A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  The neighborhood was primly neat, down to the green precision of each handkerchief front lawn, the tidy rows of children’s bikes. All the streets were named for presidents. I couldn’t imagine a junkie here.

  I looked at the note again.

  Despite the fact that I’d threatened Sembles with the idea some bad guys would recognize my car—or perhaps because of it—seeing my name broadcast on his door gave me the willies.

  I took the paper down, shoving it in my pocket, and the motion made the door swing inward a few inches. Even this slight gap in the entrance let out a gust of foul air. The place stank—a musky, invasive reek that smelled like someone had left a fridge door open for days in July. I grabbed the handle, keeping the thing from opening wider, then knocked and called out “Mr. Sembles?” a few times before I got up the nerve to cross the threshold.

  The smell was immediately stronger. I could feel it coating my throat and nostrils, and reflexively started taking shallow breaths through my mouth alone, but it was so powerful I could literally taste the stench.

  When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, the first thing I saw was the edge of a pale, liver-spotted hand flopped over the arm of a sofa, just beyond the doorframe at the end of the microscopic front hall. There was a low hum, like a TV was on with the sound turned way down.

  I wondered if Sembles had shot up and nodded out, forgetting our appointment, but then he wouldn’t have left a note. I stopped and cleared my throat ostentatiously in the hope that he’d wake up without me having to roust him.

  The hand didn’t move, so I took another step forward and said “Oh, great” out loud as I saw more of the forearm, including the blood-spattered shirt cuff.

  I took a deep breath, held it, and moved forward until I had a full view. The hum was flies. They were everywhere—circling his head, at the corners of his eyes, and clustered especially thick and blue-black around his neck.

  His limbs were angled oddly. Left knee bent and turned outward, right leg resting on the seat, as though arrested mid-kick. His right arm was parallel to that, high along the sofa’s back. Both his toes were pointed like he was doing a little jig.

  Struwwelpeter. I would have recognized the posture even without the pair of thumbs sticking out of Sembles’s mouth, the long scissors stuck in his neck.

  I swallowed down bile.

  Sembles’s clothes, from his neck to his knees, were blood-saturated—the stuff thick and gummy now so the fabric looked like reddish-brown leather, but there wasn’t a spot on the pastel afghan used for a slipcover.

  Too clean, all around. He hadn’t been killed there.

  I stood there, unable to shut my eyes but unable to focus on him—just stunned for a dragging moment.

  I could see in the kitchen, just a corner of it through an open doorway, and it occurred to me I might not be alone with what was left of Sembles.

  I stepped slowly toward the aperture, edging toward a view of the whole room—dishes and a Coke can by the sink, a glimpse of dull avocado stove rimed with grease and dust, a light panel in the ceiling still on and buzzing, though midday glare spilled into the room. Another step forward, easing onto a floorboard I willed not to creak—nothing, the room was empty.

  I looked up. One of the padded chairs was yanked back from a card table, tipped against the wall with its splayed-and-chromed front legs rearing in protest.

  On the table itself, a juice glass had tipped and rolled, spilling brown liquid, maybe the Coke? It looked sticky, drying to a stain from the outside in.

  A single fly walked around the edge, noodling for sugar, missing the feast in the living room.

  So whoever’d done this wasn’t a guest Sembles would sit with companionably over a couple of sodas—he’d jumped or been dragged out of his seat.

  There were two more doors behind the table, both ajar. I stepped closer—broom closet, empty bedroom. I was keyed so high that when I let my breath go I got smacked with a headrush and had to reach for the counter.

  I turned around and walked slowly-slowly back into the room with Sembles. One more door.

  “Bachelor number two,” I whispered, and threw it open. Nothing—a pink and gray fifties bathroom, like Band-Aids on an elephant. I made it to the toilet just in time to puke forth that morning’s coffee, then walked out to the living room and picked up the dead guy’s phone.

  When the 911 operator answered, I said, “I want to report a murder.”

  “May I have your location, ma’am?”

  “I’m in his house. I was supposed to meet him here but he’s, you know, dead—”

  “Ma’am, I need the address of your location.”

  I looked down, it was inked on the inside of my wrist. “It’s 1913 Fillmore, by the rail yard.”

  “I’ll dispatch emergency services.”

  “Could you just send the cops? It’s not a CPR situation or anything.”

  Maybe it could have been. Maybe it could have been no situation at all if I hadn’t fucked with this—pushed him into talking to me. All very well for me to think I could gad about, playing parlor sleuth, tra la. Without me, Sembles wouldn’t be rotting in the heat, rapidly becoming a pool of slop—meat soup. I’d known it wasn’t right, but still blew off that tinny little voice as fear, not conscience.

  I took a deep breath and gagged again.

  “Ma’am?” interrupted the voice.

  “Um, yeah?”

  “Why don’t you go outside and sit down. Get some air. That way you can direct the police and EMTs to the location when they arrive.”

  “Good,” I said, light-headed. “Okay, good. I’ll do that. Thank you so much. You’ve been so helpful.”

  And just as I’d done the day before when I finished with talking with Sembles, I placed the handset back in its cradle without a goodbye.

  I walked shakily back outside and stood on the front stoop, waiting for the cops, biting the inside of my cheek and feeling the enormous and wretched certainty that I’d caused someone to die.

  I started to black out, swaying a little, so I edged down one step and let my knees give, hands wide for balance, full dead weight plummeting. Landed so hard I heard my tailbone smack the top step’s concrete edge.

  It hurt worse than shit and then kept building, like the shock of water so hot you think it’s cold, pain rising in pitch until my ass and my teeth and my ribs and my eye sockets sang with it. All I could do was hang on to my knees and ride it out.

  It peaked, finally, then started to let me go, slower than it came on, of course, but still every inch a blessing as the tide of hurt ebbed, dying back until it was just a keen pulse in my coccyx.

  Everything was clear and sharp again. I could breathe. I was alive. I was grateful.

  I could think.

  I started wondering about the note on the door. The interior of the house had been fussily immaculate, except the spilled Coke. If Sembles hadn’t been killed here, he was brought back dead and couldn’t have posted the message himself.

  The killer knew my name. Knew I was expected.

  How many people had I told? Think.

  Of course Lapthorne, but Ellis was with him in New York all night.

  Ted. Wilt. Simon.

  I’d made the appointment with Sembles last night around eight o’clock, so I knew he’d been alive then. The clock in the car had just read quarter past eleven, when I parked.

  It was six hours from the city to here, so thankfully Lapthorne really was an impossibility—I’d talked to him last night at ten and Ellis had said he was in the kitchen when she called this morning at nineish—no time to drive up and back.

  The blood was thick and coagulated, so Sembles had been dead for a while. How long did blood stay wet? The cops would know stuff like that.

  My brain was stammering. How would someone get the body inside? They’d have to have done it at night—there was no attached garage to drive into and the houses were too closely packed to get away with humping a corpse up the front or even back st
eps in daylight. Plus it was a blue-collar neighborhood, so people left early for work. You’d have to have had Sembles inside before five, say, to be safe.

  The first patrol car screeched to the curb and I tried to stand up. When I realized my legs wouldn’t work, I burst into tears.

  Two cops got out: one older and kind of stumpy looking, with a gray crewcut, and a red-haired kid who looked like he should be yawning through fourth-grade math instead of riding shotgun in a blue uniform and heavy black brogues.

  They slammed the doors and started coming up the flagstones. The engine ticked slowly. Cold out.

  “The dead guy’s inside,” I said, sniffling and all shaky. “His name is Archie Sembles. I was supposed to meet him to talk about a newspaper article.”

  Another cop car pulled up, and then a fire truck and two minutes later an ambulance. People started leaking out of the houses along the street.

  I brushed a fly away from my face, thought about where else it might have landed recently, and felt distinctly unwell.

  The older cop and the two guys from the second patrol car talked to the EMTs and then went inside. The fourth-grader sat by me, one step down.

  He pulled out a steno pad. “Ma’am? Can you tell me your name and address?”

  I looked at him. Younger than me. Face guileless and nearly Osmond-sweet.

  “Madeline Dare,” I said, “Two-oh-six Green Street. Down-city.”

  The name-plaque thing on his shirt pocket read “Franklin.”

  “Okay, Miss Dare? Can you tell me a little bit about what happened here today? You stated you were going to talk about a newspaper with the deceased?”

  “Not about . . .”

  The fly came back. Looping around slow and loose, like it was drunk now. Satiated.

  “I mean not, like, his subscription . . .”

  The fly wheeled toward my face. Jonathan Livingston Carrion-Swiller.

  I lifted my hand to bat it away, feeble and jittery. Closed my throat against a surge of acid.

  “Miss Dare?” Franklin sounded all worried.

  I dug into a pocket for my card from the Weekly. Handed it to him and shut my eyes.

  “Madeline? You okay?”

  I shook my head. Very. Slowly.

  Got all sweaty, then, like the bad juice in my belly had to leach out through my skin if I wouldn’t let it flood my throat.

  “Feel faint?” he asked.

  “Pukey.”

  “Tell you a secret,” he whispered. “Me too.”

  I opened my eyes. “Thank you.”

  Ten years old if he was a day. I swear.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s your name? I mean, aside from Officer Franklin.”

  “Grant.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Grant.”

  “Want to try leaning forward? Sometimes it helps, just letting your head rest between your knees.”

  “Maybe we both should?”

  He looked away, a little embarrassed.

  “No offense,” I said.

  The older cops turned toward us, a phalanx of grim purpose.

  He stood up.

  I didn’t want him to leave. “Grant?”

  He looked down at me.

  “Don’t go in there,” I said. “It’s really gross.”

  They loaded me gently into the patrol car. Its back seat was composed entirely of hard black plastic.

  CHAPTER 35

  Officers Sully and Franklin were, I have to say, terrific. They pulled right over when I said I thought I was going to throw up, and Franklin—Grant—kindly gave me a stick of Doublemint after my final toss of bright yellow bile by the side of the road.

  I apologized profusely, and Sully said there was nothing to be embarrassed about at all, that you never knew how it was going to take you, and some of the toughest guys he knew had had their stomachs go all delicate on them all of a sudden, like, and he was just happy I’d made it out of the car.

  I felt better, but everything seemed as though it was happening in the next room. Even when I was throwing up, I was not so much experiencing it as remembering it while it was still happening—vujà dé. It was strange, because right after I’d found Sembles’s body, everything had seemed hyper-real for a while, as though I were more there than there, but now everything was soft and wobbly around the edges like God was hitting the wa-wa pedal.

  The police station was only five minutes away from Sembles’s house, and when they brought me inside they said the detective would just want to talk to me about what I’d seen and everything, that it was what they did when something like this happened, just talk to everybody so they could get their bearings, and did I want to call someone and maybe have a soda to settle my stomach?

  I welcomed the soda idea, and said I probably should call somebody but wasn’t sure who yet. Maybe somebody at work, because my husband was in Canada, and was it okay that my car was still there at the house, I might need to ask for a ride but maybe I could just walk back, it didn’t seem that far, really.

  But I was thinking that they hadn’t given me any Miranda warning, so maybe it meant I wasn’t a suspect.

  I was being treated with kindness and pity and solicitude, not suspicion, but maybe that’s what they did when they really did suspect you? I didn’t know.

  My only exposure to cops, outside Schneider and Kenny, was a couple of speeding tickets and a tsk-tsk when I’d crashed my moped. Maybe these guys were just doing a “good cop/good cop” routine—a new twist.

  Sully asked if I didn’t want to sit down, because I was looking pale again, and said I didn’t have to decide who to call right away, to take all the time I needed, nobody was in any hurry and I might have to wait a while for the detective to come back from the scene anyway. Franklin left the room and returned with the soda, which I thanked him for and sipped gratefully, if only because it made me shut up.

  Despite my reservations, I had a bad case of the post-shock chatties, and thought I’d better take a minute to figure out what the hell I was going to say to a detective, anyway, before I blathered the whole thing out. I didn’t know how the local jurisdictions were organized, and although I was pretty sure this would be a different outfit than the one that had handled the original Rose Girls case, maybe these guys were all old friends or even enemies of Schneider’s and he might not be the most politic person to mention, no matter which.

  I mean, for all I knew, these guys still invited Schneider over for barbecues and horseshoe tournaments, and God knows the case had been open long enough that they might want to pin it on anyone handy. I sure as shit didn’t want to get Lapthorne and maybe even Ellis dragged into it, especially now that his innocence seemed truly verifiable to the greater world.

  I latched onto the idea that I just shouldn’t bring up anything I wasn’t asked about specifically, and then realized that the best person to call was Wilt. First because I wanted him to know that I’d been right, that we’d set up Sembles in the worst possible way, and second because out of everybody he was the only one who couldn’t really say “I told you so,” which was the last thing I wanted to be told right then.

  Sully let me use the phone on his desk. When the call was put through to Wilt, he said, “Hey, Maddie! So how’d your first big interview go?”

  “It didn’t. Sembles is dead.”

  “Aw, Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ. And I’m guessing it wasn’t something nice and simple like a heart attack?”

  “He was . . . no, it wasn’t something simple,” I said.

  “Aw, Jesus . . . Aw. You okay? Where are you?”

  “I’m at the police station. Bridgeport. I need to talk to the detective, when he gets here, but I might need a ride later?”

  “I’m on it. I’ll stay right here by the phone until you call back. Just be cool. Polite, but, you know, keep the faith. Know what I mean?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I was feeling a little sick earlier, but now I think I’m okay. These guys have been great.” I gave Sully and
Franklin the best smile I could manage.

  “Right on,” said Wilt. “Power to the people.”

  Hippies. Jesus Christ.

  The stuff with the detective wasn’t that big a deal. His name was Fritz Huber, he looked exactly like Captain Kangaroo, and he shook my hand with a dry meaty paw before leading me over to his desk. It was in the corner of the main room—walls painted mint-green halfway up, faded beige above—with a couple of battered olive chairs hunched around it. His had wheels.

  “You know this guy outside work?” asked Huber, hitching up the belt his gun hung off and easing his considerable bulk into his chair.

  The desk looked like something army-issue, sooty green and massive enough to support the groaning weight of government work. He leaned on his elbows, forearms like tapered Smithfield hams, and flipped up the cover from a spiral pad of mint-toned paper.

  “I met him at the state fair,” I said. “Seemed like a good guy to do an article on. He cut those old silhouettes . . . knew a lot about the history. Local character, y’ know? People like that stuff.”

  Huber leaned back in his seat and spun slowly toward me, looking skeptically down his nose.

  Here it comes, I thought, the cough and squawk of a dispatch radio filling the silence while he considered me, but he dropped his eyes and only asked when I’d last spoken to Sembles, where I’d been the previous night, and whether or not I’d seen anyone else in the vicinity before or after I’d found the body. Not “So how’d you get this guy killed?” or “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  He put down his ballpoint, coughed into a fist, and then started feeding thickly triplicate forms into his old green Underwood manual. Everything was green—the color they choose for mental hospitals to calm down the patients.

  I gave him my address, which got me a raised eyebrow—down-city. One o’ them liberals—then my work and home phone numbers.

  “We’ll wanna get your prints, if you don’t mind,” he said. “Exclude you from any found in the house.”

  All I could think of was that that pretty much ruled out any second career as an international jewel thief, which was first strangely upsetting to me and then made me feel guilty as hell considering I wasn’t dead and Sembles was and it seemed like a stupid and petty thing to fixate on under the circumstances.