Authors: Nevada Barr
Now a box appears right on cue.
“Haven’t a clue,” Heath said and began ripping at the paper.
“Don’t open it,” Anna said suddenly.
“Think it’s a bomb?” Heath asked, laughing as she smashed the paper beneath the box so the wind wouldn’t snatch it away. She was as gleeful as a child on her birthday. Relief from stress, Anna guessed.
“It’s not ticking,” Heath said as torn paper revealed a shoe box.
“Bombs don’t tick anymore,” Anna said as she leapt to her feet.
Heath lifted the lid off. “What in the hell…,” she said.
The District Danger Ranger was beside Heath’s chair in an instant. “I’ll need that box, ma’am.” Before Anna could snatch the box or slap Heath upside the head, Artie had it in his big, long-fingered hands.
Wide-eyed, curious, Heath waited like a sitting duck.
“Looks like heroin to me,” Artie said with barely suppressed glee. He bounced the box in his hand as if weighing it. “An eight-ball or thereabouts.”
“Like
heroin
heroin?” Elizabeth asked.
“This could be serious,” Heath said. Now that it was too late, she was finally catching on, Anna thought, but Heath wasn’t paying any attention to the drugs in the ranger’s hand; she was staring at the wrapping paper spread across her knees.
“This wasn’t forwarded from Boulder,” she said. “This was sent to the PO box we rented in Bar Harbor.”
“The e-mail was sent to Acadia,” Anna said.
Unconsciously, Elizabeth raised her hands to her throat. “Whoever it is knows where we are,” she said softly.
Denise and her sister had neither seen nor spoken to one another since they’d decided something had to be done to keep Kurt Duffy from beating—or killing—Paulette. Not that Denise wanted to be alone; she never wanted to be alone again. Space to think was what she needed. After three days of thinking, of no contact with Paulette, she went to her sister’s house during the day when she knew Kurt would be at sea. She moored her runabout in Otter Cove, a tiny inlet with little to lure visitors. From there she hiked overland to Otter Creek and her sister’s back door. This way no one would see her car parked anywhere near Paulette’s. The car was one of the things she had thought of while she was in her lonely thinking space.
Not phoning Paulette was another thing. Cell phones were wired to record every call, every text, and, with GPS, where the phone was at any given time. Denise didn’t know how many of these invasive pieces of technology dwelt in her phone—it was four years old—but if they were going to do something serious about Kurt, she didn’t dare take chances.
The previous night she had taken her phone apart, cooked the SIM card in the microwave for a few minutes, then cut the nuked card into pieces with tin snips. That done, she smashed all the parts of the phone that could be smashed with a three-pound sledge hammer. Over the remaining rubble, she poured lighter fluid and burned what would burn, melted what would melt. The resulting black mess she tossed overboard where the channel was deepest.
It never made sense to her that criminals couldn’t destroy evidence properly. She had to suppose they never really put their minds to it. Paulette’s prepaid cell from Walmart would have to be destroyed as well.
The way her sister’s face lit up when she saw who was tapping on her kitchen door made Denise’s heart fill her throat. Along with her soul, she’d thought unconditional love went missing when she was born. The open trust and joy she saw in her twin’s eyes she’d only ever expected to see in the eyes of her newborn child.
Paulette came out onto the porch. She was wearing a calf-length skirt in lime green and pink. The pink was in geometric patterns and the green in paisley swirls. The waistband and the bottom third of the skirt were green, the rest bold pink. On her feet were mules of tan-colored canvas with green ankle ribbons and wedge heels. Over the skirt she wore a white tunic, belted with a narrow lime green ribbon.
Denise wore trousers. Always: for work, for home, for fancy dress. The palette of her wardrobe ran the gamut from dull Park Service green and gray to totally grim. Seeing “herself” in a bright skirt, she was startled at how pretty she was, they were.
Without any need for discussion, Paulette headed toward the trees. Again she led Denise in a circuitous path to the nursery so there would be no obvious trail worn in the duff. Neither spoke until they were closed behind the wooden door, lamp lit against the artificial night inside the windowless shed. This time Denise sat in the rocking chair and Paulette on the child-sized chair with the trumpet carved on the back.
“That’s a nursing rocker,” Paulette said of the chair Denise had taken. “That’s why the arms are so low and curved; so you can hold the baby and rest your forearm on the wood.”
Unconsciously rounding her arms as if she held an infant, Denise rocked gently. “It feels right, good,” she marveled. For a long moment, both she and her sister gazed out at the never-changing forest painted behind the window frames, a world no one but they could inhabit, no one but they could alter.
Paulette began as if telling a story that would be important to Denise, one that Denise had been asking for in her head. “I first brought the baby things out here fourteen years, two months, and nine days ago; you don’t forget the day you lose a child. I was just storing them, you know, for the next baby. Hiding them from Kurt so he wouldn’t sell them or break them. He wasn’t too bad back then.”
“He beat you so hard you miscarried,” Denise said.
“I guess. Yes, I mean, I know he did,” said Paulette with a wan smile, her head shaking slowly from side to side. She looked as if she were fighting clear of a fog she’d been lost in for a long time. “I guess what I was thinking was that back then, when he hurt me, he didn’t mean it like he does now. He’d get stirred up over money, or he’d get jealous of the way I supposedly looked at some guy, or he’d get mad because I wanted to go visit Mom and Dad or whatever. He’d get mad for some reason, lose his temper, and take it out on me.
“At the hospital we’ve got this old man who comes in every few months. He’s got this awful abscess on the side of his calf that fills up with yuck and bursts. We clean it up, the doctors prescribe salves and antibiotics, and it seems to heal. Then, in a month or two, he’s back in. Kurt used to be like that, this abscess that filled with yuck. Then he’d get drunk and beat up on me, and he’d be okay for a while. Even sorry in the beginning. Shoot, by the time I was twenty-six we’d been married nearly ten years. What else did I know? I guess I figured most men slapped their wives around. I didn’t have much in the way of girlfriends to compare lives with.” She smiled at Denise. “I didn’t have a sister.”
Denise smiled back without thinking, and realized she had been so strung out, weirded out, on guard, and paranoid for the last few months that she’d reacted in the same way Paulette had to Kurt’s abuse. It had become the norm, the real, the way life was. This sudden relaxing of vigilance was a revelation. Abuse was not the way life was. It was the way men made it. Women could subject it to change without notice.
“After I lost the first baby, I never forgave Kurt. Him beating me, I could forgive that. But not beating the baby to death inside me.”
That was why Denise couldn’t forgive Peter. Dumping her? Sure. Marrying a younger woman? That, too. The loss of her baby? Never. Maybe Peter was another person who needed to be dead. He hadn’t beaten her, but he had certainly browbeaten her into getting an abortion. Murder twice removed was still murder. Even in a species gorging on death every day, killing babies was genuinely despised. Nobody cheered baby killers. They didn’t get medals. People paid more than lip service to wanting to stamp them out.
“Then, three years, three months, three weeks, and five days later, I lost a little girl, my daughter. She was fairly well along. Tiny hands and fingers, a nub of a nose, ears, all perfect. I saw her in the the bathroom overhead light. That’s where I miscarried. Kurt looked sick seeing us there on the floor. I thought he was going to pick us up, but he sort of shook all over like a goose walked on his grave and said, ‘Clean up the mess.’ He didn’t come back for a couple of days, and when he did it was like nothing happened. Nothing. He comes through the door, turns on the TV, and says, ‘What do you have for supper?’ That was it. After that he didn’t hit me for a long time. A year or more.
“That’s when I fell into a kind of sleep, I think. I gave up on the house, except for keeping it clean enough to be sanitary, and I’d come back here and tidy up. Bit by bit, this room became what it is. While I was walking in my sleep all those years, this was the dream I was dreaming. Does that sound crazy?”
“No,” Denise answered. “It’s a beautiful dream. A wise dream. I must have fallen asleep, too. I dreamed of dark places and rotten people. Walking around this park we so loved when we were little, I would see nothing but my pain. Finally, my world was made of pain, and that world got smaller every day.”
Denise knew she hadn’t been a child in Acadia National Park. While her twin was being raised by kindly old folks on Isle au Haut, Denise was being kicked around trailer parks in Brewer and Bangor and Winterport. Still, she wasn’t lying; she knew that their childhood playing in tide pools was more real than hers playing on train tracks and around warehouses. Paulette would know this, too.
For an instant she was outside herself, looking at the two of them sitting in the painted room. Panic surged up her throat; she was going crazy, had gone crazy, Paulette did sound crazy.
Then she was back in her body. The terror abated. She looked around the space her sister had created, calming herself with the fabric art pieces, the windows that showed the world as it should be rather than as it was, the crib with the stuffed bear, bright-eyed, head tilted inquisitively. The true insanity was not what she and her sister dreamed. It was the actions of those who had made their lives so miserable they needed to dream it.
“Then I woke up,” Paulette said simply, cutting into Denise’s thoughts. Still on the little chair, her skirt flowing to the floor in a bright blossom, she spread her hands with a shrug. “About a year ago … six months … I don’t know. Around that time I started feeling again, then I started feeling everything was odd, off somehow. At first Kurt didn’t notice I’d woken up. When he did, he didn’t like it. He knocked me around some—not a lot, but I could feel he meant it this time. Meant to kill me.”
“The Burning Bed,”
Denise said.
“I loved that movie.”
“Self -defense. There’s no way around it.”
They were quiet for a moment, the only sound the soft beat as the rocker rocked back and forth on the wooden floor.
“Do you know how to kill people?” Paulette asked. “Rangers have guns and all. Do they teach you that?”
“Not in so many words,” Denise said. “They use the word ‘stop.’ A gun has to have ‘stopping’ power. We shoot at targets shaped like people, and we learn to aim for center body mass—bigger and easier to hit than the pinhead of the usual criminal. We learn to hit people with batons in places that will disable them.”
Paulette thought that over for a couple of minutes. Denise rocked and thought about killing. Death was standard operating procedure: Cows died for hamburgers, grass died for cows. Little lambkins were slaughtered for Easter dinners. Turkeys died by the millions for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Animals were different, the people who ate them always insisted. People pretended that killing people wasn’t the same as killing animals, that killing people was horrific. Then they voted to fight in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, Libya—always somewhere, and mostly not because anybody wanted or needed soldiers marching around their backyards shooting. Humans liked killing humans. They were good at it. They celebrated it with medals and movies and songs. Then they pretended to themselves that a woman killing a violent bastard like Kurt Duffy was so horrible she had to go to prison forever. It made no sense. Either it was okay to kill people deemed bad or it wasn’t. It was pretty obvious to Denise that in America, as well as the rest of the world, the consensus was in: Killing was fine and dandy, good even. Admirable.
The only thing bad about killing was
saying
it was okay. Like the “family values” politicians: They could fornicate, whoremonger, go with same-sex hookers, commit adultery, and still get reelected by the Evangelicals as long as they
said
those things were wrong.
So nobody was going to care that Kurt Duffy was killed. Not a bit. They only paid lip service to the idea that killing a Kurt Duffy was wrong. Really, most people didn’t care at all; they just wanted to curl up on the sofa and watch
Saw III
or
Dexter.
What she and Paulette needed to do was find a story that would help people explain the murder of Kurt Duffy to themselves so they could stop thinking about it, stop pretending it was bad, and get back to their own rat killing, as one of her old high school teachers was fond of saying.
“I don’t want to disable Kurt,” Paulette said. “I think he needs to be dead for a long, long time.”
“For the rest of his life,” Denise said, and they both laughed at the absurdity.
“My gosh!” Paulette gasped, covering her mouth. “Are we awful? I mean, we’re laughing about killing people. Killing
Kurt
! I don’t feel awful, but I know I should.”
“Don’t feel awful,” Denise said when they’d stopped giggling. “He does need to be dead.”
“Poison?” Paulette ventured.
“Do you know anything about poison? I don’t,” Denise replied.
“We’d have to buy it somewhere. That would make a trail,” Paulette said. “I could burn him in bed, like Farrah Fawcett did in the movie. She got off on a self-defense plea.”
“It wouldn’t work a second time. Too obvious,” Denise decided. “Besides, you can’t be anywhere around when it happens. You have to have an iron-clad alibi. We could screw with the brakes on his truck. I know how to do that.”
Paulette shook her head. “He only drives from here to Bar Harbor and back. Nothing bad would happen, not bad enough anyway.”