What We Bury, page 25
part #4 of Call of the Crow Quartet Series
Another episode started, its peppy theme music filling the living room. It really did not fit the vibe. Cyrus turned the volume down. “He’ll be okay. If nothing else, he’s got Koffka—”
“Does he, though? He didn’t bring Koffka to court.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “Just that I’m worried. I texted Gretchen and Frida to see if they could check on him, but they haven’t replied. That was hours ago.”
As if on cue, her phone lit up. “It’s Frida!” she exclaimed, but her face fell when she opened it. “Oh.”
“What’s wrong?”
Andi turned the screen toward him. Cyrus stared at the photo of a beaming Gretchen, who was holding a tiny pink newborn, its face all squinched up. “They’re not at the farm. Their daughter just had her baby.”
“They just left him there? By himself?”
“I guess so.” A few more texts came in, and Andi paused to read them. “She says he promised to stay inside the cabin. The police are still staking it out, and Astro’s on guard dog duty. Apparently Naveed’s been in contact by text, but he messaged her a few hours ago to tell her his phone was dying and couldn’t find the charger, same as he told your dad.” She sighed deeply.
“We could ask the cops to check up on him,” Cyrus suggested.
“Yeah, but you know how he feels about the police. If they confronted him when he was… you know. That would probably push him over the edge.”
“Well, we don’t really have any choice, do we?”
“Oh, hold on, I know who to ask.” Andi’s thumbs got busy with her phone.
Cyrus halfheartedly watched the bakers prepping their signature dishes. When Andi paused, he prompted, “So? Who is it?”
“I’m talking to someone at the Crisis Text Line. Don’t worry, it’s all anonymous. They’re awesome, and—hold on.” She typed some more, then frowned.
“What did they say?”
“They can send medics out to the farm to make sure he’s okay. But that still feels risky to me.”
Cyrus’s stomach did a clumsy somersault. “True. That time last summer, it wasn’t until after I called the medics….” He couldn’t say the rest. His voice always failed him when he tried to talk about that night.
Andi exhaled slowly. “They can’t give us advice on what to do, but I really don’t think he should be alone right now. He needs to be with someone safe. Someone he trusts. Like us.”
“But we can’t….”
“Who else can, Cy?”
“You want to go to the farm. Seriously?”
“I don’t know. I think so. Yes.”
“Let me think.” Cyrus turned the show off. The screen went black. “Okay. You’re right, the cops and medics are almost guaranteed to set him off, so we can’t rely on them. And I’m, like, 100% positive Tara’s hiding out at Torsten’s lab in Tukwila. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Which means it should be safe for us to go to the farm. Especially since the police are staking it out. Not that our dads would agree, but… Baba’s zonked, he probably won’t be up for ages. And your dad said not to wait up. He might go out after he meets with the band.”
A flash of anger passed across Andi’s face. “Well, if he can go out, why can’t we? And this is way more important than some band meeting.”
By the time Andi had gotten dressed and they’d composed a vague note for their dads that included the number of Cyrus’s burner, the only phone they were bringing, dusk was falling. Cyrus pulled out of the parking garage, hopeful that they’d missed rush hour and would get there quickly, but traffic through downtown was at a standstill. They chugged through the gridlock as darkness fell. The wind lashed sheets of rain against the windows.
Finally, they pulled up in front of Gretchen and Frida’s small yellow house. There was a police car parked on the side of the road just before the driveway, but it looked empty.
Andi, who had been resting with her eyes closed, breathed out and ran her fingers through her hair. “It looks the same,” she said. “I haven’t been back here since… you know.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Cyrus said.
“Really? You haven’t come to visit him?”
“Nah. Haven’t had time. I think his cabin’s in the back, though. There’s a side road…”
Cyrus rolled slowly down the road, leaning forward to see through the windshield better. “It’s so dark out here—oh shit,” he swore as his car bottomed out. “Looks pretty rough ahead. Better walk from here, I guess.”
He parked. They pulled their hoods up as they walked along the road, briefly veering into the squishy grass to avoid a huge mud-pit, all the way to the little cabin at the edge of the woods. The porch light was on, their only beacon in the darkness. He kept expecting to hear Astro barking or see a police officer patrolling, but everything was silent and still. Andi had her keychain-pepper-spray at the ready, so Cyrus followed her lead and opened the pocketknife he’d taken from his dad’s jacket before they left.
Andi knocked on the door. No answer.
She jiggled the knob and knocked again. “Naveed, it’s me. Please open the door. Please. We need to know you’re okay.”
Still nothing.
They circled the perimeter. Andi tried to peer into the curtained windows. “I can’t see anything.” Her voice shook in frustration. “Should we… what should we do?”
Cyrus stumbled on a patch of uneven ground. He turned on his phone flashlight and looked where he’d stepped. It was strange, there was a muddy track through the grass, which was flattened in the middle as if…
As if something had been dragged along the ground. Something heavy.
Like. For example. A body.
He traced the track with his flashlight. It was continuous, unbroken, about a foot wide. And it led straight up the slope into the woods.
That was when they heard a distant sound. A frantic bark echoing through the trees, finding its way to them.
“Koffka.” Andi took off running up the slope toward the forest.
Good thing the cops were right out there on the road. Cyrus dialed 911 as he rushed behind her, following Andi into the dark woods.
37
Naveed
Thursday, June 2
NAVEED STAYED IN THE CORNER OF THE PIT, keeping his distance from Tara Snyder. She watched as he took his weapons out of his pocket, lining them all up on the muddy ground in front of him, as if preparing for surgery. He glanced at her and saw the red stain above her knee where Koffka had clamped her leg in his jaws. It made him dizzy, so he looked up. The clouds above him whipped by, revealing splotches of dark sky and the waning moon, thin as a clipped fingernail now. Glory of the moon, he thought, returning his gaze to the ground. He added the gun to the end of the lineup.
Then he walked over to her, behind her, scythe in hand, boots squelching in the mud. He heaved her into a sitting position, then passed the curved metal blade over her head, slowly, pulling it closer to her neck as it descended. He’d sharpened the blade, and it curved so beautifully around her, sickle blade under a sickle moon. Forget guns. Once the interrogation was over, this was how he would kill her. A proper execution.
But he wasn’t ready for that yet. “If you try to scream for help, the police are close by, they’re going to find you and haul your ass back to prison. I’m only taking this off so you can answer my questions,” he told her, keeping the blade against her neck, loosening the tie with his other hand and letting it fall away to the ground.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “They won’t come, I took care of that.”
Before he could even register what that meant, she continued, “I didn’t come here to hurt you. I just want to talk. Why don’t you put that thing down?”
He waited for the hatred to surge up, but it refused to come. He was back to numbness, even with her right in front of him. “No. I’m not letting you get away with what you did to my mother. You killed her. And now it’s my turn to kill you.”
“You’re not going to blame me for that, are you?” Her words sent a fault line racing across the icy numb. “She did it to herself, Naveed. Life is hard for everyone, you know, but some of us get back up when we’re pushed down. Some of us keep fighting and fighting even when it seems like all is lost. Others… well, others just give up.”
Naveed felt like he was on fire suddenly, like maybe fire had been hidden beneath the ice all this time, and it had finally burned through. He had to restrain himself from slicing her head off right then and there.
“Look, I know you don’t want to live either,” she went on. “I saw what you were doing with my gun. It feels good, holding something that powerful, doesn’t it? So let me help you. That’s what this is about, right? You want to die, you want to stop this cycle you’re stuck in, but you’re too scared to do it yourself.”
“What? No!” he yelled. “No. Stop this—just tell me. Where’s Roya?”
That shut her up. He was still behind her, but even though he knew he wouldn’t have gotten any clues from her face, he wished he could’ve seen her expression.
“Where is she?” he asked again.
Still, she said nothing. He removed the scythe from around her neck and walked over to his array of weapons. Now he could see her eyes, but they showed no fear. He took the small stick and returned behind her.
Her hands were pale and blood-starved. He held her index finger tight and jabbed the sharp stick deep underneath her fingernail. “Where is she? What did you do to her?”
She cried out, so he moved on to the next finger. “I won’t stop until you tell me,” he said.
“Please,” she said through clenched teeth. “This isn’t about Roya. Just give me a chance to explain.”
“Go right ahead.” He went in for another jab, but the drop of blood beading on the tip of her index finger stopped him. He had to look away while the world got fuzzy.
He was a terrible torturer.
Naveed stepped out from behind her and returned to his tools. Next was the obsidian blade, though he wasn’t eager to use it.
“You don’t care about dying,” Tara said. “That’s not what you’re afraid of. You’re afraid of being forgotten. You want to make your mark—you want your death to mean something. And I can make that happen, if you just help me with what I need.”
“Help? With what?” He felt like he was losing control of the conversation, but he had to know.
“You and me,” she said. “Strange that it had to be this way, but you and me are the only ones who can make this work. We can only do it together.” She didn’t seem to be feeling pain anymore. He had lost his upper hand, but still he listened. “I’m sure you know by now that many herbicides are potent carcinogens, and Compadre was no exception.”
“What are you saying?” It was like she’d reached a hand inside his chest and was shredding his lungs into tiny pieces.
“It’s only a matter of time before the cancer develops,” she said. “And I know you don’t care about saving yourself, but your sister was exposed, too. Cyrus, Andi, all of you. But I’m closing in on a cure. If you could help save them—and thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people with cancer, why wouldn’t you do it? That’s why I’m here, that’s what got me out, there’s a new path for both of us, a new life’s work. We’re so close, Naveed. And you can help. You’re the last piece of the puzzle.”
“You expect me to believe you have some sort of miraculous cancer cure, that I’m going to go back with you willingly, turn myself into your lab rat again? You. Are. Absolutely. Insane.” Naveed decided to skip the obsidian blade in favor of the scythe. He needed to get back on top of this.
She snorted. “Like you’re one to talk. Multiple psychiatric hospitalizations in the past year, trouble with the law, locked up in a mental institution for three months…. don’t act like you’re any saner than I am.”
He tried not to show any emotion, but those words cut deep. They also, he realized, gave him an opening to ask something else he wanted to know. “So that was Tim Schmidt’s whole deal?” Naveed asked. “You sent him to spy on me. At Englewood. The urgent care clinic. He kept asking me to release my medical records. I didn’t give him permission. But you got them anyway, didn’t you?”
“He knows how critical this project is,” Tara said. “And he knows that you’re an important part of it. I needed to monitor your labs, your records, and he knew how to get me access. If you come with me, I’ll tell you all about the project and how you fit into it. It doesn’t have to be like it was before. As long as you cooperate.”
Naveed tightened his grip on the scythe. “No. Just tell me where the lab is.”
“That isn’t how it works,” she said. “We go together or not at all.”
“Then I choose not at all.”
“Are you sure about that? You don’t care about helping Roya? Or Cyrus, or Andi? You’d rather be stubborn and—”
“Don’t you see where you are?” Naveed interrupted. “This is it, Tara. This is where you die.”
He dropped the scythe on the ground and seized her throat with both hands. He pushed her backwards until he was on top of her, pressing her further into the mud, she couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything because he was choking the air out of her, he was going to kill her, right here right now she was lying lying lying but but but—
Roya. What if the research project was real, and she had taken Roya and was experimenting on her in a secret lab somewhere? If he killed Tara, no one would ever know where Roya had gone.
So, at the last moment, when her lips had turned purple, he relented, and she made awful gasping noises while air rushed back into her lungs, awful because they meant she was alive; they meant he had spared her, which meant that she had won.
For now.
He slid off of her, but as he did he caught sight of her leg again, the one Koffka had attacked, the section of fabric that was soaked with her blood, and the sight of it brought him back to the barn at Englewood where he had found Roya, her leg crushed by the horses, the flames closing in, the thick smoke engulfing them—
The next thing he knew, he was face down in the mud. Why was he lying in the mud? Didn’t even matter. He wanted to go back to sleep. Sleep, so elusive; he’d just had a taste and didn’t want to let it go, but the skies had opened up in a downpour, fat raindrops hammering down on his head, and there was another sound, a strange one, like sawing, and Koffka barking in the distance.
He started to sit up, soaked to the bone, he had just been burning hot but he wasn’t anymore, he was shivering with cold, and this all felt very familiar, so he wasn’t surprised when he saw Tara there in the pit with him. But he was surprised when he realized what she was doing, that she’d managed to cut off her wrist bonds by scraping them against the scythe lying on the ground beside her—and just as he realized this, she lunged at him.
Her left hand dangled limply by her side—something was very wrong with her shoulder—but the force of her body knocked him back down, and she threw herself across him. Though she wasn’t able to restrain him completely, with only one hand in use and her ankles still tied, she pressed the heel of her palm against the base of his throat and leaned on it with all her weight.
Naveed gasped, but no air came through. None at all: she would make sure he never took another breath. She didn’t need blades or guns, no, her words and her hand were the only weapons she needed, and they had worked, that’s what was so disgusting, he was going to die in a muddy pit, wriggling and wet like a fish, her hand forcing his neck against the ground.
He tried to get out, he tried, growing increasingly frantic; he didn’t want to open his eyes because he didn’t want her face to be the last thing he saw, but then all he could feel was her hand, her hand on his throat, Maman’s hand down in the ravine, Maman’s hand holding the glass mug in his cabin, her hand ripping apart the sprouts at Sizdah Bedar and scattering them into the river, those sprouts that meant rebirth, a fresh start, the green things growing from dirt and decay.
With a force that surprised him, Naveed managed to whack Tara in the bad shoulder with his right fist.
She cried out in pain and relented just enough for him to get a breath in, a small one, it felt like the passageway had narrowed, his windpipe collapsing, but it was a breath just the same, and it gave him the strength to tear her hand away, knocking her off balance and allowing him to overpower her, and the next thing he knew he was free. He still gasped for breath and felt like he was going to pass out any second, darkness trying to close in, but he wouldn’t let it. He wouldn’t let her take this from him. For so long she had been controlling every part of his life, even in her absence, and he wanted it back.
He punched her in the shoulder again and she went down, howling. He could barely hear it through the pouring rain. He rolled her over so she was lying on her stomach, then picked up the scythe and sat on top of her, restraining her hands with his knees, and he pulled her head up by her fucking bun, which had come unfastened and was now a muddy ponytail, and he hooked the scythe around her throat. He’d find another way to save Roya, if she could be saved, but he couldn’t let Tara Snyder live any longer.
There was a strange sound, it was dry and rustly, like wind through reeds, like coughing, but not coughing, it was a happier sound, and it took a minute to realize that he was making the sound, he was laughing, he was about to separate Tara Snyder’s head from her body and he was giddy about it, and just as he realized this he heard his name coming from above.
He looked up. Andi and Cyrus stood at the edge of the pit. He supposed he should be relieved to see them, but he wasn’t, not at all. He was annoyed—no, furious—at being interrupted. As far as he could tell, they were horrified. Their identical expressions of shock distracted him just long enough for Tara Snyder to wriggle her right hand loose. He had no idea how it happened so fast, but the next thing he knew she was clawing at him, digging her sharp fingernails into the sensitive skin on the underside of his wrist, which made him reflexively relax his grip on the scythe, and then she was tackling his arm to the ground, taking advantage of his loss of balance by rolling out from under him, and though he kept his grip on her hair she had the scythe now, and the last thing he saw was Andi’s face, the terror in her eyes, and he noticed her lips were moving, like she was saying something, maybe his name, though he couldn’t hear anything anymore.
