Possession (41 page)

Duane would be proud of her.

She kept no track of time. She thought it might be March. Sometimes she looked at her hands to see if they had blue veins and wrinkles, thinking she might have grown old and not known it. They looked smooth and taut, and they had small white lines where her scratches had healed.

She could not remember when she had last had a period. She didn't think of her body except to hope that it was

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dying. When her breasts seemed heavier and when the nipples grew tender, she thought that it must be because she had been in bed so long that she had crushed her breasts into the mattress and irritated them.

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On the few occasions when Mark Nelson arrived at the jail to talk with him, Sam was led past the single clear window prisoners ever had access to. He was startled to look down upon Wenatchee and see that the season had changed, the old trees lining the courthouse lawn gone golden and russet now, the light slanted differently, hurting his eyes. He hungered to be one of the vagrants who drowsed in the midday glow that turned the fading grass bright again, a dozen of them lounging on the benches below and desultorily watching those who had business in the courthouse. He had always felt sorry for bums before because they seemed to have no purpose and no joy—but he envied them now. They were free. He was not—nor was he likely to be. The chance that he might walk away from the tower that held him captive seemed more and more remote. Whatever Nelson did on his behalf was done with excruciating slowness and with veiled petulance. He had not gone down to Natchitat and contacted Fletch until the first week in October, and when he came back with the crime lab reports, he looked grim.

"Here're your reports, but I can't see where they'll help us. And I might as well tell you that Moutscher's got into them too. Your little friend got intimidated by your under-sheriff. The lab sent a follow-up letter about something; it came in on Fletcher's day off. Fewell saw it and started sniffing around. Fletcher had to turn the stuff over to him— he made copies first."

"That was considerate."

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"Look, Sam. His job was on the line. That little man was scared. It took a lot for him to sneak copies out."

Sam sighed. "I guess you're right. Let's see what you got."

Nelson handed over a thin stack of white sheets, the printed material barely readable. The copy machine wasn't very good.

"Blood samples. Lindstrom's blood was O positive. The blood on all the clothing samples was O positive. A small sample found on the leaves was from a human, AB negative."

"That's what Demich was. Right?"

"Yeah. But she said he was wounded in the fight with the bear. . ."

"There was no bear!"

"All right. She said his arm was hurt when he came back for her. So it fits with their theory that he was wounded and he bled some."

"Where's your animal blood? She says he told her he knifed the bear. Where's your bear blood? That big hero said he spilled bear blood, and there isn't any, is there?"

"No."

"What's the timetable on the maggots?"

Davis thumbed through the thin sheets. "Here. Life-cycle projection is eggs were laid six days before autopsy."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Just like she said. Lindstrom died either Sunday or early Monday. Just corroborates what the prosecution says again."

"Danny's fingernail scrapings? What's the poop on those?"

"That's kind of interesting."

"What?"

"Epidermis . . . human. Traces of AB negative, not enough blood to reduce to enzyme characteristics . . ."

"There! Try to tell me there were twenty-seven guys up there with AB

negative blood—twenty-seven guys who got scratched in a fight. You know how rare that blood is? Maybe 5 to 7 percent of the population. If Demich was

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trying to help Danny, how come Danny scratched him deep enough to take off a layer of skin?"

"You're reaching. You know what the state will do with that? They'll paint a picture of two guys fighting off a bear, arms and legs all entangled, say Lindstrom was hitting out at the grizzly and Demich got in the way."

"Let's see the rest of that." Sam reached for the remaining blurred copies and flipped through them. He paused finally and looked up triumphantly at Nelson.

"Got him! Try to explain this away. Three cigarette butts. Benson and Hedges. Found—/ found them beside Danny's body. Saliva traces from an AB negative secretor. Danny never smoked cigarettes, and he sure as hell didn't puff away on one while he was fighting your mythical grizzly. Besides he's O—not AB negative. So you got your hero—hurrying back to save the damsel in the tree. Only he lets her stay there scared to death while he has him three cigarettes. He's done what he set out to do. He's stabbed Danny—killed him—and he wants her good and scared; so he takes his time. He sits there and he has him several smokes. He's so damned terrified of that bear coming back and he waits around and smokes?

No way."

"That is kind of peculiar. It might be of some help."

"Some? It gives you the whole picture."

"I don't know."

"Well then, what can you do about her testimony? How come she remembers so clearly what she couldn't have seen? She doesn't remember. She's lying."

"It would seem so, but she's convincing everybody."

"Why don't you go on down to Natchitat and talk to her?"

"I tried, but her mother won't let anybody close to her, and her doctor says she can't talk to me."

"So every door we knock on gets slammed in our faces— and you won't pound to get let in?"

'For the moment. It won't look too good if we push a sick woman."

"I'm going to trial the week after Thanksgiving. You 309

remember that? I'd like to go in there with more than three cigarette butts and my good reputation which ain't so shiny anymore. Did Fletch find anything in the FIR's in Natchitat—anything that shows Demich was down there? They had to have known each other before. I can't believe she'd lie down so easy for a stranger. She wasn't that kind of woman."

"Maybe you didn't know her."

"If there's anything I know, it's women. I may not have been so good at keeping a relationship going with one myself, but I understand them. Something's hinky. She didn't chippy on Danny—at least almost until the last, if she did. They were arguing some before they took off."

"About what?"

"It doesn't seem to matter now. If it looks like it might, I'll tell you. I don't want to have to unless it's absolutely necessary."

"You don't owe her anything, for God's sake—and it won't matter to him anymore."

"It does to me."

"Anybody ever tell you you had a self-destructive streak?"

"Often." Sam stood up and signaled to the jail guard watching through the small window in the door. "I'll take these sheets if you don't mind. You can come get them in a day or two. It'll give you time to work your case load without thinking about me."

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Sometime in the night a revelation came to Joanne, wrenching her out of sleep violently. It was a truth so awful that she could not share it with anyone. As reality rushed back, she wished that she had remained mad.

She remembered the red man.

His name was Duane. His eyes were green and smoldering and they had no bottom to them at all and they never

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blinked. He was the worst thing ... yes ... thing—not person—she had ever known. She had been so terribly afraid of him.

She gagged and the rest of the memory came tumbling out of her brain like vomit from her throat. Unstoppable and putrid. She was not imagining this. My God. Ohmy-God. She had let him touch her. No—not just touch her. She had allowed him into her body with his penis and his fingers and his tongue. Wait, that was a lie she was telling herself. Not just allowed him. She had begged him to do it. All soft, she had been, and burning for him. It had happened. She did not know why. Her skin crawled, remembering, and she looked to see if her flesh was truly black and scaled from his touch. It felt so defiled. The red man. The hideous, disgusting red man.

Shame rolled over her and she was consumed by it. She had crept to him on her knees and her belly and asked him to do those things to her. Worse. It kept getting worse, no matter how hard she tried to stop remembering. She had done things to him too.

She needed to scream, but she dared not do that. She shuddered and lifted her shaking hands to her mouth so that she would make no sound. She forced herself to breathe slowly. She remembered hating him. And she remembered wanting to kill him. She had tried to kill him and failed because she was a coward. She remembered terror and revulsion. But she could not grasp why she had come to accept him and desire him ... lust for him.

It was incomprehensible, and it was too much for her to face without going crazy again. Crazy was safer than where she was now, but she could not guarantee where she would go if she slipped back. It could be worse. If there was more to remember, she did not want to know. She switched on the bedside light and saw that her room was the same. She paced quietly, afraid of waking her mother. When she was exhausted, she read and when she could not read any longer, she counted the holes in the ceiling tile and prayed—although she did not deserve to be heard by a Higher Presence.

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And then she slept, and her deepest dreams burst forth full-blown with horror. Danny. Danny came back to her, his hands held out, his face so sweet and good, and so full of shock at her betrayal. Danny was mute. She begged him to shout at her and damn her with his rage, but he would not. He only stared at her beseechingly and his dead lips mouthed "Why?"

She didn't know why. She tried to tell him that and woke saying it aloud. But he would not listen.

She had pictured Danny dead. She had imagined him injured so she could care for him. And then he was dead.

In this bed, to turn herself on, she had done it. And she had killed him.

And then she had clung to another man, had rolled and rutted with a stranger when Danny was scarcely cold. When Danny was not even buried. It was so awful because she didn't know where Danny was now, or if he was buried at all. She could not ask, because she could not tell. If anyone knew... If anyone ever found out what she was, what she had done ... She could not tell.

She had lied to everyone. She was a bad woman, a worthless woman, a whore, and a liar.

When the truth came, it was demanding, sucking up every particle of knowledge that she had buried within herself. She prayed for dawn to come but the night hours stretched and widened.

She had refused to acknowledge something else too—her nausea, and the darkening nipples that ached like boils. She crept into the bathroom and flipped the calendar back and found no mark after the middle of August. Even though she had no idea what month it was now, she knew it was not August. She hadn't bled at all, not even a spotting. What a cruel practical joke God had played on her.

She had no clue whose child it was. If it was Danny's baby, she did not deserve it. She had betrayed him in as many ways as a woman could, and she would surely betray his child, come to a day when it would ask about its father and look at her with clear, trusting eyes—Danny's eyes. If it

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was his, then part of the devil—a fetal demon—even now pulled her blood into itself. She did not want it; she would not bear it, and she would not suckle it. She would dash out its brains before she would raise the child of the red man. She would run. That would jar it loose from her. She would run until her heart began to falter, and take her blood away from the monster inside, pound and pound with her feet until it could no longer cling to her womb.

When they woke in the morning and brought her her pills and her breakfast, she did not let them know what she had remembered. They were fooled and thought that she was better because she said she wanted to get dressed and come out into the other rooms and be with them. She could no longer bear to be alone.

The days were shorter than the nights, and she bought time, day by day, allowing herself more of it when she truly wanted none of it. She sat with Sonia while her mother taught—or rushed to find something to can, paring and dicing and blanching to keep her hands from shaking. She sat with her mother through the evenings and she did not scream out loud. She let them take her to see Doc because she had no more excuses, but she lied and gave false dates of periods that had never been. She let him examine her and asked no questions about what he found. When he tried to talk with her, she turned away and said, "I think perhaps I would not like to talk about anything until next week." She saw something in his face, and then it was quickly replaced by a professional mask. He knew about the fetus; he had to know—but he said nothing.

There seemed to be something about her that stopped them all from confronting her, as if they expected that she would fly into a thousand fragments if they pushed her too far. They did not know that she was leaden, too diminished and tight to explode. She saw that people were born with a certain portion of hope that belonged to them. Life took hope and goodness away like cupfuls of flour from a bin. If YOU were lucky, you still had some left when you were old. If 313

you weren't, there was no reason to go on after your bin was empty. There was no way to replace hope. When it was gone, it was gone—and her luck had dwindled to a thin layer of white, so few grains that no amount of yeast could make it double and redouble again. A breeze could blow it away.

She had harmed Sam, but he was strong. She had no strength or courage left to save him. She wished that she could, but it always came down to the fact that she could not tell. She could not tell.

It was the last thought she held before she finally slept from sheer exhaustion. The bad dreams came immediately, and she woke with the same terrible mazes to be worked through until she came to the final question. And knew not what the solution was.

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Sam heard footsteps approaching, and then the face of Noteboom, the day shift jailer, loomed beyond the bars of his cell.