Northern Light

by Deb Davies

  DANNIE AND HER lot went to check on Elaine and send Arnie back in their stead.

  The house was quiet.

  The afternoon crept on.

  Arnie arrived, noted Charles, who was still sketching, and after a few baffled minutes, located Claire, who had fallen asleep. He helped himself to pizza. He found containers and put away the kidney bean salad, then sat in a rocking chair, drinking coffee in spite of the heat. He was working on computer notes when Jen passed him, opening the patio doors and heading down to the river.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey, Arnie. If it’s OK with you, I’m checking this progress out. If Dannie can clear a way to the pool, I can at least swim.”

  “You got sunscreen?”

  “I do. I reek of cocoa butter.”

  “Shouldn’t swim alone,” he told her.

  “I’ll be fine,” she reassured him. “Dannie says when it’s calm, you can see to the bottom of the pool.” She knew he’d put away the kidney bean salad to save them all from salmonella.

  “You want to swim?” she asked him. “I’m going in wearing shorts and this T-shirt. You could roll your pants up and get wet.”

  He pulled his wire-rimmed glasses off and rubbed the side of one hand against the bridge of his nose. He looked more relaxed than he had, but tense, too. Jen thought he was like a shirt that had been washed and hung out in wind and sunshine, but had then been bullied back on a hanger.

  “I guess not, Jen,” he said. “I should get these notes done. Laurel is helping. Thanks for the thought. Say, what’s the best movie you’ve seen that takes place in or on the ocean?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not Waterworld.”

  He checked the score of the Tigers game and went back to his work.

  There it was—the touch of color Jen had noticed when she’d first glanced outdoors. She picked her way down the path, looking out for protruding tree roots. Once she was on level, if stony ground, she could see she’d been right. Someone’s persimmon-colored scarf was caught on a willow branch that was still alive, although the tree itself had keeled over on the far bank years ago. The scarf looked like the one Claire had been wearing the day before. Well, hey, she thought. Anything for Aunt Claire.

  The river’s cold enveloped her as she stretched out and eased into the front crawl she’d swum in high school. Swimming into the river current was harder work than she’d expected. She struggled for forward motion, head turning just enough to keep herself aligned in the current. She reached a place where she could climb the silty bank, steady herself, and reach the scarf. I can still do this, she thought.

  As she stretched out an arm, the rusting jaws of a trap clamped on her right foot, yanking her, gasping and flailing, under the surface of the river. Shock blocked part of the pain, but she couldn’t gain the surface and make her way to the shallows with her foot in the trap. She pushed up with her left foot and felt the silt she’d dislodged cascade down, carrying her into deeper water. At first, she could see the sun and sky above her, even tree branches. Then blood oozed up around her, clouding her vision. She felt disoriented, nauseated, and suddenly, crampingly cold. Once, she’d been able to swim the length of a good-sized pool underwater, turn, and swim back. But that had been when she was in high school.

  Don’t inhale, she told herself. Count to one hundred.

  She got as far as twenty before she breathed water in.

  Black Pearl arrived at Arnie’s chair in the kitchen. The cat, yowling in a deep, strangling tenor pitch, landed on his chest and smacked him across the face.

  Arnie knocked the cat to the floor, but it spun toward his ankle and bit him hard, then launched itself at the patio doors. Arnie repeated Laurel’s thought that the cat might be rabid, since rabid skunks at times roamed the neighborhood. Then, remembering Pearl’s response to the raven, he touched the Glock at the back of his belt and started after Pearl, his jaw set. From the top of the hill where the house sat, he could see bits of someone thrashing in the water. Dark hair. An elbow. A shoulder. An ankle. Jen. Then she was gone.

  Arnie never remembered getting down to the pool. What he did remember was trying to hold Jen up so that her head was above water, but he couldn’t simultaneously support her limp body and unfasten what his groping fingers determined to be an animal trap. A big animal trap. Not a bear trap, thank God, but a big fucking heavy trap, one that was weighted or anchored in some way.

  He lugged Jen, cold and unresponsive, to the shallows. He tried to prop her up. She collapsed, the sand-churned brown water licking up her neck. He pulled her up again, tugging on her. Red ooze stained the water. Every time he pulled her head above water, he was wrenching her spine, her hip, her mangled foot. Desperate, he let her lolling head slip below the surface and dove below to try to release the trap, but the roiled silt and blood forced him to repeat the dive three times, her body sliding toward deeper water each time he circled down. Arnie tried struggling with the trap itself, pulling on it with one hand, the other hand trying to pull his gun free to shoot at the anchoring chain. Then Murphy was beside him, one hand steadying the chain, the other supporting Jen’s neck and head.

  Arnie blew apart the chain that anchored the trap to a waterlogged tree trunk submerged at the bottom of the pool. He lifted the trap as though he held a poisonous snake. When he sprang the device, Jen’s bleeding leg rose to the surface. He and Murphy dumped her seemingly lifeless body on the riverbank, where a few gold tamarack needles drifted down. A blue jay screamed from the trees.

  Murphy tried to cushion Jen’s blackened, swelling foot while Arnie turned her head, checked for leaf and mucus clogs, and started artificial resuscitation. When she began to gag, vomit, gasp, and breathe, Murphy spoke shakily.

  “That trap?” he said. “I sold a trap like that to a junk store years ago. The store was in Lovells. It closed when the hotel closed.”

  Arnie spat twice before he spoke. “Thanks. So what was that shit you said when Zoe’s horse bolted? ‘I won’t stand for it?’ Given what’s just happened, that sure could be taken as a threat.”

  “That’s just what that was. Shit. I tried to sound tough. Didn’t work, did it?” Before Murphy gimped back up the hill, he turned to Arnie, who had lifted Jen and was cradling her in his arms. “That trap. That was meant for George’s widow. You know that, don’t you? I take it back, Robideu. She’s not to blame. But get this mess figured out, will you? Put those women in protective custody. Marry them, move them, something. I ain’t got the heart to try to save lives again.”

  CLAIRE WOKE AFTER dreaming she was safe, sleeping in George’s arms.

  Charles woke with his head on pine needles. He’d brushed off a few ants before he realized he’d awakened to the sound of an ambulance siren. His legs were stiff from sleeping. He shambled toward the house.

  The wail of the ambulance brought Laurel to the driveway, where she saw Jen, head lolling, face pallid, in Arnie’s arms. She stumbled, looking at her daughter, and for a minute, the trees and people in her field of vision wavered.

  The ambulance driver gestured for her to stay away. Arnie, having transferred Jen’s dripping, limp weight to the men by the gurney, waved them off. They knew what they were going. He turned back to Laurel and after one look at her face, put a freezing cold arm, dripping with silt and water weed, around her waist and held her up.

  Laurel turned to him. “Will you drive me to the hospital?” she asked. She could feel his hesitation.

  “I need to be here.”

  Then Claire was by her side, easing Laurel away from Arnie so the two women clung to each other instead. Charles appeared.

  “I have to go back to the river,” Arnie said. “Get pictures of that trap, the way it was set. I’m calling support.”

  “What do you want me to do?” asked Charles.

  Arnie’s anger broke through the surface. He was angry at everyone now, though mostly at himself. He hadn’t thought, after Elaine had been hurt, that there would be an immediate s
econd injury, especially one worse than the first.

  “I don’t know, Charles. Why don’t you go watch birds?”

  After snapping photos at the bottom of the pool, Bertram Allarbee helped Arnie swing a plank across the river to the bank where the trap sat. Anything that had to be transported to help the investigation could be moved across the plank, for now. The chain anchoring the trap had been fed around the remaining branches of the old pine trunk that crossed the sand bottom of the pool. The branches stuck out like the stripped, slippery rib bones of a chicken carcass.

  Allarbee sat on the bank, pulling on his trousers, then staggered to his feet, walked a few paces, and dry heaved. There was a scarf on a tree where he and Arnie had been working. Cheap cloth. Weird color, he thought. He wiped his mouth with it and stuffed it in a pocket.

  Arnie had been staring across the pool, looking to see if Murphy’s small house was visible.

  “Sir?” Allarbee asked. “How often do you see something like this? Not like a car crash. I’ve seen crushed bones. I’ve seen motorcycle riders smeared into the highway. I’m not used to them, but I’m used to them. You know? They fit in my mind now. But this? This was malice.”

  Arnie turned back to the younger officer, whose eyes were squinting at him, puzzled. That was more than he’d heard Bertram Allarbee say since the boy had been hired.

  He tried to answer, but ended up shrugging, patting the kid’s shoulder, and walking away from him.

  BLACK PEARL APPEARED in the driveway, sniffed at the puddles of blood and water, and rubbed against Charles, who sat on the grass at the edge of the drive. He’d been watching a hawk circle.

  Charles reached down and scratched Pearl’s head. Laurel and Claire had turned to each other in crisis. The others were investigating. He might have said something about decay time of pines in water, but he couldn’t think why the information would have helped. Coffee, he thought. I’ll make pots of coffee. He walked slowly back to the house, glancing back to be sure Pearl was following.

  The kitchen was dark and quiet. He turned on lights, then found and set out towels. Something in his nature seemed to put people off when it came to asking for help. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window. When had he gotten older? Pearl looked quizzically at him.

  “You did better than I did,” he said. “I’ll find your food.”

  There were still a few pieces of pizza. He peeled off the remaining prosciutto, chopped it into bits, and fed them to the cat. He stood for a minute, watching Pearl eat. Then he crooked his elbow and leaned against a kitchen cupboard, resting his head on the back of his forearm. He tried to remember how many turkeys he’d seen, but they flew up in his mind like orange, open-beaked Thanksgiving turkeys on greeting cards.

  Pizza tastes a little off, don’t you think?”

  “Can’t say I noticed,” Charles said.

  “Seems like it used to have more zing to it,” Arnie said.

  They were sitting in the kitchen, in the half dark. Arnie and Bertram had taken hot showers and rubbed down hard with towels. Arnie had gotten back into his uniform but told Bertram Allarbee to change into one of George’s Black Watch plaid wool bathrobes. Then the boy—when had he started thinking of Allarbee as a boy?—had suddenly, unexpectedly fallen asleep in a rocking chair.

  Pearl had climbed into his lap.

  “Maybe he can’t sleep in his uniform,” Charles said.

  “Maybe he misses his momma’s titty,” Arnie said.

  “No shame in it,” Charles said. “You want Elaine to come over? I know you don’t put much faith in my staying power.”

  “You made coffee.” Arnie thought Charles might apologize again for the turkey sketches.

  “I want to look through George’s books,” Charles said. “Laurel says they’re boring or something.”

  “What the crap are you looking for? You think he’s got an old US treasury coupon bond hidden between book pages? Isn’t that like something out of a Rex Stout plot?”

  “No. I don’t know why I want to look. But I lie there at night, looking up at those books, and think they should tell me something, but I’m missing whatever it is.”

  “I’ll have Elaine come over,” Arnie said. “When she gets here, we can both go listen to the books talk. Not till then.”

  Elaine let herself in and positioned a gel cushion on a kitchen chair.

  “Don’t say anything, Arnie,” she said. “I’ll kill you if you joke.”

  “Elaine, for God’s sake, pile up all the pillows you need.”

  “Dannie didn’t have any idea when she and her brothers cleared that path that Jen would get hurt.”

  “None of us did. None of us could have,” Arnie said.

  By then, Charles was already in the library. He’d found a card table and was spreading out a few of George’s books so the copyright page showed on each.

  “Some of these books might have belonged to George’s parents,” he said. “That’s where we’re getting the little bit of old book smell. Dickens, Kipling, Churchill. The Collected Works of Justice Holmes. I’ve just spread out the ones that are leaving me perplexed.”

  “What’s the problem with these?” Arnie moved to the card table and peered down at the books.

  “Cormac McCarthy,” Charles said. “George has all of his books. All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian were good, but a lot of his stuff was crap. Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus. What was wrong with Steinbeck when he wrote that book? Christine in a dust jacket. One good book: To Kill a Mockingbird, ragged copy. A shitty copy of Stalky & Co. A first edition of Little Dorrit.”

  “So? If you want me to feel like an ignoramus, you’ve got me. I’ve read a few of these. To Kill a Mockingbird. All the Pretty Horses. But I never even saw the movie Christine.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of Stephen King here, too, but it’s not his best stuff. Larry McMurtry, but his later stuff. Nothing much by women.”

  “So? Would Laurel care about that?”

  “I don’t think George collected these books,” Charles said.

  “Claire said he did.”

  “I think he had a book scout. Look at this. There’s no uniting theme through this collection. No time period, no single writer he loved enough to get all the guy’s books. Not even an attempt to get the best book or books by favorite authors.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know,” Charles said. “But it’s not what I expected. I thought George had more focus. Was more choosy.”

  “What makes you think he didn’t focus?” Arnie asked. “I bet some of these books cost more than Bertram Allarbee makes in a year.”

  “And that’s just it. These books would knock the socks off someone who doesn’t read a lot, which I do, because sometimes, I’m snowed in. The average party guest would come in this room and say, ‘Wow, George sure loves books.’ And I think he wanted to hear that. I’m not saying he didn’t read and love these books. I’m just saying, you can look at collections, even collections by birders, and most bookshelves show some quirks and obsessions. Everything say, by Willa Cather. The Shakespeare Riots. Freddy Goes Camping, or Little Lulu comic books. You walk away from browsing bookshelves like that, and you think, that guy has a sense of humor. Who knew? Or, I didn’t think that woman would collect studies of nudes!”

  “You’re saying someone with a collection that contains oddities is into books, not adulation. These are make-an-impression books.”

  Damn, Charles thought. Arnie used adulation in a sentence. Correctly.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  Arnie said, “That’s odd. I wonder why he, of all people, would want to make an impression. I just assumed he was born upper middle class. He went to the University of Michigan. Not a shabby school.”

  “No, it’s not,” Charles said.

  “Where’d you go?” Arnie asked.

  “Columbia.”

  “Not shabby either. I went to KVCC. Kalamazoo Valley Community Col
lege.” He rubbed a hand up and across his five o’clock shadow.

  “Arnie, I gotta tell you something,” Charles said. “The smartest woman I knew lived on a farm as a child, quit school at fourteen to help her parents—which you could do then—then opened a grocery store and took care of kids and grandkids. She didn’t follow international politics, but anything about snakes, birds, birch bark baskets, preserving food for winter using layers of fat, fish traps, copper mines…you get the idea.”

  “She was Indian?”

  “No. No, she was just interested. I’ll never know as much as she did.”

  “Huh,” Arnie said. “My dad used to say, ‘Everyone’s smarter than hell about something and dumber than dog shit about something else.’”

  Arnie’s phone rang. Charles directed his attention to the books, but Arnie tipped the phone so Charles could hear. Claire’s voice was faint, maybe because she was using her cell.

  “Jen’s knocked out with opiates and full of antibiotics. She’s been checked by emergency room physicians and by orthopedic surgeons. Her whole foot went into the trap, which snapped her ankle in a clean break above the articulating bones.”

  Arnie gave Charles a thumbs-up with his free hand.

  “They’re waiting till they read the X-ray tomorrow before they have anything definite to say. There are punctures they’ll have to deal with before they put on a cast, but right now, they’re leaving those wounds open so stuff can drain.”

  “Fluid in the lungs?” Charles asked.

  Arnie conveyed the question.

  “Maybe some, but they’re watching it. If it gets gunky, they can drain some out through her back. Sounds awful, but they said they numb the spot where the needle goes in and it’s not painful or gruesome. Laurel is going to stay here, of course. Jen’s in an intensive care room, so we can’t stay with her.” Claire’s voice wavered.

  “The patient lounge at the end of the hall is OK. I’ll call tomorrow morning, if nothing changes. Someone should tell Dannie that if she and her brothers hadn’t cleared a path to the river, I would have hired a work crew to do it. The fact that the path was cleared wasn’t the problem; the problem was the bastard who set the trap that hurt Jen.”