It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  “Are you from television?” he asked.

  “Why, no,” said Pat.

  “I’m a neighbor,” he said. “I live over there.” He nodded at what could have been any of three or four more ranch houses farther along down the road.

  “How convenient.”

  The neighbor blinked but recovered. “They put me on French TV once,” he said.

  “Really? About Lemuel?” She turned off the engine.

  “They came to the house for more than an hour. I had to clear a space so they could set up their cameras. They had me move the cane chair under the deer head. They asked me a million questions. What sort of man is he? What sort of neighbor? What sort of town is this? And then all they showed was me saying that I hadn’t read his book. They got a whole lot of people to say it and then showed us saying it one after another. Like we were a joke.” As he made this statement, his expression did not change. He was still good-natured, matter-of-fact, ready to tell the story on himself, but unsure how to do so. “They got the mayor, too. They showed him sitting at his desk under his seal of office.”

  “That’s awful!” cried Pat. “What did Lemuel do?”

  The man shrugged. “He said they were trying to make us look like real Americans, only they didn’t know how. He didn’t care if I hadn’t read his book. And then I did! I was going to tell him, but I didn’t get the chance before his son found him.”

  Dread pricked the back of Pat’s neck. “Found him?”

  “I thought you were here because of that.”

  Pat shook her head.

  “He fell down the basement stairs.”

  “Oh, no!” Pat’s voice slid up and down the scale. “What happened? Is he okay?”

  “He’s in the hospital. He’s been there a while. I figured I’d better clear the driveway just in case.”

  “You don’t know what’s wrong with him?”

  “Not really,” said the neighbor. “He just didn’t wake up.”

  “Does his son live here with him?”

  “Recently. But mainly he lives alone.”

  Her drive to the hospital was oddly like her trip to visit Frank when he’d broken his leg: empty roads, brittle surfaces, eerie light. This time Pat was at the wheel. You’d think that she’d have more of a sense of control, but she did not. She had a similar feeling of being suspended between two times. She realized now that it had been building for months. Would the new era begin today? Tomorrow? The next day? It was coming soon.

  When Pat was directed to a room at the ICU, she thought at first that the nurse must have made a mistake. In the bed was a strange lump of wrecked flesh; you wouldn’t even see someone so unhealthy begging for change on the streets. But as she was turning to go back to the nurses’ station, she started to recognize traces of the earlier face: Lemuel’s half smile was gone, of course, but the full lips were there, and the darkness around the eyes was the same, and a line on his cheek indicated where the crease had been. Pat sat heavily in the hospital chair near the bed.

  The noise was incredible—whirring, beeping, buzzing, hissing. It couldn’t all be normal. Through the glass window separating her from the rest of the ICU, she could see several people milling about, watching a wall of monitors, pushing at a huge stainless-steel machine on wheels, bending over to pick up ripped plastic bags. Two technicians conferred in urgently muffled tones. A sense of impending disaster was everywhere.

  Pat peeked again at “Lemuel.” Two tubes snaking out of his mouth were taped onto his bloated cheek. Another tube stuck out of his neck. Three wires sprang from pads on his chest. Two IVs were secured to a wrist board; the wrist was lashed to the stainless-steel piping that constituted the side of the bed. A final tube dropped from under the white woven hospital blanket to a heavy frosted-plastic sack in front of her. His urine.

  The man was the size of two of the old Lemuels. He was as big and white and tightly encased as an overstuffed laundry bag. His belly swelled under the blanket. You could tell he had no clothes on, but his ankles and legs, all huge, were tubed in stretchy black. A multitude of machines peered down at him.

  In strode a young doctor writing on a clipboard. She was followed by a young man in an oversize pea coat.

  “Doctor, please,” said Pat. “Why is he making that sound?”

  “What sound?” The doctor did not stop writing.

  “That!” Pat pounced, then tried to imitate it.

  “It’s just moisture in the breathing tube. It’s bound to happen when you’ve retained as much fluid as he has.” The doctor turned over a few pages on her clipboard so forcibly they made a slashing noise.

  Pat looked dubious. “What exactly is wrong with him?”

  “Are you a family member?” More noisy ruffling as another page went over the bulging clip.

  “I don’t know,” said Pat mournfully.

  “I see,” said the doctor, making long cutting marks across the paper. “Well, I hope you have some influence over him. He has congestive heart failure. And if he ever gets out of here, he’s going to have to stop drinking.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “And smoking.”

  Pat nodded.

  The doctor looked up for the first time. “He has the body of an eighty-five-year-old man.”

  “I really wanted to talk to him,” said Pat.

  “I can’t help you there,” said the doctor. “He’s going to be out for at least another week. He can’t breathe on his own yet. Why don’t you talk to his son.” With her clipboard, she indicated the boy behind her.

  He had a thin-lipped, wary mouth, which made him look as if he was going to give nothing away. His fingers were hooked over the pockets of the pea coat.

  “Are you looking for me?” he said in a polite, resolutely cool-guy drawl.

  “Yes,” said Pat, noting the eagerness behind the distrust. “Yes, I think I am.”

  IN THE DARK WOODS

  CHAPTER

  12

  The man’s face was huge and moony, white, jowly. Rolls of fat accordioned as, sitting, he propelled his office chair with invisible feet into the well of a gray metal desk. His attitude, though, seemed neutral. Virginia decompressed by one turn of the dial but was brought up short by a curl of the man’s lips. The fat made it impossible to tell what this movement meant. Was it a cough? A sneer? How odd that a person with such a face should be dealing with the public.

  “Two dollars.”

  His mouth had barely moved, and Virginia doubted she could have heard right. She couldn’t remember what minimum wage was now, but surely it wasn’t as low as that.

  “What did you say?” she asked. She knew she could not let him see her fear.

  “Tuh duhs.”

  This time his words had been even more incoherent. His huge moony face had started to waver as well.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, gripping her legs to keep them still. She had to remember to keep her voice even. She had to be careful not to cry out. “I’m having trouble understanding you.”

  “Tuh duh.”

  If she concentrated, maybe she could lip-read.

  “Tuhd.”

  “I can’t…,” she began, but then he opened his mouth wide, and the words came out as plain as day: “You’re not going to pretend…”

  Although her sense of smell had failed, she could tell that the words were accompanied by an awful stench. No wonder he usually kept his lips shut when he spoke. “You’re not going to pretend you’re worth more” is what he said, and she knew that the stench had become fouler, as foul as rotting limbs, and that’s what those were in his mouth, not teeth, but a fringe of rotting toes stuck in the gum line, each with a sharp curving nail and wiggling…jiggling…maggots….

  Virginia woke hot and sweaty, crusty all through her head, her heart pounding. “Oh, Jesus,” she said aloud. Yes, it had been a dream, but she had escaped nothing by waking. She leapt out of bed as if she were on fire, grabbed her heap of black clothes, added a white shirt, and staggered ou
t into the cold Maine morning. She was afraid she would be late again.

  Virginia used to think that the whole point of a mystery novel was its solution. The criminal might be brought to justice, or might not. What mattered was that the truth resided somewhere. The detective knew it—and so did the reader. Now, however, the finality and stability of the end did not interest her. What Virginia sought was the transformation of facts. She didn’t want order to prevail; she wanted a different order to prevail.

  Logic is supposed to rule in crime novels. Clues pile up through the pages until they can be sorted out properly. But deep down all mysteries are contemptuous of evidence. This man’s fingerprints are all over the murder weapon; he threatened the victim; he was seen in the vicinity at the time of the crime; he was the only one with the code, the key, the knowledge that the victim was home. So of course he didn’t do it.

  How wonderful it would be to live in a world where facts could be inverted. A suicide turns out to be murder. The actual love triangle involves the two less glamorous of the spouses. The victim is not the beloved mother, but a relative reported dead years ago—a relative no one knew, or cared about. And that man is not omnipotent; he is just a puppet. Watch his underling, who has a crafty streak. When Virginia learned of her ruin this past fall, she picked up The Red Right Hand, which explains away just about everything except for gravity.

  The truth might be better than it appears; it might be worse; but at least it is different. At least it is not this unbearable present, this cruel betrayal, this lost hope, this dashed chance. A good mystery should turn under you so smoothly that you have to hold on for dear life.

  Virginia was stunned. She’d been stunned for months. Her legs as they took her on her usual route past the first clearing uttered the whiff, whiff of worn black denim; her hands resettled themselves in the padded crevices of her pockets; her feet, well, her feet were cold, but they were there, reconnoitering the uneasy sand between asphalt and earth. These sensations seemed distant, though. It was her consciousness of being stunned that made her aware she was still alive. It was like a photographic negative of a feeling. It wasn’t quite the same, perhaps, as a real feeling, but you could distinguish the outline, so it would do; it would do.

  If only she had bought a new pair of boots.

  It was ridiculous to think this way. She was probably never going to write again. She was impoverished. But oh, it would be so much easier to be poor wearing a sharp pair of black cowboy boots. You could even make a decent corpse.

  Her own boots had split. The left one was perhaps as salvageable as ever, which wasn’t much, but the right had a two-inch score in the outer seam. Virginia had worn them through much of the pleasant Maine summer, when it didn’t really matter, but now the ball of her foot ached with the cold from the frozen ground.

  Until her ruin, she had been planning to buy a new pair of Justins when they went on sale in January. Her stepmother, Pamela, always gave her a check for Christmas that would have been more than enough. The expense was of course inexcusable, the money should be saved for an emergency or at the very least used for a visit to the dentist, but the boots would probably last Virginia another nine years, if she kept them properly oiled, and who knew what would happen in the next decade; she’d probably be dead, and if she were dead, she wouldn’t need teeth.

  Virginia was used to doing without. Her freelance copywriting jobs, which had never paid much anyway, had become fewer and farther between in the last decade and a half. She’d sold only one story in years, and her two books, if you did the math, netted her about thirty-nine cents per hour, which looked weird on a census form. Her life as a result was very dramatic. A library fine could be a make-or-break matter.

  For nearly a decade, however, she had always been able to count on the stock her stepmother had given her after her father died. It made sense that the proceeds of his careful middle-class life should go to his long-standing wife, Pamela, but in his will he had directed her to “make provision” for Virginia. The phrase prompted all sorts of questions. Had he despaired of her ever being able to support herself properly? Clearly he thought she should have a middle-class life. Despite her dedication to her art, she would have to have proper medical care. She would have to be able to get on a bus if a crisis demanded her presence elsewhere (i.e., the Berkshires, where Pamela lived). She would have to repair her eighteen-year-old Chevy if it broke down. But if this type of security was so important to him, then why didn’t he leave her some money outright? She was afraid he had not trusted her with it—a feeling that Virginia could not help but think was justified by the outcome, even though it was Pamela who had bought the stock.

  Virginia had thought her self-sacrifice was so canny. She’d cashed in some shares a few years ago, after a bout of pneumonia, but other than that she’d been firm and hadn’t sold any more. She hadn’t sold any even through this past summer, when her copywriting jobs had dried up altogether. She had been tempted, of course. Pamela had chosen the stock mainly because Pat’s husband had worked at the company that issued it, and she’d always liked Pat, but the choice had been a good one; the stock had soared in value. Sometimes Virginia used to daydream about the things she could buy: the boots, of course, and a soft red rug, because the floor of her basement apartment was cold, and a sleek black sweater with a shawl collar that she’d seen on a tourist walking into the Dock. But while she was putting off the purchase of these pathetic luxuries, enormous and incomprehensible crimes were being committed, and the stock that was supposed to be her security turned into dust.

  When Pamela had called Virginia about the LinkAge debacle, Virginia had not at first realized what she was talking about. Very little national news seemed to touch people in Damariscotta. LinkAge stock? What was that? She hadn’t fully comprehended that Frank Foy’s company, which was called LGT, had been bought out and so was known by another name. But it didn’t matter what she knew; the company was bankrupt, anyway. And Frank himself was going to go to jail. For what, Virginia wasn’t exactly sure.

  She moved away from the side of the narrow road to avoid an oncoming car. Curious that this should be so automatic a gesture. But it was fitting that she find herself halfway into the woods, where the winter landscape was as still as death. The earth would be no colder than the asphalt, after all.

  Why had she waited? Why hadn’t she given into temptation as she’d envisioned doing? She imagined as she often did an improbable string of events that could have ended in the sale of her shares just-in-the-knick-of-time. (“Can you believe it!” she would have exclaimed to Pamela.) She hadn’t spoken to Pat in years, but Pat could have called her out of the blue about something else, about, say, that crazy Lemuel Samuel, and said, “Oh, by the way, Frank’s company isn’t looking too hot.” Or Virginia could have had an idea of her own: Buy video game stock! Video games were all that her landlord’s kids ever talked about, and they didn’t even own any. Or LGT could have swindled the local school board. She would have sold then. Definitely. No matter what the projected profit. She’d have put the money into bonds.

  Shortly after she heard about her ruin, she’d driven from Damariscotta down to the shoe repair shop just north of Portland—just think of the money she’d wasted on gas—and the repairman, an Arab, had dropped the boots on his crowded and crabbed counter with such distaste and then had looked at her with such malevolence that she suspected a larger grievance. He must have thought she was a Jew, trying to exterminate his people, or maybe he had some other delusion equally histrionic and shabby. Up until that moment she’d sympathized vaguely with the Palestinians and thought that since 9/11 Arabs in America were getting a raw deal. But there in the shop, if Mossad had been recruiting, she, an Irish Catholic girl, would have happily joined up and shot this hateful foreign man dead.

  She was only sorry she had let him go so far as to quote a price to her—seventy-five dollars, which may have been real or not, but which he knew quite rightly she could not afford. Nor would anyon
e have taken up the offer; a bit more would buy a cheap new pair, and twice that sum would cover a well-crafted one with a little shrewd shopping. The encounter left her incapable of doing anything but reading the most ridiculously opaque of mysteries for days, helpless at the murderous rage that poverty had brought out in both of them.

  Her anguish was hard to recapture, or even really remember, in her stunned state. But her incredulity was the same. How could Virginia Howley, who could read a nefarious scheme into a video rental contract, have fallen for this stock fraud? She had never given her credit card number over the phone, never used it online. She’d always been an inversion of Sherlock Holmes: From a spot on a sleeve she could spin a paranoid fantasy of monumental proportions. None of this had helped. Instead of using Pamela’s Christmas check for boots, Virginia was using it to eat.

  Her walk divided into three parts, just the way a good mystery did. It began with an expectant turn into the wide world, i.e., a departure from the basement apartment in the row of ranch houses where she’d lived for more than fifteen years. Next was the larger road, where she was walking now and where the winter terrain was as chaotic as her thoughts. Mud was frozen in indecipherable contortions. Shattered skins of white ice covered empty little pits. Blocks of leftover snow lay here and there, impervious, fuzzy, and as oddly shaped as the Styrofoam braces used to pack electronics. The woods nearby could hold a body for days before it was discovered. Soon, however, the road would curve into the final part of her walk, the bridge from which she could see her previously hidden destination, the Dock.

  The Dock was a nautically themed restaurant Virginia had first eaten at years ago, with a lawyer who owned a Christmas tree farm. They’d joked about the meaning of the word dock. He was well traveled—he’d hitchhiked all over the country as a young man—and although he was a native, he was friends with many newcomers, people from the Boston area for the most part. He had assumed at first that Virginia was like them. She supposed she should have been, but she wasn’t. They were telecommuters, or they lived off trust funds, or they had some other arrangement through which money acquired elsewhere was used in Maine; it went a lot farther here. They had moved to Damariscotta to avoid work, which baffled Virginia, who was always hoping to burrow more deeply inside it. The lawyer, a genial sort, never did understand that the telecommuters reflexively made distinctions that separated him from them. They liked him, yes, but what they liked was his slight Down East accent, his casual references to catches, to boats, to local families. He was palatable as well as authentic. And the telecommuters were so well-meaning, you couldn’t even complain about them; you’d feel like an idiot. Only the other day one fellow made a joke about having his beans “à la mode,” and when Virginia didn’t smile, his wife kindly explained to her that it was French for “with ice cream.” It was this sort of thing that made you want to put a gun to your head. But anyone who blithely claimed that such little slights were worse for the soul than worrying about the rent never faced down the end of the month with dread.