She looked down at the countertop and scanned the scrawled lines on a page of the open journal. She was getting sleepy, and the text began to blur as she came to the last words, which ended midsentence in a long shaky line trailing off the paper.
“So he was inoculating the mushroom cultures, and something must have interrupted him.” Gwen’s eyes drifted to a plastic box pushed to the rear of the countertop. She opened the lid and looked down at a cluster of large fungi, dark, marbled and coated with dirt. She sniffed. This was familiar. “Sadie, do you know what these are? Truffles.”
“Ugly-looking, aren’t they?”
“A truffle is a—”
“A subterranean fungus,” said Sadie. “You think I sleep through
all
my classes.”
“Truffles come from Europe, and it costs the world to buy them. Even my dad complains about the price.”
“Really?” Sadie reached into the box, pulled one out and washed it under the sink. “Maybe they’re not so ugly. Take this one for instance.” She held it out for Gwen’s inspection. “It looks like a cute little bird, doesn’t it?”
Gwen nodded, drowsing, almost losing her balance on the rolling chair. She stared at the truffle nestled in the palm of Sadie’s hand. The small outgrowth at the top might be a beaked head, and the strange shaping in the bulk of it could pass for sweetly folded feathers. Her mouth dropped open when Sadie bit the head off and laughed.
“Not bad.” Sadie held out the box. “Wanna try one?”
“I don’t think so.” Gwen smiled. “Did you know that truffle spores are usually spread by deposits from the assholes of burrowing rodents?”
“Rodents? Rat shit?” Sadie pulled the truffle out of her mouth and spat into the sink. Gwen was extremely pleased with herself; she had finally grossed out the master.
When Sadie had washed her mouth out with water, she looked up at the clock on the wall. “We have to be very careful.” She pulled a rag from the cupboard under the sink and began to clean up each dot of blood on the painted white cement floor. “He comes back here twice a day. If he finds anything out of place, he’ll know I’m still breathing.”
“He thinks you’re dead?”
“He’s pretty sure I am.” Sadie made a wet ball of the dirty rag and stashed it behind the store of boxes and cans under the sink. “He buried me alive.”
“Oh,
right
.” By the grace of the pills, Gwen was feeling giddy now, and only deeply ingrained politeness prevented her from laughing out loud.
“He
did
,” said Sadie, insistent and somewhat wounded by this disbelief. “And I got a real good look at him while he was filling in my grave.” She opened another low closet and hauled out a bulky green trash bag. “You want to see what he looks like?” The child opened the bag wide to display rolls of black material: the knit of a sweater, the wool cuff of a pant leg and the toe of a large shoe. Sadie dug deep into the bag and plucked out a piece of black felt, a ski mask. She pulled it over her head—instantly morphing into an entirely different creature.
Gwen was jolted awake, eyes wide and all her attention riveted to the black felt mask. So this was the thing that had come to sit by her cot in the bathroom. The eyes were cruel slits crowned by slashes of white stitching that resembled angry eyebrows. The mouth was sewn shut with thick white embroidery thread to create the outline of intermeshed triangular fangs. Sadie was showing her the face of the monster.
“What do you think?” Sadie’s words were muffled by the material, her voice unrecognizable and barely understood.
“Take it off!
Please
, take it off!”
“Okay, okay.” Sadie hurriedly removed the mask and plunged it back into the bag. “We have to hide soon. When he knows you’re gone, he’s gonna tear this place apart looking for you.”
“He’ll think I’m outside. I tied the bedsheets together and left them dangling out the bathroom window.”
Sadie nodded with approval. “Good job. But he’ll be back soon, and he’s still gonna search the house.
I
would. We’ll know when he’s here—you can hear the car engine. We have to find a place to hide.”
They walked out of the sterile room and back into the vast space of the mushroom farm and the hum of tiny motors. Any one of the carts beneath the rows of tabletop shelves would make a good hiding place with room to spare.
The dog barked again. Gwen turned toward the trees, the realm of the chained animal. “If he lets that dog loose, there won’t be
any
place to hide.”
“There’s one safe place.” Sadie led the way to the center of the aisle of tables and pulled out a wheeled cart full of dirt. She pointed under the table to a dark rectangular hole between the cart tracks. Small mounds of soil were piled on the sides of it, and all the dirt in the cart would account for the rest. “That’s it. He didn’t finish filling it in. His beeper went off and he left. But that’s where he buried me.”
“You’re not serious.”
Sadie smiled. “That’s my grave. I
told
you he buried me alive.”
Gwen covered her ears. “He didn’t.”
“Hell yes, he did.”
“Stop, it’s not funny.”
“He thought I was dead.” Sadie pulled Gwen’s hands away from her ears. “No, listen. It was some of my best work. The trick is the open eyes.”
Gwen hugged herself and shook her head. “No.” But now she looked at the hole in the ground, and it
was
very like a small grave.
Sadie reached into a cart under the next table and pulled out her clothes all caked with dirt—more proof. “I have to put these on first. He buried me in my clothes.” She pulled the purple sweatshirt over her head. “I’ve given this a lot of thought. The best death is with open eyes. Of course it’s harder. You can’t blink. But if I’d closed my eyes, he might’ve listened to my heart.”
Sadie stepped into her purple jeans and zipped them. “Oh, and another nice touch? I went stiff all over. He came down to check on me later, just enough time for rigor mortis to set in. It was perfect. I didn’t have my parka on, and I was lying three feet down in cold dirt. You see, Gwen? Cold? Stiff?” She sprawled out in the hole and folded her arms across her chest in the best tradition of a movie corpse. She stared open-eyed at the ceiling. “See?
Dead
.” She grinned. “Neat?”
Gwen nodded, dumbfounded, not really letting it sink in that Sadie was lying in her own grave.
“If the dog leads him here, he’ll think the dog just wants to finish what he started in the boathouse.” Sadie sat up and scooped more dirt from the ground, deepening the hole. “This is the best hiding place—the only hiding place.”
“I’m not going in there.”
“Well, yes you are, Gwen. It’s the only way.”
And now they heard the car engine, only faint at first, but it was coming closer. Sadie ran back to the sterile room, calling out to Gwen, “Get into the hole. I forgot to put the bag back in the closet. I have to put it back or he’ll know.”
Gwen crawled under the table and reluctantly settled into the hole, lying back on the dirt as Sadie had done. It was not so bad really, and it was cooler here. Her eyelids felt so heavy now, closing slowly. She crossed her arms over her chest and wondered if it would be appropriate or helpful to say her prayers while lying in a grave.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” she whispered.
The car engine was directly overhead. Where was Sadie? There was no panic, no urgency in this thought, merely sleepy speculation. Perhaps the next time, she would only take
two
of the pills.
“I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” And then she remembered a better prayer, an ancient relic of folklore and more powerful. This had been yet another gift from her best friend, a magic charm to stave off the nightmares of a perpetually frightened child—so they might get on with the hard-core therapy of watching horror films. “From ghoulies and ghosties, and long-leggety beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us.”
She could hear bare feet pounding back to her. And now Sadie was piling into the grave and scooping the dirt in around them. “He didn’t have time to shovel in much, so it won’t be so bad. Just enough to make it look like I never left, okay?” She pulled Gwen’s shirt up over her face. “This’ll keep the dirt out of your eyes and your mouth.”
Gwen had heard no footsteps overhead, but she knew the man was in the house. She could feel his presence. In her mind, she followed him upstairs to the bathroom. She imagined his outrage when he saw the open window, the sheets, all the evidence of her escape.
Bad girl. Oh, he’s so angry.
Now he would be running down the stairs to search outside the house, perhaps believing that she had made that jump from the end of the sheets to the hard ground, not knowing what a miserable coward she was.
Bad girl.
She closed her eyes and held on to Sadie, who was reaching up to pull the cart back into place over the open hole, their coffin lid on wheels. Gwen was feeling light-headed again, and breathing deeply. The ruthless need for sleep was overtaking her entire body, relaxing every muscle. But now her eyes shot open in the dark. Things were moving in the earth beneath her. The ground was alive with insects, and they were inside her clothes and crawling on her flesh. She wanted to scream, but at the height of terror, her foot kicked out with an involuntary stumble, falling into sleep. And then her fast-beating heart settled into the gentle rhythm of an exhausted child.
Ellen Kendall removed her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes. At the center of the kitchen table lay the bound trial transcript awash in the first light of morning. She turned to look out the window. Noisy blackbirds were gathering around the garbage can in the yard, flapping their wings and screeching. A lean starling alighted on the windowsill. Grease glistened on his feet, and now it smeared the sill.
Filthy little beast.
She waved her hand at the glass to shoo him away. But the scavenger only cocked his head and glared at her, fearless and oblivious to warnings.
Well, what could one expect of a bird too stupid to fly south for the winter?
She looked down at the transcript. Hours ago, when it was still night, she had closed the heavy volume, retiring to her bed and the warm comfort of a down quilt. But compulsion had killed her only chance for sleep and called her back to the kitchen, cold and barefooted, to finish her reading. Now her eyes were sore, and her mind was flooded with odd thoughts.
What if the priest was innocent
?
She had not seen Paul Marie since the day a jury had found him guilty of murdering her daughter. He had been dressed all in black, but for the white of the priest’s collar.
The starling flew off.
Ellen turned to her son. Rouge sipped his coffee as he leaned against the door frame. He was dressed in jeans and one of his father’s old pin-striped shirts. A red tie hung around his neck, undone, and his smile was wry. She admired her handsome child and envied his youth; young faces were indestructible and never showed wear or sag. Ah, but then Rouge had slept soundly, hadn’t he? And perhaps that was what his smile was about—an apology for ruining her entire night.
Ellen tapped her reading glasses against her teeth. “You were right. The defense attorney was definitely dirty.” She opened the transcript and riffled the pages. “It’s all here, babe. A first-year law student would’ve put on a better show in court. Too bad the priest’s lawyer is dead. You could’ve fried him with the receipt for the police reports on the bogus witness.”
“So somebody bought him off.”
She nodded. Not
somebody
, though, not just anybody. “The most likely suspect in that maneuver is your dad. He was obsessed with nailing the priest. But Paul Marie was really convicted in the family newspapers—all three of them. The courtroom debacle was only a formality.”
Doctors had kept her heavily sedated for most of that year, and she had also self-medicated with alcohol, but something of the carnival atmosphere had sifted through the curtain of Valium and whiskey fumes. As she recalled, it had been a good year for priest bashing all over the country.
“You want me to track down the payoff?” Years ago she would not have asked; she would have run with this story. But she was no longer in the game, not a reporter anymore. Oh, and this time, she was the widow of her prime suspect.
Rouge stood at the counter and filled his coffee mug again. He brought the carafe back to the table. “I’m more interested in Dad’s financial arrangement with Oz Almo.”
“Sorry, babe. I was kept out of that. I only know your father paid an enormous amount for the ransom.” But her son would know more about the dollar-and-cents details of Bradly Kendall’s affairs. Rouge, at nineteen, had settled the estate and done the financial planning to save the house and keep them both afloat. She had been sober by then, but of little use to her son.
Rouge tipped the carafe to fill her cup with an aromatic stream of black coffee. Ellen smiled at this small service her son had once performed by habit. It reminded her of the old days when she had been too drunk to be trusted with the pouring of hot liquids. She sometimes wondered what passed for nostalgia in less dysfunctional families.
“I know the amount of the ransom money,” said Rouge. “But a lot more disappeared from the stock portfolios, and all the real estate holdings were mortgaged to the hilt. I couldn’t account for half of what was missing when Dad died.”
“So you figure he was giving money to Oz Almo? Bribes for the lawyer? That might work.”
“Whatever Dad was up to, he was using cash—no paper trail. Almo is the logical go-between for payoffs.”
“God, I despised that nasty little bastard, but your father had a lot of confidence in him. Oz was still on the force then, and he did make a great prosecution witness. Of course, with the defense attorney working for the prosecution—”