I jammed the card against the access point across the private road, and it let me through, the gate lifting with its familiar slow confidence, the stolid gravity of an object performing a job for humankind. I was ludicrously relieved, as if I’d been expecting that even this part of everyday experience would have broken over the course of the day.
“Nice,” Emily said as we drove in.
I didn’t say anything. I was busy adding to a mental list of stuff to take with me to the hospital, and then beyond. (Where? I didn’t know. A hotel or motel, somewhere to sit tight for a couple of days before coming home again to a life that had been corrected in the meantime.) Discovering that even Janine had taken part in what had been done to me made it difficult to take anything for granted. Were my neighbors involved in the fun? Had someone knocked on the Mortons’ door and made a donation to their church? Had sweet Mrs. Jorgensson been offered an envelope of used bills and thought, Well, seems like harmless fooling, and it would mean bigger Christmas presents for the grandchildren, so why not?
Did I know any of these strangers, really?
Did I know anyone at all?
“Nobody here is in the game,” Emily said, disconcertingly. “At least, not that I’m aware of.”
“How did you know . . .”
“You think loud.”
Yes, I thought bitterly. Maybe I do, and maybe that’s it. Perhaps it was the naive and brash self-evidence of my desires and ambitions that made me the perfect target for the game in the first place.
He’s a wanter. He has designs above his station. Let’s take that and twist it. Let’s show him how things really work behind the scenes. Let’s break his little dreams apart.
I parked in the driveway. “You want to stay here?”
She shook her head. “Think I’ll come wash this mess up, see what I’m dealing with.”
“I’m taking you to the hospital regardless.”
“So you keep saying.”
The house was quiet and dark. I led Emily to the kitchen. My note to Stephanie was still on the counter there. The problems of the man who’d written it seemed trivial now. I pushed it to one side.
“What do you need?”
“Paper towels, antiseptic if you have it. Painkillers would be good. Got a home medical kit?”
“Somewhere.” I went to the big cupboard at the rear of the room. As I rootled through it, wanting to get Emily set up so I could run upstairs, she wandered away from the counter, looking around.
“Nice,” she said again.
“Is that irony? Just, I’m not in the mood.”
“No,” she said. “You have a nice home.”
“You don’t seem the type to want this kind of thing.”
“Everybody wants it,” she said. “Just some of us know it’s unlikely to happen in this lifetime. So we pretend the white-bread life sucks.”
I stalled, still shifting things around in the cupboard, trying to find the first aid kit. Was I really going to run from all this, even temporarily? Okay, I’d wanted more, bigger. But this was a nice house, and I’d earned it. Steph and I repainted it. She’d found nice things to put in it. It was ours. It was mine.
Was I going to let a bunch of assholes force me out, when I hadn’t done anything? Running is a deep instinct, but isn’t it better to turn and fight, defend your corner? No—I have a good cave, and no asshole is going to take it away from me, for even a day.
“Christ, here it is.” I turned, opening the first aid box and pulling out a roll of bandages to see what else was inside.
“Bill.”
She’d walked to the far end of the room and was staring through the doors into the pool area. Her voice sounded strange.
“What?”
“Fuck,” she said. The middle of the word stretched out for a long time.
I went to stand next to her. There was something floating in the pool. Something else was lying beside one of the loungers. Emily reached behind for her gun, found she couldn’t begin to hold it with her right hand. She got it with the left instead. It looked awkward, heavy. I opened the screen door.
We went together, Emily sweeping the gun from side to side. There was a rushing sound in my ears.
The thing lying by the lounger was a forearm. It had been hacked off at wrist and elbow. There was blood on the floor around it, but not much. Presumably because it had been cut off after the person was already dead.
My stomach rolled over. There was nothing in there but liquid, which splattered to the stone floor. I emptied my guts until it felt like they were going to come out.
I straightened and we turned together to look at the thing floating in the pool. It was facedown, tilting on the right, as if it would not be long before it sank.
It was wearing the torn remains of a long black skirt and a black blouse. I knew the blouse. It ended in lacy cuffs at the wrists. I knew the front fell down a little when the wearer leaned forward. I knew because I’d glanced down it less than twenty-four hours before.
Emily stowed her gun and went over to the pool equipment and brought back the long pole with a net on the end. She couldn’t manage it, and gave it to me.
I reached it out and snagged the body’s left shoulder. I pulled. The body moved, spinning slowly about the middle, but did not come any closer. I tried again, this time resting the loop of the net across the body’s back and pulling more gently.
It started to drift toward us.
We watched it come. When it was resting against the side of the pool I squatted down.
They’d shaved Cass’s head. Before, during, after? Hacked at her back and her arms and legs. Floating there, pale and waterlogged and as dead as anything could be, she looked larger than I remembered, life taking with it the anima that had lightened her progress across the earth.
I reached down, against my will, and took her upper arm in my hand. I turned the body over.
The damage to the front was far more frenzied, especially over the chest. They’d taken her face, too. Someone had gone at her face with instruments I couldn’t imagine. An ax, hammers, a saw. There was nothing left but holes and insides.
Something changed forever inside me then. Hazel’s body had looked strange but somehow okay, part of a story we never want to hear but that death is always going to whisper to us someday. We die, it happens.
Cass’s body said more than this. It said God was dead, too, and that he’d always hated us anyway.
“Bill.”
Emily was pointing at the wall of the pool area, at a two-foot smear of dried blood. “And there.”
Another smear, on the floor toward the side. This was what the forearm had been used for. Someone had held one of the cut ends against these surfaces and dragged a trail of evidence, to make it that bit harder trying to hide it all. Were these smears just down here? Or upstairs, too? Were they in the bed, under it? In drawers, in the roof?
Emily looked sick. Evidently even her experience in the Gulf was not enough to make this okay.
“This isn’t a game,” I said.
“No. Nothing like this was ever in the plan, ever even hinted at. You think I’d be here if it had been?”
“That’s not what I meant.” I had tears running down my face and appeared powerless to stop them. “I mean, how could anyone think of this as a game? I mean, what kind of person could even do this?”