“Maybe.” But he shook his head. “No way to know, not for sure.”
I hadn’t moved, except to take my hands out of my pockets, let them hang, empty. The Mace was in my pack there by his feet, if he hadn’t taken it out already. He’d had time to go through everything I’d carried up with me — water, protein bars, sunscreen, guidebook, keys, my wallet.
“Nowadays, of course,” he said, pulling his own pack onto his lap, opening one of the small flaps on the side, “anyone goes missing, especially someone with a family that loves them, there’s a search.” He took out a man’s wallet, flipped it open. “Did I tell you at dinner that I’m a volunteer with the Search and Rescue team back home? Here’s my ID for it.” He held out a worn card with some kind of insignia on it. When I didn’t come closer to look at it, he shrugged, slipped it back in. “I’m usually the liaison with the family. I help keep them informed, and offer support. I keep an eye on them. It’s what we’d want for our families, isn’t it, if anything happened to us?” His smile was back.
“You have a family?” I asked. Maybe he’d keep talking, nothing bad could happen while he was talking. Maybe someone would come up the trail, though it didn’t look like anyone had been here for months. Maybe I could decide what to do, maybe I could get my feet to move. How could they feel like ice when sweat was burning on my neck, sliding down my back?
“Of course,” he said. “Don’t we all? Though we’re maybe not as lucky as you. Do you think the twins will take after Jenny or her husband?”
And then I could move, because he took something else from his wallet, held it out to me, and, like he must have expected, I reached for it. It was the small picture of them I’d had in my wallet, Jenny leaning against Dan, his arms around her, keeping her safe. But with my next steps, I stumbled off to the side, dodging from the hand I was sure was reaching for me. I lunged not for the photograph, but for part of the machine that had fallen, a heavy bar lying loose. I grabbed it, swung it around without time to look, heard the sound of bones breaking...
I guess I was lucky. I don’t know if what I did killed him, or if it happened when he fell back against the machine. Either way, it was done. Just like that.
I scrambled over to the side of the house and huddled, shaking with cold that felt real despite all outer evidence to the contrary. The sun was high overhead and the shadows had sunk to almost nothing. I never considered going for help, or telling the authorities. I couldn’t justify what I’d done to myself, much less to anyone else. Finally I stood and picked up the bar again. It felt light now — impossible that it could have done much damage — and I scrubbed it with dirt, then shoved it far as I could into the sand-filled space under the house set furthest away. I held on to Frank by his wrists, dragged his body over to the mouth of the mine, and slid him in as if he’d been peering into the darkness, and fallen.
I looked through his wallet, which he’d dropped to the dirt when I hit him. The main ID wasn’t for Frank Ross, nor were either of the two additional IDs that I found slid behind a back flap. There were three necklaces, delicate gold chains, one with a cross no bigger than the nail on my little finger, the other two chains dangling heart-shaped lockets. I pried them open with the edge of one of his driver’s licenses. Curls of soft, pale hair in each, and tiny photos. A fat-cheeked baby. A young boy. The entwined initials on the front of each locket matched none of the IDs.
Looking at the remnants of lives. Wondering what was left of my life. How much was left after I’d saved it — if I had.
I put everything back in the wallet as he’d had it arranged. Put the wallet in his backpack and left it there by the side of the mine, as if he’d taken the pack off before looking down, ignoring the warning signs. I dropped his flashlight into the hole, heard it scrape against the rough walls and then land noisily. Anybody could drop a flashlight. I brushed out the drag marks with my jacket, but it wasn’t necessary.
The storm that came during the night struck hard. Watching out the window of the motel room where I’d gone for refuge, seeing the rain pour down, lit in green and yellow by the neon sign and the security lights, I knew the narrow canyons I’d walked in were flooding, and that my footprints and the other marks I’d left up in Chloride were washing away.
Halfway down the trail I’d stumbled, fallen. Then crawled over to a small-leaved bush and thrown up what was left of my breakfast. I was surprised there wasn’t any blood in it. It seemed like there should have been, like a payment of some kind. But I never did pay for that decision made before I was absolutely sure. I scraped dirt and stones over the vomit, pushed myself up to my feet, and got back to the car without seeing another soul.
When the police showed up weeks later, asking me if I had any information that would help in their investigation, I was able to convince them that the sum total of what I’d known about the man was that he liked flowers and was an oil-policy researcher. We’d taken a walk together, shared, as they knew from the waitresses, coffee one morning and dinner one evening, then gone our separate ways. He had mentioned he was going into the Panamints.
The detectives told me Frank “Reynolds” had been under suspicion for “situations” across the border in Nevada and that I’d been very lucky — that they were certainly glad I was all right. I assured them I was. Same as I told myself, every sleepless night.
The Bleeding Chair
by Janwillem van de Wetering
Though he was Dutch-born and his most popular detective fiction featured Grijpstra and de Gier, a pair of Amsterdam police officers, we never considered publishing Janwillem van de Wetering in our Passport to Crime department. That’s because the author was so fluent in English that he could write a story like the following in English, without any help from a translator or editor. Sadly, this longtime contributor to EQMM died several months ago. This may well be his last published story.
Let me introduce myself. Hi, I’m James. It’s too nice a name for me so I prefer to be called Vetty, short for “veteran.”
I got “veteran” on my license plate, too. As I swapped a leg for a medal, the pickup truck also sports one of those blue invalid cards.
Silly, I know. Like I want to advertise that there is something special about me, that I bravely fought for my country, losing a useful limb. That there is value to my being around here. While, in truth, I pride myself on my knowledge, okay, let’s say “strong suspicion,” that there is not.
I merely exist, I will tell the crowd at the Thirsty Dolphin. I am aimlessly adrift in the universe, on a desolate, but beautiful — especially now, because it’s the midst of winter — part of the Downeast Coast of the state of Maine, U.S.A.
Bunkport is my hometown. Small to middling, as Maine towns go. Fiercely Puritan once, but there’s been some intermingling with other tribes. An ongoing process that leads to exchange of ideas, differences in practice, adjustment of attitudes, that sort of thing.
The Thirsty Dolphin’s Bunkport’s only watering hole. Where the action is. The contemplation of action, rather. It is owned by Priscilla, a person of great wisdom and charm, weighing more than any human scale can measure. We all respect Priscilla, because she keeps an aluminum baseball bat under the counter and will not put up with either language, attitude, nudity, or violence that go beyond flexible local standards.
I’m not unhappily adrift, I tell my audience, who are willing to listen when I promise to pay for the next round of Priscilla’s cheaper draft. On the contrary, I tell them, I would be unhappy if I did have an aim. A purpose. A goal. You see, I figure that if I did want to get somewhere, reach some benchmark, I would be unhappy, miserable, outright depressed. Even, especially, if I crossed that line.