The Killing Lessons (10 page)

Pain woke Nell. She opened her eyes. She was looking at a low wooden ceiling with cobwebbed beams. She was lying on her back in a soft dark blue sleeping bag on the floor. She was desperately thirsty. She recognised nothing.

Instinct told her not to make a sound. She lay there, blinking. Her right foot was a lump of fire. Her face felt like a cold skin mask someone had put on her. There was a whispery sound and throbbing heat to her left.

Very carefully, she turned her head.

A stove.

Old-fashioned. Squat. Iron.

The stove she’d seen. Her boots were next to it, laces undone.

She lifted her head and looked about her.

A small wooden room. Yellowy light came from two oil lamps, one on a table by the window (snow was still falling, the sky not quite dark), the other on a small shelf above a big white sink. A thin front door with a half-rotten backpack hanging from a hook.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows.

Opposite her a pale green wing-backed armchair, like old people had. A few feet past the sink another doorway, with no door. She could see a third doorway beyond it, showing the edge of a brown-stained bathtub.

She twisted –
very
carefully – to see what was behind her. A battered couch, also green, but not matching the chair, with bits of its foam showing through rips in the fabric. Above it on the wall a crookedly hanging picture of three white horses drinking at a stream, with a forest behind them.

Hey, cunt
.

The words. The dream.

It was a dream.

It wasn’t a dream.

Everything stopped. Like the split second on the roller-coaster just before the drop.

Then she was falling. Then everything fell back in on her.

It fell back in on her and inside her and filled her with emptiness that swelled and in a moment would break out of her like a fruit bursting through its skin. And there would be nothing after that. Nothing.

Mom.

Run
.

I’m going to be all right but you have to run. Now!

Mom.

Oh God please please please—

The front door banged open.

An old man on his hands and knees. Longish grey hair and a beard. Bright green watery eyes in a lined face. He was dragging something behind him.

He collapsed on the threshold, breathing heavily. Cold, snow-flavoured air rushed in.

Nell had started, shoved herself backwards. She’d hit her head on the base of the couch. Moving had made the pain in her legs blare.

For what felt like a long time she remained frozen, watching the man on the floor. Something in the stove popped. The couch smelled sour. Beyond him she could see a wooden porch, big flakes of falling snow, the dark forest across the ravine. Mom. Josh. She had to get back. She—

He raised his head.

‘Oh,’ he gasped. ‘You’re…’ But he couldn’t catch his breath. He bent his forehead to the floor. Wheezed. Raised his hand, as if telling her to wait… wait. Nell pictured herself jumping over him, out onto the porch, running into the drifting snow. She tried to get up. The pain in her legs stopped her again, immediately. There was no arguing with it. There was nothing she could do.

The old man lifted his head a second time.

‘You’re awake,’ he said.

Nell imagined him undressing her. The hands in the dream.

But she was wearing all her clothes. They felt stiff and hot.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘You’re safe. I found you outside. What happened? Where do you live?’

Nell was aware of her mouth open, nothing coming out.

‘Listen,’ the old man said. ‘Just give me a second. You’re safe, I promise. Just… I’m not going to hurt you. Are you OK? How are you feeling?’

Nell didn’t answer.

‘This looks weird,’ he said. ‘I know. I’m… I have a problem with my legs. Can’t really walk at the moment. You shouldn’t try to move. I think your ankle’s broken. Let me get this door.’

She watched him push himself back up onto his hands and knees – wrists trembling – and drag the sack of logs inside. He turned around and pushed the door shut. It all seemed to take a long time.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ he asked her. He’d crawled to one of the fold-out chairs and was propping himself up on it in an awkward position. His face was moist.

The blood coming out of her mother. All that time. How long?
They’re still here
. They. More than one. Was he one of them? Josh would be looking for her. Was Josh…? But when she thought of Josh she got dark silence from the place where God was. The feeling of how much she’d wanted to put her arms around her mother came back, hurt her chest. Her mother slowly opening and closing her eyes. The blood on her mouth like crooked lipstick.

Mom is—

No she’s not.

‘It’s OK,’ the old man said. ‘You don’t have to say anything. It’s OK. Everything’s going to be all right.’

The room’s loud quiet was like water boiling away.

‘How about I ask you and you just nod your head for yes and shake it for no?’ the old man said. ‘I know you’re scared, but I promise you don’t need to be. All I want is to help you and get you home to your mom and dad.’

Your mom and dad. Nell remembered her dad making scrambled eggs and waffles in the morning, saying: I hope you appreciate the consummate skill going into this, missy.
Consummate
. He purposely used big words he knew she didn’t know the meaning of, so she’d have to ask him. She remembered finding her mom curled up in the shower with the water crashing down on her and her face like she’d never seen it before and her mom not being able to speak, then recovering and saying, Shshsh, baby, it’s OK, I’m sorry, it’s OK.

‘Can you tell me if you live nearby?’ the old man said. ‘Just nod your head.’

Should she tell him? What if he was one of them?

But the thought popped into her head: he was the man from the cabin. Mystery Guy. This was the cabin. There was nothing else on this side of the bridge. She started trying to work out if that made him safe, but the words were out before she could stop them.

‘My mom’s hurt.’

The sound of her voice shocked her. It made everything more real: the cabin; the old man; everything. It was as if everything had been waiting to catch up with her. And now it had.

He seemed surprised that she’d spoken. His eyebrows went up.

‘OK. You’re mom’s hurt. Did she have an accident? Can you tell me where she is?’

Her throat tightened. ‘At home,’ she said. ‘Ellinson. You have to call an ambulance.’

An ambulance. Doctors. Medicine. But she kept seeing the red-haired man standing in the hallway, the calm excitement in his face.
Hey, cunt. How’re you holding up?

Tears welled and fell, hot and intimate on her cheeks. Something had gone out of the world when she’d seen her mother lying there. Something had gone and now the world was huge tilting spaces.

‘Hey,’ the old man said, raising his hand. ‘It’s OK, don’t cry. It’s OK. We’ll figure this out. Don’t cry.’

‘You have to call an ambulance,’ Nell said again, her voice small and ugly to herself. Stupid thoughts like the old man looked like the guy on one of her mom’s CDs. Kris Kristofferson. In the mornings sometimes her mom put on ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. Nell liked it.

‘There’s no phone here,’ the old man said. He looked around the room as if there might be a phone in spite of what he’d just said. ‘I don’t… Is your mom… Is anyone else with her?’

Stupid useless thoughts. Bobby McGee. Her mom’s skirt pushed up all wrong. The pale light still coming through the front door’s little frosted window, falling on her bare legs.

‘Josh,’ she said. ‘My brother.’

‘Was Josh hurt too?’

‘I don’t know.’

There’s no phone here
. And the blood coming out. Bits from TV hospital dramas flashed. The word
haemorrhage
. How could there be no phone? He was lying. She’d made a mistake.

‘You have to call an ambulance,’ she repeated.

‘There’s no phone here,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. There’s no electricity. I’m not lying to you, I promise. You don’t have a cell phone, do you? You know? Like one your mom maybe has?’

She shook her head. The home screen on her mother’s iPhone was a picture of her and Josh, grinning into the camera. Josh had kept changing it for pictures of rock bands until her mother had put a security code in.

‘Me neither,’ he said. He kept looking around the room. There was a tremor of panic in him. The room’s stillness and the stove’s soft breath were terrible, because of the blood coming out of her mother and all the time passing and the world just going on, not caring, not even knowing.

‘You have to
do
something,’ she wailed, trying again to get up, crying out when the pain in her legs jammed her.

‘Hey, easy, take it easy. You’ll hurt yourself if you try’n put weight on it. Come on now, calm down. We’re going to figure something out, I promise.’

But hopelessness crushed Nell, and she sobbed, her hands over her face. She thought of her grandmother, who lived in a retirement complex with a bright turquoise pool like a big mosaic tile. In Florida.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ the old man said. ‘How about I start? You must be wondering. First, my name’s Angelo. My dad used to own this place, and now it’s mine. I came out here to… Well, for a sort of vacation. Yesterday – no, the day before – I found you lying in the snow outside. You were unconscious. I could see you were hurt, so I brought you inside and built up the fire to keep you warm. You’ve had a fever. In fact, hold on, you must be thirsty.’

Nell lowered her hands and pressed herself back against the couch. Angelo struggled across the floor and hauled himself up on the sink. His body shuddered with the effort.

‘I have this thing wrong with me,’ he said, filling a tin mug with water from the tap. ‘Something in my back’s gone wrong, and it means my legs don’t work properly. Which is why…’ he lowered himself, carefully, wincing, back onto his knees, ‘which is why I’m crawling around like this. Here. Go ahead. It’s just regular water. Don’t drink it too fast.’

But she couldn’t drink it at all. She watched her hands taking the cup from him, but her throat was twisted shut and she couldn’t stop the tears. She wanted to be sick, but the sickness stuck inside her. It just kept rising and knotting and not coming out.

‘Well, have a sip when you’re ready,’ Angelo said, moving away from her back to the chair, propping himself up again. ‘But you should try, because you’ll feel better.’

Nell stared into the cup. The smell of the tin and the stony water reminded her of when they went camping. She couldn’t control her thoughts. More and more useless thoughts.

‘What’s your name?’ Angelo said.

Nell forced herself to swallow. Not speaking was worse. Not speaking left her raw to the new way the world was, giant and ugly and empty. She had a brief image of cities full of dark traffic and millions of strangers.

‘Nell Cooper,’ she said.

‘Nell Cooper. OK, that’s a start. And you live across the ravine, in Ellinson, right?’

She nodded. She didn’t know if she should be telling him but she didn’t know what else to do.

‘With your mom and dad and your brother, Josh?’

Swallowing the tears hurt. Brought all the times she’d cried before, then her mother close, saying, Shshsh, Nellie, it’s all right, it’s all right…

‘Just my mom and Josh.’

Angelo paused. ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘And your mom’s hurt, and maybe Josh, too, so we have to try to figure out how to get help.’ Another pause. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ he said.

‘There was a man,’ Nell said. ‘He… There was a man in our house and he hurt my mom. She said they were still there when I came in and she told me to run. I didn’t want to run. I didn’t want to run I should’ve stayed with her but she told me to run.’ More tears she couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t. But she did. Forced herself. The way her mother had pretended to be angry. She’d pretended to be angry because…

‘Well I know one thing,’ Angelo said. ‘If your mom told you to run, she meant it, and you did the right thing to listen to her. You did
exactly
the right thing. Now let’s look at what else. Do you think Josh might have run, too? To a neighbour maybe?’

Nell tried to see it. Josh running to Sadie’s. Sadie calling the police, an ambulance screaming through Ellinson, pulling up outside their house.

But she couldn’t.

She shook her head.

Angelo opened his mouth to say something – then changed his mind. He looked around the room again. His hands were shaking, Nell could see. Then he seemed to come to a decision.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Here’s what I think. I think… I’m going to put on every piece of clothing I’ve got and I’m going to try to get across the bridge. My car’s on the other side, so I can get to your house. To a phone, at least. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make it like this, but I’ll try. You can’t move on that leg, so you’re going to have to stay here. But I’ll build up the fire and—’

‘You can’t,’ Nell said.

He looked at her. ‘What?’

The words felt dead in her mouth. Her whole body seemed to collapse into a new hopelessness. ‘You can’t go over the bridge,’ she said. ‘It’s gone. You have to go over the tree.’

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer
. Something like that. Valerie had read it or heard it. Back at the station she waited until Carla was gathering up her things. It was just after nine in the evening.

‘I haven’t eaten all day,’ Valerie said to her. ‘Want to grab a bite?’

There was only the slightest hesitation, but she clocked Carla having to stop, calculate, recalibrate. There was, Valerie decided, a Carla scheme of things. A Carla
agenda
. Balanced on a wire. The woman’s physical composure was in fact a pitch of tension so extreme it manifested itself as calm. It satisfied Valerie, with a kind of thrilled dread.

‘Sure,’ Carla said, as with pleasant surprise. She opened her mouth to add something, stopped, started again. ‘What did you have in mind?’

They went to a tapas bar a few blocks away. Valerie’s strategy: she wasn’t hungry. Tapas you could pick at. The restaurant was low-lit, less than a dozen mosaic tables and a compact, tempting bar at one end, its liquid treasures glimmering. To drink or not to drink? That was the question. But Carla ordered a glass of Shiraz, apparently without conflict. Which would make me
not
drinking look suspicious, Valerie thought. Bluffs and double-bluffs. Fuck it. ‘Vodka tonic,’ she said to the waiter.

Valerie didn’t, she now realised, have a plan for how this should go. Having made the decision to play along, Carla appeared relaxed. Tired, even, which made Valerie doubt herself. Maybe Carla was just an irritatingly efficient person who didn’t wear her traumas on her sleeve?

‘Sacramento, mainly,’ Carla said, in answer to Valerie’s question of where she grew up. ‘My parents moved down to Phoenix in ’02, but I was already at Quantico by then. My dad was Bureau. He retired a few years back.’

‘You were always going to do it?’

‘Pretty much. He was against it, actually. As was my mom. Although my mom never got over me giving up ballet when I was nine.’

A sense of humour. OK. Not
entirely
the clipped machine her professional self suggested. Valerie took an injudiciously large gulp of her drink.

‘I don’t know what it was like for you,’ Carla said, ‘but I wanted it more or less as soon as I understood what it was.’

‘Catching bad guys,’ Valerie said.

‘Yeah. You either have the disease or you don’t.’

‘I know.’ And the disease either kills you or it doesn’t. Goddammit.

Carla untied her ponytail – to redo it, tighter – and when her hair fell into its soft bob it changed her face, showed the nervily focused young girl she’d once been. Now filled with grown-up losses and regrets. Then she refastened the hair tie, and the hard, locked-up adult was back.

‘Too bad it doesn’t leave much room for anything else,’ Valerie said.

The waiter, a very small old Hispanic guy with a moustache that looked too big for his face, brought their plates.

‘You don’t have anyone?’ Carla asked, not really looking at her, when the waiter had gone.

For a vertiginous moment Valerie wondered if Carla was a lesbian. If she was, she might be reading this entirely differently. Shit. She really hadn’t thought this through.

‘No,’ Valerie said. ‘You?’

Carla took a green pitted olive from the bowl, scrutinised it briefly, then said, ‘No. Not for a long time,’ before popping it into her mouth.

Which brought them, all but palpably, to an impasse. Valerie’s next words were out before she had a chance to rehearse them in her head.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Are you here to evaluate me?’

Carla stopped chewing. Looked down at the table. Chewed again. Swallowed. Looked back at Valerie.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Does the Bureau think I’m not doing my job?’

Carla looked genuinely baffled. ‘Why would you say that?’ she said. She said it with such manifest perplexity Valerie felt foolish.

She backed up, slightly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Because those fuckers are still out there. On my watch. If you’re here to put me under the microscope I’d rather know, that’s all.’

Carla was still for a few moments, as if unpacking it all, slowly. Then she said, ‘No way.’ And after a pause, ‘Everyone knows how hard you’ve been busting your ass on this.’

Which stalled Valerie. Jesus,
was
she just being paranoid?

‘You’re worrying needlessly,’ Carla said.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. I know how it feels. No matter how much you do it’s not enough if they’re still out there. There’s nothing to do but keep doing as much as we can until we get them.’

‘We don’t get them all. Maybe we won’t get these.’

‘No point thinking that way. You focus on the ones you got. You got Suzie Fallon’s killer when no one else could.’

The name still detonated something in Valerie, three years on. Still detonated everything. Everything the Suzie Fallon case had cost her. Everything it had made her become.

‘You know about that?’ she said.

‘I was following it. It’s why I jumped at the chance to work with you.’

Flattery? Carla hadn’t delivered it that way. Rather as if merely reporting a fact. It embarrassed Valerie. She felt her face warming. She also felt herself wanting to like Carla. And somehow not being able to. Her animal self couldn’t. When she and Blasko had met, their animal selves had recognised each other immediately. They’d joked about it, later, the pheromonal doom humans still lived under. This, with Carla, was the exact opposite: a recoil without reason.

Somehow she made it through the rest of the brief meal. Having been asked, the direct question – which had of course revealed
Valerie
’s agenda,
Valerie
’s scheme of things – left both women awkward again. Forced the conversation back into small talk: real estate prices; Myskow’s sick leave (a duodenal ulcer);
Mad Men
; the world’s current obsession with not eating carbohydrates. Valerie couldn’t say why but it still seemed to her that there was something Carla was holding back. Every time their eyes met it was as if Carla were watching her through a two-way mirror.

When they’d paid their check and were gathering up their things, Valerie’s phone rang. It was Laura Flynn. As per Valerie’s instruction she’d been back through more of the Katrina footage from the zoo. Raiders had shown up three times. Always on the edge of the crowd, always watching Katrina.

Carla made no pretence of not waiting for the outcome of the call.

‘Don’t get excited,’ Valerie said to her. ‘But it looks like we’ve actually got a suspect.’