I pushed back from the wall, turning my body so that my head was toward the stones and inching backward up the angle of the board. Still no shift in the length of wood; it had to be wedged in pretty tight. I kept moving until I was stretched out along it from crotch to chin, then slowly swung my left leg over. And eased myself into an upright position, straddling the board like a kid facing the wrong way on a narrow seesaw.
I sat like that, not moving, sweat leaking out of me, until my breathing returned to normal and little prickles of pain erased the numbness in my arm. The rough part was next: getting my feet under me, standing up on that slender two-inch expanse. I put my head back. The top of the well was only about eight feet away now; I could see the wooden lip, I could see more of the nearby trees and the fat gold underbelly of a cloud where the westering sun struck it. God, I thought, let me get up there.
All right. I inched forward again until my knees butted against the stones; felt down along the wall on both sides. No toeholds there. I leaned up and brushed my palms over the mossy rock higher up. Small projections here and there, precarious handholds at best, but I had no other choice. I dug the fingers of my right hand into one of them, braced my left hand on the board and my right shoulder against the wall, lifted my right leg and cocked the knee over the wood. Shoved up, pulled up, got my knee down on the board-and almost lost my balance. Frantically I clutched at the stones, throwing my weight against them. If the board had shifted then I would have come right off it and toppled back into the water. But it stayed wedged and I kept my perch, kneeling on the one leg with the other still hanging down.
My hands were slick with water and sweat, but I didn’t dare let go of the wall or the board long enough to dry them. The strain was making my head ache so badly that I had difficulty keeping my thoughts together. And that was good because thinking led to mistakes in a situation like this. You had to act on reflex and instinct.
Balanced on the one knee, hands flattened against the wall, I turned my body so that I could bring the left leg up; put that knee down ahead of the other. Shifted my weight to the left leg, managed to draw the right one up far enough to get the sole of my shoe flat on the board. Crawled up the wall, pushing with the right foot, rising by inches. The muscles in the leg started to weaken, but by then I had the left shoe down too. Blank space of time, no more than a couple of seconds. And then I was standing up on the board, gasping, sobbing a little from the effort, belly and chest and the side of my face pressed against those cold, clammy stones.
When I stretched my arms upward my fingers slid over the wooden lip on top, a couple of inches beyond it. All I had to do now was grab hold of the lip and haul myself up and out. But my left arm was going numb again; I had to bring it back and down and let it hang loose at my side. Both legs had a jellied feel. I don’t have enough strength, I thought. All this way, all this struggle, I can’t pull myself the hell up there.
Then I thought: Goddamn you, yes you can. Yes you can! There’s not going to be a third corpse in this frigging well.
The tingling came back into the left arm, and pretty soon a dull throbbing ache replaced the numbness. I concentrated on the arm, told myself I could feel strength seeping through the muscles and sinews. Made myself believe it. I already had my right hand hooked over the wooden lip; I brought the left up and made those crabbed fingers fasten around the lip too.
I shut my mind down, tensed, and lunged upward.
One of my flailing legs dislodged the two-by-two; I heard it skitter loose, fall and splash into the water. Pain ripped through my left shoulder and armpit, and the arm went numb again. I pulled frenziedly, my shoes scraping against the stones, not finding any purchase. For a moment I felt my grip on the wood slipping; then my right foot dug into a niche, held long enough for me to heave upward again and fling my right forearm over the lip. My head came up out of the well, and I saw the ground and the sun blazing through the trees, and somehow I got my left forearm over the lip too, and squirmed and struggled, and first my ribcage and then my belly slid over the upper ring of stones, over the curved wood…
And I was clear of the well, lying face down in the good sweet grass.
I was out.
I lay there for a time in a patch of sunlight, I don’t know how long, waiting for it to warm me and some of the pain and tension to ebb out of my body. My mind felt sluggish, vague and dreamy. The last half-hour, all that had happened inside the well, seemed unreal, as if I had been given some kind of drug and had hallucinated the whole thing.
The police, I thought eventually, you got to talk to the police. And that made me stir, get up on my feet. The wind blowing across the clearing gave me a whiff of what I smelled like; it brought bile up into the back of my throat. I looked at the well, shuddered, and looked away again. My left arm flopped around like a hunk of sausage when I started to walk; I grabbed it in my right hand and pulled it in against my chest. It was starting to tingle again, to hurt, so maybe it would be all right.
I went around the front of the house, shambling a little, like a drunk on his way home from a wake. My car was still sitting where I’d left it. The rest of the clearing was deserted, or I thought it was until I got to the car and opened the driver’s door. Because when I did that I glanced across at the near side of the house, and somebody was sitting on a small pile of lumber over there. Just sitting, not doing anything else. Not even moving.
The skin between my shoulder blades rippled. And my mind was clear and sharp again. I shut the car door, thinking: So this is the way it ends. She never left at all. She’s been sitting here the whole time.
I understood why when I got to her. I understood a lot of things then, and all of them were ugly. Like murder. Like killing a sister.
Like Arleen Bradford herself.
Chapter 23
She did not move as I approached. Just kept sitting there rigid and straight, hands flat on her thighs, legs crossed at the ankles, looking out over the valley. I stopped a couple of paces to one side of her. The sun was at my back, perched atop the distant crests of the Sonoma Mountains, and the way I stood put her in my shadow. But she still didn’t seem to know I was there.
She was wearing an ankle-length skirt and a chaste white blouse and the kind of shoes mothers refer to as sensible. No makeup except for a little rouge on cheeks that were as white and thickly textured as gardenia blossoms. She looked all right until you saw her eyes. They were wide open and unblinking-not unlike those of Hannah Peterson’s corpse down there in the well, and just about as lifeless. Pieces of dull glass, like windows behind which lay dark and empty rooms. The Arleen Bradford I had met four days ago, the prim and proper and caustic one, didn’t live there anymore.
I moved over in front of her, so that I was blocking her view of the valley. That made her see me; she blinked once, but nothing happened in those vacant eyes except for a flicker of recognition. Her body held the same rigid posture.
“Oh,” she said, “you got out of the well.”
“Yeah. I got out of the well.”
“Did you find Hannah? She’s down there. Him, too. Lester Raymond.”
“I found them.”
“I knew you would when I saw you climb down inside.”
“Is that why you tried to trap me in there?”
“Of course.” There was no emotion in her voice; she understood what I said to her, she was rational and lucid, but something had short-circuited inside her. Or died inside her. It was like talking to a machine instead of a human being. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody else, but I was afraid. I knew you would go to the police. I don’t like to be locked up. Hannah locked me in a closet once when we were children. I hated that, I don’t want to go to prison.”