Good Morning, Darkness

by Ruth Francisco

  Scott knelt beside the body. He placed his fingers on the base of the woman’s neck. The body was warm, but there was no pulse.

  “It was an accident. I can’t believe anything like this could happen.” Laura sank to the floor as if her legs could no longer hold her up; she pulled her shins to her chest and touched her head to her knees. The moon shined on the high arches of her feet; they seemed so perfect to Scott, so strong and graceful. Not deadly weapons. She looked up at Scott, her chin trembling, her eyes so lost, so helpless. “Scott, help me.”

  It was clear to the superhero what he had to do. He was Laura’s defender, preserver of her terrible secret. Like a medieval dragon assigned to protect the Holy Grail, he would protect Laura. At any cost.

  He didn’t think of the dead woman as human but as an empty body. He took her by the wrists and dragged her to the bathroom. He guessed she weighed no more than 110 pounds. He leaned her against the tub, then flopped her inside.

  He turned on the overhead light which glared too brightly; it induced efficiency, thought and action, clear and orderly. The old-fashioned claw tub had a freestanding showerhead. He pulled the shower curtain out of the tub and to one side; it was still damp from Laura’s last shower. He asked Laura to bring him heavy-duty garbage bags. As he unbuttoned the woman’s blouse, then her camisole, he noticed her acrid body odor, mixed with cheap perfume. He slid off her shoes and jeans. She wore no underwear and had a Brazilian bikini wax, her pubic hair a tiny domino strip around her vulva. Details assailed him, humanizing her: a mole on her shoulder, a fine gold necklace, long painted nails, a pierced belly-button, a thick scar on her left elbow. He didn’t even know her name. Paralyzed with fear, he gulped for breath; he felt his head detach from his body and float above her. Time stood still.

  Man is spiritual, not material. Where were these words coming from? A childhood ecumenical field trip? If it was a dead body, an empty vessel, then it wasn’t human.

  He turned. Laura stood behind him, leaning against the doorjamb, a box of garbage bags in her hand. Her face looked attentive and trusting, like that of a child watching her father build a camp fire. Scott’s fear dissipated, and when he looked back into the tub, the body was again a body, refuse, empty of anything human.

  He walked outside for a minute to clear his head. He took a deep breath; the cool mist woke him. The neighbors’ condos were dark. He let his eyes wander around the dark rectangles, over the azalea bushes, around the yard. The sculptor’s ax, wedged on a stump, cast a shadow like a sundial. He still felt dizzy but sensed an urgency to act. As he walked down the steps, he couldn’t feel his body, watching as it seemed to move on its own. He yanked the ax by the handle and carried it back into Laura’s apartment. He liked its weight, its worn oak handle; it felt like a friend.

  He went back into the bathroom with a sense of mission. This other person took over, the cool, confident technician. He asked Laura if she had gym bags. She came back with two black canvas bags, each big enough for two queen-sized pillows. They looked new. All the better, he thought. Less of Laura’s hair and sweat, or whatever else might be traced back to her.

  He shook out two garbage bags and put one inside the other, then did the same with two more bags. He was pleased with the heavy duty plastic. He placed the woman’s clothes in the tub at her feet, then removed his own clothes and took them out to the living room.

  He covered the woman’s face with her camisole and picked up the ax. Four cuts, he decided. The blade was razor-sharp. Three inches below her hip bone was a crease left by her tight jeans from her pubis to her outer thigh. He raised the ax over his head and aimed.

  He was surprised. No spurting blood, merely a slow creeping spill that made him think of ketchup. He rocked the ax back and forth to sever the ball joint, then raised her leg to slice through the skin on the back. He wrapped her blouse over the stump and placed it in one of the garbage bags. He repeated the procedure for the other leg and each arm, careful not to get any blood on the outside of the garbage bags.

  That left the torso and head. The smell of blood, metallic and bitter, filled the room. He began to feel nauseated. He asked Laura to hand him another garbage bag and slipped it over her head and torso. Carefully, he rinsed his hands and the outside of the bag. Then he placed the bag in a second garbage bag. He tied both bags off with twist ties and put each in a gym bag.

  He recalled he carried the bags to the front door. Laura seemed dazed. Must be shock, he thought. He set her down in a chair in the living room while he went back to the bathroom. He scrubbed the tub with cleanser, careful to dispose of the sponge in one of the gym bags. He poured bleach down the drain. Then he took a shower.

  As the hot water soothed his body, his mind raced, planning the next step.

  He dried off and dressed in the living room. They agreed that Laura would leave the next morning, heading out of the country. He gave her all cash he had on hand, about three hundred dollars. Then he gave her the engagement ring to sell. It was worth a few thousand, he said. Once she left the country she mustn’t use her credit cards. She should take a bus to the border, then fly from Mexico. He would take care of her apartment; he’d tell everyone she had to leave unexpectedly. “I’ll take care of everything, Laura. You disappear. Don’t even tell me where. If I don’t know, I can’t tell. I won’t let anything happen to you, Laura.”

  They agreed to meet in six months in Amsterdam. No communication before then.

  Now he realized that when he left her apartment to bring around the car, she must have slipped the engagement ring on the woman’s hand. He imagined her opening the bag and digging around to find the dismembered hand and cramming the ring onto the limp finger. That must have been what she’d done. When he said his final good-byes to Laura, was she wearing the ring? He couldn’t remember.

  He wondered if she had intentionally left the garbage bag untied so it could leak.

  Then the full force hit him: His knees wobbled, and he slid to the floor beside the telephone. Laura had set him up for her own murder.

  Did she know Vivian would hunt her down, forcing a confrontation? Had she known he’d cover for her even if it meant killing someone? Had she planned it all?

  He had to believe there was another explanation.

  Would she be in Amsterdam in a few months? Would she be at the St. Nicholaas hotel, as they’d planned? He’d make sure he was there in September, waiting in Vondelpark, watching the leaves fall. Then she’d clear it up.

  But first he had to save his own skin.

  * * *

  Peter sat in his blue Volvo outside Scott’s apartment. He was about to get out of his car when he saw Scott turn off the lights and leave his apartment with two suitcases and an empty duffel bag. Scott got into his BMW and turned west on Montana.

  There was nothing else to do but follow him.

  As Peter tailed the white car down the California Incline, then north on Pacific Coast Highway, he remembered how Laura had once looked at him when the three of them were having breakfast together. Scott was talking about something a mile a minute, and Laura had looked across the table at Peter. The whole world slowed down, and it was just the two of them alone, and she was talking to him telepathically, or at least that was the way it seemed to him, as though she was saying, It could be us, you and I. That would make me happy.

  Yeah, he admitted, she’d gotten to him, too.

  Peter saw Scott slowing in the center lane with his turn signal on. Peter passed, then, at the next intersection, swung back.

  The BMW was parked beside a brown bungalow that jutted out over the water. Peter stopped twenty yards further up the highway.

  The waves were calm, but a breeze was picking up, making the water a little choppy. Two surfers floated on their boards just beyond the breakers. A Mexican fisherman tossed a line from the rocks.

  Slowly, it dawned on Peter that he might be implicated in whatever nefarious deeds Scott was involved in. That whole thing with the foreign account. An
d what about Laura’s disappearance? Peter had talked to Laura just days before she disappeared. Now, Scott with two suitcases, looking like he was splitting town, leaving Peter to answer all the questions? No way. Peter admitted he could be a chump sometimes, but he wasn’t stupid.

  But could he rat on a friend? He didn’t know for sure Scott had done anything illegal.

  Peter felt the edge of the cop’s business card in his pocket. He got that this tight feeling in his chest that said he’d be spending the next few days in a linoleum and cinder-block room, telling the truth yet made to feel as if he were lying.

  He watched Scott in the rearview mirror. When Scott pulled a knife out of his trunk, Peter picked up his cell phone.

  * * *

  Reggie was getting the shakes. The patrol unit he’d sent over to Santa Monica radioed in and said Scott wasn’t home. He knew he couldn’t wait for Scott to be picked up. Scott was spooked, a flight risk.

  After Reggie assigned a unit to hang out at the Santa Monica Airport, he got into his cruiser. He wasn’t sure where to go. As he coasted down Centinela back to the station, he felt an awful dread that a murderer was going to slip through his fingers. Five blocks from the station, his cell phone rang. It was Velma.

  Someone had called in with an anonymous tip.

  Reggie made a U-turn in the middle of an intersection and raced toward Malibu.

  * * *

  After Scott pulled off Pacific Coast Highway on the sandy shoulder above Connie’s house, he sat. He was an hour early. He needed the time to plan, to gather his courage. He knew Connie seldom locked the sliding glass door to her deck. He thought he would try to catch her in the shower. That would take care of the blood. Then he’d do what he needed to do to get her into a duffel bag—purchased for the occasion—and take her to the airport.

  But when he saw that her kayak was gone, he had a better idea.

  Every few years, the newspapers reported a shark attack on a kayak in Malibu. Last year it was a UCLA college student and his girlfriend. The Coast Guard found the kayaks, then his mangled body, with a leg and an arm ripped off. They identified him first by his engraved Rolex watch and second by his fine Beverly Hills orthodontia. They never found the girl, but her kayak had been chomped in two and smeared with blood. A girl like Connie was tempting fate by kayaking every day, even in the winter, when sharks fed in the cool coastal waters. No one would be surprised that such an adventurous girl would die such a dramatic death.

  Scott congratulated himself on his brilliance. He wasn’t some demented psychopath; no, he was a performance artist, creating, innovating from his environment. He wasn’t, after all, a murderer by choice, but one forced into unpleasant methods by perfidious females. He was no more a murderer than a farm boy sent to war, killing honorably, heroically.

  Scott opened his trunk and shook out a wetsuit. He also had scuba gear, fins, towels, and a de-boning knife.

  He thought his plan was shrewd in its simplicity. When she paddled back at dusk, he’d swim out to her. All anyone would see from shore—if anyone was looking—was her kayak flipping over, a brief disturbance in the water, obscured for a moment by a wave, then the empty tranquility of the vast ocean. As the orange sun set over the glinting water, anyone who observed the scene might come to believe they’d imagined it.

  Later, he would stop in at the surf shop in Malibu Village and at few local bars to start a rumor about a shark sighting. By the time her body washed up, there’d be a great white alert—twenty feet long, head as big as a rowboat—and he’d be on his way to Barbados.

  * * *

  So like I said, I’d been going up to Malibu in the evenings to fish. That evening I was alone on the rocks. It was the middle of the week, and even though it was June, by late afternoon it was pretty cold. I saw two surfers give up on the waves and paddle to shore. Then I was the only one.

  I saw him drive up in his white convertible. For the longest time, he stood watching her paddle in her kayak. She wasn’t out far, maybe half the length of the pier. There was something about the way he was watching her that scared me, like an egret stalking a fish in ankle-deep water, following it slowly until it predicts precisely the moment the fish will turn.

  He walked back to his trunk, stripped off his clothes, and pulled on the wetsuit, like you see the surfers do up and down Pacific Coast Highway. Some use a towel around their waist; others don’t care who sees them naked. They usually change between the rocks and their cars so if you’re driving fast, you can’t see what they’re doing. That’s exactly how he changed. The only thing was, he didn’t have a surfboard.

  After he got on his wetsuit, he pulled a scuba mask and flippers from his trunk. He closed the trunk and tiptoed over the rocks to the water.

  So I think to myself, I’ve got to rescue her.

  I needed a boat. I climbed down to the sand, hopping from rock to rock toward the row of houses that hangs out over the water. A lot of them have boats stored underneath their decks, and nobody locks them: kayaks, rowboats, dinghies, canoes. I’ve never kayaked before, and I didn’t think this was the time to try it out. I dragged an inflatable dinghy down to the water’s edge. Under another house I found a kayak paddle.

  As soon as I saw him dive under the water, I pushed out the dinghy. I had a tough time getting over the waves; they kept on crashing on top of me and filling the bottom of the dinghy. My sneakers and jeans were soaking wet. When I got beyond the breakers, I spent a few minutes scooping out the water with my hat. Then I paddled hard. It was slow going. The dinghy was too wide for the paddle, and if I used it on one side, like with a canoe, I ended up going in circles.

  I finally got the hang of it and paddled out several hundred feet. My stomach was all queasy, so I closed my eyes and pretended I was in a hammock. That kind of worked.

  The sun was resting on the edge of the sea. The girl was way out; all I could see was a speck of yellow and the sun shining on her paddle as it dipped back and forth. She looked like she was trying to paddle to the sun.

  I began wondering where he was, where he planned to intercept her. I let my eyes sweep over the surface of the water, looking for his air pipe. I figured he had to surface every once in a while to see where he was going, but I didn’t spot him.

  The girl started back, her paddle smacking the water like the propeller of a plane. I knew I had to get as close to her as I could—to warn her. I couldn’t move very fast, so I tried to get to where I thought she’d pass me.

  She was working her shoulders like a jockey on a horse. When she got close, she looked up and yelled, “How’s it going?” with a big smile on her face. I waved and shouted like a crazy man.

  She didn’t pause. Just kept paddling.

  * * *

  By now Connie’s shoulders were warmed up—tingling and slightly achy. She was looking forward to a warm shower. She didn’t have a watch and was a little worried she’d stayed out too long. She’d have to hurry to be ready for Scott. She didn’t want to get caught half dressed. He seemed to like to surprise her, and it sapped her of her defenses.

  A breeze was picking up. As her kayak plunged over the whitecaps, water splashed her hair. It wasn’t dangerous, but she had to work hard to keep the kayak straight. Normally, the challenge would be fun, but now it irritated her; she simply wanted to get to shore.

  She thought she saw something dark swimming under the water—a dolphin, maybe?—then glanced up at the sky and realized it was only the shadow from a small cloud. But for some reason, it made her uneasy.

  As she paddled beneath the Malibu pier, a swell lifted her and threatened to slam her against a massive cement piling. She pushed off with her paddle and let the next wave carry her through.

  In the distance, she saw her house. Was that Scott’s white BMW parked by the road? He must be early. Distracted as she felt, she knew she couldn’t have been out that long.

  A surge of energy pulsed though her, a panicky need to get to shore. She paddled hard, counting to herse
lf, then singing in a toneless way a stupid song from Girl Scouts—why was she recalling it now?—grunting out a note with each stroke. Her stroke evened out.

  Suddenly, something black lunged at the kayak like a huge serpent, tackling her around the waist. She screamed and fell into the water. The kayak tipped over. She grabbed for it, but her hands slipped off. A man in a scuba mask—Scott?—splashed toward her, grabbing at her arms. She held fast to her paddle and tried to beat him off, kicking hard with her legs to get to the kayak, but it kept sliding away. He dove and came up under her, snatching at her arms and her head.

  She saw something glint in his hand.

  She grabbed at the canvas seat, trying to pull herself back into the kayak. As he tackled her legs with his left arm, slashing at her with his knife, missing, scraping the side of the boat, she kicked loose and somersaulted over the top.

  They were both trying to climb in the kayak, spinning it like a hot dog on a spit. She smacked him in the face with her paddle, then balanced it across the kayak and vaulted herself up like a gymnast on the parallel bars. She tried to get away, but he yanked the paddle out of her hands, throwing it fifteen feet away. He lunged and flipped the kayak again. She fell into the water, and they were back to spinning the kayak.

  She managed to climb back on and straddle the overturned kayak, thrashing her arms in the water, trying to propel herself closer to the paddle. She grabbed it just as he pulled himself up on the nose of the kayak. She stood, struggling for balance, then lifted the paddle up and back like a baseball bat. He crouched, his knife in one hand, ready to leap.

  They stared at one another.

  It didn’t surprise her that he as trying to kill her. She’d always felt it there lurking, his appetite, his malevolence. What did surprise her was that she didn’t want to passively accept death, as she had always feared she would. A thought—no, a ferocious instinct—zapped through her body like an electrical current: No one’s going to hurt my baby!