The Murder in Skoghall (Illustrated) (The Skoghall Mystery Series Book 1) (40 page)

“I…I don’t know. Carl! Carl! It’s Bonnie. It’s me.”

He placed the tip of a nail against the bottom of Bonnie’s foot. She kicked at him and landed a blow to his head. Carl reeled away from the bed, stumbling and regaining his balance just short of crashing into the wall. He lunged at her. Bonnie thrashed her entire body, twisting against the belt, kicking both legs wildly. Carl climbed onto the bed and knelt on her, one knee pinning her thighs, the other across her shins. She writhed beneath his weight, grunting with the strain, repeating his name in her own voice, the voice of his sweetheart, but Carl focused solely on holding the nail against her foot. She felt the metal tip tracing a zigzagging line across her sole as she squirmed, and then Carl brought the hammer down. The first blow smashed the bone at the base of her big toe, but the second hit the nail’s head and drove it into her flesh.

Bonnie thrust her face into the bedding and screamed into the comforter. She kicked against Carl’s weight, but he worked fast to take a second nail from between his teeth and hold it to her other foot. Again he drove it in, she bit her lower lip and sobbed into the bedding as the nail pierced her flesh. Carl hammered in the third nail. The pain was too much. Bonnie couldn’t breathe. A strange sensation of heat exploded like a fireworks throughout her body. When her vision cleared, Carl was above her, leering down into her face.

“This is the last time I’m going to ask you this.” His voice was soft, almost gentle, almost patient. “Where are the guns?”

“I…” Bonnie gulped. It took her entire will, the will of a mother protecting her child, to answer him. “I will…show…you.” She panted through the effort of holding so much pain at the distance necessary to remain conscious, able to think, to speak.

Carl flipped the hammer over and leaned over her feet like someone working on an old board. Casually, he used the prongs to rip the nails back out of her flesh. Bonnie gulped down air, her face burning red with the intensity of each nail withdrawn, her teeth biting into her lip. He tossed the hammer and nails onto the bed and turned to look around the room, his gaze landing on the orange sash on the floor.

He picked it up and put it around Bonnie’s neck, jerking her head up to loop it behind her, then letting her head drop again. He twisted the ends of the sash together, tightening it against her neck, and freed the belt from the headboard. Carl grabbed the sash in both hands and gave it an extra twist. Bonnie gagged as he dragged her off the bed and yanked her onto her bleeding feet. “Show me,” he insisted with a shove forward and tug backward, each movement another punch to her neck. Bonnie brought her hands to her throat, but her wrists were so tightly bound that she couldn’t get hold of the sash.

She pointed with her hands toward the door. If she showed him something he wanted, maybe he would leave. His knuckles punched into the back of her neck as he jerked her forward. Bonnie took a step and her knees buckled. The pain of the holes in her feet was so intense she thought was going to throw up or pass out.
Not allowed, Bonnie Mae Sykes
, she told herself.
Not allowed
. She curled her toes under to try and lift some of her foot above the floor, to keep the pressure of walking off the wounds, and she hobbled into the hallway and over to the staircase.

With her hands grasping awkwardly at the banister, Carl pushing and pulling against her throat, causing her to gag every other troubled attempt to get air, she made her way downstairs. Her thoughts, though not even formed into words, were a prayer. If the prayers of the desperate carry any more weight than the prayers of the calm, then Bonnie’s supplication weighed several tons. And if one believed in free will for all, then Carl’s will would have to be measured against Bonnie’s. The notion gave new meaning to a battle of wills, and if Bonnie had one will that was stronger than another, it was the will to protect her child.

They made their way out past the sugar maple to the smokehouse. Bonnie’s legs kept buckling beneath her and each time she slackened and dropped toward the ground, Carl yanked upward on the sash, tightening it around her throat like a tourniquet. By the time they reached the smokehouse, Bonnie could not speak. She thrust her bound hands in the direction of the doorway and Carl reached around her to pull it open.

The moon hung large and bright in the sky, only a day shy of the full moon, its face the only witness to Bonnie’s plight. The crickets chirred in the tall grasses at the edge of the yard where it became forest. Nearby, an owl hooted, its final note trailing off sorrowfully. Carl looked over Bonnie’s small shoulder and into the smokehouse. Leaning against the curved brick wall were a couple of rakes, a hoe, some shovels, hand tools, and her pruning shears. At the back, near the old stove, she kept a stack of extra flower pots and some bags of mulch.

“See? Was that so hard?” Carl snarled into her ear, his breath moving her hair against her neck. “You stupid bitch. I knew you had the guns. I knew it.” He jerked hard on the sash and twisted its ends even tighter, shrinking the loop around her throat, choking her until Bonnie could not make a sound or take a breath. Carl raised his voice to a shout as her legs folded beneath her. “Stupid bitch!”

As Bonnie lost consciousness, she heard her son’s cry from inside the house. Her one impulse was to comfort him.

Carl let the gook drop to the ground and stepped over her body into the hut. He gathered up all of the weapons inside and then found a canvas tarp at the back under some kimchi jars and dirty sacks of rice. He laid it out and worked quickly to wrap the weapons inside. There were too many for him to carry all the way back to base, but he could hide them where the VC wouldn’t know to look, then he could come back later with some men and recover the cache. Part of him wondered at how easy it had been to torture the woman.
Torture
. That was the only word for it, if he was honest. What else would you call driving nails into someone’s feet? She was yellow. She was them. He was us. Not that it mattered she was yellow. In a different war she would have been a Kraut or a Ruski or something else altogether. It only mattered that she was them and he was us. That was what made him right. But right or not, the red and black was everywhere, seeping, seeping. He could hardly sleep, could hardly eat. The Kamikaze. Yeah, he was willing to do what the others weren’t. They hadn’t seen as much as he had. Not yet. The weapons clattered together heavily when he tossed them onto the tarp. There was a lot to move. It would take him at least an hour to bury them. He wondered how long he had before her friends came back. There were always more. A village was never empty for long. He kept looking over his shoulder while he worked. When the hut was cleaned out, he looked at the crumpled woman on the ground. What to do with her? She would make a nice little message to the other VC sympathizers, a reminder of who was right and who was mighty. A pole spanned the narrow hut over his head. He went outside and reached under the woman’s armpits and around her chest. He grunted as he lifted her and pulled, dragging her heavy, limp form over the threshold into the hut. He had to drop her inside and pant to recover his breath. It always amazed him how much deadweight weighed, like a body increased in density once the spirit left. And what about him? He was still alive, but his spirit had already gone. How dense was he? He grabbed her again and hefted her up, bracing the body against his chest, then with one hand threw the sash over the beam above his head. He grabbed the dangling ends, caught them in both hands, and hoisted her with a grunt. The gook moved, swaying against her tether while he tied it off. When he had the sash secured, he looked at his handiwork. She hung limply in the middle of the hut, her arms dangling, her legs buckled beneath her with the feet awkwardly behind the hips, resting on the dirt floor. Something nasty trickled down her leg. She smelled like shit, but then everything smelled like shit in Nam. Carl picked up the load of guns and headed into the jungle. At the edge of the trees, he paused to gaze back up at the moon. It was unbelievable that the same moon shone on the entire planet. Here. Wisconsin. Same goddamn moon.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Jess was dead. She had no other way to explain the sensation of being without her body. Carl picked her up off the ground, hefting her with his arms looped around her chest. He grunted and half-swung, half-dragged her into the smokehouse. Jess wanted to tell him to take it easy on her, yet at the same time, she didn’t really care. Her body seemed a thing already discarded. Carl got the orange sash up and over the pole. He pulled it to himself, bending his knees and using his bodyweight to counter hers. The body lifted, those loose limbs dangling like a puppet’s empty form. Jess saw a trickle of something down the inside of her leg. It was curious, how invested she had been—how invested everyone was—in the nondisclosure as it were, of all things bodily and natural. Well, not all things. Brushing the teeth was all right. And manicures were actually social. But anything to do with digestion…yes, it was a curious sort of caring. Jess only felt a sort of wonder for the fact that
that
lump of flesh had been her vehicle for twenty-five years, for all those glorious experiences. Carl was industrious in his efforts to tie off the sash. It really was a remarkable amount of effort. Jess turned away from them, Carl and her body. She had somewhere to be. Somewhere…

She stepped outside the smokehouse and was caught by a sound. It felt like chords binding her heart. It terrified her and she felt herself trapped somewhere dark and still and neither here nor there.

Jess heard someone screaming. And then shouting. Shouting her name. Then she realized it was her screaming. She had never heard herself scream before. Not like this. She closed her mouth and the screaming stopped.
That’s better,
she thought. She felt less disoriented without the screaming. Beckett. She was inside the smokehouse. He was outside, banging on the door and shouting her name. Jess got to her feet awkwardly, grateful for the lantern over her head, and, holding the wall for support, pushed open the door to the smokehouse.

Rain blew in through the doorway, swept by a driving wind that carried Beckett in as well. He pulled the door shut behind him and grabbed Jess’s shoulders. “Are you all right?” he shouted over the storm. Jess was only just discerning that the sounds around her were not those of night crickets and that she was also soaking wet. “What the hell happened in here?” Beckett asked.

“I don’t know. I think…” She looked at him, looked into those blue eyes, searching for an anchor. “I think I died. Or I was with Bonnie when she died.”

Beckett pulled her to his chest and wrapped his arms around her. “Jessica…” He kissed the top of her head and held her tightly while thunder boomed and shook the earth. He took her by the shoulders and looked into her face. “I thought… I thought the worst.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I have to get out of here.”

Beckett took the lantern and grabbed the door handle. He paused to look at Jess. She nodded. He swung the door open and they rushed into the storm. It swallowed the light from the lantern and they kept their heads bent against the cool droplets pelting their faces as they ran for the house. The parched ground could not absorb this much water this fast, and mud sucked at their feet.

They reached the front door of the house, grateful for the shelter of the porch. Jess and Beckett paused to look back at their path. It was so dark, Jess could hardly make out the smokehouse. A bolt of lightning shot down from the sky with a white flash so bright it obliterated everything. The accompanying boom shook the ground, the house, and knocked Jess off her feet. For days, whenever Jess closed her eyes, she would see the blue-tinged impression of her sugar maple and the lightning bolt that set it on fire. As flames scorched the base of the tree, Shakti tore past Jess and leapt off the porch into the storm.

Jess glanced over her shoulder to see Beckett holding the front door open, a stunned look on his face. She scrambled to her feet. “Shakti!” she called as she ran past the burning tree.