The den, also small—the entire cabin wasn’t more than five hundred square feet—sported a cracked brown leather couch and a small bookcase filled with adventure novels and positive-thinking manuals. This was Brian’s place, all right. In the bathroom, she found the toothpaste and shampoo brands he preferred. In the bedroom, she found a queen-size brass bed that squeaked when she sat on it. She walked around a bit more but found no evidence anyone had been there recently. She went outside and looked for footprints around the cabin but found none.
She sat on the porch as exhaustion found her bones and her brain. She wiped at a tear with the heel of her hand and then another, but then she sucked hard through her nostrils and stood and shook her head like a dog who’d been caught in the rain. It wasn’t just that she would have to trek to the car and drive back toward civilization with not enough daylight to reach it before she’d probably have to pull over with her one working headlight and sleep along the side of the road again. It was that she had nothing to return to. By now they’d have found Caleb and would have ascertained that she’d been in Providence the same time Nicole Alden had been murdered. The circumstantial evidence might not be enough to convict her in a trial, but she would most definitely go to jail until such a time as that trial was held. Could be a year or more. And who’s to say that the circumstantial evidence wouldn’t be enough to convict her? Certainly for Caleb’s murder; a policeman would go on record saying she’d lied about the victim being alive in her condo when, at that point, he’d been dead. Once they had you on record lying about anything, they could convince a jury you were lying about everything.
So she had no home. No life waiting for her. She had two thousand dollars in cash. She had a change of clothes in a bag in a car she’d have to abandon in the first city where she could find a bus terminal.
But a bus to where?
And wherever she got, how was she going to survive on two thousand dollars with her picture on every TV screen and every Internet news site in this country?
Trudging back through the woods, she rifled through her options until she came to the grim conclusion that she had only two—turn herself in or take the gun from her pocket right now and use it on herself.
She found a rock and sat. The lake was an hour back. All she had to look at were trees. She took the gun out of her pocket, hefted it in her palm. Brian, by this point, was probably a continent or two away. Whatever scam he’d been running through Alden Minerals and that mine in Papua New Guinea, he’d run it. And run off with the profits.
She’d been played. That was possibly the worst of it. That she’d been used and discarded. To what end, she had no idea, couldn’t see what her role had been in all this. She was simply the dupe, the rube, the unforgivably innocent pawn.
How long would her body lie among the trees before it was found? Days? Seasons? Or would animals come to feast on it? Years from now someone would find a bone or two and the state police would arrive to find the rest. And the mystery of the missing reporter suspected in the murders of two people would finally be solved. Parents would tell it as a cautionary tale to wayward teens. See, they’d say, she didn’t get away with it. Justice prevails, the status quo is reaffirmed, she got what was coming to her.
Widdy stood about fifty feet away and smiled at her. Her dress was not bloodied, her throat was intact. She didn’t open her mouth when she spoke, but Rachel heard her more clearly than the birds.
You tried.
“I didn’t try hard enough.”
They would have killed you.
“Then I should have died.”
And who would tell my story then?
“No one will care about your story.”
But I lived.
Rachel wept into the dirt and the dead leaves. “You lived poor. And black. On an island no one gives a shit about.”
You gave a shit.
She stared through the trees at the girl. “You died because I convinced you to hide. You were right. If they had found you earlier they would have raped you, but they wouldn’t have cut your throat, they wouldn’t have, they would have let you live.”
What life?
“A life!” Rachel screamed.
I wouldn’t want that life.
“But I want you to be alive,” Rachel begged. “I need you to be alive.”
But I’m gone. Let me go, Miss Rachel. Let me go.
Rachel was staring right at her. And then she was staring at a tree. She wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve. She cleared her throat. She sucked the forest air into her nostrils.
And she heard her mother’s voice. Jesus. This had to be dehydration or exhaustion or low blood sugar or maybe she’d already put the gun to her head and fired and she was already dead, but here came Elizabeth Childs and her nicotine vocal cords.
Lie down, her mother said with a distinctly weary benevolence, and soon we’ll be together again. And it’ll be like that week you were sick in bed and I never left your side. I’ll make all your favorite foods.
Rachel caught herself shaking her head, as if her mother could see her, as if the trees could, as if she were anything but alone. Was this how people went crazy? Ended up talking to themselves on street corners, sleeping in doorways, skin covered in sores?
Fuck that.
Rachel pocketed the gun and stood. She took in the woods all around her. And she knew she wasn’t going to die to make life easier for Brian or Kessler or anyone else who assumed she was too weak for this world.
“I’m not crazy,” she told her mother, told the trees. “And I don’t want to be with you in the afterlife, Mother.” She looked at the sky. “One lifetime of you was fucking plenty.”
It was one o’clock by the time she reached the SUV. It would take two hours to get back to 201. Three hours on 201 until she hit a town big enough to have a bus station. She’d have to hope buses ran through that small town after six in the evening. That’s if she were lucky enough to get from here to there without being pulled over for driving an SUV that looked like it had been dropped from a crane.
She got behind the wheel and pulled out onto the dirt road. She’d driven for about a mile when the man lying on the backseat said, “Fuck happened to Caleb’s car? You look good, by the way.”
He sat up, smiled at her in the rearview.
Brian.
30
PRIMAL SELF