Fear the Darkness: A Thriller

by Becky Masterman

  I told her the latest about Frank Ganim, the real name of the guy who had come on to her at the Humane Society do and at the church. I told her how I had found that out.

  She was shocked, less by the fact that he’d lied about his name than by narrowly escaping his fate. “That could have been any of us,” she said, touching the kitchen counter as if needing reassurance that she would not fall. “We could have died.”

  I had decided Carlo was the only person who should know about my suspicions of Gemma-Kate’s involvement in the poisoning.

  “I’m here because of you,” I said, diverting the subject.

  “But.”

  “What’s for lunch?”

  Mallory shook her head and busied herself taking an artichoke, morel, and Swiss quiche out of the fridge. “Annette made it this morning,” she said.

  “Do you ever cook?”

  “Not if I can help it. I open dessert, though,” she said, and showed me a bit of sponge cake with raisins that was molded in the shape of a large tuna fish can. “It’s called spotted dick, I kid you not,” she said. “I got it at World Market, hadn’t seen it since I was a child.” As if hypnotized by her memories she reached out and started to break off a piece.

  “Freeze. Step, away, from, the cake,” I said in my best cop imitation.

  She jumped when I said “freeze,” and I felt a little cruel pleasure in still being able to pull that off.

  “My saddlebags thank you,” she said, with mild regret. “You and Carlo can eat it. I have some lemon curd to go with it.” She poured three glasses of an incredibly dry rosé, carried one into the bedroom, where Carlo was visiting with Owen in a way only Carlo could do, and we took ours out to the patio along with a plate of roasted garlic and blue cheese because I had liked it so much at Blanco’s.

  She was thoughtful not to notice my right foot slapping on the patio paving stones, something that had gotten more pronounced after my freezing episodes. “How’s Owen doing?” I asked to get her started talking, when we were settled in the chaise longues next to the pool.

  Mallory said, “No change.” Then, minding her manners, she said, “And how are you?”

  “Still on edge. Confused thinking. I had a high temperature the other night. I’m less sick to my stomach, but I still have the runs, which might be stress related.” I clicked the imaginary stopwatch. “Your turn.”

  “Here,” she said, fixing me a bit of French bread, with a healthy glop of cheese and a little of the softened garlic squeezed over the top. “Maybe this will help bind you.”

  Good Lord, is that what it comes to? Talking so casually about our bowels? But I took the concoction without protesting, and then, after Mallory had fixed a smaller one for herself, helped myself to seconds.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, me waiting for her to talk, with the sun high up over the mountain to our right, enjoying that pleasant sensation you find only in the desert, where your arm facing the sun is hot and your arm in the shade is cold. When I turned to the little patio table to get some more bread and cheese, I noticed Mallory was crying so quietly I hadn’t been able to hear her.

  “Hey, kiddo,” I said. “Why did you want us here?”

  “Life is so fucking difficult sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I’m afraid. I can’t see…”

  Mallory didn’t say what it was she couldn’t see. The future, I thought.

  She said, “I’m sorry I get overwhelmed with this self-pity. Sorry to be a wet blanket.”

  “Wet blanket? Hell, you’re my hero.”

  “What’s important is that you’re my friend, right?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “What I wanted to ask is, if something ever happens to me, would you look after Owen?”

  “Why? What’s going to happen?”

  “It’s not like some premonition. I’m not talking that kind of hooey. It’s just that sometimes I can’t sleep at night thinking about what if I get sick or killed in a car crash.” Her face twisted, and I guessed she was thinking about the train that destroyed her life. “There’s a fund set up and all that, but both of us are fairly alone in the world. I’d like to think there’s someone looking out for him besides a money manager and a home health care nurse, even if Annette is wonderful.”

  I was touched. I agreed with the solemnity the occasion required, but then as always was embarrassed by the feelings and needed to lighten the mood. “And would you agree to take care of the Pugs if something happens to me?”

  She smiled. “Of course. And Carlo.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Even if I’m dead you can’t have Carlo. I’ll give you the Pugs, but not Carlo.”

  Mallory laughed. “Agreed. But you realize, if you’re gone, within twenty-four hours he’ll get a half-dozen casseroles from church ladies.”

  Seeing that she seemed grateful to get past the seriousness, I added, “This doesn’t mean we have to watch Beaches together, does it?”

  She reached over and patted my arm. “Hell no. Neither of us is the wind beneath anyone’s wings. We’re either the eagle or we’re nothing. Let’s eat something.”

  Conversation over lunch swung in the direction of Joe Neilsen. I told her what I had discovered about the Choking Game. Mallory listened, then put down her fork and listened some more, then sat back in her chair and paled to an extent beyond her usual empathy.

  “He didn’t,” she said.

  “Didn’t what?” I asked.

  “The couple of times he had come over to read to Owen we had a Coke and talked. Well, he had a Coke and I had a glass of wine. You know how I am, Brigid, you’ve said it yourself. I flirt with men, women, children, and animals. And they respond. Joe told me about the game.”

  “You knew?”

  “Uh-huh. He told me how he played it with the young men in the youth group. The way he described it he said everyone was doing it and it was perfectly safe, even the police did it to get control over violent criminals. I supposed I was flattered that he was telling me something that he might not tell most adults. I’m afraid I went what you call ‘all Auntie Mame’ and told him we should try to experience as much of life as possible. So he probably tried it on himself and it’s my fault. I should have gone straight to Lulu about it, but I thought it might be like that game we used to play at slumber parties where you press your arms against the floor and lift someone up … Oh God, I can’t believe how stupid I am.”

  I thought about how Lulu had said she felt responsible for Joe’s death because she had encouraged him to come out to his parents. And how Ken said he thought he had killed Joe because there was a connection between the Choking Game and drowning. Now Mallory was taking responsibility. I felt like Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express, where everyone on the train stabs the victim (sorry for the spoiler). Only for me there was a twist. Everyone was taking responsibility but no one was being responsible.

  Carlo and I both reassured Mallory as best we could, but ultimately failed at the purpose of our visit, which was to cheer her up. She seemed undone by what I had told her. She was able to serve us a bit of dessert, the spotted dick with a healthy dollop of lemon curd on top, trying to hide that she was ready for us to go.

  I stopped in the bathroom before we left, while Carlo attempted to comfort her more at the table. I came back to that sudden silence that makes you know people are either talking about you or talking about something they don’t want you to hear.

  Mallory drew her hand away from where it had been resting on Carlo’s forearm. Who was counseling who? She got up from the table, went to the kitchen counter, and picked up a copy of some pages she had printed from the Internet. She’d been reading about toads and I might be interested, she said.

  Whatever it was that she had been talking about with Carlo, though, I didn’t think it was about either Joe, Owen, or Pugs eating toads. Then I suspected I knew.

  Forty

  I’m a better driver than Carlo. He tends to think while he’s driving, and when
he thinks he slows down until people behind us get angry and honk and shake their fist. So I was driving when we left Mallory’s. My driving us does not, however, prevent him from giving advice like “Whoa, honey, you cut off that fellow.”

  “Did not,” I said, despite the fact that said fellow had rolled down his window to yell at us because his horn wasn’t satisfying enough.

  We were heading north on La Cañada, a straight road that dips into and back out of an area called Oro Valley. It wasn’t the most direct route home, but Oracle can get really boring after a while. Despite the fact I’d only had one glass of wine (glass and a half) (maybe twelve ounces tops) I felt uncustomarily tipsy. “Would you please read me that thing Mallory gave us? It’s in my tote bag.”

  Carlo reached around to the backseat, petted the Pug because she thought that’s why he was reaching back there, and pulled my bag into the front, then fished around till he found the paper folded in half.

  “Bufotenine,” he said. “Not sure I’m pronouncing that right. ‘Toxic compounds found in the parotid gland, venom, and skin of a variety of toads.’”

  “Can you skim down to a more interesting part?” I asked.

  He did, and picked up again with “1994 a California wildlife instructor was arrested for possession … dried skin … huh, toad smoking. Drooling, seizure activity, arrhythmias, here we go, toxic to dogs.”

  “Now you’re getting too sketchy. Why would a person want to have those symptoms?”

  He read further. “It’s a hallucinogen. Euphoria. Visions. Changes in perception of time. How do you tell if a dog is hallucinating?”

  Brain seriously fuzzed, I didn’t yet make the connection. “Mallory is good to take an interest in the Pug,” I said.

  “Mallory was asking about you,” Carlo confessed. I knew it was only a matter of time. Besides being an indifferent driver, Carlo is not well equipped for keeping a secret or telling a lie.

  “I figured that’s what you were talking about when I left the room.” I smacked the steering wheel with my hand. “I told her I was going to tell you myself.”

  “I have every right to know this, and I’m going to insist you make an appointment with the doctor that Neilsen referred you to.”

  “Wow, you know everything. Maybe you know more than I do. What else did Mallory say?”

  Carlo and I usually don’t argue. I’m tired of it, and he doesn’t know how. He switched from demanding to more of a wheedle. “Honey, we’re just concerned.”

  “We? I don’t see anybody else here and I’m getting really tired of this ‘we’ business. You got a mouse in your pocket?”

  “Keep both your hands on the wheel,” he said, as I waved them about for emphasis.

  “I’ve got it with my knee.”

  “Don’t be annoyed.”

  “I just don’t like people talking about my personal health behind my back,” I said. “I don’t like people telling me not to be annoyed when they’ve done something annoying.”

  “Now you’re over the line,” Carlo said, sounding a little harsh.

  I started to flare up, not understanding what line he meant, then I saw that I was crossing into the oncoming lane and wrenched the wheel to the right. What I took for harshness in Carlo’s voice was alarm. At the same time I thought I saw some rust-colored things whip across the road. I yelled, “Snakes!” and swerved to miss them.

  I spun into a doughnut, an oncoming car missing me by a quarter inch. Another one behind it might not be as lucky.

  Instinct kicked in. I stepped on the gas rather than trying to brake. That worked; the car came out of the spin and headed straight. Unfortunately it headed straight into a saguaro cactus, a nice old one with six arms raised to the sky. The cactus stopped the car. The air bags stopped us.

  Now, maybe multiple snakes was another hallucination, but there must have been at least one. Carlo to this day doesn’t remember the snake, but he probably would have if the air bag hadn’t broken his nose. The bags deflated like punctured bladders but we still sat there, stunned and groaning. The Pug ended up straddling the console between the seats, having been propelled from the back to the front. She appeared shaken by hitting the gear shift, but seemed generally unharmed. When the Oro Valley cops showed up, I explained what had happened, trying to avoid the snakes. Snake, I amended. Just one snake. It seemed more sensible. Maybe I was slurring a bit because of my general befuddlement and having just taken it in the face with nearly two thousand pounds of pressure of ballooning plastic traveling at two hundred miles an hour.

  The cop peered into my eyes. “Are you okay, ma’am?” he asked. I know what they usually mean when they ask that question. I assured him I hadn’t had anything to drink. He looked doubtful, perhaps because he could smell the bit of rosé on my breath, and told me to stay put, which was fine with me. When he came back from his car he informed us he had ordered an ambulance.

  He asked if I could get out of the car and I did, though stumbling a bit. He asked where the snake was.

  I looked at him with what I’m sure was a you’re-an-idiot expression, swerved my hand in a slithering gesture, and said, “Gone.”

  He pointed to a bit of tire tread in the road, asking if I had mistaken that for a snake.

  I said, “Does that look like a snake to you? It doesn’t look like a snake to me.”

  “Ma’am, you seem angry at me. I was just asking.”

  He went to his car, came back with one of those Breathalyzer tubes, and asked me to breathe into it. I told him what he could do with his Breathalyzer. That seemed to make him suspicious and a little angry in turn. When the ambulance arrived I heard him talking with the driver about the snake I’d seen. Maybe it was a little green snake, he said. Or maybe it was a little elephant. A pink elephant.

  As Carlo and I got into the ambulance I glanced at my Camry and the cactus it had hit. The front of the car was buckled, and the cactus leaned at a forty-degree angle, stopped by a concrete block privacy wall in front of a housing development. I heard somebody say they’d have the car towed to the nearest dealership.

  They took us to Oro Valley Hospital on Tangerine and checked us into the emergency room. Carlo and I were put in separate areas. The receptionist held the Pug in her lap. They took blood. From both of us, they said. Routine. Apparently we had both suffered abrasions from the air bags, Carlo had a slight nose fracture, and we needed to be checked out to make sure the impact hadn’t broken any other bones in our faces. We were released with the warning that we were likely to feel sore the next day and that our faces would be black and blue.

  Apparently the blood test didn’t show high enough levels of alcohol, but with more than usual pleasure the cop gave me a ticket for killing the saguaro. I asked him how he knew the cactus was dead. He just smiled.

  I called Gemma-Kate to come get us in the other car. She asked where we kept the keys, and got directions. All very responsible. She didn’t ask how we were.

  “What was that about a snake?” asked Carlo while we sat in the emergency room waiting for Gemma-Kate. They had given him some pain meds, and he had a large bandage across his nose. Later I might joke that the air bags were never engineered for a nose that size, but now was not a good time.

  “You didn’t see the snakes?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t. The policeman asked me about it.”

  Certainly there had been one snake. It was red. No, that sounds too much like a hallucination. It was reddish brown. But I remembered Carlo turning into a skeleton on the road to Mallory’s, and losing my way in my own house the other night, and didn’t push the issue of the snake.

  Sitting there, waiting for Gemma-Kate to arrive, I started to free associate.

  Pug, I thought, stroking the dog that draped over my lap. One of the nurses had brought her some water, and she was sleeping off the trauma of bouncing around the inside of the car.

  Then, I thought, snakes in the road.

  Must have been a hallucination.

  Why
am I having hallucinations?

  Visions. Changes in perception of time.

  Then, toad. Hallucinations from smoking toad skin.

  Then, poison. Pug poisoned by toad.

  Then, Gemma-Kate.

  By the time she arrived at the ER waiting room, one can understand my state: agitated, confused, and ready to pick a fight.

  Forty–one

  There’s a phrase that investigators use: Lock in, lock on, lock out. You develop a likely suspect, lock in. Then you search until you’ve found the evidence to prove your case, lock on. Everything links together and whatever doesn’t link gets eliminated—lock out. It might not be the smartest way to approach an investigation, but it works surprisingly often.

  Maybe I could buy that the Pug had been poisoned by accident. Maybe I could even buy that Frank Ganim’s death was a prank gone horribly wrong. But if I was being poisoned, it was no accident. And if Gemma-Kate was purposely poisoning me, then it was difficult to think of any other person spiking the coffee and killing Ganim.

  The dominoes fell straight toward Gemma-Kate.

  I would be looking for something that looked like powder or dried skin, and I knew where to find it. I kept this to myself on the drive home, simmering in an anger stew. But while Carlo went to lie down for a few minutes, I went into the spare room, where Gemma-Kate had been staying. I hadn’t been there since I’d gone in looking for the Pug.

  Gemma-Kate might not have been your typical teenager, but over the days this had morphed into a typical teenager’s dump. Underwear nested in jeans on the floor where she had stepped out of them. A half-empty bag of tortilla chips on a plate where the salsa had dried. A pile of books thrown haphazardly against a wall, including a couple of Carlo’s that I remembered seeing on a bookshelf; that was the only thing that made the room different. I didn’t think kids read actual books anymore. Unmade bed.

  “What are you doing in my stuff?” she protested, as I opened drawers in her dresser and scrabbled through T-shirts, underwear, a little makeup. I opened up a container that looked like it should contain blush, and that’s apparently all it contained. I slammed it on the dresser upside down to see if she had hidden something underneath. I knew how to find drugs. But nothing.