Closing Costs

by Bracken MacLeod

  The man stood up, folded the knife, and stuck it in his pocket. He stared at her while he did, satisfaction growing on his face. “Good girl,” he said. She wanted to stab him once for every time he said that. “Stand up.”

  She stood. He lurched toward her, a fist drawn back, and she fell into the chair, almost toppling over backward. She raised her hands to protect her face, waiting for the blow to land in her stomach instead and for her bladder to let go. He didn’t hit her. Instead, he said, “I didn’t say ‘Simon says.’ ”

  “Y-you’re S-Simon. I assumed any-anything you said was s-something I sh-should do.”

  He smiled. “Get up.” She did. He didn’t threaten to punch her again. Instead, he drew the gun from behind his back and held it down beside his leg. “You going to behave, or do I need to tape your wrists together?”

  She thought about the tingling in her fingers as blood returned to her hands, and didn’t want him taping her at all again, even if it was just her wrists. She nodded, keeping her arms stiffly at her sides.

  He smiled with one side of his mouth and nodded at the staircase. “You first.”

  Nelle stood carefully and took a hesitant step forward. Her legs were shaky, and her feet were tingling pins and needles along with her hands. That was good. That was feeling. She could run on feet with feeling. She took another step and then another.

  At the staircase, she hazarded a look back at her husband. He looked away from her, letting his eyes drift downward. It’s okay, she wanted to say. Everything’s going to be okay. That she didn’t believe it didn’t mean she didn’t need to say it. But then, “Simon” hadn’t said she could talk to her husband. In her mind, she said goodbye. If she got the chance, she was going to take it.

  I love you, Evan.

  Then she climbed the stairs, leaving him alone with the dead girl in the shadows.

  22

  Evan watched them go upstairs, Nelle leading the way with the piece of shit following behind her, holding a gun to her back. The image of them wavered and blurred for a second and then all he saw was the man’s legs, and then the empty staircase. He listened for their footsteps above, but the pounding in his head made it hard to concentrate. It was difficult to hear through the rush of blood churning in his ears. Hard to do anything at all but ache and feel useless.

  There was a heavy thump above and then another and then silence. Evan wanted to tear out of his bindings and rush the man who’d broken into their home, but he was taped too tightly, and could barely move his wrists, let alone his whole body. He couldn’t do anything but sit there and look at the floor. He had to keep working at the tape around his wrists—pull and twist and hope to stretch or weaken it, since he couldn’t actually reach any of it with his fingers. He had to focus on that and trust that Nelle could manage by herself. In any other circumstance, he’d feel assured she could. She was more than capable of holding her own. But the man in their home wasn’t some pimple-faced goon who goosed her ass at Dan Brereton’s signing table at Comic-Con or some idiot Internet tough guy making threats from his mother’s basement. He was a real threat. He was present death.

  Strong as she was by herself, they were better together. So he kept pulling at the tape, and trying to hear what was happening upstairs.

  23

  At the top of the stairs, Nelle hesitated. She thought for a second about bracing herself against the wall of the narrow hallway and trying to kick him down into the cellar. He might shoot, but what were the chances he’d hit her? Fifty-fifty? The man was so close, shoving the gun into her back, it was more like eighty-twenty. Still, she was moving, and he’d be caught off guard—maybe he’d miss. The odds were . . . well, better than her chances of winning the lottery. She decided to gamble.

  Nelle lurched forward, nearly falling into the wall ahead of her so she could use its stability for extra force. She raised a leg to kick and banged her knee into the molding beside the bathroom door. It hurt, but she ignored the feeling, ready to drive her heel backward. Before she could piston the kick, the intruder slammed his forearm into her back, across her shoulder blades, and pushed her up against the wall hard. Her neck popped, and her face, already stinging, mashed into the wall. A small shadowbox painting she’d bought at a friend’s gallery exhibition years ago fell off of its nail and clattered away down the hallway.

  “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “I—I tripped. I swear. I tripped.”

  The man shoved her harder against the wall, and she felt the barrel of that fucking gun jam into her back, just below her floating rib. A bullet there would rip through her kidney, and maybe her liver. Or maybe it’d tear apart her intestine, if it deflected down off her rib, or go up into her lung. Every potential path was her ruin.

  He shoved again with his forearm. Her upper spine popped several more times, and her neck ached as it was wrenched around by the pressure against her back. Her arms were as useless as when she’d been taped to the chair. She couldn’t push off the wall, or swing at the man, or even claw at him. She just let them drop to her sides, submitting. Showing him she wasn’t doing a thing.

  “Tripped,” he said.

  “I swear. I’m s-sorry. My legs . . . are wobbly from sitting in that chair.”

  One final shove that pressed the air out of her lungs, and he was gone. No longer up against her body but somewhere else. He moved in her house like a ghost who could slide through walls and disappear into shadows. Like the girl. Except he was real.

  It wasn’t fair. Nothing about this was fair. He had all the advantages and she had none.

  His voice floated out of the shadow behind her, and she turned to face him. He stood in the hallway between her and the kitchen, his gun still pointed at her. They stood at the confluence of the front room, the kitchen, and the bathroom. Each space offering its own avenue of revolt or escape, and all of those options stunted by the man standing in front of her. Not four feet into the kitchen, a butcher block stood on the counter, bearing an assortment of large knives. Evan kept them all very sharp, but she knew which one in particular she’d run for. The year before, for his birthday, she’d bought him a cimeter carving knife. It was ten inches long and curved upward at the tip, resembling something out of a Friday the 13th movie more than a kitchen tool. But when she saw Evan carve a rack of ribs with it for the first time, she understood why he’d asked for one. It cut through meat and cartilage like butter. Yes. That’s what she’d run for. The cimeter. Except the intruder knew better than to let her into the kitchen. He stood in the archway, blocking it.

  The bathroom beside her offered nothing. A closed window she’d never get open in time to even try shimmying through. No. The bathroom was as worthless as the kitchen was blocked.

  All that remained was the front room, where he was herding her anyway. If the front door was still unlocked, she could sprint for it, hope he didn’t just repeat the move he had at the top of the stairs, slamming her with a forearm into the beveled window in the upper half of the door. He was so fast. She imagined being shoved face-first through the pane, sharp edges of glass shards slicing through her skin like Evan’s finely honed knives. She imagined leaning through the window, bleeding out onto the front steps, and dying in the shade of the overhang where she liked to stand and look at the flowers she’d hung from a hook next to the downspout and listen to the breeze wake the Japanese wind chime beside that, delicately complementing the patter of her blood sprinkling on the composite plastic boards below.

  “Stop it,” he said, his look telling her he sensed what she was doing.

  “What do you want?”

  He jerked his head toward the front room. “I want you to sit your fat fucking ass on that couch and shut the fuck up.” The man ushered her into the room and gestured toward the sofa. He grunted at her to “siddown,” moving closer, the heat of his hostility pushing against her. She sat. Defeated.

  Compared to the chair downstairs, it was like landing on a cloud. Her aching neck and back
still hurt, but she didn’t care. Any relief at all was worth it. She placed her hands flat on the fabric at her sides and tried to calm down. Straight ahead, there was a purple orchid standing on the bay window ledge. It was blooming and in the daylight looked perfect, like a picture from a gardening catalogue. Beside it was stacked a pile of books she had yet to find a home for. One of her many to-read piles, this one acquired the weekend before at the Ripton Public Library book sale. “Where are you going to put those?” Evan had asked. “Right here,” she told him, knowing that he was right about her being out of space for new books, but unable to help herself. Give Me Your Hand sat beneath The Open Curtain, which was beneath another called In the Valley of the Devil, and topping them all, Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone. Beyond them, through the window, the bright daylight shone on their front yard, shadows from the trees wavering in the unmowed grass. She looked at the driveway and remembered seeing it lined with cars at their housewarming a month ago, and how much fun it had been to have a house full of friends, laughter echoing off the walls along with Evan’s music, and the smells of spring and lamb grilling on the back patio drifting in through the open windows while she sipped wine and told stories. All the people they’d left behind when they moved to Ripton.

  How did we get here?

  V

  ◆

  Memory

  24

  THIRTEEN MONTHS BEFORE CLOSING

  The thumb drive sat on her desk. It was a little more than a half inch wide and maybe an inch and a half long in a black, rubberized plastic shell. The question how anyone could swallow such a thing flitted through Nelle’s mind. She knew chances were the man on her embalming table hadn’t swallowed it at all.

  The memory stick had gone undiscovered during the subject’s autopsy at the medical examiner’s office. Cause of death had been clear: he’d shot himself in the head. Nelle knew that the ME did a thorough exam, removing all the organs and inspecting them before placing them back in the man’s body cavity, but she was also aware that if the cause of death was clearly a self-inflicted bullet to the brain, an ME running behind might skip procedures that weren’t necessary for their report. Procedures like a rectal exam, for instance.

  She’d only found it because Tony insisted that Nelle place an “A/V closure” in bodies she embalmed. It was like a trocar button for closing up incisions, except for natural orifices. In other words, a plug. It was to keep them from seeping or leaking. Not everyone used them—some morticians used epoxy or cotton—but the screw closure was Tony’s practice. Most people outside of the business didn’t know about them at all. And when they found out, they were either appalled or amused, depending on how dark their gallows humor. And that was how she found it. She’d begun to insert the A/V closure into the body and felt something strange, like a little tap on something solid. For a moment she thought about just shoving a little harder, placing the plug and getting on with the job so she could leave at a decent hour and have an unhurried dinner with Evan. But then curiosity got the better of her.

  Every once in a while, someone died with a baggie of something illicit inside of them. “Butt drugs,” a friend in mortuary school had called them. The young woman said she dreamed of one day finding butt drugs, a special prize hidden inside a cadaver, like a golden ticket under the wrapper of a chocolate bar.

  “Would you actually do butt drugs?” she’d asked her classmate.

  The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. But wouldn’t it be cool to find some?”

  Nelle wasn’t sure then if it’d be “cool” or not, but at the moment she felt her heart flutter a little at the idea of discovering something hidden. Something secret. With a long hemostat clamp, she’d removed the object, wrapped in cling film. And that was how she found herself staring at a black and red memory stick, wondering whether she should call the ME’s office or the police, or insert it into her laptop to see what the stick contained.

  Curiosity got the better of her, and she pulled the cap off and stuck it into the USB port on her work laptop, figuring she could call the ME afterward. She wanted to know what a person who was about to kill himself wanted to hide so badly. The saying you can’t take it with you flitted through her mind, barely noticed.

  The system recognized the device, and she ran a quick scan to make sure it wasn’t going to infect her computer. When the scan turned up nothing, she opened a window to show what it contained. On it was a single file named kinaccts.xlsx.aes. Nelle had no idea what any of that meant. Her finger hovered over the touchpad while she debated clicking the file. She drew her hand away and picked up her cell phone instead.

  “Hey, minha querida, what’s up?” Evan answered.

  “You busy, bebê?”

  “No. Just, you know, smokin’ some endo, sipping my gin and juice. Same old.”

  “Very funny, Medium Pimpin’. Really, though,” she said, “I’ve got a question for you. Are you busy?”

  “No. I’m just waiting for a diagnostic to finish running. I’ve got time. Shoot.”

  “What’s an AES file?”

  “It’s a kind of encryption. Usually what comes right before that extension is the file type. What’s before AES?”

  “XLSX.”

  She heard him let out a short breath through his nose. “Oh, that’s easy. That’s an Excel spreadsheet. It’s one that’s been saved with an encryption program so nobody can open it without the password.”

  “It’s password protected?”

  “Wouldn’t be much of a cipher if it just opened itself. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Are you trying to break into Tony’s books? Not very nice, Nelle.”

  “What? Never! Look, I’ll tell you later.” Nelle pulled the phone away from her ear, intending to end the call—they liked to just hang up on each other like characters in the movies; it made them both laugh. But she hesitated and looked behind her at the dead man on the table. He didn’t want this to be found. He’d . . . hidden it before he killed himself, so whatever was in that spreadsheet had to be important. Curiosity killed the cat.

  “But satisfaction brought it back.”

  “Say what?” Evan said.

  “Oh, nothing. Hey, do you think you could crack a password on a file like that?”

  Evan was quiet for a second, and then he said, “Maybe. Most people’s passwords are something stupid like ‘one two three password.’ Depending on the person who encrypted it, it could be done. AES isn’t like the most impenetrable program out there. Whoever locked up that file isn’t a black hat hacker or anything.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “You be—”

  Nelle ended the call, thinking about what Evan had said. Depending on who encrypted it. Who this man was, was the kind of guy who shoved a jump drive up his ass before eating a bullet. She had her doubts he was thinking several moves ahead. Not if he ended the game by blowing his brains out. She, on the other hand, was thinking about what could be stored in a file he wanted to hide so badly that he couldn’t bear the thought of it being out of his possession even after he was dead.

  You can’t take it with you.

  She ejected the drive, put the cap back on the device, and stuffed it in her pocket. She’d finish getting Mr. Shearman ready for his funeral and then worry about his secrets.

  25

  Evan screwed up his face, leaned back in his chair, and looked at the device he’d tossed onto the table like it had burned him. Nelle smirked at her husband’s fussiness about touching the memory stick. He’d had a lot of jobs, oil change mechanic, line cook, web designer, and now computer security consultant. He kept getting cleaner as he went. Nelle had only ever had two: nanny and mortician. Both were dirty. At least as a mortician she got to wear gloves. “Calm down, Howard Hughes.”

  “Not wanting to touch something that has been up a dead man’s butt does not make me eccentric, Nelle. It makes me like the normalest person ever.” He leaned forward and picked it up between
two fingers.

  “You going to sniff it?” she asked, a smile growing on her face.

  “Guh. No!”

  “You were. You were totally going to smell it. You are so gross!”

  “What is wrong with you? How’d you even find this? I thought dead people, you know . . . pooped when they died.”

  “Pooped? Are you three?” He looked at her with growing impatience. She relented. “Fine. Yes and no. Not always. Your muscles always relax, but if you’ve got nothing to evacuate, there’s no ‘pooping.’ And this wasn’t coming out without something behind it pushing.” She didn’t bother explaining how she’d become curious that something was up there in the first place. She’d told him about the A/V closures once, and he declared that he never wanted to hear about them or anything else she did at work again. “It was wrapped in plastic and I cleaned it, okay? Do you think I want what was inside him on my fingers? If I touched it, you can totally touch it.”

  Evan made a pouty moue with his lips. She thought he looked like Martin Freeman when he did that. A cute, vulgar hobbit with a big—but not too big—nose, ears that stuck out a little, and a perpetually sad expression. “Do you want me to crack this or not?”

  Nelle dropped her head with faux shame and nodded. He gingerly pulled the cap off the drive, set it on the table, and plugged the device into the side of his computer. He opened the window and clicked the file. A dialog box opened, asking for a password. Nelle watched as he opened another program she’d never seen before and started working with it.

  “You’re not going to guess?”

  “I don’t know who this guy is. The password could be his cat’s name.”