Northern Light

by Deb Davies

  Charles woke slowly, his head pounding and the sound of his own heart loud in his ears. Every bone in his body ached in a way it hadn’t since long ago. As a boy in high school, he’d briefly tried being a quarterback. He hadn’t been fast enough then, and obviously, he hadn’t been fast enough when someone standing in shadow had smashed him on the head. He guessed he was lying in the excavated area of the Michigan basement he’d been about to explore when the world had gone dark.

  His feet were roped together, and his hands were roped together behind him. A rope ran from his ankle tethers to the rope imprisoning his hands, pulling his shoulders and arms back uncomfortably and making it impossible for him to lurch from his back to his feet.

  A gag, smelling faintly of chloroform, and much more strongly of lavender perfume, had been stuffed into his mouth and was held in place by duct tape wrapped around his head. There were also slight scents of putrescence, old wood furniture, and dust.

  There wasn’t much light, but being nearsighted without his glasses, he could at least see he was lying in a trench about three feet deep.

  How long had he been out? An hour? Two hours? Sunset’s light glowed like a blurred spider web through cracks in the far wall. He listened hard and could just barely hear the high-pitched chip of a cardinal’s warning call. Or was it the squeak of a mouse? Or a brown rat. Charles was quite fond of the docile, even affectionate, laboratory-bred hooded rats. He’d kept a pair as pets in college. They had taken balls of cream cheese from him in their small fingered hands and—though they’d made holes in his socks—had never nipped, let alone bitten him. That did not mean he wanted to become supper for a common Norway rat descendent cousin. As a child, he’d read his father’s terrifying and amazingly racist Fu Manchu books, which had left him with a phobia—of sorts—of being tortuously, slowly eaten alive.

  Maybe not a phobia, he thought. Fuck this.

  He arched his back, which resulted in a pulling wrench in his shoulders. He dropped his weight back and felt the bottom of the trench give the way branches give if you throw a tarp over them. He rocked his weight from side to side. This time, the bottom of the trench crackled, and the stench of death penetrated through the drenching lavender scent. His scrabbling fingers found cloth—the felted wool of old blankets.

  He was in the top bunk of a grave.

  He closed his eyes and made himself take deep, dust-filled breaths, filling his chest and forcing air down past the diaphragm. Three—he would take at least three, mentally cleansing inhalations before he let his body spasm in mindless, self-punishing panic—

  He lay there, trying to relax from his clenched toes to his forehead, acknowledging aching shoulders, admitting he was cold.

  I apologize, he told his body. I put you at risk too often. We are one, but my mind lets you down. Rest a bit, he thought. Calm body, calm mind.

  Will someone find me?

  What has happened to the others?

  Will the person who finds me hurt me?

  Where is Claire? Has someone hurt her?

  How will Lane feel when I’m dead?

  After each unbidden question, he tried to calm his conscious mind, which wanted to spin at top speed like a hamster in a wheel. He had relaxed his cramping feet, slowed his heartbeat, steadied his breathing. Then whiskers touched his left eyelid. His eyes flew open, and his sudden inhalations resulted in him pulling the gag deeper into his mouth.

  Pearl’s round eyes gazed down at him. He smelled of dry cat food. He patted Charles’s face with one soft paw and purred with affection. Or was it curiosity?

  Some affection, anyway, Charles decided, knowing he would never be able to say again, “I’m not a cat person.”

  True, the cat might not lead rescuers to him, but his friends knew Pearl patrolled the basement. Sooner or later, they would look for Pearl and find him, and Charles was much less likely to be rodent fodder.

  Find us both soon, he thought. Before the night gets any darker.

  Pearl appeared perplexed but pleased. He leaned down and sniffed at Charles’s face, then jumped down beside his hips.

  If Charles turned on one side, he could see down the length of his body. Pearl strummed the rope that held his feet together. Next, Pearl scent-marked the rope by rubbing against it. Then, Pearl sharpened his claws on the blanket—the blanket that divided Charles from…Murphy?

  His brain rushed back into his skull with a virtual popping sensation, filling the vacuum that had occupied his head once he’d forced the fear out.

  Who else’s body would be so thin?

  Laurel? Jen?

  But he’d seen each of them that morning over coffee.

  Murphy. A gristly little man alive. A gristly corpse dead.

  Somehow, Charles would have to flex in these ropes. He would have to bend stiff knees until he was in a supine kneeling position. He would have to wriggle numb fingers and tear at the felting that kept his feet from Murphy’s feet.

  There was at least a chance Murphy had been buried with his boots on. Or, like Charles, left fully clothed, to be buried later. With his boots on.

  And according to Jen, there was a sheath knife in his right boot.

  Charles had the arms, hands, and fingers of a man who had spent years climbing up and down trees looking for owl nests, and scrabbling about on rock faces looking for swallows. The occasions when he’d fallen and hung also stood him in good stead. Over time, he’d developed the sometimes critically important, sometimes disastrous ability to ignore pain when he set his mind to it.

  Inch by sweaty inch, shoulders, calf, and bum muscles aching, he moved around until he could rip at the matted wool. He was afraid Murphy might have been double-wrapped, like high-end cold cuts in cellophane and butcher’s paper—only in this case, Charles was afraid he’d find the blanket and a tarp.

  Pearl had spent a blissful twenty minutes chewing the plastic tips off Charles’s shoelaces, and Charles had broken off most of his fingernails by the time he maneuvered into position. The broken nails snagged on the wool, splitting and ripping off. As the last light disappeared, he touched and recoiled from the hair on Murphy’s ankles, which suddenly made the man’s body and death unpleasantly real.

  He flexed his fingers. Murphy’s sock had scrunched down at some point and puddled in the heel of his boot. Charles touched cold skin, then an edge of leather. More maneuvering, then leg cramps so sharp and sudden they made him convulse, but he remained impervious to the pain in his hands.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. He’d cried out, which brought Pearl back to peer down at him. The small black cat was all but invisible now, the wide-open yellow eyes all Charles could see.

  Slow, now, he told himself. If he jerked and shoved the knife, he might lose any chance to—

  Don’t think. Mind blank. He wriggled his fingertips as gently as if he were scratching Pearl under the chin.

  The metal, when he touched it, was smooth, and his hands were slippery with blood. Pearl was now curious and jumped down on top of him, bumping at his wrist, trying to help his excavation. He swore through his gag at the cat, making enough noise that Pearl walked up his body, sniffed at the gag, and rubbed against his cheek, purring.

  Goddamn it, he thought. Goddamn cat. Get your ass out of my face! To keep Pearl from rolling against his nose, he moved his neck and eased his head back, realizing his leg cramps had eased. When he cut through the first rope that held him, he realized how much his hands were bleeding. Gobbets of blood. Chicken-gut-sized globs of blood.

  By the time he managed to roll up and out from the excavation, his arms were smeared with blood up to his elbows. His fingers oozed blood. He swayed on hands and knees.

  He no longer functioned coherently.

  He remembered losing the first of his molars when he was a child: the salt-blood taste in his mouth, the tooth tottering when his tongue pushed against it, one root still holding, a tap root linking his childhood to an adult world.

  In this case, the tap root linked an ad
ult world to his future existence. Pull yourself together, he told himself. Push yourself up or die here.

  Goddamn it, you bastard, push.

  When Charles pulled himself up the basement stairs to the kitchen, he remembered Claire’s plunge down them. He’d thought, when he gained the kitchen, he would have some respite, but after glancing out the windows, he lowered himself to the floor and crawled to the outside door. He let himself tumble to the driveway, sick with horror. Shit, he thought. Holy God. Shit, shit, shit.

  He didn’t think anyone on the patio had seen him. Certainly Bertram Allarbee—upright in a kitchen chair with a hole in his forehead—would not see or hear anything ever again.

  His best chance of helping Claire and Laurel would take him around the kitchen corner, past the cedar trees. If he was seen, he could at least provide a distraction. If he was shot, Arnie might hear. He crawled, keeping his head low, gravel embedding in cuts in his hands, forearms, and knees. When he turned the corner, he saw the only cover he had was Arnie’s body.

  He had always thought of Arnie as a big man, but he knew that in death, until bloat set in, all things collapse, ribs sinking inward once lungs are deprived of breath. His only reaction was cowardly and plaintive. Why couldn’t the man have been bigger? A half-ton of a man, a bulwark he could hide behind?

  Beyond Arnie, what he saw seemed surreal. Burning branches spat and cracked. Heat made the air above the fire pit waver. Smoke and sparks stank of beeswax and lavender.

  Ann Campbell, wearing a black shirt, tennis shoes, and slacks, stood with her back to him, silhouetted in the light of the fire pit. She looked like a small, pudgy version of Modesty Blaise, the heroine of British books and comic strips once worshipped by his adolescent self.

  Ann had pulled her hair back from her forehead with a black scarf that tied in back and swayed with her body’s movements. Her right wrist dangled, supporting the slight weight of a woman’s mother-of-pearl-handled pepper-box revolver that took small caliber bullets. His dad hadn’t taught him to drink, but he knew his guns.

  Ann was facing the fire pit. Claire sat in an Adirondack chair, her legs dangling to either side, her shift falling back above her knees. She looked drugged. Her head lolled on one bare shoulder, her hair half in her face, half blending with what she was wearing.

  Laurel, wearing a man’s T-shirt and a pair of women’s boxer shorts, sat on the ground next to Claire’s chair. Her arms and legs were crossed, and her chin was tipped up, her mouth set in a disdainful look.

  Was there a way he could let Laurel, and only Laurel, know he was there? Throw pebbles? Try an owl call?

  “Hello, Charles,” Ann said.

  “She’s got two pistols. Bertram’s dead, and Arnie might be—two shots, one in the chest, one in the head. She says she’s got six bullets,” Laurel rattled off.

  “What’s wrong with Claire?” he asked Ann, scooting toward her.

  “Rohypnol. Not a lot.”

  Charles looked blank.

  “Date rape drug,” Ann said. “I brought some samples of cheesecake and doctored apple jack. Bertram wouldn’t drink on duty, but he let me in. If he’d taken a drink, I wouldn’t have had to kill him. Miss Priss here,” she nodded at Laurel, “must have just pretended to drink.”

  “Where did you get the drug?” Charles asked—not that it mattered, but the longer he could keep Ann talking, the more chance he had to think.

  “None of your business. Don’t come any closer, or I’ll put a bullet in Laurel’s stomach,” Ann warned him. “I didn’t want Claire comatose. Just a little woozy. I needn’t have bothered. Neither of them could get away from me. I told Laurel I’d shoot Claire, and Claire I’d shoot Laurel. They’re soppy as newborn kittens. Think the world is all milk, milk, milk.”

  “Bitch,” Claire said, her words slurred.

  “There won’t be any more kittens,” Ann said. “Patsy took care of kittens. Claire has a lot to answer for, Charles, but it’s your fault Patsy’s dead.”

  Claire moved in the chair, twisting her head and torso, eyes still closed, face still blank. Drool ran down her chin, following the line of her neck into her cleavage. She made a visible effort to swallow and adjust her jaw so her lips closed. She swallowed hard again.

  Charles looked more closely at the way she was sitting and realized her feet were tied—one on each side of the chair, splaying her legs and immobilizing the lower half of her body. Her wrists were tied to the armrests. Jesus God.

  “Laurel. Are you tied up?”

  “No. But I can’t get up fast. Why is it Charles’s fault Patsy is dead?” she asked Ann.

  “Patsy Cluny had a code, a leftover Catholic thing,” Ann said. “She was willing to help me get Claire out of this house, but it turned out she was using a rationalization: we could set the stage for accidents if good could prevail. Claire and the basement stairs? Zoe Weathers’s horse? No one got really hurt. We made that sign to try to scare Claire out, but it didn’t hurt anyone.

  “When it came to setting that trap in the river, Patsy wouldn’t help me. I paid Murphy a lot of money, but I didn’t trust him much.”

  “You thought Claire, not Jen, would be the first to swim after the path was cleared,” Charles said.

  “I damn well did,” Ann told him. “We all heard about your beautiful stream, Charles, and how energized Claire was from being there with you. But it was Jen who nearly drowned. And then Murphy and Patsy both went soft on me. I don’t see why people are so sentimental about younger people dying. Just because they’re young doesn’t mean they’re worth much. Murphy was angry. Of course, he had to go. And Patsy started looking at me. She started using rosary beads and crossing herself in the store, as though Jen was my fault.”

  “And Jen wasn’t your fault?” Charles asked.

  “Jen was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Laurel and the snake—just my little joke.”

  “Then you poisoned everyone at the wake, including yourself. You spread suspicion and distracted us all from Patsy’s death. How did you come to know about green-spored parasol mushrooms?”

  “Patsy and I picked some by accident once, a long time ago, so I knew I would react to them. More important, I buy for the store. You think I can’t look up mushrooms? Do you think I’m stupid, Charles?”

  Charles saw Laurel flex her legs as though preparing to lurch forward.

  “Not stupid, but mean. The way Patsy’s father was mean, Ann. You offered her a refuge, and then you killed her.”

  “I was never mean to Patsy! She was my best friend! She had the best food, the best medical care. She never knew pain and suffering, once she moved in with me.”

  “Bee stings?” Charles asked her.

  “Don’t bait me. I knocked her out before I dropped the branch with the hive on her. And then, I had to walk home and leave the car there.” She narrowed her eyes. “What I want to know, Charles, is why you suspected me. You weren’t surprised to see me just now. It could have been Sanjay who spooked Whit. Zoe’s always liked him, but now, she’s crazy about him. And I bet he made a pile of money taking care of that horse. It could have been Bill Marsh. Did you think of him? Maybe Barbara’s insured, and he needs money for the farm.”

  “I notice fibs,” he said. “You said everything you sold was made in Michigan. But the citrus hand lotion? Really? And you told everyone Murphy hand carved those ‘lucky sticks.’ Claire asked me if I thought one of those would be helpful for Jen. They’re just small trees that honeysuckle vines snake around, so they grow in grooved spirals that take a little smoothing out. It didn’t seem very important, but I wondered why you would stretch the truth about something so banal. And why would Murphy go along with it? You couldn’t have been paying him much. His underwear looked like he’d been discharged in it.

  “I started to think about Murphy and you. Both of you with an angry edge—him from his time in the service, you from thinking people dismissed you as a shopkeeper. And neither Sanjay nor Bill could have tried to burn
my cabin. Bill’s taller than the man Ed described, and Sanjay has the shoulders of a big animal vet. So I thought—Murphy. But now I’ve seen Murphy, and I know it couldn’t have been him.”

  “I wanted the bitch out of here! If she hadn’t been stubborn, if the neighbors hadn’t been soft, she could have just sold this place. But no—rally around the bereaved.”

  She leaned forward and pulled Claire’s chair closer to the fire. There were embers in the fire pit. Ann, keeping hold of a gun with her right hand, scooped some coals with what looked like a metal soup ladle, stared at them a long minute, and threw them over Claire. Tendrils of Claire’s hair caught fire, and Claire jerked her head back and struggled. Laurel lunged to put out the flames.

  Ann snickered. “Sit down, bone ass. Save some energy to use when your lardy friend catches fire. I don’t intent to kill you. I may not even kill Claire.” She drew Claire’s name out. “I want to know, before I leave—and I am leaving—what kind of magic Claire has in her cunt.”

  She slowly used the ladle—oh God, Charles thought, it was sterling silver—to catch the hem of Claire’s slip and push it up her thighs.

  “Did you read Johnny Tremain?” Ann asked.

  Claire threw up, covering her rounded, silk-clad stomach with alcohol and bile.

  “Actually, it was Johnny Tremain: A Story of Boston in Revolt,” Laurel said. “She could tell you that herself, if you hadn’t drugged her. She worked in a children’s bookstore.”

  “I read. Libraries.” Claire’s head came up a little. Her voice was less slurry. She hit the R hard, because a teacher had shamed her once for saying “libary.”

  “I know that,” Ann said. “I know all about you. The main thing I know is, we were a lot alike, you and me. My family Irish and Polish, yours Irish and German. Both of us growing up fast, our parents not liking it. Boys always after me, wanting to rub against me. Me, staying a good girl. But that’s not what you did.” She swayed like a cobra, swinging the ladle hypnotically from her right to her left and back.

  “This is…about Georsh,” Claire said. She straightened in the chair, eyes focused on Ann. “You slept with George.”