The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (11 page)

We watched every movie in
The Val Lewton Horror Collection
, of course, and certain scenes Des played over and over. Treading water in a basement pool, Alice screams and screams, the echoes drowned by the growls of the thing prowling the encircling tile, claws a-click, a-click. The walls of cane ripple and whisper as Betsy leads Jessica along the bloodied path to the crossroads guarded by the staring dead. Mary sends her would-be protector into the darkness at the end of the corridor, from which he creeps to fall into her arms a corpse. The dropped corn meal sprays across the ground, its thousands of grains an obstacle to vampires but no hindrance to the Leopard Man as the fleeing Teresa leads her pursuer unerringly to her life's last locked door.
Mamacita, let me in! Let me in! Let me in! If you love me, let me in!

But when I think back on those months now, I mainly remember the caches we found, me driving while she leafed through her marked-up printouts from Geocaching.com, getting us as close as the nearest intersection anyway, or the nearest decent place to park, before heading out on foot. Sometimes the treasure really was a cache-and-dash, like the canister hung on the hook inside the two panels of the big sign outside the ice-cream stand. We barely had to leave the car to log that one. Other times it was a lot harder to find, like the Thermos half-buried in the brambles 20 feet off the C&O Canal trail.

Des was fearless, or simply heedless, when she knew a cache was nearby. The scars on her arms weren't her only scars—some she told me about, eventually—and I wasn't surprised, after watching her in action for a few weeks. She darted across busy highways, looking only at her GPS unit. She clambered up and down steep hillsides, ignoring the trail that offered a safer but less direct route. At the top of the old stone bridge over the Casselman River, she hoisted herself onto the wall and leaned so far out that I grabbed her belt, braced my feet against the base of the wall, and held on, frightened.

"Hey, leggo!" she hollered. "The cache might be in the outer wall, between the rocks. I can check real easy, if you just—."

"You ladies mind coming down from there?"

Behind me, walking up the bridge, left hand hooked into her belt and right hand suspended near her holster, was a Maryland state trooper.

I froze, my legs braced, Des' belt cutting my hands, her feet kicking the air.

"Des!" I said. "The cops!"

Her feet stopped kicking. Her voice was muffled. "Local or state?"

"The fuck it matters? Come back here!"

"Come down, I said," the trooper repeated, planting her feet on the flagstones in a way I did not like at all. She was younger than I had thought, with a spray of freckles across her cheeks, but she spoke with the universal now-see-here-young-lady sternness of her tribe.

"She's coming, officer," I hollered, and so she was, shinnying backward until she dropped down beside me, dusting her T-shirt.

The trooper cocked her head, looked surprised.

"Des?" she asked.

Des squinted at her. The trooper took off her hat, grinned. Des stepped forward. "Terry? Is that you?"

The trooper laughed and ambled up the slope, swatting her thigh with the hat. "Didn't recognize you at first, Des, not from the, uh, angle you were presenting."

"My best side," Des said, walking to meet her. They looked as if they might hug, but at the last instant each raised an arm, and they bumped fists.

"Didn't know you were still around," the trooper said.

"Yeah, well."

"Haven't seen you at the bars lately."

"Been busy," Des said, and then they both looked at me, though the trooper looked first. I was trying to go into unobtrusive prop-girl mode, which is tough on a stone bridge in daylight when you're wearing a bright green LITTLE MISS SAVE THE WORLD T-shirt. Des bought it for me because it matched her hair.

The trooper stuck out her hand, flashed a dazzling smile. "Busy, yeah. Marjorie Terry. Pleased to meet you."

"This is Jen," Des said, before I got a chance. I ignored her.

"Jenny Milledge," I said. Terry's grip was firm and warm and lasted longer than I expected. "Sorry if we gave you a scare."

"No problem. What were you guys up to, anyway?"

"Geocaching," I said.

Trooper Terry looked at Des, a slight crease between her blonde eyebrows. "GPS scavenger hunt," Des mumbled. I never had seen her look embarrassed before.

"Ohhhhh, so that's the latest," the trooper said. She turned to me. "When I met her, it was chess. She walked into Fusion with an ivory Napoleonic set under her arm and said, 'I can mate every dyke in the house!' Then it was, what came next, bartending? Flipping the tumblers behind your back like
Coyote Ugly
? Then you bought that Canon, and hello, Annie Leibowitz."

"I wasn't the one who posted those," Des said.

"I know who posted 'em," the trooper said. "So, it's hidden treasure now." She winked at me. "Clearly you've had some good hunting already. I'll see you around, Des. Find your way back to Fusion sometime. I'm usually on night patrol, but at midday I work on my nine ball. You come too, Jenny. New faces always welcome."

The refusal of Des, thus far, to take me to any of the watering holes west of Baltimore had been a sore point between us. "I'd like that," I said, a little loudly.

In silence, we watched the trooper slide back into her patrol car and drive westward, toward Grantsville. Then Des looked at me. When she really turned on the charm, it was like watching a marquee light up, but the reverse was just as dramatic. Now a full blackout was in effect, and I could hear the air-raid sirens.

"Thanks for all the suckup—I mean, backup," she said.

"Thanks for keeping
me
a secret from all your friends—
if
that's all she was."

"You're projecting." We stomped back to her car. "
I
wasn't the one fogging her sunglasses. It's the uniform, isn't it? And the freckles."

"Shut up." As we climbed in, I slammed my door, so Des slammed hers even louder. The dashboard hula girl wiggled her hips.

"You
wanted
her to slap on the cuffs," Des said, peeling out eastward, toward Frostburg. She was speeding by the time we reached the foot of the hill, and the new Casselman River bridge thrummed beneath the tires only momentarily. We seemed to reach the interstate in mere moments. Time flies when you're not having fun.

"When she walked away just now? You totally checked out her ass. Don't
even
deny it, Jen, I heard you swallow spit and breathe through your nose. Are you familiar with the noun 'tell'? It's a poker term."

"Christ. Poke this," I said, with a gesture. It was true, I
had
checked her out, but would I have realized it without Des nattering on? That made me madder. "Do you tell people
nothing
about yourself? She didn't even know you were a geocacher—which is only, like, your entire life."

"Well, I didn't know she was a cop, so we're even."

I snorted. "Even? No, I'd say a career in law enforcement is harder to hide than a . . . glorified compass. I think she wins that one." I stopped laughing as my head was thrust back into the seat rest. Des had floored the accelerator.

"She wins, huh?"

"Des, cut it out!" The sound of the air rushing over the never-quite-closed passenger window became a jetlike whine as a distant pickup in the next lane grew impossibly quickly, then hurtled backward past us. "I hate it when you pull this shit! You're scaring me. Des?"

Two tanker trucks were side by side ahead. From their perspective, they were laboring up the grade, barely gaining on the summit. From mine, they were an onrushing wall of metal.

"Tell me who won, then."

Des called them her "black rages," but I thought of them as white. When she was in their grip, her voice was as calm and cool as a marble slab.

I no longer even registered the windshield before me. I saw only the gleaming bulletlike rear of the nearest tanker, on which the reflection of Des' car ballooned like something spurting through a wormhole.

"You won, you won! You always fucking win, OK?"

She laughed and applied the brakes. I lurched forward, palms on dashboard, as the car fishtailed. "And don't you forget it," Des said through gritted teeth as she cradled the wheel and steered the rapidly slowing car over the rumble strip and onto the shoulder, where it shuddered to a stop.

Unable to breathe, I watched the tankers get blessedly smaller as they chugged on up the grade. Then Des' mouth was on mine, breathing for both of us.

Once again, Des somehow had maintained control—of the car, of herself, of me.

I asked Des, early on, if she ever hid any caches herself.

"Yes," she said, "but since I know where those are, what fun would hunting them be? And it's not as if you've finished your current task. You're not half done decrypting those clues."

I had rediscovered my childhood love for ciphers and codes when I realized that many hiders posted not only their cache coordinates but also clues that would help the finder, clues that often were encrypted using this simple substitution cipher:

 
A B C D E F G H I J K L M
N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 

A becomes N, B becomes O, and so forth. It was easy to learn, and soon I could just read "vg'f," for example, as "it's," and "gur" as "the." And how Des used to laugh at my indignation when the encrypted "clue" turned out to be the same information already written out above in standard English. "It's like those idiot car owners," I told her, "who buy a personalized plate only to spell out MY MINI, or something, as if that weren't obvious."

"I agree," she said. "People that uncreative shouldn't be allowed to drive."

That was our last dinner together before I went with my parents to visit our Southern cousins over Memorial Day weekend, so I wasn't with her when it happened, had to read about it in the paper that I kicked out of the way when I lugged my mom's latest Tupperware CARE package into the apartment, half-pissed that Des hadn't returned my calls all weekend. I sat at the butcher's block with the unrolled paper and a ham biscuit and a cup of Irish breakfast tea, snapping the newly liberated rubber band against my thigh as I glanced at the local front and wondered—before I had the chance to think about what I was wondering—where they dug up such an out-of-date photo of Des. Her high-school yearbook? Then the story around the photo hit me, not word by sequential word, but at once, like a rogue wave, leaving me gasping among the fragments. Dateline Oakland, Maryland. Fatality. Muddy Creek. Flood stage. Five inches of rain. Lone hiker. Slipped. Apparently. Fell. Waterfall. Fifty feet. Rocks. Body recovered 6:45 p.m. Visitors reminded of danger. Family notified. Services pending. Agencies assisting. Maryland Natural Resources Police. State Park Service. State Police. "Right coordinates, wrong time," Des said into my ear via her apartment voicemail, which she re-recorded frequently in hope of annoying her mom, who never called. "Be careful leaving a message." Southern Garrett Rescue Squad. All to be commended. Oakland Volunteer Fire Department. I set down my cell phone, lifted my teacup by the handle and brought it down hard against the edge of the block. Fragments flew. Hot liquid spattered my chest. Blood welled from my knuckle. I gripped the jagged porcelain handle to gouge my palm, to cut, to hurt, but felt nothing as I lifted the cell in my other hand and speed-dialed again, just to hear Des' voice, and again, and again, the right coordinates but the wrong time, long past the start of my shift, long past sunset, the right coordinates, the only light in the room the microwave time, the wrong time.

The pews were thronged with impeccably dressed, well-coiffed young women, the demurely sniffling products of the best diets, dentistry and tennis lessons that money could buy, as well as, apparently, the latest cloning technologies. Who would have guessed that as an undergrad, Des had been the president of a fucking
sorority
? And here were the sisters, generations of them, what a turnout. Maybe they were earning activity points. I stood at the back of the church with the other latecomers and groundlings, marveling.

And when did they start showing PowerPoint presentations at funerals?

When the world loses its focus, these are the things you focus on.

I looked for Trooper Terry, the only friend of Des I knew, but she was nowhere in sight.

The "ladies of the church," as the gray-mustached pastor put it, had a spread ready for us afterward, in the social hall. I shuffled dutifully past the long table with the rest of the throng, known by and knowing no one, and I put several random food-shaped objects on my coaster-sized wax-paper plate and made arrangements of them. With a couple more corn chips, I might have had a reasonable approximation of the international biohazard symbol. I slid my artifacts off the plate into a trash can and replaced them with two triangular pimiento-cheese sandwiches on wheat bread. Someone had sliced off the crusts. I wondered who she was and whether she thought that trimming the crusts would spare us something, us mourners; or whether she simply had a bread pudding in mind for later; and wondered miserably who in her sorority Des had fantasized about and how far she had gotten with any of them. Or vice versa.

"Ms. Milledge?"

I blurted "Yes" even as I looked up to see Des—an older Des, with crow's feet and smaller eyeglasses, and shorter, and in an expensive black pantsuit. Of course I had been hanging around hoping to get up the nerve to speak to Des' mother; I realized that now. She had been visible throughout the service, enthroned in the beribboned front pew. But what I intended to say to the woman was a mystery ("I knew your daughter, and I mean biblically" and "With your daughter, Mrs. Creech, it wasn't just the sex" both seemed to lack a certain something), and that
she
might approach
me
never had crossed my mind. For all I knew, she'd never heard of me, certainly never would have singled me out in a crowd. She was looking not at me but at my untouched sandwiches. I dropped the plate into the trash, dusted imaginary crumbs from my fingers and reached out a hand—which she grasped with a look of surprise, as if the handshake had been involuntary, like my response when I heard my name. "I'm so sorry," we both said, and then we let go, flustered. I was self-conscious about my own hand once withdrawn, as if I were obligated now to do something with it. I stuck both hands into my jacket pockets.