The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (18 page)

Chapter 21

I
n one fluid, almost casual motion, Bernie MacDonald lifted the rifle by his side. There was no sound, but George registered a rapidly approaching projectile, a streak of red making its way toward Karin and him. Then there was a hideous sound, like a small ax hitting wood, and Karin collapsed by his side. MacDonald altered the angle of the gun, and George slammed the door and latched it.

He dropped to his knees and looked at Karin. She was scratching at her throat, making small sounds like stifled yawns. He moved her hands away. There was a dart, not much bigger than a golf tee, stuck in the dead center of her neck. Grasping it by its red conical tail he pulled it free. It left a puffy mark and a tiny bubble of blood the size of a pushpin on a map. Karin sucked in a ragged breath, then groaned, moving her head back and forth.

“It’s a dart,” George said. “A tranquilizer, I think. How do you feel?”

Karin sat upright, put a hand to her neck. The puffiness was quickly turning to a welt, and she rubbed at it, smudging the blood. George was aware that they had left the sliding doors unlocked in the living room, and if he had any chance of escaping from MacDonald, he needed to get to those doors.

“I need you to stay calm,” he said to Karin, “while I lock the back door and find a way to get to a phone. Okay? Just lean up against this wall. Everything will be okay.” To his own ears, his voice sounded reasonable and calm, as though he were telling a colleague that he needed to send a fax and would be right back.

He maneuvered Karin so that she was leaning back against the hallway wall. Her eyes had a frenzied, animal look to them, but he thought that the lids were starting to sag a little. “I was shot?” she asked.

“Just with a tranquilizer. You’ll probably fall asleep, but you’re going to be okay.”

She took her fingers away from her neck and looked at the smeary traces of blood on their tips. “I’ll be right back,” George said and bolted up the half stairway to the second level. He looked across the living area and through the sliding-glass doors. There was no sign of MacDonald in the backyard or on the patio. He pulled the doors tight and twisted the latch so that it locked, then stepped back into the center of the living room. It occurred to him that locking the doors was most likely futile. It was clear that this house, with its corpse wrapped in plastic, was directly linked to MacDonald and Liana. MacDonald would have a key, and if he didn’t, he would simply break the glass doors.

George ran back toward Karin. She was still slumped in the position he’d left her in, but her eyes had closed, and she was already breathing heavily through a slack mouth. The hand she had been looking at, with its bloody fingers, still hovered in front of her face, her arm somehow staying bent and upright. She looked like a marionette, all strings cut but one.

George crouched. It felt like an hour since he’d discovered the body in the laundry room, but it had probably only been a few minutes. He could hear no sounds, neither inside the house nor outside. What would MacDonald do? If he came into the house, he’d run the risk that George would hear him and be able to bolt out another exit and run for it. George wouldn’t be able to use the car, since MacDonald had blocked it in the driveway, but he could run into the woods and hide. His chances would be slim, but there’d be a chance.

George tried to calculate how many exits and entrances there were in the house. He knew of at least three. There was the front door, the sliding-glass doors in the living room, and there had been sliding-glass doors in the bedroom. There would also be some sort of entrance to the garage, probably down the stairs from where he was then crouched. Why hadn’t Bernie made his move?

George decided to position himself in the darkened hallway on the second level of the house where MacDonald wouldn’t be able to see him through a window. He came out of his crouch, the joints in his knees popping loudly. Karin remained in her position, her arm still raised as though her elbow had locked. George bent back down and gently grasped her wrist, lowering her arm so that it lay by her side. Now she looked like a drunk at a party who had fallen asleep standing up and slid down the wall. It was a small improvement.

He tried to walk casually, neither too fast nor too slow, up to the second level. He glanced through the glass into the backyard again, saw nothing, then entered the hallway, flicking the switch off so that the hall darkened. He leaned against the wall and listened again. A minute passed. His skin had felt charged and tingly, but now it was turning slack and cold. He ran a hand through his hair and was startled by how much sweat coated it. Something made a faint ticking sound in the house, and his legs started to buckle. He realized that whatever bravery and resourcefulness had gotten him this far was draining away, as fast as water emptying from a sink. Instead of imagining his escape from the house, he was imagining Bernie MacDonald suddenly appearing out of the darkness of the hallway. He saw himself stiffening in place like a statue while Bernie shot a dart, or worse, into his neck.

George thought,
Why isn’t Bernie worried that I’m calling the cops? He obviously knows the landline isn’t working, but how can he be sure I don’t have a cell?
Does he know that there’s no service here, in the deep woods on the edge of the ocean?
If that was the case, then there was no reason for Bernie to hurry, and George knew that the longer he was in the house, the higher the probability that he would lose his nerve.

George decided to pick a direction and make a break for it. It would give him a fifty-fifty chance of escape. The advantage to the back of the house was the proximity of the woods, which began just a few feet from the patio. George tried to remember what the woods had looked like; he could picture a low-lying, impenetrable brush of rhododendrons and rosebushes toward the side of the house, but couldn’t remember exactly what he had seen bordering the patio. If it was more of the same, then he wouldn’t stand a chance.

The advantage to the front of the house was that he knew exactly where to go—straight down the gravel driveway, staying close to the edge so that the trees could provide a little bit of cover, then making his way to Captain Sawyer Lane. He would be more exposed at the front of the house, but he could move faster.

George formulated a plan. He would move swiftly but calmly toward the front door, peer out toward the driveway, scanning for any sign of MacDonald. If he was still there, by his car with his rifle in hand, then he would turn and bolt out the back, moving as fast as possible, and take his chance with the woods in back. If he saw nothing, then he would unlatch the door and move through it as fast as possible, racing for Captain Sawyer Lane.

He willed himself to start walking toward the front door. He carefully took the few steps down to the landing, past Karin, who still lay slumped against the wall, her position unchanged. The skin of her face was turning an alarming gray. He stopped at the narrow side window and looked out into the world. There was no sign of MacDonald. His car was still there, parked behind Karin’s Audi. A crow hopped along the gravel driveway, pecking at something. He looked as far as he could along the sight lines to either side and saw nothing.

He unlocked the door and swung it inward. He stepped outside, looking to either side: no sign of Bernie MacDonald. He ran toward the cars. The crow did a little stutter-step and lifted itself up and away on its ragged-looking wings. He ran past Karin’s Audi, then MacDonald’s Dodge, taking a quick look into its interior as he passed it. Lying across the Dodge’s backseat was a woman. George slowed to a halt to take a better look; it was Liana, on her back, both legs bent to allow her to stretch fully across the length of the seat. Her head leaned against the back of the seat, her hair plastered to one cheek, and as George’s shadow crossed her, he thought he saw a flickering of her pale lids. He stepped closer. Despite her awkward position on the backseat, her clothes were fairly neat. She wore the purple skirt he’d seen her in before and what looked like a cotton turtleneck sweater. Her sweater had pulled up slightly at her midriff, revealing a sliver of white skin. One flat-soled shoe was on the floor of the car, and one hung from her slender foot. George pulled at the door handle, but it was locked. He gently rocked the car, trying not to make too much noise, but she was clearly out, no doubt tranquilized by whatever drug MacDonald had loaded his rifle with. George was glad to have seen the twitch of her eyelids, to know at least that she was still alive.

He felt a sting in his shoulder, grasped it, and pulled a tiny dart out, then flung it away as if it were a live wasp. MacDonald was walking toward him with a relaxed grace, the rifle already by his side again. He was coming around from the back of the house. George had guessed right: he had been at the back. George started running again, toward the road.
Maybe I can reach the woods, find a hiding place, and crawl into it,
he thought.
Maybe he won’t find me. Maybe I’ve pulled out the dart before the poison has had a chance to get into my blood.

But as he ran, passing in and out of shafts of sunlight coming through the breaks in the trees, the earth under his feet began to shift, tilting violently to his right. He tried to adjust his gait, but his feet tangled, and he went down face-first onto the forest floor. He got to his knees, and the world tilted again, the trees whirling around like sped-up film. He lay back down. The floor of the forest was a soft bed of fallen pine needles. He closed his eyes, and the spinning stopped.

Chapter 22

G
eorge sometimes wondered if the limited banks of his memory were entirely filled with details of Liana, all used up on the first semester of college, those sixteen heady weeks. Despite the lack of photographs, he could clearly remember most of Liana’s outfits, the exact dimensions and decorations of her dorm room, the way she held a pen, the way she smoked a cigarette, the exact taste of her mouth. He remembered these details because in his mind he had returned again and again to those moments, allowing most everything that had happened to him since to float by unobserved and unanalyzed. And he was aware that every time he returned to those memories of Liana he was re-creating them in his mind, tinkering with them, falsifying them. He knew that he should not trust those memories anymore, that they were stories told to him through the distortion of time, like phrases passed along in a game of telephone.

But there were memories of one night, in the dark beginnings of December, that he did trust. He’d been over that evening so many times in his mind, and the conversation never changed; for that reason he believed it to be true. They’d been to Trumbull Arts Cinema, a student-run movie theater housed in an ornate refurbished lecture hall on the east side of the quad. They’d seen
Something Wild,
the Jonathan Demme film with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith; though George hadn’t seen this film since, he could remember it almost scene by scene, just as he could remember the slightly ratty balcony seats that they’d sat in and the way the flesh of her palm felt in his as they held hands while watching the film.

It was Friday night, and there was a party they were planning on going to afterward. The party was at Zach Grossman’s quad; Zach was a friend of theirs, and the current boyfriend of Liana’s roommate, Emily. He was local, the youngest of three brothers, and therefore a reliable supplier of kegs for freshman parties. As they neared the party, UB40 thudding loudly through the open windows, Liana squeezed George’s hand and said, “I have a better idea.”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go check out the new science building.”

They walked against a cold prickly wind toward the far north of campus, where construction had begun on a four-story science building. It was being built on a gently sloping parcel of land that abutted the school’s largest parking lot. The foundation had been laid, and the structural beams and girders were all in place, rising four stories. It reminded George of something created from a massive erector set. An orange plastic fence had been haphazardly strung around the site.

Liana led George to a section of sagging fence where a stake had been uprooted from the earth. She stepped over the fence, pulling George along with her.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Let’s go inside. I’ve been dying to do this.”

George followed her into the building. They stood on the poured concrete floor and let their eyes adjust to the dark. A half-finished stairwell, with rudimentary planks stretched across to create steps, led up to the top floor. Some sections of some of the floors were finished, but most were not, and looking up, George could see the purple night sky, the sprinkling of stars.

“I’m not going up there,” he said.

“Why not?”

Before he could stop her, Liana sprinted up the steps, rattling the planks on the girders. George followed, swallowing his fear. At the third floor, Liana crossed a temporary walkway that led to a section of what seemed to be permanent flooring in the southwest corner of the building. She sat, and George gratefully sank beside her. Ratty blue tarps had been tacked up in place of walls, and they crackled and whipped in the sharp wind. “It feels like we’re on a ship,” George said.

“It does,” Liana said, lying backward to look up at the sky. George turned toward campus. He could make out the low slate roofs of the dorms that surrounded the quad, then the chapel’s steeple, lit up by its pale spotlight. The city flickered in the distance.

“All right,” he admitted. “This was a good idea.” He lay down next to Liana. The wind and the rattling tarp obliterated any other sounds from campus.

“Do you think Lulu was being dishonest?” Liana asked.

It took George a moment to realize that she was talking about the film they had just seen.

“Well, yeah,” he said.

“Because she was pretending to be someone else? Because she wasn’t telling him her whole story?”

“Both those things.”

“But that implies that every time we meet someone we are somehow required to divulge our entire past, as if that would somehow be the most honest thing to do.”

“There’s a big difference between divulging your entire past and using your real name.”

“But that kid in your dorm,” she said, “the one who calls himself Chevy. That was a nickname he gave himself when he got to college. That’s no different from what Lulu did in the movie.” Liana’s normally measured monotone was speeding up, not alarmingly, but enough to be noticeable. Although he couldn’t say what it was, George had thought at the time that she was revealing something of herself to him. He sat up a little, cupped his hands around his lighter, and lit a cigarette.

“I guess,” he said.

“All I’m saying is this: if someone reinvents herself, like Lulu did in the film, isn’t it possible that the person she’s become is more honest . . .  more truly herself . . .  than the person she was born as? No one can choose the family he was born into. No one can choose his own name, or how he looks, or what kind of parents he has. But as we get older we get to choose, and we can become the person that we were meant to be.”

“You’re about to tell me your real name is Bob and you come from Canada?”

“No, but I also don’t feel at all related to my parents, or to Florida, where I come from. I might as well have changed my name. Do you know what I mean?”

“I understand. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I get what you’re saying.”

“What do you mean you don’t agree?”

“You make it sound as though human beings are free to change themselves entirely at a whim. It just doesn’t work that way. We may not like who we were born as, but that doesn’t change anything—it’s still who we are.”

“It has nothing to do with freedom to change. All I’m saying is that maybe the people we change into are the reality of who we are. Like in the movie—Lulu is truly who that character was. Even though she had made it all up.”

“But that wasn’t what the movie was saying. The movie was saying that we can’t escape our past.”

“I know. I’m telling you what
I
think.”

“There’s still something you’re saying that I don’t quite agree with.”

“You’re just arguing for the sake of arguing.”

“I’m not. I get what you’re saying. You’re saying that as we get older we have the opportunity to become the people we were meant to be. I just think, in general, that people who try to escape from their past, or try to divorce themselves from their parents, they’re kidding themselves. It doesn’t happen that way. Maybe on the outside, maybe in the way that others see them, but down deep everyone is the product of their past.”

“So you don’t think people can change?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that no one can ever completely shed his beginnings. Like it or not.” George flicked his cigarette over the edge of the building. Watching the orange sparks get whipped away by the wind made his stomach feel a little hollow. He had never liked heights.

“Blood will out,” Liana said. Her voice sounded resigned.

“Something like that.”

Liana was quiet, staring up through the skeletal frame of the building. George turned onto his side and stared at her profile, a black cutout against the distant lights of the parking lot.

“You’re just saying that because you like where you came from,” Liana said. “You like your parents and your hometown and New England. You chose to go to fucking college less than two hours from where you live. I don’t think you really understand what it’s like to feel like a stranger in your own family.”

“Okay. Granted. Calm down. I’m not really disagreeing with you about anything. I just think . . . that when you say . . . that when you say that the people we become later in life are more truthful than the people we were at the beginning of our lives, I don’t entirely agree with that. No, wait. Hear me out. I just think that there is truth in both aspects of a person. You can’t discount where we come from even if you’d like to. It’s still always there. It’s still the truth of who we are.”

Liana was quiet again. In retrospect, George recognized that she was defeated. The conversation ended, but over the years George had returned to it in his mind again and again. He’d long since realized that Liana Decter was asking for permission to become Audrey Beck permanently. She’d been this new person for less than three months, but she must have seen the genuine possibility that she could entirely shed her previous skin and start new.

They stayed in the half-finished building another hour, getting colder. They had turned onto their sides and wrapped their arms around each other for warmth. George remembered the pain in his hip and how Liana had started shaking with the cold before he did. They’d kissed, and George had been able to see a wet glint of light in one of Liana’s open eyes. They touched each other through their clothes. George asked if they should go back to one of their dorm rooms.

“No.”

George stayed on his side while she moved down the length of him, unzipped his jeans, and took him in her mouth. Liana had done this before, but it had always been a brief precursor to something else, with her not quite knowing what to do and George struggling not to come. That night George was relaxed enough to pay attention to the feeling. He let his head fall back onto the cold floor and stared into the night sky. After he had come, Liana kept him in her mouth while he softened. That act, like the conversation that led to it, had been keeping house in his memory banks ever since.

Liana had slid back up and kissed him. He had now begun to shake as well, but they stayed side by side for another fifteen minutes before admitting defeat.

And now, when George woke, nauseous and groggy from the tranquilizer, and found himself on his side, face-to-face with Liana, he thought initially that he was dreaming, or that he was dead and had been returned to the happiest moment of his life. But then Liana’s eyes opened, and he saw the fear in them and became aware of the rope-bite at his wrists and ankles and the hard surface that he was lying on that was bucking up and down. He smelled gasoline and heard the rhythmic whine of a motor and the slap of water. They were under a green tarp, translucent enough so that he could sense the daylight above them and make out the shadowy features of Liana’s face.

“Where are we?” he said in a grainy voice he barely recognized. The act of speaking unloosed something in his head, and the world, already lifting and falling, tilted even more precariously, as though he were tumbling unmoored through space. He heaved violently, his body straining against whatever was holding him in place. His wrists felt like they were being scored by razor-sharp glass.

After retching, he broke into a coughing fit, tears streaming from his shut eyes. When he finished coughing and his breathing returned to a sort of normalcy, he looked again at Liana. She had managed to slide a little ways away from him, and George realized that she was bound up like he was, immobile beneath the tarp.

“You okay?” she asked.

George’s throat and mouth felt coated in bile. Another wave of nausea passed through him, and he shut his eyes to fend it off.

“You were shot by a tranquilizer gun,” Liana said.

“I know,” he said and reopened his eyes. “Where are we?”

“We’re on Donnie’s boat. Or I guess you know his real name now.”

“Bernie.”

“That’s right. He’s going to kill us.”

The boat banked sharply, cresting a wave and slapping down hard on the water. George felt what seemed to be another body rolling up against his backside. He tried to turn his head, but all he could see was the tarp pressing down on them. “Who’s behind me?”

“Your friend. I don’t know who she is.”

“Karin Boyd. She’s Gerry MacLean’s niece. Jesus.”

“She’s dead, George.”

“How do you know?”

“I watched him drag all three of you onto the boat. Bernie told me she died from the tranquilizers. Not that it matters. He’s going to kill us all anyway.”

“The other body’s on this boat as well?”

“Katie Aller?”

“The woman who was living in that house?”

“Yeah, that’s Katie Aller. Bernie killed her last night.”

“Who is she?”

“It’s a long story and we don’t have time. I need you to try something. He tied your hands in front, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Before I got nabbed, I managed to grab a steak knife and slide it under my skirt. It’s in the band of my underwear. I’ve been trying, but I can’t get to it.”

“It’s in the front?”

“Uh-huh.”

George scooched forward as much as he could so that his knees and Liana’s knees were touching and their faces were side by side. The tarp moved with him but still covered them entirely. Even though he couldn’t see the system that Bernie had used to hog-tie him, he knew that his ankles were secured, as were his wrists. It also felt as though the rope had been wrapped around his waist and tied to his wrists so that his hands were pinned to where his belt buckle would be. His fingers were tingly and numb, but he could move them. He got close enough so that he could touch Liana’s fingers. He could also feel what felt like nylon rope tied tightly around her wrists, plus stickiness on her skin that was either sweat or blood. “You need to slide yourself lower down,” she said.

He did what she said. It was hard work. Bernie had tied the rope tight at every juncture, and he could feel the damage at both his ankles and wrists where the nylon was cutting into his skin. Once his hands were below Liana’s, she pulled herself in closer to him so that his fingers pressed against the tops of her thighs. He could feel the fabric of her skirt, the line of her underwear along one hip. He couldn’t feel a knife.