Blood on Their Hands (Mystery Writers of America Presents: MWA Classics)

by Brendan DuBois

  She put Kay Stanley, the old caretaker’s daughter—Will Stanley himself had died in his bungalow on Bear Island just two winters ago—in charge of day-to-day operations, calling in the right people to check the septic system, overhaul the old Wendaban boats, install the solar panels, deliver the propane that still fueled the interior of the lodge because Carl Verdyne had liked the feel of it. Kay moved soundlessly the way heavy people do, her short arms swinging, her eyes disappearing into her muscular cheeks when she smiled.

  It was Kay who hired Luke Croy, a handyman on the lake, to replace the rotten boards on the wraparound porch. He arrived one morning in a blue steel open boat that held clean pine lumber, backlit by the sun that was just edging over the pointed tops of the fir trees so she couldn’t make out his face. When she could—Kay introduced them down at the dock—she could tell he was getting to be an old lake man even in his thirties, where all the colors of flashy city places settle over time and what’s left are the browns that make a man indistinguishable from the wilderness. His long hair was pulled back neatly into a ponytail; his skin had a bright kind of windburn. He wore a loose cotton shirt and a leather carpenter’s belt. She found his lack of conversation unsettling, so as he pried up the old boards with more care than she would have thought they deserved, Jo went back to sweeping the plank flooring of what was called the Grand Parlor at Wendaban. She kept an eye on him through the front windows as he measured and cut and sanded and hammered.

  Over a week, Luke the silent handyman finished the porch repair and went to work on the roof over the kitchen, where water damage had blackened the logs. At lunchtime, he disappeared up the lake in his blue steel boat for an hour or so—“Eating his lunch?” Kay shrugged when Jo asked if she knew what he was doing—and the rest of them planned the gala fundraiser for what Jo hoped would become the Wendaban Center for Environmental Studies. She and Kay and Benoit, the prickly cook from Quebec that Kay had found, and Minette, a summer resident who was better connected on the lake than the hydro lines, were discussing whether it was more environmentally friendly to string Chinese lanterns or stake torchieres, when the first call came over the VHF radio.

  “Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl,” the strange high voice leaped into the room from the small box Luke had installed on the mail table in the corner, “this is Black Heart. Over.”

  Jo didn’t recognize the caller’s handle, but as she loped over to the microphone, she could see Kay frowning. “Black Heart, this is Cabin Girl. Over.”

  “Cabin Girl—” It was a strained falsetto, not male, not female, filling every syllable with a kind of calculated insanity Jo had never known existed. “—tell them what you did to Christine.”

  Tell them what you did to Christine.

  She couldn’t tell them: she didn’t know. After sixteen years, she still didn’t know. Jo left the others sitting there and walked stiffly up the creaking stairs to her room—her old room on the second floor of Wendaban, the one she’d had for thirteen summers, on the sunset side of the lodge, next to the back stairs, where the logs sloped and her friend Christine, the nurse’s girl, would sneak in laughing in her long white batiste nightgown and crawl under the covers with her. At twelve they rubbed their feet together for warmth even in July because the Temagami nights were chilly. At thirteen they made tiny braids in each other’s hair and applied lipstick to each other’s lips and Jo told her how the Hackett boy had kissed her, which was okay, she guessed, if you like kissing a fish. Someday I’ll show you how it’s done, Christine sat back, erasing some of Jo’s lipstick with her pinkie—oh, not on me, silly, she was quick to say, on the mirror. Christine’s hair was white with moonlight as she flung herself back down on the mattress. I know because I used to follow my brother around before he went to live mostly with our dad. Then she folded her hands across her little breasts and smiled a smile that had nothing to do with Jo and her eyes only seemed to be looking up at the sloping logs but Jo knew she was looking right at whatever the knowledge was, which meant it was for real.

  Tell them what you did to Christine.

  Black Heart.

  Someone named Black Heart knew how Jo ended up dressed only in a red shirt she had never in her life seen, floating unconscious in an old Wendaban skiff in the darkest part of the shallows, where the bay curved away from the lodge and the reeds were high, the night Christine died. Someone named Black Heart was saying it wasn’t an accident.

  For three days, the only calls for Cabin Girl came from cottagers wondering whether Wendaban was open for dinner business. Otherwise, the VHF was a source of weather, messages relayed to youth camps from anxious parents wondering whether Johnny was managing without his teddy, and someone named Little Dorrit who sounded like she was a hundred giving a fruit and vegetable wish list to the long-suffering Irish Stu, who went into town on a regular basis.

  The fundraiser was a month away, and in addition to the indispensable Minette, and Walter, the Tums-chewing Toronto lawyer, the planning circle now included Cheryl, an event planner, and Guy, the University of Toronto professor working on putting together a consortium for the Wendaban Center. Providing them all with beds and food for as long as they needed reminded Jo of the old Wendaban, when a tough orange tabby patrolled for mice, and chess and bridge were played nightly by hurricane lamps in the Grand Parlor.

  Luke still stayed apart, stripping away the bad shingles over the kitchen—the day it rained hard he came inside and replaced a leaky seal around the toilet in #10—and when Jo climbed the ladder high enough to offer him a tumbler of lemonade, he shook his head, “Thanks, no,” and turned back to his work. For some reason, Luke was one of her failures.

  Jo heard the boat just as the motor sputtered to a stop and she set down the framed enlargement of the famous photo of Wendaban in 1904 that she and Kay were mounting over the stone fireplace. It was a black-and-white shot that had found its way into any pictorial history of Lake Temagami: an Ojibway woman stood far back on the path leading up to the porch of the fine, solid lodge with its rough-hewn posts, set back in a stand of old growth pine in that decade before World War I. There was a grand stasis to the picture Jo always liked: everything was straight and plentiful then, the jobs, the money, the pleasures, the people. She went to the double front doors and peered through the screen.

  A man had tied up a runabout and was standing on the main dock, his hands in his pockets, slowly looking around. Jo held up a hand to Benoit, who was griping to her in two languages about these paltry inexcusable framboises, and asked Kay to take a look. The man was wearing a white polo shirt and nylon khakis, and in the sun that wasn’t quite high enough yet, his skin was the olive gold that certain blonds have who get to spend a lot of time outdoors. When he moved over to the lamppost where the main dock abutted the rocky shore, she could tell it was the Hackett boy, some sixteen years after the experimental wet kisses in the same spot.

  Tom Hackett.

  Someone from those few summers before Christine died, when loon chicks slid on and off their mothers’ backs and mayflies rose by the thousands over the lake like soft weightless gold shavings in the twilight and she wore her frilly halter top and one pair of shorts she didn’t change for weeks because she was too busy chasing spotted toads into the woods until she either caught them or she didn’t, her belly brown and showing in all the days of those early summers, when Carl Verdyne played the mandolin and guests leaned, listening, nearby. Tom Hackett. As she got to him he dropped his sunglasses and she thought it strange she should be so happy to see someone who only ever followed her around, someone she wouldn’t let join her when she went out fishing because all he had to recommend him as far as she could tell was what her grandfather called the Hackett fortune even though he had great hands with a fishing pole because old Will Stanley had taught him, too, just like Jo, and even then he had a frank crinkly smile which to the twelve-year-old Jo was only disturbing.

  “I heard you were back,” he said to her now, scratching the side of his nose as
she held out her arms—amazed to find him standing on her dock—as if to say, well here you are.

  “Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl—” Jo spun to face the radio, ”—this is Black Heart. Over.”

  She didn’t move. It was late afternoon and Luke had gone for the day and Minette was in town at a fish fry and Tom Hackett had ferried Benoit to the landing to pick up the Wendaban mail in one of the battered green group mailboxes. “Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, this is Black Heart. Over.” It was the same high sexless voice, a concentrated malevolence that sounded like no one she knew. No one she ever knew. Jo grabbed the mike just as Kay came out of the kitchen.

  Her thumb was twitching as it held down the button. “Black Heart, this is Cabin Girl. Over.” She let the button go.

  “Cabin Girl—” the voice went higher, slower, “—I know how you killed Christine.”

  Jo felt herself flayed open. She looked down to make sure, crossing her quaking arms over her torso just to hold everything in, not understanding why there was no blood or organs. Her first thought was to turn off the radio and give Black Heart no more access to her, but the radio was her sole connection with the rest of the lake, the only way she’d learn about fires or medical emergencies—the way the lake was hearing the harassment of her by someone calling himself Black Heart.

  Kay stood at her side as she held down the button on the mike. “Temcot, Temcot, Temcot,” Jo raised the radio operator at the Headquarters for the Cottagers Association, “this is Cabin Girl. Over.”

  “Cabin Girl, this is Temcot. Over.”

  “Get me the police, Andy. I want to report a crime.”

  Millie T. called her, then, a middle-aged lady who told her to give the bastard hell.

  Bar None called her wondering who Christine was.

  Bevel Boy, who turned out to be Luke, saying he’d come back if she wanted.

  My Blue Haven called offering legal advice.

  Irish Stu, who wanted to know if she needed anything in town.

  And Windjammer—Tom Hackett, who said he’d meet her on the dock of Wendaban for another shot at it—just to make her laugh.

  But the Ontario Provincial Police who came in their blue and white patrol boat and took a few desultory notes told her what she already knew: there was no way to figure out who it was, not as long as Black Heart stayed on the VHF radio. He could be anyone anywhere—all he needed was an antenna—on one of the thousand islands of Lake Temagami, or within range on the mainland—or on a boat.

  She listened while the OPP advised her to get rid of the VHF radio and install a telephone with caller ID, not telling them it would be a betrayal of her grandfather, and she felt her eyelids droop in pain as it occurred to her that maybe her whole presence on the lake was now just a betrayal of another sort. When the cops asked about the Christine mentioned in the harassing calls, she told them the truth: Christine was her summertime best friend—the daughter of the nurse at Wendaban—who had died in a fall one night the summer they were both thirteen, and she heard about the death the next morning. The lurid parts that only shimmered shapeless in her memory, all sixteen years that followed the event, she left out—left out because a speck of corrosion was beginning in the part of her brain where fear resides, and it was making her wonder whether the torment by Black Heart was, after all, correct.

  Back inside the lodge Jo stood without moving in the Grand Parlor, her body just a broken mobile of dry bones, while Kay brought out dinner plates. The simple act of eating anything set before her seemed like the only joy left in the world.

  “Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl, Cabin Girl—” at the sound of the voice Jo let out a sob, “—this is Black Heart. What happened to the red shirt you wore the night you killed her?”

  She was undecided about the effects of suffering. Did it close over her like some kind of carapace and keep her safe from all sharpened speech and damaging looks? Or did it make her into a cluster of unprotected dendrons, a bouquet of stripped filaments completely incapable of blocking sensation? Benoit’s incisors clicked when he spoke. Luke rubbed his left thumb and ring finger together before he ate. Kay had a smell of wet ashes when she passed. They were all becoming more formal with each other, which she realized is what happens when pain fills the spaces between people. Black Heart wanted her to suffer, wanted her to pay, that much she knew. What happened to the red shirt you wore the night you killed her? She didn’t know. Didn’t know what had happened to it. Didn’t know why it was important. She remembered waking up in the skiff in the middle of the night—only the dock lights showed her she was back at Wendaban, only the dock lights located her somewhere in a world where she had always found comfort—thirteen and wet and bruised and naked in a large red shirt. What happened to the red shirt you wore the night—She had stumbled out of the boat someone had tied to the old crooked dock in the shallows near the back of the property—without Christine, who must have rowed them back, left Jo there, and gone up to bed. The shirt was mystifying, but she staggered noiselessly up the back stairs and fell into her own room. In the morning came the news, and in her grief over Christine— and her failure to confess to the events of the night before— Jo never wondered again about the shirt. But Black Heart had seen her in the red shirt. Or Black Heart had dressed her in the red shirt. She felt sick at the thought. What happened to the red shirt—The question was about a piece of clothing; there was no question at all about the killing. Had Black Heart seen it happen? Had she and Christine not been alone, after all?

  Cheryl the event planner took charge of the RSVPs as they came in and kept insisting on floral arrangements, which Jo refused. Guy and Walter pushed for a short video presentation on Wendaban and Lake Temagami—”You’ve got to give people something for their money, Jo,” they argued—and she agreed. A leaky shower pan in #16 led to water damage downstairs in #4, so for the week before the fundraiser, Luke appeared to be in at least three places at once, looking grim when he told her he couldn’t get his hands on a new shower pan that would fit and he was damn well going to have to put in extra hours if she wanted all the repairs done in time. Jo paid her bills, handled the workers, and—when no one was around—ripped through old trunks and stashed boxes, looking for a red shirt.

  Overnight the temperature dropped and Jo was up, cold, before daybreak. She went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Outside the rain was soft and metallic on the pines and the bald rock. In it she heard the sound of everything she ever knew that flowed or healed, and without putting on a rain jacket, she took her coffee outside and walked the shore of Wendaban to the old crooked dock, where she sat. Rain added to the mug. Rain added to her face. Night was leaving, and a fine white Temagami mist was slung low, she could tell, over the water. A fish jumped. Jo cried for her grandfather, who had loved her—who sorrowed for her as much as for the dead Christine the morning he came into her room with the sloping logs and told her Christine had met with violence, which was just how he put it. Met with violence. Jo had no voice. He had gone on to say the girl was found dead on the rocks at the bottom of Stone Maiden Cliff. Her clothes were gone. They didn’t know yet whether she had been—interfered with—he said, frowning, and she wasn’t sure what he meant. But there were signs of a struggle at the top, and he was so grateful his Jo had been home asleep all night. Then, as he patted her shoulder in a gruff sort of way, she wondered, stricken, who did this to Christine?

  Who did this?

  And then she knew: she did.

  And she started to scream.

  She screamed because she had pushed her friend off Stone Maiden Cliff. She screamed because she could never tell anybody. She had been home asleep—just like her grandfather said—all night. All night. Every night. Home. Home asleep. The bruises were under the covers. The red shirt was on the floor. She could never look at any of it. She could never tell. No one will know, Christine had said, only she was wrong. Black Heart knew. All along.

  Jo curled up tight on her side on the old crooked dock, fanning
her fingers against the wood, like an underwater dying thing. A black dock spider eased a leg joint up between the boards. They weren’t hand to leg, the two of them, but they were close enough. The rain was stopping.

  She heard a boat coming, making its slow small way to the main dock at Wendaban. Blue. Luke’s boat. She curled up tighter, not letting herself feel relieved he was putting in more hours to get the job done. Without moving her head from the boards, she could see in the thin new daylight more world than she ever needed—a water skimmer rowing silently across the lake surface, a duck quacking softly along the near shore, the misty lower branches of the far pines. She heard him come over and stop just a few feet away. He set down his toolbox without making much noise.

  “How long have you been here?”

  Jo fanned her fingers. Her lips felt strange. Unfamiliar. “All my life.” All he could do was grunt. She raised her face. “Why don’t you like me?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Things matter.”

  “Do they?”

  “Of course they do.”

  “Things like a red shirt?”

  She jerked away from him. “What do you know about it?”

  “I heard the call.”

  “I could use a friend.”

  “I give you good work for a fair price.” He picked up the toolbox and started to walk away. “We don’t have to like each other.”

  In the late afternoon the day before the fundraiser, Kay set out some cold cuts and store-bought potato salad—Benoit refused to handle them—for the helpers to grab a quick bite while they worked. At the crowded dock, boats were tied up to other boats, bumping softly against each other in the light wind. Minette was out front directing her teenaged son’s friends on just where to hang the banner saying Welcome to Wendaban in Ojibway that Kay had got some Bear Island children to paint. Tom Hackett was tying up the VHF radio with calls placed by the radio operator at Temcot HQ to the Ministry of Natural Resources, trying to get it straight whether torchieres were considered open fires during a fire ban. Jo stood so long waiting for an answer that Luke took the bed linens out of her arms and went upstairs to make up the bed in #12. Minette’s boy was trying to drive a torchiere into the thin Temagami soil, poking it around for a better grip, then started bellowing out “John Henry.” Jo stepped outside as his friends joined in, and for a moment everything was robust with youth and goodness. Hammer be the death of me, Lord, Lord, hammer be the death of me. The strong boys, the imperturbable clouds, Minette’s laughter as the wind took the banner off one of its nails and it rippled sideways in a half-fall.