Iron House (19 page)

The match burned out.

Michael lit another and stepped gingerly toward the back. On the bench, he’d seen a gooseneck lamp next to a toolbox and a spill of faded, orange life jackets. He bent the neck until the bulb pointed back and down, then threw a filthy rag across the top of it and turned it on. Yellow light burned through the rag, so muffled and low that Michael doubted it would carry. It lit the boathouse, though—and the body. All Michael saw at first were legs. Protruding from behind one of the sailboats, they were thick and swollen, one straight and the other twisted beneath it. Leather work boots covered the feet. Blue jeans. A tooled leather belt.

Michael stepped over a pyramid of varnish cans, then moved around the stern of the boat. It was eighteen feet long, fiberglass. It looked as if the body had been jammed behind it; perhaps it had fallen that way. He saw hints of the body but the shadows were deep, so he dragged the sailboat away, its keel grinding on the wood, ropes shifting, a coil sliding off the hull. Returning to the body, Michael saw a middle-aged man who’d been dead for some time. The torso was distended, the skin mottled and gray. The face had the slackness peculiar to death, the utter loss of humanity that Michael knew too well. One eye showed, milky-pale, and whiskers were stark on the skin of his face. He was four inches over six feet tall, maybe two hundred and sixty-five pounds, a large man, but unfit. Calluses thickened the pads of his hands; the nails were dirty. Beneath the jaw line was a denim shirt stained black with blood. A knife handle protruded from his neck, and it was the knife that made pieces shift and click. It was the knife that made the picture whole.

“Ah, shit.”

Michael rocked back on his heels. The blade had not entered the dead man’s neck at the precise place and angle of the blade that killed Hennessey, but it was close. Right side. Just below the ear. More than the wound was familiar—there was something about the face, too. Michael felt hair lift on his arms. He studied the face for long seconds, then checked the shirt pocket, the front pockets of the dead man’s jeans. Finding nothing, he shifted the body. It moved loosely, so he knew that rigor had come and gone. A few days, he guessed, probably three, based on when Julian showed up a gibbering wreck. The body was cold and loose and Michael’s fingers sank into the fat. He grunted once, and the dead man flopped onto his side, one arm striking a second boat, dried blood making a slight tearing sound as the body rolled. Michael used a rag and two fingers to remove the wallet from the man’s back pocket. He saw a few bills, some credit cards. The driver’s license confirmed what he already suspected. Michael knew the guy, and so did Julian.

Fuck-head from juvie.

Ronnie Saints.

His features had roughened with age, but Michael had a remarkable memory for faces, especially for those he considered enemies. After Hennessey, few kids had done more to wreck Julian’s life than Ronnie Saints. At the age of eleven, he’d pulled three years in juvenile detention for beating a neighborhood kid half to death in a fight over a stolen pistol. When he finally got out, his parents were gone, either dead or lost in some hillbilly meth trailer in the mountains of north Georgia. Speculation had lasted a week or two when Ronnie first rolled into Iron House; after that, nobody really cared. He was just another fuck-head in from juvie.

Michael studied the driver’s license. Saints was thirty-seven years old and lived in Asheville. Michael memorized his address, then rolled him onto his back. Keeping the rag over his hand, Michael put one finger on the handle of the knife, right at the end. The blade was utilitarian, the handle stained wood with brushed, metal rivets. A fishing knife, maybe. Something similar. He put pressure on his finger, but the blade barely moved. It was jammed in deep, wedged against bone and gristle. Michael took his finger off the knife and checked the body. He saw no other defensive wounds, no signs of struggle. There was spatter, but beyond that there was no blood except where he’d found the body.

When it happened, he thought, it happened hard and fast.

Michael wasted no time thinking about the whys of it; the old patterns rose as if never forgotten. Julian was in trouble, and Michael was going to fix it. It’s what brothers did, what family was all about. He stood and thought of the steps he would take in the next three minutes. He laid them out in his head, mechanical and precise. He needed a boat that wouldn’t sink, something heavy enough to drop a body and keep it down. The floorboards were heavily grained, and the blood had soaked too deeply to be scrubbed out, but the place was a mess and clearly unused. He could shift boats, spill some varnish.

He found a pair of old gloves on the workbench and slipped them on. The first canoe he checked was wooden and decayed beyond his willingness to trust it. The second was aluminum. He heaved it off a rack and lowered it to the water, where it settled with a splash and loud clunk against the wooden slip. A canoe would be tough for heaving bodies in and out. It was narrow and easy to tip, but also light and fast through the water, quiet. Michael bent low, caught the dead man’s boots and dragged him across ten feet of floor. He stopped at the edge. The canoe rocked two feet down; the water beyond was burnished black. From a shelf on the far wall, Michael retrieved a twelve-pound anchor and a coil of heavy line. Bending, he placed the anchor on the dead man’s chest and cinched it tight with multiple loops around the torso and waist. It was hard work; the man was heavy and loose. A final loop went around his ankles, and Michael lifted the legs to cinch the knot tight. That’s when he saw Elena.

She stood in the door, one hand over her mouth, her face so pale it was translucent. How long she’d been there, Michael couldn’t guess, and under the circumstances he didn’t care. The sun was rising half a state away. They had forty minutes, maybe less.

“Help me,” he said.

She bent at the waist, overcome by the smell. She gagged twice, then said, “I don’t understand.”

“There’s chain there.” Michael pointed. “I need it.”

Her eyes drifted down and right, settled on a mound of filthy chain in a hollow space beside the door. She looked back at the body as Michael tore the knife from its neck and tossed it, clattering, into the canoe. “Did you…”

“Chain. Elena, please.”

“Did you kill him?”

Michael dragged the body another six inches, lined it up with the edge of the canoe. “He’s been dead for a while.”

“What are you doing?”

“Fixing a thing that needs fixing. I really don’t have time to explain. Will you give me the chain, please?”

She didn’t move. Part of Michael understood her struggle, and part of him was angry. He’d told her to stay put for a reason.

“You knew you’d find this?”

Michael crossed the space between them and scooped up the chain. “The smell’s hard to confuse with anything else.” He took the gun from her limp hand, tucked it into his belt. “I wish you had listened to me, baby. I’m sorry you have to see this.”

She stared at the body, her throat pulsing as she swallowed whatever bitter emotion the sight conjured. “Who is that?”

“It doesn’t matter. Now, come here, please. I need you to do something.” Michael began to loop chain around the body, looked up, impatient. “You don’t have to touch it. Just hold the canoe.”

“Hold the canoe,” she repeated. “Why?” The question hung in the air between them. Michael found her eyes, and saw the moment she understood. “You’re going to sink him in the lake?”

“It’s not my mess, Elena, but it has to be cleaned up. It’s important. Trust me. The canoe, please.”

She shook her head. “This is wrong.”

“It’s what has to be done.”

“We need to call the police. This is…” She trailed off. “This is…”

“All you have to do is hold the canoe. Baby, please…”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“There are reasons.”

“I’m not going to sink a dead man in the lake.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Please don’t tell me that.”

“Sun’s coming, baby.”

She shook her head. “I can’t be here.”

“Elena…”

“No.” She stumbled through the door, wood slamming once on the wall outside. For an instant Michael saw the hint of her, a flash of black cloth and skin, then she was gone. He looked once at the empty door, then at the body. For half a second, he debated; then he went after her.

“Elena.”

“Stay away from me.”

Her feet were loud on the wood, then quiet when she hit grass. She was running, but blind in the dark. Michael caught her by the water’s edge, her arm hot and dry between his fingers. He pulled her to a stop. “Settle down. Come on.”

She jerked her arm, but he held on. “Let me go, Michael.”

“Just listen.”

“Let me go or I’ll scream.” One second stretched to three, then Michael released her arm. For an instant more, there was total silence, then she said, “What the hell are you?”

“I’m just a man.”

“I can’t be with you.”

Her head moved in the dark, and Michael knew she was about to run. She took a step, and he said, “It’s not safe, baby. I need you to stay with me.”

“No.”

“Elena…”

“I need to think. I need time. I need…”

But she didn’t know what she needed; and the sky was growing lighter. Michael reached for her hand, but she stumbled back. “Don’t touch me.”

“It’s still me…”

“Don’t follow me. Don’t call me.” She stepped back, and Michael moved forward. “Take one more step and you’ll never see me again. I swear!” She threw up a hand, her palm pale in the dark.

Michael froze, said, “Trust me.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I won’t.”

And there was such disgust in her voice, such fear and loathing that when she turned to run, Michael declined to follow. He watched her fade along the shore—the moment an agony of indecision—then turned slowly for the boathouse. She needed to think, needed time. So, he poured varnish on the bloody floor, dragged a boat across the stain and rolled the body into the canoe. It was heavy like his heart, cold and broken; so, he sank it in the lake, in the deep, black water surrounded by silent woods and purple hills. For an instant, the face shone as it fell, then, Michael was alone with the choice he’d made.

Back at the house, he was unsurprised to find the car gone and Elena with it. He looked at the place it had been, then stood on the porch, tall and still as the night gathered its last breath and a new day crowned. He wanted to call her, but minutes passed and red light spilled across the valley floor. She would understand or not, return or keep running. So, he went inside and took a shower. He put his duffel bag near the sofa, then stretched out and let sleep take him deep and dreamless, so that he woke long hours after the sun had filled the sky to bursting. He opened the door—felt scorching heat—and standing on the porch, saw two things at once.

Elena had not returned.

Cops were dragging the lake.

Elena drove with tears in her eyes and a burn the length of her throat. She could still smell the body, the scent so pervasive it was in her hair, her clothes, steeped into the oils of her skin. And images came with the scent: mottled skin and swollen hands, the look on Michael’s face, the cool detachment and methodical precision.

There’s a chain there ...

She checked the mirror and scrubbed one arm across her face, a dark laugh building in the hollow courses of her soul. How could she have allowed herself to believe that he was the same man she’d once thought him to be, that he could kill in cold blood, yet be a decent father to the child he’d put inside her?

“Oh, God…”

The laughter came then, an expulsion so sharp and tattered she frightened herself. In the mirror, her eyes were not her own. They were glass eyes, stone eyes painted black. Her fingers felt the wheel, but the wheel felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. Elena did not know where she was: some town in North Carolina, a road with four lanes, fast-food joints and cheap motels. There had been countryside and red light fading to orange, a whisper of trees.

I’ve done no wrong of which to be ashamed.

The thought felt false but she clung to it, one hand moving to the seat beside her. She had clean clothes and her passport, enough money to get back to Spain. She would forget about Michael, and the death she had seen. She would find her father and tell him that she’d been wrong to leave, that life in a small village was life enough. Elena almost wept at the thought, and at the images that came with such clarity: home and family and people that never changed. Her fingers brushed the warmth of her stomach, and where the fear had been she felt resolve. She would go back to her parents, she decided. She would go home and raise from this mistake a small and perfect child that would never know the provenance of its conception.

Elena reached for the mirror and twisted it up and away. She had had enough of painted eyes and emotionality. She was Carmen Elena Del Portal, and she would go home. But first, she had to rid herself of the smell. That meant a shower, a place to change clothes. The thought was so attractive it became an imperative. Her clothes felt heavy and soiled, her very skin corrupt, so that when a roadside motel appeared on an approaching rise, she signaled a right turn and rolled into the parking lot.

For a moment, she sat in silence as emotion took her down. She thought of Michael and felt a soft place in her heart.

“No.”

She smeared both hands across her face, shook her head.

“No.”

She got out of the car, her eyes red but dry; a bell chimed as she walked inside. The clerk behind the counter was a tall, spare man, whose face was severely lined for a man who otherwise appeared to be in his forties. He had long arms and wide, square palms. He thumbed a key on a plastic fob and his smile lingered as she placed four bills on the smudged counter. “You need anything…” He held onto the key two seconds longer than he should have. “You just call the desk.”

She sniffed, then palmed the last moisture from the skin beneath her eyes. “Thank you.”