Raveled (26 page)

Chapter
37

Artie… sixteen years ago

Artie didn’t become aware of the police sirens until they were practically in the parking lot of the shop. From the splaying sound of the gravel, he could tell they’d skidded to a stop. And despite the circumstances, he knew from the squealing reluctance of the first car that it needed new brake pads and possible resurfacing of the rotors, but he didn’t know what to do about this other situation. If he stopped the CPR, Bobby might die. But the CPR didn’t seem to be doing anything but making the kid’s head flail around on the concrete. Was he pressing too hard? Was he supposed to give breaths? Was he even pressing on the kid’s heart?

Artie vaguely heard the poli
ce jiggling the door handle by his office. He called to them. “Back here! Back in the first bay! Hurry!”

About thirty seconds later, he hea
rd heavy boots crunching against the gravel on the side of the building. When he turned his head to see them coming around the corner, he caught sight of that fat gopher out on the hill instead. What the hell had happened?

Three Lavitte police officers stopped short at the sight of the disheveled man with a day’s growth of beard and dried spittle on the side of his mouth who was giving CPR to a corpse.

“What the hell you doing, Artie?” said Fred Alesbury, the husky police chief and sometimes poker buddy of Artie’s.

“I’m trying to save him,” Artie said. “Help me. I don’t know what I’m doing
here.”

“He’s dead,
Mr. Fennimore,” said the second officer, each word arriving more slowly than the previous one. This was only the young cop’s second dead body. If Artie had been coherent, he’d have vaguely remembered him as the Elvis-haired former captain of the high school soccer team. He’d been several years ahead of Kevin at school. “From the looks of it, he’s been dead for hours.”

Artie
observed Bobby’s body as if for the first time. “What are you talking about?”

“Who tied him up, Artie?”
said Fred.

“Tied him up?” And again, Artie saw
the scene anew. Bobby’s arms were tied behind his back to the bumper of the Mercedes. How could he not have noticed that Bobby’s limbs were all askew at an angle no human could achieve comfortably?

“I… I… I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Gonna need you to step away from the body, Artie.”

“But I… he can’t be dead. That don’t make no sense. I mean…”

“Step back, Artie,” Fred said, adding more authority to his voice. “This is some sort of homicide and we’re gonna need to take you to the station, get a statement, probably check you over for evidence.”

“What? What! Check me for evidence? What are you talkin’ about
, Fred? I didn’t shoot him.”

Fred
grabbed Artie gently by the arm and nudged him away from the body. Artie kept staring at young Bobby, trying to figure things out. At some point, he had stepped in the pool of blood that had dried to a gluey texture beneath the body and his shoes squished and stuck with every step he took. The sound drew his eyes down and he caught sight of his clothes, covered in blood. The knees of his jeans, where he’d knelt down to give Bobby CPR, were two big splotches of red ink. His hands, which had pressed against Bobby’s chest, looked like a child’s finger-painting project gone wrong. And he didn’t know it, but even his face, which he’d swiped with his bloody fingers at some point, peeked out at the officers between streaks of crimson.

“Did I call you guys?” Artie asked. “I wanted to call, but I didn’t want to stop resuscitat
ing him.”

The
Elvis-haired cop shook his head. “You didn’t call.”

“Then
why—”

“We’re
checking everywhere for a girl who’s gone missing. Parents ain’t seen her since yesterday afternoon.”

“Who?” Artie
said, urgent images of his own daughter, Allison, flashing through his foggy head.

“Girl by the name of Shelby Anderson.”

“Shelby Anderson,” Artie repeated. “I saw her yesterday, riding her bike down the road here. Red haired little thing, right?”

Elvis
cocked his head at Artie, lowering his eyes to the untucked waist of Artie’s shirt. It was stained with blood. He turned and mumbled something to the rookie officer who’d been standing quietly by trying not to throw up at the sight of his first corpse. The newbie seemed relieved to have an excuse to leave the scene as he ran around to the police cars in front of the garage.

“Whose gun is that, Artie?” asked
Fred, pointing to the pump shotgun.

“Mine,
Fred. You know I keep guns in the shop. Hell, you been out here shootin’ with me.”

“That the gun that killed Bobby here?”

Despite Artie’s compromised condition, he managed to look indignant. “I don’t know. I just found him like this a few minutes ago. I got no idea how he got here or what’s going on.”

Elvis
piped up. “Now I’d surmise that that most certainly is the gun that killed Bobby.”

“Why’s that?” Fred said.

The former soccer whiz smacked some gloves on his hands, walked to the gun and picked it up. “Can’t think of no other reason to have a silencer on.”

Fred let
his jaw go slack as it hit him that his buddy Artie might be in some real trouble. For a good five seconds, he nodded his head up and down, like a sheet flapping in a mild breeze.

“Now wait a minute,” Artie said. “I put that silencer on not ten minutes ago.”

The officers glanced at the congealed liquid surrounding the hardening, dead body. “I don’t think so, Artie. Looks like that boy’s been dead a mite longer than ten minutes.”

“
No, I’m not saying I shot Bobby,” Artie protested. “I shot a gopher. Out back. I swear. My head was hurtin’ so bad, I wanted to muffle the shot a bit.”

Fred glanced
towards Garbage Hill. “Well now, that might help your case. If there’s just one bullet missing from your double barrel there, and we bring in that gopher, that might—”

“
He could’ve reloaded,” Elvis said.

“That’s true,” Fred said. “But still, where’s that gopher?”

Artie’s head sank and his body wilted like a discarded marionette. “I missed it.”

Fred sighed.
“You do some drinking last night, did you?”

“
Yes, Sir, I sure did,” Artie said. “But I ain’t never drunk enough to kill someone in cold blood.”

“Not least that you remember,”
Elvis added.

The
youngest officer returned with two evidence bags and tweezers. He handed them over to Elvis.

“Now listen hear,
Mr. Fennimore,” Elvis said, leaning towards Artie’s waist with the tweezers, “I don’t mean no disrespect but I gotta get these here hairs off your shirt, and then I’m gonna need you to take off your shirt and put it in this bag.”

Artie
gazed down at his body like he was staring at an exhibit in a museum that didn’t make the least bit of sense to him. Then he looked over at the hairs dangling from the tweezers in the officer’s hand. They were long. Twelve inches at least. And they were crimson. “Now hold on a minute.”

“No, you hold on a minute
, Mr. Fennimore. You’re under arrest.”

“I’m afraid we’ve gotta take you in, Artie,” Fred said.

Artie protested the entire time they read him his rights. He wanted to deny everything with crystal clear facts, but there was nothing crystal or clear going on anywhere in his head. This wasn’t him. This wasn’t his life. That thought continued to pound in his head as the officer stuffed his shirt into an evidence bag and him into a police cruiser in front of his very own shop. The air held an unusual chill for an August morning.

Chapter
38

Allison… present

Charlie decided that despite two cocktails under his belt, and a possible warrant out for his arrest, it was best to skip town and return to Charleston. We’d already made our anonymous call, pretending to be teenagers who’d come across Ervin’s body while making out in the woods.

Charlie
dropped me off at my house and departed with selfless wishes: “Remember, if they come to hunt you down, you were there alone.”

I
left him with something equally sweet to gnaw on during his long drive home. “Sounds good. We’ll just cross our fingers that Officer Ervin didn’t run your plates before he entered those woods.”

With a
dirty look to rival a diva whose dressing room M&M’s were the wrong color, Charlie blew me a kiss and promised to stop at Puccio’s next time he was in New York. I hoped he wouldn’t. For the first time, after seeing what Charlie had made of himself, I felt the tiniest bit ashamed of my subservient status in the workplace, even if I did hold the power to spit in the drinks.

I peeked in on my m
om. Snoring away. Thank God for sleeping pills. Did she dream, I wondered? Of the life that could have been or of life as it had turned out? Of Kevin and me as successful businesspeople or of Kevin lying drunk in some hooker’s hotel room and me having served him the gin that put him there? I closed the door, hoping she slept without dreams.

The metal box from the well felt like
a hot poker in my hands. Between the threat of getting arrested for assaulting an officer and the growing conviction that my visit to Ravine may have caused Jasper’s death, I felt like that lacrosse player who’d crashed into my brother—all the headlights pointing at me from the wrong direction.

In my room with the door closed, I stared at the metal box.
Now or never, Allison
, I told myself. I wondered if I should call Kevin to share the moment. It felt like cheating to be doing it on my own. Screw it. He was probably locked in his room at this hour anyway and I didn’t want him to trade any more favors, especially if the box turned out to contain Jasper’s old Hot Wheels or a used condom. The box was welded together on each seam by thin strips of contrasting metal. I twisted, pulled, slammed, slid and stomped on the thing to no avail. No secret lock, no sliding mechanism, no nothing that I could find. I tried plinking off the little strips on the side, but they were on there tight. Why hadn’t I held onto Charlie’s toolbox?

“Damn, Jasper, how am I supposed to open this thing?”
I mumbled.

I hid the box in my closet
. Not wanting to take any chances, I wrapped it in an old wool sweater inside a storage container, in a pile of containers stacked eight high. It would do until I could get back from the garage. I went down to the kitchen and had my hand on the doorknob when the darkness outside suddenly became a wall of intimidation. I’d walked to that garage thousands of times, but now, with the outdoor bulb burned out and the sensation of being hunted, I dreaded stepping into the shadowy blackness. Unable to shake off the anxiety, I searched through several cluttered cabinets until a flashlight finally presented itself.

Creaking open the door and
ensuring it wouldn’t be locked upon my return, I flicked on the flashlight. It sputtered and shut off. I smacked it, shook it and did everything but give it mouth-to-mouth until it returned to life, but the patient’s chances seemed grim. Even at full strength, it offered only a measly stream of light, doing more to attract bugs than to show me the way. I made it to the garage and switched on the bare bulb on the ceiling as fast as I could. So far, so good, but my breaths came fast and short. The sound of a car racing down the road sent me into a near panic. I shut off the ceiling light and pressed myself against the garage wall, as if the approaching vehicle contained occupants who could see through solid wood.

The car skidded as it reached
the house, followed by a startling clang and the screeching rubber of escaping tires—the types of sounds that usually precede the crunching metal of a fatal crash. Then an inebriated shout penetrated the darkness—“Take that, baby-killer!”—followed by raucous screams of delight. The noise faded as the vandals sped away; the feeling of violation didn’t.

My head fell
to my chest in despair. So that’s what my mother put up with. Baby-killer? Really? I thought about the human ego and how every person who relayed the story of the Maniac Mechanic likely added their own spin. Who knew what the locals accepted as truth anymore? Or what stories floated from mouths to ears at teenage sleepovers? Did children use stories of my dad as fodder to scare each other on camping trips? Were there urban legends permeating the fabric of Lavitte, or maybe the whole country, using Artie Fennimore as the protagonist?

I sighed, grabbed an old toolbox, and returned to the house, the flashlight hanging limply at my side, d
ead again.

I
tried every unnamable tool in the box. Nothing worked. I sat back on my bed and thought hard about some simple option I must be missing. The longer I lay there, the more my mind began to drift to the code from Jasper. I replayed it in my head: the adding of the atomic numbers, the corresponding pages, and the faint lines beneath the words. Then I remembered the dangler. The final clue had led me to a page with nothing underlined. I had checked all four yearbooks in case Jasper had made a mistake, but I’d come up empty. I’d let it go because Jasper’s message had seemed complete, but maybe the dangler had meant something. I retrieved the yearbooks from under my bed and found it:
MG
. Magnesium.

I searched
Magnesium on the internet, assuming my tired brain would not correctly recall the properties of this particular element. Aha! I knew within the first three results that appeared on my screen. Magnesium was the rare flammable metal, at least when it came in small strips. Much like the ones holding the sides of the box together. I needed to burn my way in. But I wasn’t going to chance lighting the box on fire and destroying its contents. I read further and uncovered the key to the box: Hydrochloric Acid. Seriously, Jasper? You couldn’t have chosen something normal people keep around the house, like a key or a screwdriver? Knowing him, he probably kept acid in the pantry next to the salt and pepper in case the urge ever struck to blow something up. According to the internet posts, dissolving strips of magnesium in hydrochloric acid would form charged magnesium ions that reacted with the hydrogen gas, leaving behind magnesium chloride.

I suddenly remembered the day clear as a bell.

Jasper and I had been the only two at our lab table that day. Perhaps a new flavor of gum had come out and Rosie Lawrence and her buddy needed to be first in line to get it. Anyway, Jasper had dropped the magnesium strips in the test tube and I’d poured in the acid, feeling proud that he trusted my shaky hands to do the dirty work. We’d laughed and made jokes while the chemical magic happened. If I recalled correctly, the conversation had grown a tad perverse and I’d even entertained the thought that this genius upperclassman might have a small crush on geeky old me.

I couldn’t recall
the details from the paper we’d written on the experiment, but it didn’t matter as long as the acid would open the box. I hid the box back in its wool sweater, returned the yearbooks to their under-the-bed lair, and paced. All the stores were closed at this late hour so I’d have to wait until morning. It would be a long night. Ten minutes later, I threw myself on the bed and forced my eyes closed.

No way I’d get
any sleep tonight with the answer to
that night
a mere twenty feet from my head.