Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/12 (10 page)

I can't hurt him, and he knows it. I can only inconvenience him a bit. I already
have. Some of the freshman girls weren't looking at him quite as perkily after I
finished my story. I've pulled a brick from his ivory tower. That's all it takes
to start the whole thing falling down around his ears. Words have power. Rumors
and suspicions can destroy a man. His hand dangles in the drawer.

"Pick a number," he says.

"No," I say. "I've got a better idea."

"Such as?"

"For you, as my trusted mentor, to introduce me to your agent and some of your
Hollywood contacts."

I've got the manuscript for my latest novel in my backpack. I pull it out and
hand it to him. He looks at me with some surprise, but not much. He reads the
first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page. Then he grins, and the grin
grows wider until it's a beaming smile, and then he starts to chuckle, and that
becomes wild and resentful laughter.

He's frightened. He might be the most terrified man I've ever met, because he's
got the most to lose.

I wonder what that's like.

"Congratulations," he tells me, beaming. "You've won!"

 
The next day, in front of the class, Hal presents me with the three
signed books, the movie tickets, and a colorful certificate suitable for framing
that he printed out which declares me the winner of the
First Annual
Chadwick Creative Arts Competition.
My classmates are astonished,
stunned into silence, and sit in their seats clapping sluggishly. Fruggy Fred's
jaw hangs practically to the desk. Jerry the Jock begins to cry. So does Woody
Wright. So does Eloise. The rest fume and glower.

I bow and make a little speech about how proud and grateful I am to Hal and my
fellow students, who inspired me to greatness.

 
Hal's word is good. His agent calls that very afternoon and says he
loves my novel. It shows great emotional resonance, he says. The publishing
world moves rapid fire. Hollywood is even quicker. By the end of the weekend
Hal's agent—my agent—has secured a three-book deal and managed to
swing a sizeable film option with a major studio. He calls me baby and talks
money. This is going to be a hell of a ride, baby, you're aiming for the top. He
says a number and the number is so high that it's barely conceivable to me. I
hold the phone to my chest, listening for my heartbeat, but there's nothing
except the tinny voice of the agent going, Baby, baby.

I whisper, "Thank you, Pandora."

 
I drive over to the Moore house.

I can hear her parents arguing upstairs. Beth's name erupts from deep in her
father's chest. It's a prayer, a hymn, and a curse. He could be dying on his
deathbed, crying out one last time. I climb the porch steps, knock at the front
door, and wait. No one answers. I knock and wait again. Her father rips open the
door and stands there in all his anger and pain, his face mottled, lips twisted.
His daughter's been missing for more than two weeks.

"What the hell do you want?" he asks. His voice is loud but full of cracks, as if
his very next word will shatter like defective crystal.

I say nothing. I hand him my story. My name's not on it, but I feel like I'm
giving over my life's accomplishment. He'll recognize the characters. He's
trained to be suspicious of everyone and everything, and his daughter is
missing. He looks like he's about to throw the pages back at me but something in
my eyes stops him. He frowns and a black vein throbs in the center of his
forehead.

He begins reading the first sentence of my tale. His wife eases up beside him and
cocks her head at me. I think I might be crying. I can't be sure until tears
flick across the lenses of my glasses. I walk away while Beth's old man shouts
for me to stop. I stumble up the sidewalk blindly.

 
Six days later, on the front page, Beth's father seems almost serene
compared to how he looked that evening on his porch. His expression is one of
controlled rage and semi-satisfaction. Hal is being led away by the sheriff, who
grips Hal tightly on the shoulder. Beth's cell-phone bill has been recovered.
The cops cracked her text messages. She had a lot to say about Professor
Chadwick and the way he made her feel. The things he whispered. The caresses in
the night. She wants to know when he'll marry her. She wants to know what
they'll name the baby.

I watch the news. He's a little disheveled but it only adds to his looks, giving
him a sense of wildness. He claims not to know where she is. He says that she
visited him in the early hours of the morning more than a week ago and left a
couple of hours later. He swears he didn't hurt her.

They book him on a couple of trumped-up charges. Really, they have nothing,
except possibly inappropriate behavior between a teacher and a student. Beth was
eighteen. They can't hold him for long. He's got top-notch lawyers. The cops
want to go through his yard with methane probes but Hal's attorneys are way
ahead of the curve and block the police at every turn. He'll be out in a day or
two. He'll be done at the college, but what does Hal care? He can give back and
pay forward in a lot of other ways, at a lot of other universities.

No one knows where Beth is.

 
I can afford a much better apartment now, but I don't want to move.
I wait here in the dim corner of the room, standing at the window, and stare
into Mrs. Manfreddi's dark backyard. She still curses her tomatoes, but maybe
not as much lately. The work continues. The fence is almost finished, the ground
leveled. The moonlight pools across the soil, silver on black, and it makes me
want to run out there and dive and go swimming.

Hal's career is still riding high, but not as high as it had been. The agent
wants a new book from me as soon as possible.

I sweat over the manual typewriter, taking the time to discover my muse. She's
fickle. She's shy and hides when I call to her. She embraces me when I least
expect it. I provide her with whatever it is she needs.

Pandora waits with me in the darkness. I am a red ruin. The great literature of
my life is the absence of the woman I love. I'll never heal. I'll never leave.
She'll haunt and hate me forever. She'll warm me on the bitterly cold nights. I
miss Beth.

In my stories I write about the truth of love: its pain, its dulcet desolation,
and the void it often brings with it.

Copyright © 2012 by Tom Piccirilli

 
Natasha Cooper began writing fiction after ten years as a
publishing executive. Her first books were historical novels but she soon turned
to crime fiction, where her best-known creation to date is barrister Trish
Maguire. Several years ago the London author launched a new series starring
forensic psychologist Karen Taylor, and for those books she has signed herself
N.J. Cooper. The third Karen Taylor novel,
Face of the Devil,
was
published in June. The previous title in the series,
No Escape,
appeared in the U.S. in 2009 as a Pocket Books
paperback.
 

 
It's people you leave, not places. I'd been wrong about that too.
For years, I'd told myself it was this empty landscape I'd hated. Only the
shushing of the wind in the willows and the calling of birds broke the silence,
and they'd never been any use to me.

I gazed at the garden, still a big semicircle with the grass bordered by
flowering shrubs and the odd fruit tree among the willow saplings. Whoever the
current owners were, they must have shared his taste for nature only barely
tamed.

The river still ran along the bottom of the lawn, with the orchard on the far
side and the wet empty fields beyond. I could just make out the distant hills,
and I thought of how I'd hated the flatness and the loneliness.

A big white bird flapped down onto the rickety bridge he'd made when he bought
the land for the orchard, and I heard his rich deep voice echo in my head:
"That's an egret, Kim. Have you ever seen one before?"

How could I? Only six when I'd first come here, but already the dangerous victor
of eight failed fosterings, I'd never been outside a city.

This place had seemed like a prison, and he my jailer. I'd known he must be weird
from the start. If I hadn't hurt so many of the other children, I'd never have
been sent here. He'd been the carer of last resort, a man who'd had some success
with tough boys in the past. This time, when they'd run out of options, they'd
given him a girl. Me.

The egret lifted itself from the bridge up into the sky. Today the great space
above the wetland was clear bright blue. I didn't remember that, any more than I
remembered the wildflowers that were turning the fields ahead of me into a
yellow and white froth. Everything here was beautiful. Why hadn't I seen it
then?

The low-built old farmhouse had friendly-looking green-painted windows in its
sturdy white walls, and a steeply sloping roof of terra-cotta tiles, rippled
like the sea.

"Double Romans, they're called, Kim," he'd once said, always teaching, pointing
things out, trying to make me someone I wasn't.

There were no cars at the front of the house and neither sound nor light from
inside, so I let myself push open the side gate and walk right into the
semicircular garden. If anyone challenged me, I could pretend I thought the
house was for sale. I saw at once that someone had changed the scrubby vegetable
patch into a neat set of raised beds, beautifully kept and showing pristine rows
of new growth.

I thought of the slugs, horrible squelchy things, that I'd collected once when
he'd pissed me off, nagging about my homework or my clothes or hair. I must have
been eleven by then. The slugs had seemed fair revenge for the nagging and the
way he'd fallen asleep in his chair, leaving his mouth open. . . .

A cloud sidled across the sun and took away even the thin, inadequate English
warmth I'd felt on my face, making me shiver. Or was that memory? Or guilt?

The slugs had been the least of it. I saw so much now, more or less the age he
must have been when he'd taken me in. I hadn't understood any of it then: how
badly I'd needed him to be safe and kind and so how hard I'd pushed him to make
him reveal himself the opposite.

I'd never known an adult who couldn't be cruel. All those failed fosterings had
proved to me that any one of them, however calm they'd seemed at first, could be
driven to take off their masks of kindness. Only he had resisted nearly
everything I'd tried to make him do.

None of my malice or my violence had made him hit me or lock me up. I still don't
know what a sight of my true feelings might have done because I'd never let him
see those.

I used to watch him, tall and upright and shabbily dressed, smiling at me as he
calmly talked on and on, using words as reins and bits and goads and whips. Now
I wondered what would have happened if I'd howled and told him what it had been
like before and flung myself into his arms. Would he have picked me up and
cradled me and made it all safe and different?

Or would he have stuck to his line of teaching me the things he liked, trying to
make me into what he wanted?

Sometimes I had tried. But never for long. Waiting for horror to descend had been
unbearable. I'd always rather have done something to bring it down quickly and
get it over.

"He's a good man," my social worker said. One of my social workers. I don't
remember which. They blurred at this distance.

I walked now across the lawn, remembering the opportunities for rebellion the
grass had given me. I'd refuse to mow when he asked me to, or mess about with
the straight lines he'd left on the lawn, or hide small dangerous stones in the
longer grass to bugger up the mower blade and give him trouble.

Standing at last on the edge of the river, I wondered if I'd see the kingfisher
today. I never had. I don't think I'd even believed it existed. I'd thought he
was lying about that too.

"You have to be quiet, Kim. And very still. And you have to watch. Once you've
seen one for the first time, it'll get easier. You'll learn to recognise the
flash of greeny blue, just above the water. Once they've let you see them the
first time, they seem to slow down for you."

Not for me, I'd thought then. I thought it still. No beautiful wild thing would
change its course for me. Why should it? I'd always been a lost cause. The
source of endless trouble for anyone who'd ever been lumbered with me. That's
what one set of foster parents had said. Dangerous, too.

In England, anyway. Out in Australia, I'd learned to be different. Someone else.
I'd had friends and work and my own money. Never much money. With a messed-up
education like mine, you didn't get well-paid work. But I'd done okay. I'd even
found a bloke. He was a good man, as well as the reason why I was here now,
smelling the wetness of the peat and clay all around me, the squashed grass, the
horses in the far field, and the sweetness of the wildflowers, remembering.

"You'd better go back, Sally," Sam had said a week ago, using the name I'd chosen
for myself when I'd run away to become someone else. "Something's not right in
you and you're talking more and more about England. Go back and lay the ghosts.
Make your peace with your memories, whatever they are. I'll buy you an open
ticket so you can take your time. We can afford it. Don't come back until you're
ready."

"When will that be?" I'd asked, standing on the beach, with the sun drilling down
into my shoulders, my ears full of the crashing surf and the shrill calls of
happiness from the unknowing people all around us. I'd felt sullen in a way I'd
almost forgotten, ready to dump it all on someone else again.

"You'll know when you're ready," Sam had said, tucking stray wisps of hair behind
my ears under the sun hat. "I can't tell you."

When I was six my hair had been white blond, then it had darkened. Later, I'd
dyed it all kinds of colours, chosen to make him angry. By the time I'd stolen
the passport at Heathrow, I had a mousy-brown ponytail, like the girl I'd picked
out of the London-bound taxi queue as my target. The Aussie sun had bleached it
since.

Looking back, I can't see why I wasn't afraid at Heathrow. I'd had a bagful of
his money—all I could get from the house and the cash machines—and
the nicked British passport. Why hadn't I been afraid a report of what I'd done
might get to Sydney before me so that I'd be arrested on the plane? Why had I
felt cocooned in some transparent casing no one would be able to break?

I still didn't understand it, but once I'd got to Sydney unmolested I chucked the
passport into the sea, then found the kind of bar where they're happy to give
you work for cash, even if you haven't any proof of identity. It was also the
kind of place where people who offer fake ID documents can be found. I'd waited
till I was sure of one, then paid his price without letting him know how much I
hated him. Once I'd paid I was free. For the first time in my life, I was
free.

No one could do it now. Not with CCTV cameras everywhere, and DNA and e-mail.

It was the first thing I'd ever done well. I'd tried to make it the start of
someone I could like. Sally. For a time I'd thought I'd won. But memories had
grown in the dark silence until they'd devoured my sleep and my health.

He walked with me everywhere now, and his face hung over me as I lay in bed. I
couldn't forget the warmth in his dark eyes when I'd done something that pleased
him, or their hardness when I'd failed.

He must have been lonely too. I can see that now. But then he'd seemed
all-powerful, without feelings or fears or needs.

I turned my head away from the river. His voice sounded again, bumping around in
my mind, as smooth and comforting as rich hot chocolate:

"Sometimes they say that only people who deserve it actually see the kingfisher,
but I think that's sentimental, Kim."

"Then
I
am sentimental," I said aloud to the space he'd once inhabited.
"I don't deserve it."

I turned my back on the river and walked at last towards the rhubarb patch, where
we'd had our last encounter. It was a mound, carefully sloped to make the water
drain away so that it wouldn't rot the crowns. How well I remembered the care
he'd lavished on those red stalks and their poisonous yellowy-green leaves.
Bending down over them, he went on talking to me even as he weeded around his
acidic, horrible fruit.

"I know you'll be legally free to go on your birthday, Kim. But you can't. You
may be nearly old enough, but you're not fit to live alone. Not yet. One day,
I'll help you go. But for now you must stay here. And I . . ."

He'd never managed to say whatever it was he'd do because I'd raised the old iron
bar like an axe above my head and brought it crashing down onto the back of his
head and then his spine.

Now I looked at the scarlet stalks of rhubarb, asking the old questions that had
come to torture me: Had he died at once? Who had found him? Could he have been
saved? Why hadn't they come after me?

Tyres squeaked on the paving, like something out of one of my nightmares of
retribution. I thought of hiding, or climbing the wall into next-door's garden.
But I had to face it. I'd always known it would come. And better here than in
Australia with Sam. At least Sam would never have to know who I really was, what
I'd done. I turned to face it.

A wheelchair came to a stop just by the rhubarb bed. He raised his head,
white-haired now, and stared right at me. His dark eyes were the same. His voice
too:

"Thank God you're safe, Kim."

Copyright © 2012 by N.J. Cooper