Authors: Michael Marshall
We didn’t say much more after that. I sat, content to be wreathed in her smoke, her body warm against my side as it got darker and darker in my head, and her breathing got shallower, and eventually she fell asleep.
I sat there, supporting her meager weight, a still point at the center of the world.
S
ome time later, having half woken, she smiled drowsily at me and hauled herself to her feet. She stumbled off in the direction of the bedroom, pausing just long enough to glance back at me from the door.
I drifted back to sleep for a while, before waking again to find myself on the floor, her pack of cigarettes close to my face. Without giving the idea a second thought I took one, lit it, stuck it in my mouth, and dragged on it deep. I don’t remember whether it felt good or not, or whether I even finished it.
A
t two o’clock in the morning Hunter walks into the sleeping condominium complex and lets himself into the apartment on the second story. Everything is as he left it. He walks to the couch, lowers himself down, and sits in the darkness. It is very quiet. No one is awake at this hour. Through the sliding doors at the end of the living room he can see across the central area of tennis courts. There is a light in one of the condos opposite, but it is dim, most likely there to comfort and guide a child should he or she need the bathroom in the night. Hunter watches for ten minutes and sees no one. A child sleeps on, undreaming, unaware.
He turns back to look across the room. On the wall is a canvas. Pieces of coral and seaweed have been stuck to it, along with some shells. In the darkness they look like blots of black ink against shadow. He wonders how long ago Hazel Wilkins undertook this project, a quiet and earnest celebration of where she lived, while a now-canceled TV show played in the background. These things of the ocean, once alive and in transit, are now so still they seem to deny the very idea of change, dismantling continuation and breaking the world into an infinite series of present moments.
They’re there.
They’re still there.
They’re still there.
And so is he. He closes his eyes, and there is a flash of noise and movement in his head. He lets his skull tip slowly forward, and holds it in his hands.
H
e stands over the shape on the bedroom floor. This is where she ran. He is not yet sure what he’s going to do about the result. He steps over her and goes to the closet, pulls the doors open. From the interior comes the smell of perfume worn on other days. Dresses, blouses, jackets hang all in a row. There is a sufficient number that most touch the next in line, but it seems to him that if he were to take each item to a different town in the country, or even the world, they could not feel farther apart from each other than they do now.
He has never been responsible for someone’s death—not so directly anyhow. If it hadn’t been for Hazel Wilkins, he could have told himself everything was going better than planned. He broke this woman’s neck with his own hands, however, and he feels bad about it.
He turns from her closet and kicks her body, hard.
H
e goes into the kitchenette and makes himself a cup of instant coffee. He drinks it standing at the doors out onto the balcony, far enough back that—should anyone look over—they will see nothing but shadow. It is cold in this apartment. The body in the bedroom would likely not announce its presence for a couple of days, by which time he hopes it will all be done. Hunter doesn’t know how often the maid service operates, however. It could be that at 8:00
A.M.
sharp tomorrow some poorly paid Mexican woman will be opening the door to this apartment. Her response to a dead body is unlikely to be restrained.
Hunter worked out pretty quickly why Warner had given him Phil Wilkins’s name. Partly as the real target was already beyond his reach, but also because Warner hoped a confrontation between Wilkins’s widow and Hunter would send a message to the real people Hunter is here to find. He was ready to sacrifice Hazel, in other words.
Unfortunately, Warner was right—or he will be, if people find out what happened in this condo that afternoon. It doesn’t surprise Hunter that Warner would have been prepared to sacrifice someone, and he feels he owes it to Hazel Wilkins that her death not be a matter of fulfilling someone else’s plan. She cannot just be David Warner’s Post-it note or ploy, and so he needs to come up with some other way of letting this play out.
Which means he needs to move her body.
But first he needs to check if there is anything here in this apartment, anything from which he can learn.
I
t soon becomes clear that, wherever the bulk of this woman’s stuff is, it isn’t here. Either she’s divested herself of a lot of the past, or it’s stored elsewhere.
He checks the shelves, the drawers, the closets. There’s nothing except the big framed photograph of her and Phil, holding cocktails and grinning on the balcony of this very apartment on some long-ago sunny afternoon. He saw the picture on his previous visit. He recognized Phil Wilkins, recognized him as someone he’d thought of as, if not a friend, then a more than casual acquaintance. Realizing that this had been a lie, even so long after the fact, was part of what led to the unraveling of his discussion with the widow. Given how many lies we tell other people and ourselves, it’s funny how much those of others hurt.
On the upper story of the duplex—a small adjunct up a narrow stairway, holding a second bedroom and bathroom—he finds a storage area. This is home to nothing but a couple of suitcases, both empty. It’s beginning to look as though all he’s going to come away with is the names she gave him that afternoon. She tried to give them early, too. It needn’t have gone the way it went, that was the worst of it.
Except . . . once he had pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, saw her read the signs and come back with recognition in her eyes, it had already been heading down a one-way road. She’d started trying to talk, to tell him things, to name names, as if to unburden herself. He’d stopped listening, however.
He can still hear the sounds in his head, remember the frenzy of movement. There were a couple of moments when it seemed like it was another woman in front of him, just as old but fatter—a woman whose heart gave out. Memories leaking sideways, as they sometimes do.
At last, as he tramps back down in the living area, he spots a ruffle in the valance of the sofa. He reaches underneath and finds a laptop. Not hidden, merely stowed out of sight, Hazel having been of an era that regarded computers as machines—like a vacuum cleaner or ironing board—to be brought out, used, and returned to steerage, not tolerated as part of a room’s decoration.
Bathed in the screen’s dim cold light, he soon realizes that, though the pickings may remain slim, this is how the woman stored her past. There are a lot of photographs, some child having been diligent in digitizing Mom’s visual history for her. He sets his back against the wall and starts to go through the files.
B
y 4:00
A.M.
he has only one image pulled aside. It is a shot of David Warner with both Wilkinses, taken in some bar on an evening many years before, and it seems to Hunter that Hazel doesn’t appear entirely comfortable. Warner has his arm around her shoulders and is grinning like a shark. The older woman has a fixed smile. This picture is not much help, though, as everyone in it apart from Warner is now dead.
Then he comes upon a final photograph. This has more people in it, and by the time Hunter has absorbed the content, his hands are trembling. He closes the laptop, but it makes little difference. The image burns in his head like a flare. The photograph was taken, presumably, by the woman lying dead in the bedroom. She’s not in it, at any rate, though her husband is. It shows a table in the sidewalk area of the Columbia Restaurant on St. Armands Circle. The cloth is strewn with plates of half-eaten food and jugs of half-drunk sangria. Candles and lamps are lit—it’s midevening, middinner. Phil Wilkins is in the center, next to a young-looking Warner, with another two women and two men, most of whom Hunter half recognizes. They look happy and full to the brim with confidence and joie de wealth and circumstance, their shared grins, teeth, and tans impregnable as a fortress: except the couple in the middle, whose smiles look a little forced, as if there’s something on their minds.
Behind and to one side of the table, at the edge of the range of the camera’s flash, is another man. He’s looking down as he locks the battered car he’s just arrived in. He’s totally unaware of the Kodak moment twenty feet away. The man is John Hunter.
At the moment the picture was taken, they didn’t even know he was there. He remembers the night, however. About thirty seconds after this picture was snapped, he noticed Phil Wilkins at the table, and Phil stood up and—in retrospect—took care to come over to Hunter rather than let it happen the other way around.
They had a brief conversation. Though Hunter knew a couple of the others by sight—and had met Warner a couple of times—none appeared to pay him any attention. His mind had been on other things in any event. He was keen to go meet his woman. He waved vaguely at the table and hurried away. He arrived at a much cheaper restaurant on the other side of the Circle to find that his date hadn’t arrived yet, and was relieved.
He was less relieved when, an hour later, she still hadn’t shown up. He eventually left alone.
Yes, he remembers this night. It was his last as a free man. It was the night before the cops found the mangled body of the only woman he’d ever really loved, and blamed her murder on him.
I
woke with a cricked neck and a head that felt very terrible. I was sprawled on the floor, face pressed into the rug, forcing my head at a right angle to the direction it usually faced. My neck had clearly been unhappy about this for a while, and got straight onto announcing the fact now that I was awake. Opening my eyes made everything much worse immediately. The room was full of morning light streaming from the glass door onto the balcony. It smelled of ash and wine.
I blinked and focused and saw my phone lying on the floor near my head. The screen said 7:35. The panic this induced had me sitting upright, very suddenly.
Cassandra’s bedroom door was shut.
I had time to feel a beat of relief that I hadn’t made a
total
fool of myself by trying to follow her in there in the dead of night.
Then I noticed that the bathroom door was closed, too, and that there was now a word on it. The word was scrawled in letters that had dripped and run like spilled red wine.
The word was
modified.
Someone was banging on the front door.
I
scrambled to my feet, pushing myself upward via the sofa, meanwhile stepping on the saucer Cassandra had been using for an ashtray, flipping it over, and spreading ash and lipsticked butts everywhere.
I grabbed my phone. I lurched over to the bathroom door. The letters there had not been written in wine, of course. Wine would have simply run, leaving nothing but a faint residue. These letters had dripped more slowly, viscously. The red was browner, matte where it had dried. It was blood. It had to be blood.
I pushed the door open. “Cass?”
Just the bathroom. The shower cubicle. Water dripped from the fixture slowly. No one there.
More banging on the front door. I turned toward the bedroom. My head was pounding and I could feel sweat popping out all over my body and scalp.
I pushed the bedroom door. It opened six inches, showing me a strip of the far wall.
“Cass? You in here?”
There was no response, so I said it again, fighting against the climbing volume of the hammering coming from the front door and against the knowledge that I was going to have to go into the bedroom.
“Cassandra?”
I pushed the door farther, and took a step.
The smell of whatever perfume it was Cassandra wore. A bed, empty. The comforter thrown back. Everything covered in blood. Just so
much
blood.
There was no sign of a body, but I knew Cass could not have lost so much blood and still be alive.
All the perspiration on my body turned to ice. I stumbled back into the main room. It seemed clear I was going to have a heart attack and I didn’t care. The front door was beginning to splinter around the lock. I stumbled in the opposite direction, toward the frosted glass door.
Out on the balcony it was very hot and very bright. The balcony was three feet deep, four feet wide. A rusting railing, broken brown tiles underfoot. A couple of stories below lay a patch of waste ground, once landscaped but now overrun with scrub and tilted palm trees and discarded household items dropped off the balconies on this side of the building. Those either side of Cassandra’s were too far for me to hope to get to. I leaned over the railing, feeling it shift and squeak beneath me, and couldn’t see how I could hope to get down without breaking my neck. This was a dead end. There was only one way out of the apartment. I stepped back into the room just as the front door finally flew open.
A woman burst in. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, brown hair tied in a tight ponytail. She clocked the word daubed on the bathroom door.
“Where
is she
?”
I must have glanced toward the bedroom. She ran over, ducked her head through the door—and swore violently, in a voice that sounded close to cracking.
When she came back out I realized I’d seen her before, dressed differently. She was the waitress from Jonny Bo’s. The one who’d served us on Monday.
“What . . . what are you—”
“Come with me,” she said, grabbing my arm and driving me toward the front door with enough force to almost throw me over. “Come now. Or you’re going to die.”
S
he herded me in front of her along the walkway toward the spiral stairs. I stumbled down them, round and round, my head splitting, and I didn’t start to resist until we got down to the courtyard at the bottom, and she started to trot toward the gate.
“Who
are
you? Why are you—”
She stopped and turned in one fluid movement, and before I knew it had her hand at my throat, thumb and fingers gripped around my windpipe. She looked me directly in the eyes and tapped my cheek lightly—tap tap tap—with the tips of two fingers of her other hand.
“No questions. Do what I say, and do it
now,
or I’ll leave you here and that will be the end of it.”
She let go of me and ran off toward the gate. I followed. I didn’t know what else to do. There was a battered pickup parked in the street outside. I went around while she opened the driver’s-side door. I’d barely got my ass on the seat before she stamped on the gas and yanked the vehicle in a hard fast 180-degree turn and accelerated off up the road.
After thirty yards she slammed hard on the brakes, however, staring intently through the windshield up the long, curved road that passed the condos I’d walked by the night before with a girl who . . . whose blood had since been used to write a word on her own bathroom door.
“Shit shit
shit
.”
The woman jammed the truck into reverse and pulled a long, fishtailing U-turn to hurtle back the way we’d come. She bumped up over the curb as she completed the turn and sent the side of my head cracking into the window frame. I crashed back down into my seat and grabbed the seat belt as she kept the vehicle accelerating along the last fifty yards of the two-lane.
At the end was a low gate between two short metal poles, and I’m glad the gate was open, as I don’t think she would have stopped.
She swerved through the space and bounced onto the pockmarked single lane that cut away into the scrub and into the swampy woods beyond. Before long the bushes were crowding in, and the dirt road twisted back and forth to follow the contours. She’d either driven this way before or believed she had no choice, and kept going faster and faster. I saw a couple of faded and tilting real estate signs, indications that someone had tried to develop this part of Lido’s southern nowhereland at some point in the last decade and given up, but otherwise nothing more than the sight of branches whipping past the window.
After a couple of minutes the road broadened a little and the trees fell away on the right to reveal the banks of a flat, overgrown waterway. I got a flash memory of a fuzzy, long-ago afternoon: of a place you could walk to if you were intrepid and had a lot of time and started from outside the Lido Beach Inn and went the long way around the shoreline, past all the motels, past the point where man had trammeled and honed—but I have no idea if that’s what I was seeing now. In a flicker of trees it was gone, and then we were back into the woods.
Thirty seconds later the truck decelerated suddenly. There was a patch of dried mud by the side of the road ahead, home to old tires, an ancient mattress stained brown, and strewn with pieces of rusted metal. The woman pulled over onto this and wrenched around in her seat, staring intently back up the way we’d come.
I opened the car door and was sick.
I was glad of the acrid smell. It anchored me to the here and now for a moment, though what slopped out of my mouth onto the ground was the color of the red wine Cass and I had drunk together.
I’d barely finished before I was hauled back into my seat by the neck of my shirt, the woman’s arm then pushing past me to pull the door closed.
“You done?”
Then we were in motion once more, bouncing onto the dirt road and following it farther into the wilder part of the island, the acres of scrub and forest and moss and occasional flash glimpses of stagnant water through the trees. She was still driving fast, but without quite the dire urgency of before.
The flickering of the early morning sunlight was making me feel broken and sick, and so I closed my eyes. I found it was no worse inside my head like that than it had been with my eyes open.
So I stayed that way for a while.