

  “It’s what he said to you, wasn’t it?” I put in quietly. If I could get him, even if only for an instant, to see the pattern that he was repeating—

  —to see precisely how Reuben Tate was surviving, in whom he lived on—

  —but Mike wasn’t hearing me. All he could hear was Reuben’s exact words, long ago as he terrorized Mike.

  And all he could do was repeat them.

  Molly turned and ran, and I knew from her face that she wouldn’t tell anybody. She was too frightened. Suddenly it hit me that she must have been there in that graveyard. She must have seen; that was the point of it all, really. No wonder she was scared. I heard the door open, then slam shut.

  Wade quietly worked his wrists and ankles, still trying to loosen the twine. But he wasn’t getting anywhere; George either.

  Or me; the thin cord had bitten in enough to make my hands swell. I couldn’t see whether Paddy or Marcus was even trying.

  And Mike was moving fast, squirting more flammable stuff, its fumes thickly choking.

  “If you light a match now, there’ll be an explosion. You’ll go up along with us. Think: There’s got to be a way to settle all this without—”

  He looked pityingly at me, shaking his head, then went to a panel of switches at the end of the work area and examined them. Finally he flipped one of them, and I heard an electric motor begin turning somewhere, felt cool air moving against my face.

  “Ventilation,” Paddy said defeatedly. “For working with dye and solvents and so on. With the draft …”

  He slumped against his bonds. I got it: That fan would suck the fire into an inferno, just like a chimney.

  “Mike,” Ellie began sternly. “I want you to stop all this nonsense right this—”

  He began lighting the sparklers, quickly, one after the other. I thought he might say something more, but he didn’t. Not a word. Everything had already been said.

  Finally he approached me with the syringe, its wicked tip glittering, stepped behind me, and stabbed me abruptly with it.

  “Sorry,” he said softly. “I really did like you.” I felt the stuff going in, a brilliant shot of anguish and a hot, swelling lump in my shoulder. His hand hovered over a switch by the door.

  The lights went out. The door slammed. He was gone.

  Instantly, we were shouting, struggling, fighting to escape that damned macramé twine, but without, please God, tipping over one of the sparklers, whose heads fizzed glaringly in the darkness and reflected from the flammable pools around them.

  “Damn it, Sondergard, you wimp,” Paddy grated out, his voice tight with the pain of pulling against the rough cords that held him. “You should’ve—”

  “What?” Willow demanded, the word a sob. “Let that bastard get his knife into me? Paddy, you always were a heartless …”

  “Quiet.” Wade’s deep voice sounded authoritatively in the flame-punctured darkness. “Just work on these ties. Tear your skin off if you have to, there’s fire extinguishers all around, on the walls. Just get to one, and—”

  The injection hadn’t hit me yet. Apparently it had all gone into my shoulder muscle, and not into a vein. But in the next few moments I wondered if that was lucky or not:

  A spark fell. Instantly, flame billowed up. In its glow, all the room filled up with shadows, dancing evilly as lines of blue flame skittered horridly from one pool to the next.

  A whump! of fire exploded to the ceiling, blocking my last view of Ellie, her eyes dark pools of fright. Willow began to scream, a high, wordless shriek of protest.

  Blood slicked my wrists. The cords slid, only the tiniest amount. Wade bumped his chair toward me, wanting, I supposed, to help me, but nothing was helping.

  And nothing was going to. Through a rising haze of whatever it was he’d shot me up with a puddle of fire crept toward me, pausing nastily for an instant, then coming on with a rush. The air was choking, searing my eyes and throat. Somewhere a bottle exploded, and a worse reek filled my nose stingingly: fabric dyeing chemicals.

  With a tearing sound that I realized only distantly was my own flesh ripping, one of my hands came free. But I couldn’t do anything with it, the other and my ankles were still bound, and what I smelled now, hideously, was the stink of burning hair.

  Howling from somewhere. Another explosion. Scalding-hot air like a lungful of boiling water ripped down my windpipe.

  Suffocation, I realized; hot smoke and burning chemicals. Then it seemed I was being carried away. Something inside me dug its heels in, wouldn’t go.

  But there was no help for it.

  People say having a near-death experience is fascinating: the white light, your relatives all beckoning to you, and so on.

  Personally, I’ve seen enough white lights in my life not to be unduly impressed by another one, and if you knew my relatives, you would know why I don’t find the notion of them waving to me particularly attractive, either. In my youth, before I got on that Greyhound, when any of my relatives beckoned it was usually to get some fool to pull over so they could hijack his truck.

  “Mom,” Sam said from his chair in the corner of my bedroom; since what we had taken to calling “the incident,” he refused to let me out of his sight for very long.

  “What?” I opened my eyes. It had been three days, and I was beginning to get a little concerned about him.

  “Are you sure a Ouija board takes two people to operate?” He frowned at the card table where he had the dratted thing set up. “Because …”

  “Sam,” I said patiently, as well as I could through my sore, smoke-rasped vocal cords. My hand was bandaged, and the injected sedative had made me sick as a dog; I didn’t remember what the emergency people had done about it, only that it hadn’t been pleasant.

  “A Ouija board doesn’t take any people to operate. A Ouija board doesn’t do anything.”

  He frowned stubbornly. “But …”

  Just then Ellie hurried up the stairs and came in, looking lovely and au courant in her new short haircut. Only a few small places on her ear still showed pink where she had been burned.

  Thirty seconds more, Bob Arnold had said, and it would have been the ball game. As it was, Mike Carpentier had managed a solid base hit: The building was rubble, everything Paddy owned gone, the space nothing but a blackened crater.

  But everyone had made it out alive. “He’s here,” Ellie said. “Should I send him up?”

  “Dad!” Sam rushed to the stairwell. “Hey, Dad—you weren’t supposed to get here until …”

  “Tonigh
t,” Victor agreed, coming in without being invited to survey me in all my invalid splendor.

  I’d been told to stay down. The lungfuls of vapors I’d gotten had been pretty corrosive, and I was struggling to obey. But what Victor said next made me want to hop up and swat him mightily.

  “I convinced them,” he intoned loftily, “of my innocence, at last.” He glanced at me, caught my expression. “Of course,” he added hastily, “your mother did help.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Sam replied dubiously, glancing at me also. “It was a real team effort.”

  Clearly, Sam was deciding whether he wanted to get into this subject with his father right off the bat. I shook my head—Victor was always at his most impossible, following a narrow escape—and after a moment Sam grinned at me, rolling his eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said, clapping Victor on the shoulder in mock congratulations. “Good job, Dad.”

  Victor glanced suspiciously at him, seeming to know he was being made sport of, then let it go.

  “So what’s this story Chief Arnold told me about a burning building?” he wanted to know.

  His tone conveyed clearly that this sort of thing was little more than he expected of me, considering my complete lack of any common sense whatsoever. Which, looking at Victor and realizing that once upon a time I had believed it was a good idea to marry him, I thought was pretty much right on the money.

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “But it was Sam and Tommy Daigle who got us out of it. And Ellie. Without her, we’d have been toast. Although,” I added with a sharp glance at Sam, “it sure took you long enough.”

  “Mom,” he defended himself, spreading his hands. “We had to find Bob Arnold. And then we had to convince him, which on account of Clarissa was busy having the baby—”

  Clarissa, it turned out, had delivered a perfectly lovely and absolutely healthy eight-pound girl, just at the very moment that Ellie was in the act of having her hair burned off. Furthermore, Clarissa had done it at home after a labor of about ten minutes, so Bob Arnold had been understandably distracted.

  “But how did you know to go get Bob Arnold, is what I don’t see,” Victor questioned, having apparently already heard some of the story’s details but not all of them.

  He frowned puzzledly. “You see them in a car and they go one way, you go the other. So how …?”

  “That’s where Ellie came in,” I said. Even for Ellie, it had been amazingly quick thinking.

  “The boys were behind us in their car. And on the way down a hill, it would be normal to touch the brakes. Mike wouldn’t suspect any mischief. So Ellie did touch them: Morse code. SOS.”

  The idea still blew me away: Sam and Tommy fooling around with something, and later it saved all our lives.

  “Well, isn’t that clever, now,” Victor congratulated Ellie patronizingly.

  Fortunately for him, he didn’t reach out and pat her on the head. The gleam in her eye at the moment reminded me that in the old days, Ellie’s rascal ancestors used to while away the time between looting square-riggers and swigging rum by filing their teeth into sharp points.

  Now she only smiled, a thoughtful, private smile, as Victor turned away. “But why would this Mike have been suspicious?” he queried, and began picking snoopily through the items ranged out across my dresser top.

  “From what Arnold told me,” he went on, “until he snapped, and began behaving in a somewhat suspicious manner …”

  He picked up a silver button I had found between two old floorboards in the attic, made a dismissive face, and tossed it down onto the crocheted dresser scarf.

  “… no one suspected him,” he finished. Then he began poking into the jewelry box that Wade had built for me, his attitude proprietary, as if he had a perfect, inalienable right to do so.

  “He shouldn’t have been suspicious of us,” Ellie answered, seeing that I was speechless with fury. “But he had a guilty conscience. So he thought we understood much more than we did.”

  She walked over and began restoring my dresser things to order, stepping deliberately in front of Victor to do it, so that he had to move away.

  “His plan nearly worked,” I added. “He almost did make it seem to be too much trouble, to keep on trying to get you out of jail.”

  He had the grace to look grateful, but only for an instant. “And the trellis? What did that show?”

  “Again, nothing in itself. But Reuben climbed one when Mike was a kid, to terrorize him. He was trying it again on Mike’s child, on a similar trellis. And the connections between those things were strong in Mike’s mind. He thought we would see them too, much sooner than we actually did.”

  “Reuben made Mike a killer,” Ellie said, “in the sense that he gave Mike what it took to be able to do it, fear and rage. But unlike Reuben, Mike still had some remnant of a conscience, and that, in the end, was what caught him up.”

  Victor pondered this for about a millisecond. Then:

  “Well, that’s all very edifying, I’m sure. And it’s over. Jacobia, is there anything good to eat in the refrigerator? Jail food is hideous, and I’m starved.”

  He rubbed his hands together in what he apparently thought was a display of charming eagerness.

  At this, I considered telling him of the lovely red berries among the weeds in the garden: nightshade, among the deadliest of the natural poisons. When I was busy getting him out of jail I had somehow missed noticing the obvious alternative to his imprisoned status: that he would be here.

  Which was when Wade came in, his knapsack over his shoulder. He and Ellie had been putting their heads together earlier, but I didn’t know what about. Now he took in the scene:

  Me propped up on pillows, Sam at the card table, Ellie in the doorway, and Victor, there in the middle of it all, looking smugly sure of his newly regained position as king of the castle, even if this particular annex of it did happen to be my house.

  The phone rang; Sam ran to answer it.

  “Hey, Victor,” Wade said pleasantly, putting down his bag. “Welcome back. Glad everything worked out okay for you.”

  Then, astonishingly, he began taking off his clothes.

  It was his bedroom, of course; Wade’s and mine, I mean. But somehow I don’t think Victor had quite understood that, before.

  Slowly, Wade unbuttoned his shirt and hung it on the chair where he always hangs his work clothes until he washes them. He sat, removing his boots and socks as casually as if he were used to stripping down in a room full of people.

  Which he was not. To Wade, there is a border between the land of clothing and the land of not wearing any, crossable by invitation only. Now, as Ellie left the room very quietly, Victor cleared his throat and began frowning with extreme discomfort.

  Seeming not to notice, Wade pulled his belt off and undid his pants. He looked fetching and entirely unselfconscious; that he did this in front of me often must suddenly have been, to Victor, illusion-smashingly clear.

  Until that moment, I do believe Victor thought the idea of my having any sort of romantic life apart from him was just some ridiculous fraud I kept attempting to perpetrate on him, just to annoy him. And the rest of it, of course, was only an extension of that: Victor’s belief that somehow I still belonged to him.

  Wade stood up, destroying as he did so any possible remnant of this mistaken—not to mention utterly Cro-Magnon—notion.

  “Well,” Victor croaked, glancing about wildly for somewhere to rest his gaze, not finding any, and backing toward the door.

  “Say, isn’t that Sam calling me?” he asked flusteredly at last, then turned and fled.

  When he was gone, Wade approached, looking I thought rather convincingly Cro-Magnon himself.

  In the nicest possible way, of course.

  That night, Ellie and I went onto the porch for a breath of air. The sky was full of stars as if someone had punched pinholes in it, letting light through from the other side. On the eastern horizon lay the false blue dawn of moon-rise.

 
“You put him up to it,” I accused her, meaning Wade.

  “I never,” she denied innocently, then temporized. “Well, I did say I thought you needed some help setting Victor’s head on straight, making him see reality. And anyway, what’s wrong with a little help from your friends?”

  It wasn’t reality. I was no more Wade’s property than I was Victor’s, and Wade would be the first to say so. But as illusion, it was better than Victor’s idea that I was still somehow part of his harem.

  More fun, too. “Thank you,” I told Ellie sincerely. “What’s going to happen to Molly, do you suppose?” The child had seen it all; that, bottom line, had been the reason for Reuben’s murder.

  “Anne Carpentier’s flown home. Pretty shocked, from what I hear. I don’t think she had any idea Mike was capable of anything like this.”

  “No.” Sensitive and complicated, she’d called him, while she herself was the perfect example of “what you see is what you get.” I’d have bet money that she’d never even had an inkling.

  “She’s a tough cookie, though.” Ellie’s voice was approving. “She’ll get Molly through it, if anyone can.”

  I thought so too, but it wasn’t going to be an easy task. In trying to protect her, Mike Carpentier had done his daughter more damage than he’d prevented. “If anyone can,” I echoed.

  We stepped off the porch, strolled down Key Street to Water Street. Ahead lay the granite-block post office building, across from the blackened remains of Paddy’s studio.

  “Victor’s project getting back on track?” Ellie asked. Beside us Monday ambled companionably, pausing to snuffle up a piece of apple core before trotting on.

  “In a New York minute,” I said, still amazed at the speed with which he had done it. “The district attorney decided not to press charges about the prescription he wrote Reuben, under the circumstances.” Which wasn’t such a complete no-brainer as it sounded, since it was that prescription drug, in part, that Reuben had been incapacitated by. Victor had been lucky.