Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (13 page)
I felt good. Hell, I remember feeling absolutely euphoric, a little happy hum inside my head. Hopeful for the Pug and Gemma-Kate alike, I even gave her a small hug when the dishes were dried and put away. We retired to our various chairs, with GK deciding to scope out the offerings on TV. I told her she could do On Demand if she liked. When I heard screams coming from her room I asked her to turn it down some. Apparently she was into horror, but stared at it without appearing horrified. If she’d looked at any of Todd’s books while he was studying to be a detective, that was why. Reality is much worse.
Todd. He probably was afraid to call me, in case things were not going well. I gave him a call to let him know things were going well. He answered on the second ring.
“What’s wrong?”
Clearly this man had caller ID. I said, “Nothing! Everything is actually very nice. Gemma-Kate is teaching me how to cook, and Carlo has been showing her around. Did she tell you?”
“I haven’t heard from her. I was wondering.”
I remembered her texting in the backseat of the car when we were coming home from church a few days before, saying it was her dad. “I thought.”
“What?”
“Nothing. How’re things with you?”
“Fine.”
“Okay, fine.”
And that was a typical conversation with my brother. I wondered for a moment why Gemma-Kate would have told such an unnecessary lie, but chalked it up to adolescent secrecy and dismissed it.
Though the evening was pleasant enough I had a hard time coming down, even with a glass of wine or two. Didn’t want to take a sleeping pill after the wine and instead lay awake for several hours with my heart pounding the way it used to when I was in trouble. I must have fallen asleep at some point, but woke up with an upset stomach.
I pushed aside the covers and made it to the bathroom, thinking I would throw up, but I just had dry heaves.
“What’s wrong?” Carlo’s voice came from the darkness when I returned.
“Sorry I woke you. Nothing serious, just a little nauseous. Maybe the sauerkraut disagreed with me.”
Carlo said, “Could be dehydration. I think you need to cut back on the caffeine.”
“The hell you say,” I said. I shuffled into the kitchen and fixed an Alka-Seltzer. I watched it fizz in the glow of the night-light plugged near the stove. Then I thought about the Pugs that usually slept on the kitchen floor when it was warm and in our bed when it was cold. We still had the windows open, and this night could have gone either way. I pictured the sick Pug in his hospital room, out cold the way I had seen him last. Do dogs hate the dark? I hoped they left a little light on for him so he wouldn’t be scared.
Our remaining Pug wasn’t in the kitchen, but I thought I heard a whimper somewhere. My anxiety skipped up a notch. I went into our bedroom to see if the Pug was on the bed.
She wasn’t. Anxiety building, and remembering that I felt odd about feeling anxious—this is all recounted well after events unfolded and it’s difficult to be precise about how one felt in the past, how strong the feeling was, and why—I roamed through the rest of the house looking for her. I even turned on the back porch light to see if we had accidentally left her outside. Scanned the backyard. No Pug.
There was only one more place to look, behind the closed door of the bedroom where Gemma-Kate slept. I went back to our room and into my closet and gently pulled my robe off the hanger so it wouldn’t bang against the closet wall. I slipped on the robe and crept across the living room to the opposite end of the house and quietly as possible—so as not to disturb her, you understand—looked inside. There was enough moonlight coming in through the window to see the silhouettes on the bed. Gemma-Kate on her stomach, hugging her pillow, and the Pug down at the foot of the bed. I tiptoed across the room and placed my index finger on the dog’s side. She was breathing. She was asleep, and not whining now.
“Hello, Aunt Brigid,” Gemma-Kate’s voice came out of the dark.
The nerve on the side of my neck that sparks whenever danger is imminent sparked now. I jumped like I never had when surprised by the man with a knife. You’re kind of always expecting the man with a knife.
“Are you having trouble sleeping?” she asked, quite awake.
I coughed lightly to make sure I had my voice. “I had a bit of stomach upset. Just took an Alka-Seltzer and checking to make sure everything is all right. With you.”
“I can see that.”
“I thought I heard the dog crying,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Are you having trouble sleeping?” I asked.
“A little.”
“Is something bothering you?”
“No.”
“Well then. Good night.”
“Good night, Aunt Brigid. I love you.”
Her world had done a one-eighty, I thought. I cleared my throat again. “Well. I love you, too, Gemma-Kate.”
After that, taking the Pug would have shown a lack of trust, so I left her sleeping on Gemma-Kate’s bed, went back into our bedroom, and got into bed.
“Is everything all right?” Carlo’s voice came through the dark again.
“Jesus.” I jumped. “Doesn’t anybody sleep around here? Yeah, it kind of is,” I said, feeling pleasantly surprised, and yet. That anxiety. My heart was still pounding and I couldn’t think of a reason why I wasn’t exhausted after such a busy day. I said so.
“Maybe the wine,” he said. “Too much coffee and wine. Drink a big glass of water.”
It was a funny thing. After Carlo found out a year into our marriage that I was capable of killing people with my bare hands, and on several occasions had, he had tended to become a little more protective rather than less. He had the notion that my violent past made me more vulnerable. I said, “Stop hovering, honey. Go to sleep.”
He had already turned to face the other direction, and I rubbed his back lightly as if he was the one needing comfort. Then I rolled on to my right side and scooched over just enough to feel Carlo’s bare bum lightly touching mine, for comfort.
Seven in the morning in March: The sky is just lightening up and you get a fine forty-five degrees of dry air. The female Pug was looking downhearted and clung to my side, sitting and staring at me expectantly whenever I sat down. Gemma-Kate left some of the cheddar-and-green-chili omelette she’d made for herself in the pan on the stove, and after eating that and fixing another Alka-Seltzer I felt a little better. Thinking a walk might clear up my lingering stomach upset and general anxiousness, I grabbed my new walking stick that Carlo had made for me, one with a blade in the bottom to fend off critters, saddled up the dog, and headed out to the back of our property.
They say there are five thousand trails running through Tucson and its environs, maybe more, up and over the mountains, and connecting the area like human veins and arteries. Once I had shown Mallory on the map three trails that, if you knew how to go and were willing to walk the four miles, connected our houses. But she would never do the trails with me or even meet me halfway. Like I said, she was much more a shopper than a hiker.
While I’m not much of a shopper myself, I understood how she felt about hiking. When I was working for the Bureau I had no time for nature. It was just something you had to go through to get to the next building. Now I had the time and the peace of mind not only to notice the world but to name the things in it. And springtime in the desert can get your attention like nothing else. You think the color purple does that? Try a purple cactus rimmed with hot pink flowers as big as coffee cups. We’d had plenty of winter rain, not the sudden monsoon kind that makes the otherwise dry riverbeds run and fills the dips in the road so you can’t drive through them, but the light cold rain that comes all day, soaking the ground and preparing it for the yellow poppies that coated the ground in certain places now, making it look like someone spread mustard thick over the arroyos.
I was proud of that thought, thinking the poppies looked like mustard rather than some god-awful vision from a memory of a violent past. Where the ice was melting off the higher elevations I could see the sun glinting off small pools. I remembered how Carlo and I, during a walk toward the mountains in the distance, had seen that sparkle, how he thought of a sprinkling of diamonds or some such while I thought of an angry giant breaking a mirror. I was changing, I thought, thinking of poppies as mustard. Just watch, it was only a matter of time before I’d begin to see butterflies and bunnies in the clouds. Everything wouldn’t make me think of something hideous.
I was in no hurry, which was just as well since this was the Pug who liked to sniff. Walking is good for thinking, and I put together what I knew so far about Joseph Joe Joey Neilsen.
Son of a helicopter mom and a stepfather who maybe wasn’t keen on the thought of having a stepson, gay or straight, living with them forever.
Only hobbies, making handmade gifts for his mother and probably masturbating, maybe in the pool so Mummy wouldn’t find any evidence on his bedsheets.
Dragged to church, and the youth group, too, I’d bet. Suitable friends forced on him, what they called “socialization” these days. Come Sunday I’d talk to Elias and Lulu’s kid, what was his name, Ken?
Go see Detective Sam Humphries and stop by the medical examiner’s lab to see George Manriquez, who was always there during the day unless he was at a death scene, but there weren’t that many homicides, suspected or otherwise, in Tucson.
Tell Jacquie Neilsen that you couldn’t analyze someone’s ashes.
As I thought of each element of my investigation, I found myself tapping my stick on the ground rhythmically and murmuring, “Joe. Joey. Joseph. Joe. Joey. Joseph.”
My thoughts were so far away from my surroundings I almost put the dog in danger. She had been sniffing at a pile of rocks—coyote piss, I thought idly, as she started to paw at the ground next to the pile. I watched her, thinking Joe Joey Joseph, until my attention was piqued by a little pronged thing coming out of the earth. Chicken bone, I guessed with more instinct than certainty, and pulled her leash to keep her from chomping down on it.
Wasn’t a chicken bone, though. Bird claw? Interested, distracted from my thoughts, I studied it. Then I thought that the pile of rocks didn’t look natural. Someone had placed them there. So, still keeping a tight rein on the Pug’s leash while she strained at the same spot that fascinated me, I kicked aside the rocks and pushed at the dirt underneath with the toe of my hiking boot. The little pronged thing was the drying foot of a frog.
Bigger than a frog, a dead toad, pretty big. Make that huge, as big around as a saucer. Lying on its back in a shallow grave. I looked more closely, poked at it with my walking stick..
The toad had been slit open from its throat to its butt, too neatly for an animal attack. Only the organs were missing.
I always carry a poop bag with me. Even if the dogs go outside the development, you don’t want to encourage any more flies than we already have. I put my hand through the plastic and, still holding the Pug back with a tight leash and my right foot, I bent over and picked up the toad.
Walked back to the house with the Pug frisking around me saying I want it, give it to me. Like she had a death wish.
“No. Bad dog,” I said without any real conviction because I was trying hard to get my brain to work with me.
When I got back to the house I got a bigger plastic bag that we save from grocery shopping, put it on the glass-top table on the back porch, and slid the toad from the poop bag onto the larger one. I turned on the hose hooked up at the back faucet and wet down the body, water running just lightly enough to get the dirt off without pushing it off the table. I looked at the toad more carefully. The slit down its abdomen was clearer now. Clean slice, not made with teeth. Its internal organs had been neatly removed. I went inside to the desk in the living room and pulled open the drawer where we stored pens, stamps, and other small tools. The exacto knife we used for opening up that goddamn packaging that coats everything as if the main purpose is to keep you from opening it was in the drawer where it usually was, but it could have been washed.
The Pug was scratching and whining at the back door to go out where the toad was.
“Gemma-Kate,” I said, a flare of anger having subsided into a quiet disbelief. She didn’t respond. I heard screaming from her room—and went there. She was simultaneously staring at a movie and her iPhone. I think the movie was
Saw
but can’t say which one because I haven’t watched them. “Gemma-Kate,” I said. She looked up at me with blank eyes, but I could swear she knew.
“Outside,” I said, then turned and walked away.
She followed me out to the living room. “What?” she said.
When I turned to look at her, she, to my mind, manufactured a shy smile.
“On the porch. Now,” I said, my voice cracking with fresh anger.
I opened the door and, grabbing her by her upper arm none too gently, pushed her outside. I shut the door and directed her attention to the table with the wet dead toad. “You did this, didn’t you?”
She looked at the toad, then looked at me. Not denying, not even looking surprised. I looked into her face and saw neither fear nor doubt nor guilt, only the usual combination of full-eyes and half-smile, a lack of affect. For the first time I recognized those eyes from my past, and they frightened me as eyes like that always had. It was what Carlo would call an epiphany.
“You poisoned my dog,” I said.
The back door opened behind her. “Don’t let the Pug out,” I said, but the Pug was out, and Carlo followed. My warning and the momentary focus on the dog seemed to give Gemma-Kate just enough time to assess the situation and resolve it. She slumped into the chair at the table and put her face in her hands.
“What’s going on?” Carlo asked, watching Gemma-Kate in the universal pose of dejection before noticing the dead toad.
“She poisoned my dog,” I said.
“What happened, Gemma-Kate?” Carlo asked.
Speaking partly through her hands so she didn’t have to lift her face, Gemma-Kate said, “The night you were at that party I found this toad out back. I was going to throw it over the fence. But then I thought it could just jump back into the yard so I should kill it. Then I thought, you know, I’m in biology, and I’d dissected a toad before, but never this big. Why shouldn’t I dissect it? I didn’t have anything else to do. So I did.”