The Bodies Left Behind: A Novel Read online

  They’ll be coming. Of course, those two men’ll be coming after her. They wouldn’t know exactly where the car went in but they could find out easily enough.

  You have to move.

  Brynn climbed to her knees and tried crawling. Too slow. Move! She stood and immediately fell over. Her legs wouldn’t cooperate. In panic she wondered if she’d broken a bone and couldn’t feel the injury because of the cold. She frisked herself. Nothing seemed shattered. She rose again, steadied herself and staggered in the direction of Lake View Drive.

  Her face throbbed. She touched the hole in her cheek, and with her tongue probed the gap where the molar had been. Winced. Spat more blood.

  And my jaw. My poor jaw. Thinking of the impact that had cracked it years ago, and later the terrible wire, the liquid meals, the plastic surgery.

  Was all that cosmetic work ruined?

  Brynn wanted to cry.

  The ground here was steep, rocky. Narrow stalks—willow, maple and oak—grew out of the angular ground horizontally but obeying nature turned immediately skyward. Using them as grips, she pulled herself up the hill, toward Lake View Drive. The moon, neatly sliced in half, was casting some light now and she looked behind her for the Glock. But if it had flown from the car before the dive, the weapon, perfectly camouflaged for a dark night, was nowhere to be seen.

  She picked up a rock shaped a bit like an ax head. Gazed at the weapon manically.

  Then Brynn recalled finding Joey bloody and gasping after eighth-grader Carl Bedermier had challenged him after school. Acting by rote, from her medical training, she’d examined the wounds, pronounced him fine and then said, “Honey, there are times to fight and times to run. Mostly, you run.”

  So what the hell are you doing? she now snapped to herself, staring at the chunk of granite in her hand.

  Run.

  She dropped the rock and continued up the incline to the private road. As she neared the top her foot slipped, dislodging an avalanche of shale and gravel. It fell in a huge clatter. Brynn dropped to her belly, smelling compost and wet rock.

  But no one came running. She wondered if the men were deafened themselves from the shooting.

  Probably. Guns are much louder than people think.

  Move fast while you can still take advantage of it.

  Another few feet. Then ten. Twenty. The ground leveled some and she could move faster. Eventually she was at Lake View Drive. She saw no one on it and crossed fast, then rolled into a ditch on the far side, hugging herself and gasping.

  No. Don’t stop.

  She thought of a high-speed chase last year. Bart Pinchett in his Mustang GT, yellow as yolk.

  “Why didn’t you pull over?” she’d muttered, ratcheting the cuffs on. “You knew we’d get you sooner or later.”

  He’d lifted a surprised eyebrow. “Well, long as I was moving, I was still a free man.”

  Brynn rolled to her knees and stood. She slogged up the hill away from the road and into the trees, plunging into a field of tall yellow and brown grass.

  Ahead of her, two or three hundred yards or so, she saw the silhouette of the house at 2 Lake View. As earlier, it was dark. Would the telephone be on? Did they even have a telephone?

  Brynn gave a brief prayer that they would. Then she looked around her. No sign of the attackers. She shook her head again, swiveling it from side to side until the second water bead burst.

  Which made the sudden sound—footfalls charging through the grass directly toward her—all the more vivid.

  Brynn gasped and started to sprint away from Hart or his partner, maybe both, when a forsythia branch caught her foot and she went down hard, breathlessly hard, in a tangle of branches, which were covered with yellow buds bright as you’d see on wallpaper in a baby’s bedroom.

  THEY WERE DRIVING

  back from Rita’s, a mile away. It seemed to Graham that every place in Humboldt was a mile away from every other place. He’d brought Joey along—didn’t want to leave him alone, because of the skateboard injury, even if he was “fine,” and because he’d ditch homework for video games, instant messaging and MySpace on the computer and texting from his iPhone. The boy wasn’t crazy about picking up his grandmother but he was in pretty good humor as he sat in the backseat and text-messaged a friend—or half the school, to judge from the volume of his keyboarding.

  They collected Anna and headed back home. There, Joey charged upstairs, taking the steps several at a time.

  “Homework,” Graham called.

  “I will.”

  The phone rang.

  Brynn? he wondered. No. A name he didn’t recognize on caller ID.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. This’s Mr. Raditzky, Joey’s central section advisor.”

  Middle school was a lot different nowadays, Graham reflected. He’d never had advisors. And “central section” sounded like a communist spy organization.

  “Graham Boyd. I’m Brynn’s husband.”

  “Sure. How you doing?”

  “Good, thanks.”

  “Is Ms. McKenzie there?”

  “She’s out, I’m afraid. Can I take a message? Or can I help you?”

  Graham had always wanted children. He made his living with plants but he had an innate desire to nurture more than that. His first wife had decided against motherhood, suddenly and emphatically—and well into the marriage. Which was a big disappointment to Graham. He believed he had instinctive skills for parenting and his radar was picking up early warning signals from Mr. Raditzky’s tone.

  “Well, I want to talk to you about something…. Did you know Joey cut school today? And that he was ’phalting.” Something faintly accusatory in the tone.

  “Cut school? No, he was there. I dropped him off myself. Brynn had to be at work early.”

  “Well, he did cut, Mr. Boyd.”

  Graham fought the urge to deny. “Go on, please.”

  “Joey came to central section this morning, gave me a note that he had a doctor’s appointment. And left at ten. It was signed by Ms. McKenzie. But after we heard he hurt himself, I checked in the office. It wasn’t her signature. He forged it.”

  Graham now experienced the same unexpected alarm he’d felt last summer while wheeling a plant across a customer’s yard, not realizing he’d rolled it over a yellow jackets nest. Blithe and happy, enjoying the day, unaware that the threat had already been unleashed and dozens of attackers were on their way.

  “Oh.” He looked up in the direction of the boy’s bedroom. From it came the muted sounds of a video game.

  Homework…

  “And what else did you say? ‘Defaulting’?”

  “The word is apostrophe P-H, ’phalting. As in ‘asphalt.’ It’s when kids run up behind a truck at a stoplight with their skateboards and hold on. That’s how Joey hurt himself.”

  “He wasn’t in your school lot?”

  “No, Mr. Boyd. One of our substitutes was on her way home. She saw him on Elden Street.”

  “The highway?”

  In downtown Humboldt, Elden was a broad commercial strip but once past the town line it returned to its true nature, a truck route between Eau Claire and Green Bay, where the posted limit meant nothing.

  “She said the truck was doing probably forty when he fell. He’s only alive because there weren’t any cars close behind him and he veered into a patch of grass. Could’ve been a telephone pole or a building.”

  “Jesus.”

  “This needs some attention.”

  I talked to him….

  “It sure does, Mr. Raditzky. I’ll tell Brynn. I know she’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Boyd. How’s he doing?”

  “Okay. Scraped up a little.”

  He’s fine….

  “He’s one lucky young man.” Though there was an undercurrent of criticism in the man’s tone. And Graham didn’t blame him.

  He was about to say good-bye when something else popped into his head. “Mr. Raditzky.” Graham cra
fted a credible lie. “We were just talking about something yesterday. Was there any fallout from that scuffle Joey was in?”

  A pause. “Well, which one?”

  Lord, how many were there? Graham hedged. “I was thinking about the one last fall.”

  “Oh, the bad one. In October. The suspension.”

  Treading again blithely over a yellow jackets nest…Brynn’d told him there was a pushing match at the school’s Halloween party, nothing serious. Graham recalled Joey had stayed home afterward for a few days—because he hadn’t felt well, Brynn explained. But that was a lie, it seemed. So he’d been suspended.

  The teacher said, “Ms. McKenzie told you the parents decided not to sue, didn’t she?”

  Lawsuit?…What exactly had Joey done? He said, “Sure. But I was mostly wondering about the other student.”

  “Oh, he transferred out. He was a problem, ED.”

  “What?”

  “Emotionally disturbed. He’d been taunting Joey. But that’s no excuse for nearly breaking his nose.”

  “Of course not. I was just curious.”

  “You folks dodged a bullet on that one. It could have cost you big.”

  More criticism now.

  “We were lucky.” Graham felt his gut chill. What else didn’t he know about his family?

  A little pushing match. It’s nothing. Joey went to the Halloween party as a Green Bay Packer and this other boy was a Bears’ fan…. Something silly like that. A little rivalry. I’ll keep him out of school for a bit. He’s got the flu anyway.

  “Well, thanks again for the heads-up. We’ll have a talk with him.”

  When they’d hung up, Graham got another beer. He sipped a bit. Went into the kitchen to do the dishes. He found the task comforting. He hated to vacuum, hated to dust. Set him on edge. He couldn’t say why. But he loved doing the dishes. Water, maybe. The life blood of a landscaper.

  As he washed and dried he rehearsed a half dozen speeches to Joey about cutting school and dangerous skateboard practices. He kept refining them. But as he put the dishes away he decided the words were stilted, artificial. They were just that—speeches. It seemed to Graham that you needed conversation, not lectures. He knew instinctively that they’d have no effect on a twelve-year-old boy. He tried to imagine the two of them sitting down and speaking seriously. He couldn’t. He gave up crafting a talk.

  Hell, he’d let Brynn handle it. She’d insist on that anyway.

  ’Phalting…

  Graham dried his hands and went into the family room and sat down on the green couch, near Anna’s rocker. She asked, “Was that Brynn?”

  “No. The school.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Sorry you missed poker tonight, Graham.”

  “No problem.”

  Returning to her knitting, Anna said, “Glad I went to Rita’s. She doesn’t have long.” A tsk of her tongue. “And that daughter of hers. Well, you saw, didn’t you?”

  Occasionally his soft-spoken mother-in-law surprised him by letting go with a steely judgment like this one. He had no idea what the daughter’s crime was but he knew Anna had considered the offense carefully and come back with a reasonable verdict. “Sure did.”

  He flipped a coin for the channel, lost and they put on a sitcom, which was fine with him. His team was toast this season.

  THE FRANTIC YOUNG

  woman was in her midtwenties, face gaunt and eyes red from tears, her stylishly short, pixie-ish hair, dark red, now disheveled and flecked with leaves. Her forehead was scratched and her hands shook uncontrollably, but only partly from the cold. It had been her panicked footsteps Brynn had heard, not those of an intruder, moving toward her through the brush.

  “You’re their friend,” Brynn whispered, feeling huge relief that the woman hadn’t met the Feldmans’ fate. “From Chicago?”

  She nodded and then gazed out into the deepening dusk as if the men were hot on her trail. “I don’t know what to do,” she said in a manic voice. She seemed childlike. Her fear was heartrending.

  “We stay here for the time being,” Brynn said.

  Times to fight and times to run…

  Times to hide too.

  Brynn looked over at the couple’s houseguest. She wore chic clothes, city clothes—expensive jeans and a designer jacket with a beautiful fur collar. The leather was supple as silk. Three gold hoops were in one ear, two in the other, a stud atop both. A sparkling diamond tennis bracelet was on her left wrist and a bejeweled Rolex on her other. She was about as out of place in this muddy forest as she could possibly be.

  Scanning the forest around them, Brynn could see no movement other than swaying branches and herds of leaves migrating in the breeze. The wind was pure torment on her soaked skin. “Over there,” she finally said, pointing to cover. The women crawled a dozen feet away—to a cavity beside a fallen chinquapin oak in a snarled area of the forest, fifty yards from Lake View Drive and about a hundred and fifty from the house at number 2. When they’d settled into a nest of forsythia, ragweed and sedge Brynn looked back toward the road and the Feldmans’. No sign of the killers.

  As if awakening, the young woman suddenly focused on Brynn’s uniform blouse. “You’re a policewoman.” She turned her gaze to the road. “Are there others?”

  “No. I’m alone.”

  She took this news without emotion and then looked at Brynn’s cheek. “Your face…I heard gunshots. They shot you too. Like Steve and Emma.” Her voice choked. “Did you call for help?”

  Brynn shook her head. “You have a phone?”

  “It’s back there. In the house.”

  Brynn wrapped her arms around herself. It did nothing to warm her. She looked at the woman’s supple designer jacket. Her face was pretty, heart-shaped. Her nails were long and perfectly sculpted. She could have been on the cover of a grocery store checkout magazine, illustrating an article on ten ways to stay fit and sexy. The woman dug into her pocket and pulled on tight, stylish gloves whose price Brynn couldn’t even guess at.

  Brynn shivered again and was thinking if she didn’t get dry and warm soon, she might pass out. She’d never been this cold.

  “That house.” The young woman nodded toward 2 Lake View. “I was going to call for help. Let’s go there, let’s call the police. We can get warm. I’m so damn cold.”

  “Don’t want to yet,” Brynn said. It seemed less painful to speak in abbreviation. “Don’t know where they are. Wait until we know. They could be headed there too.”

  The young woman winced.

  “You hurt?” Brynn asked.

  “My ankle. I fell.”

  Brynn had run plenty of trauma calls. She unzipped the woman’s boots—made in Italy, she noticed—and examined the joint through her black knee-highs. It didn’t look badly hurt. A sprain probably; thank God it wasn’t broken. She saw a gold ankle bracelet that probably equaled a half dozen of Brynn’s and Graham’s car payments.

  The young woman stared toward the Feldmans’ house. Chewing her lip.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Michelle.”

  “I’m Brynn McKenzie.”

  “Brynn?”

  A nod. She usually didn’t explain its derivation. “I’m a deputy with the county sheriff’s office.” She explained about the 911 call. “You know who they are, those men?”

  “No.”

  Brynn whispered, her voice growing more distorted, “Need to figure out what to do. Tell me what happened.”

  “I met Emma after work and we picked up Steve and all drove up together. Got here about five, five-thirty. I went upstairs—I was going to take a shower—and I heard these bangs. I thought the stove exploded or something. Or somebody dropped something. I didn’t know. I ran downstairs and saw two men. They didn’t see me. One of them’d put down his gun. It was on the table near the stairs. I just picked it up. They were in the kitchen, standing over the…over the bodies, talking. Just looking down and they had this expres
sion on their faces.” She shut her eyes. Whispered, “I can’t even describe it. They were, like, ‘We shot them. Okay, no big deal. What’s next?’” Her voice cracked. “One of them, he was going through the refrigerator.”

  As Brynn scanned the woods the young woman continued, forcing back tears, “I started to walk toward them. I wasn’t even thinking. I was, like, numb. And one of them—one had long hair and one had a crew cut—the one with the long hair started to turn and I guess I just pulled the trigger. It just happened. There was this bang…. I don’t think I hit them.”

  “No,” Brynn said. “One of them’s hurt, I think. One you just mentioned. With long hair.”

  “Hurt bad?” she asked.

  “His arm.”

  “I should’ve…I should’ve told them to stop, or put their hands up. I don’t know. They started shooting at me. And I panicked. I just lost it completely. I ran outside. I didn’t have the car keys.” A disgusted look on her face. “I did something so stupid…. I was afraid they’d come after me so I shot out the tires. They would’ve just left if I hadn’t done that. Got in the car and left…. I was so stupid!”

  “That’s all right. You did fine. Nobody’d think straight at a time like that. You have the gun still?”

  Please, Brynn thought. I want a weapon so badly.

  But the woman shook her head. “I used up all the bullets. I threw it into a creek by the house so they couldn’t find it. And I ran.” She squinted. “You’re a deputy. Do you have a gun?”

  “I did. But lost it in the lake.”

  Suddenly Michelle became animated. Almost giddy. “You know, like, I saw this show one time, it was on A&E or Discovery, and somebody’d been in a car wreck, a bad one, and they lost a lot of blood and they were in the wilderness for days. They should’ve died. But something happened, like the body stopped the bleeding itself. The doctors saved them and…”

  Brynn had experienced this mania before, at car wrecks and heart attack scenes, and knew the implicit question was best answered simply and honestly. “I’m sorry. I was there, in the kitchen. I saw them. I’m afraid they’re gone.”