he trudged toward the porch and opened the door. Behind him, the nanny laughed again.
The cabin was dark, the only light the faint flicker from the stove behind the curtain. He walked carefully, trying to avoid the litter on the floor, the shapes in the room. Halfway to the back his foot struck something soft. As he bent to shove it out of his way it made a human sound. He knelt, saw that it was Iris, then found a lamp and turned it on.
She was crumpled, face-down, in the center of the room, arms and legs folded under her, her body curled to avoid assault. He knelt again, heard her groan once more, and saw that what he’d thought was a piece of skirt was in fact a pool of blood and what he’d thought was shadow was a broad wet trail of the selfsame substance leading toward the rear of the cabin.
He ran his hands down her body, feeling for wounds. Finding none, he rolled Iris to her side, then to her back. Blood bubbled from a point beneath her sternum. Her eyelids fluttered, open, closed, then open again. “He shot me,” she said. “It hurt so bad I couldn’t stop crying so he shot me.”
“I know. Don’t try to talk.”
“Did he shoot the babies, too? I thought I heard …”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you look? Please?”
He nodded, stood up, fought a siege of vertigo, then went behind the curtain, then returned to Iris. “They’re all right.”
She tried to smile her thanks. “Something scared him off. I think some people were walking by outside and heard the shot and went for help. I heard them yelling.”
“Where would he go, Iris?”
“Up in the woods. On his dirt bike. He knows lots of people up there. They grow dope, live off the land. The cops’ll never find him.” Iris moaned again. “I’m dying, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know. Is there a phone here?”
She shook her head. “Down at the end of the street. By the market.”
“I’m going down and call an ambulance. And the cops. How long ago did Marvin leave?”
She closed her eyes. “I blacked out. Oh, God. It’s real bad now, Mr. Tanner. Real bad.”
“I know, Iris. You hang on. I’ll be back in a second. Try to hold this in place.” He took out his handkerchief and folded it into a square and placed it on her wound. “Press as hard as you can.” He took her left hand and placed it on the compress, then stood up.
“Wait. I have to …”
He spoke above her words. “You have to get to a hospital. I’ll be back in a minute and we can talk some more.”
“But…”
“Hang on.”
He ran from the cabin and down the drive, spotted the lights of the convenience market down the street and ran to the phone booth and placed his calls. The police said they’d already been notified and a car was on the way. The ambulance said it would be six minutes. As fast as he could he ran back to the cabin, hoping it would be fast enough.
Iris had moved. Her body was straightened, her right arm outstretched toward the door, the gesture of a supplicant. The sleeve of her blouse was tattered, burned to a ragged edge above her elbow. Below the sleeve her arm was red in spots, blistered in others, dappled like burned food. The hand at its end was charred and curled into a crusty fist that was dusted with gray ash. Within the fingers was an object, blackened, burned, and treasured.
He pried it from her grasp. The cover was burned away, and the edges of the pages were curled and singed, but they remained decipherable, the written scrawl preserved. The list of names and places was organized to match the gaily painted boxes in the back. Carson City. Boise. Grants Pass. San Bernardino. Modesto. On and on, a gazetteer of crime.
“I saved it,” Iris mumbled. “I saved it for my babies.”
He raised her head to his lap and held it till she died. Then he went to his car and retrieved his B Box baby and placed her in her appointed crib. For the first time since he’d known her the baby made only happy sounds, an irony that was lost on the five dead children at her flank and on the just dead woman who had feared it all.
1987
BRENDAN DUBOIS
A TICKET OUT
Brendan DuBois (1959-) was born in New Hampshire and has lived there his entire life. A former newspaper reporter, he has written a variety of novels and has been a prolific short story writer, with more than one hundred published stories to his credit.
His mystery novels, set around the New Hampshire seacoast, often feature Lewis Cole, a magazine writer who was once a research analyst for the Department of Defense. The first book in the series is
Then there are the nights when I can’t sleep, when the blankets seem wrapped around me too tight, when the room is so stuffy that I imagine the air is full of dust and age, and when my wife Carols sighs and breathing are enough to make me tremble with tension. On these nights I slip out of bed and put on my heavy flannel bathrobe, and in bare feet I pad down the hallway —past the twins’ bedroom — and go downstairs to the kitchen. I’m smart enough to know that drinking at night will eventually ‘cause problems, but I ignore what my doctor tells me and I mix a ginger and Jameson’s in a tall glass and go to the living room and look out the large bay window at the stars and the woods and the hills. Remembering what we had planned, what we had stolen, the blood that had been spilled, the tears and the anguish, I sip at my drink and think, well, it wasn’t what we wanted to do. We weren’t stealing for drugs or clothes or to impress the chunky, giggly girls Brad and I went to high school with. We were stealing for a ticket, for a way out. In the end, only one of us got out. That thought doesn’t help me sleep at all.
It began on an August day in 1976, about a month before Brad Leary and I were going in as seniors to our high school. That summer we worked at one of the shoe mills in Boston Falls, keeping a tradition going in each of our families. Brad’s father worked in one of the stitching rooms at Devon Shoe, while my dad and two older brothers worked on the other side of the Squamscott River at Parker Shoe. My dad was an assistant bookkeeper, which
