Doesn’t matter. I am too tired and too impaired and too thirsty to keep going. I will die here, plastered with sweat and crusted blood against this two-centuries-old wooden building, burned into the side by the afternoon sun. Here Maia will find the empty shell of my body and carry it away to sea.
The dog barks at the foot of the building. I can’t see him, of course. But I hear him. He barks a second time, loud and sharp.
“Hey,” I say, the word drifting feebly off in the air like a dead leaf. I clear my throat, lick my lips, and try it again. “Hey, boy.”
Houdini keeps barking, probably because he’s hungry or scared or maybe just happy to see me, even my long spindly bottom half. He’s probably been lost in the woods, chasing squirrels or being chased for the last two hours. But in my dizziness and fatigue I imagine his frantic yips as encouragement: He is insisting that I continue up, that I assault the next rung and the next.
My little dog has reappeared at the crucial moment to insist in his rough canine language that salvation waits at the top of the ladder. I keep going. Up I go.
When at last I’m on the floor of the blockhouse I just lie there for a while, coughing. My throat is shutting down, collapsing in on itself like a dusty mineshaft. I roll over when I can and crawl to the trunk under the cannon and manage to open it and find a two-gallon jug and heave the heavy thing to my lips and drink like the lost man in the desert, letting water spill out and soak my face and my chest. I come up for breath like a surfacing dolphin and then drink more.
I let the empty plastic jug drop from my hands, and it bounces with a hollow sound on the wooden beams of the blockhouse floor.
Then I go back to the trunk, and a minute later I’ve found it. The pink paper, buried—not even buried—half hidden at best, beneath a change of clothes and a flashlight, a single sheet of pink notebook paper, worried and blackened at the edges where Brett’s fingers, stained with dirt and gunpowder, have picked at its corners. Folded and grimy but still bearing the faint smell of cinnamon.
I laugh out loud, a nasty dry rasp. I take the page from Martha’s diary and wave it in the air, pump it crumpled in the fist of my working hand. The page is torn and jagged at one edge, ripped out as if with force. I look up at the roof of Brett’s cloister and press the paper to my chest and grin, feeling the grime on my face crack and fall away. I read it and reread it, and its meaning starts to well up around me, and then I’m getting dizzy and cold, so I press the torn-out scrap of notebook paper to my chest and lean back against the old wooden wall and shut my eyes.
He’s barking, down there. Houdini is shouting, beautiful and faithful creature, hollering to keep me awake, or maybe at some interesting clouds, or maybe he’s just giving his little voice box a workout, as dogs are famous for doing.
I should—I open my eyes, stare at the opposite wall, struggle to form the thought—I should check on him. I roll from sitting down onto my belly and crawl back to the doorway. The arm is starting not to hurt, which though a relief is nevertheless a very bad sign. I peer over the edge, and there he is, barking, purposeful, sending his voice up along the side of the building to where I can hear him, way up here.
“Good boy,” I whisper, smiling down at him.
The sun is lower now and not as bright and I can see clearly where, down at the base of the blockhouse, my dog has built a little pyramid of dead birds. And I am not sure whether this is supposed to be a kind of sacrifice in my honor, or a tribute, or some sort of bizarre enticement: Here, master, here! If you survive this situation, you can eat these birds.
“Good boy,” I say again. “Good dog.”
It is some time later. If I check my watch I will know what time it is, see how many hours have elapsed with most of my arm cut off from my circulating bloodstream like it’s downriver from a dam, and discover thereby how close I am either to dying or to losing my right arm forever.
There is an ache up and down the length of my body. In olden days they would strap you, hands and feet, to a machine, turn a wheel to make you talk. Or even not to, just to watch you experience it. Or because there was someone visiting the court who had never gotten a chance to see the machine in action. Another one of those things that makes you think, well, okay, the end of the human race, what are you gonna do?
I read it again, the pink page, Martha’s slightly slanted all-block-letter handwriting, just like the quote from St. Catherine above her sink. But different in tone, so different:
HE’S DEAD N. IS DEAD HE’S REALLY DEAD
I’LL NEVER SEE HIS FACE AGAIN OR KISS HIM AGAIN
WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES THERE HE IS THE GOLD-CAPPED SMILE THE HAND-ROLLED SMOKES THE SILLY TATTOOS
BUT THEN I OPEN THEM AND HE’S GONE AGAIN
OK SO LET THE WORLD DIE NOW IT’S DEAD ALREADY WITHOUT HIM BUT
It ends like that, in the middle of a thought, to be continued on the next page. There’s a date at the top, July fifth, just a couple weeks ago.
He’s dead, she wrote, N.’s dead he’s really dead.
Who, Martha? Who is N.?
I still don’t check my watch, but I can feel it getting later. The day is wearing itself down, the sunbeams appearing and disappearing in the slitted windows. I wish I could send out my thoughts like medieval telegraph crows to gather clues and bring them back to me, up here in my doomed chamber.
Who was N., Martha? With gold teeth and hand-rolled cigarettes and funny tattoos?
How many guns are left in that storehouse by the power station, Julia Stone? Would you run and check for me? Do you even need to look, or is it you who’s spirited one away?
Officer Nils Ryan—Brett’s buddy from the trooper days—Nils starts with N. But there’s another one, another N., and I can’t remember it. The world spins. This case was like a straight line, simple and clean: A man is missing. Find the man. And now it’s like the wilderness is crowding in along the road, turning the world into a thicket, a maze, a tangle.
I squeeze up and down along the edges of my arm and feel nothing and meanwhile my breath is ragged and uneven. At a certain point I will cross a threshold where it won’t matter either way; “loss of limb and/or death,” the double-conjunction pivot point resolving decisively on “and.”
The kids are going to be okay. Alyssa and Micah Rose at Quincy Elementary. I gave that over to Culverson, and Detective Culverson will stay on top of it. I smile at the thought of Culverson—at the Somerset right now, dining alone, asking Ruth-Ann politely what he owes her.
The sun is losing its luster. It’s late afternoon. Next will be nighttime.
The only thing is that it’s too bad about Nico. Because I did, I promised her I would protect her until one or both of us were dead. She was drunk and I was fifteen, but I promised her and I meant what I said. I tell her I’m sorry, in my mind somewhere. If there is anyone that I can send a telepathic message to, it’s my sister, and I let my mind go blank and launch it into the air, Nico, my dear, I am sorry.
I open my eyes and see my watch without meaning to. It’s 5:13. Approximately six and a half hours since impact, since the bullet tore the hole into my biceps.
I haven’t heard from Houdini in a long time. Perhaps he decided to abrogate our contract, escaped into the woods, evolved into a sea dog or a wolf. Good for him. I reach up to my face as if to make sure it’s still there. It’s dirty. Cragged. Lined in a way I don’t remember. The edges of my mustache are growing in weird, all fuzzy and uneven like a disintegrating coastline. I hate that.