The Purveyor, page 4
part #2 of Ivers & Wilson Series
Patrick unfolded the letter and read it silently. Then he sighed and nodded.
“She’s dead!” Helen’s voice was shrill.
“I know.”
“Did you know before now?”
“No, but…yes.” Patrick put his arm around Helen’s shoulder. She stiffened, but he pulled her closer, closing his other arm around her. “I didn’t know, but when we didn’t hear from her…I knew.” He reached into his cargo pocket. “I brought your cigarettes,” he said producing the pack. He even held the lighter for her. She smoked until the heaving in her chest subsided.
“I have to call Terri. He’ll be able to find out what happened to her. I have to know. I did this to her,” Helen said. “She needed me, and somehow I didn’t know it. I couldn’t reach her.”
Patrick nodded again, but it wasn’t a yes. “Adair’s always had problems,” he said finally. His voice held none of its usual jovial lisp. “You only knew Adair for a little while. I loved her too. Shit. But there was never a time when I didn’t think this would happen eventually. Adair’s always been in trouble. You haven’t seen that, because that time at Pittock, before Marshal Drummond, that was the best time of her life. That was the happiest and strongest she had ever been, but she had a lot of problems, and people like you and me, we couldn’t help her.” He took her hand. “Listen to me, Helen. Don’t think that you could have saved her.”
From the diary of Charity Kimball
I remember.
We were seven years old and running with a shotgun clutched in my sister’s hand.
“Do you want to eat venison again?” Mother called after our protests.
We didn’t like shooting rabbits even though Mother cooked them with acorns and the house smelled of stew and woods, and the dogs played with the pelts. Prudence always loved the dogs, especially the gray giant named Blue that Daddy rescued from the fights because he said Blue had Christian eyes.
So we ran down the mountain, our arms spread wide, the shotgun in Prudence’s hand, the bullets in my left pocket. It was February and the air was cold, but I didn’t feel it because I had Prudence. And we ran, laughing and stumbling, and it was like our arms were laced around each other’s waists, closer than lovers, although we did not know that word yet.
Then Prudence stopped.
“Charity, there!” she said.
She saw a rabbit. I thought it was too far, but Prudence said I was the best shot in the fold. We wedged the rifle against her shoulder. She eyed the scope. I steadied the barrel with my hand. She rested her index finger beside the trigger. I braced for the explosion that always frightened me, although Prudence said it was like God coughing, and we should never be afraid of anything that came from God. Even the cold, or the coyotes howling, or the dark look that got into Blue’s eyes sometimes. Not even the squall of blood and entrails when we hit a rabbit.
“God provides for the lilies of the field,” Prudence said as she scooped up the animal and put it in the bag Mother gave us. “He provides. But we can’t wait for him to chew our food for us.”
I knew Prudence had learned that from Mother. It bothered me that she recited it so quickly. But then, we were seven. Everything was recitation.
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A moment later, Prudence pulled us up short. She eyed another rabbit on the horizon. She cocked the rifle. Then she stopped. I was waiting for the blast.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Shoot.”
“No,” Prudence said. “See?”
She moved forward, drawing me with her. When we got close enough for me to see, I saw that, along with its two hind legs and two front legs and its head, there was another, smaller head. That head had no ears, but it had brown eyes that looked at us in fear.
“Just shoot it,” I squealed.
“Shut up,” Prudence said. Then she reached over and did something she had never done before. She pinched me, hard on my upper arm where only I could feel it. She pinched with her nails until I looked for blood to come through my jacket, even though our plaid coats were thick.
I started to cry, and Prudence looked at me sideways. We could never really face each other, and I was aware of that suddenly, for the first time.
“What is it?” I asked, afraid, feeling that the rabbit was more than a rabbit. It was like in church when Pastor would read us stories from the Bible. He told us that they meant more than they meant, and that there were no good stories, except the stories that pointed to God. “Is this a story that points to God?” I whispered.
“Yes,” Prudence said and turned so quickly, I felt our pelvic bones cry out in pain as her torso shifted away from mine.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Home.”
“Without the rabbit?”
“Without that rabbit.”
Chapter Six
From her seat on a bale of hay, Adair watched Cecelia as she leaned back and forth in the saddle of Shen Yun, a massive black Andalusian stallion, testing the saddle’s give. Back at the estate, Montague and Cyrus were at work in the large hall they referred to as the board room. Another merger. A real estate deal gone sour.
It’s wrong. For the thousandth time Adair remembered the seconds she had spent at the edge of Wyatt’s Bluff and wished that she had jumped. It’s wrong. The familiar pain ground away at her spine.
“Well, Merrill?” Cecelia asked. “Are you coming?”
Cecelia’s dark hair cascaded out from beneath her riding helmet. In one gloved hand she held the reigns; in the other she gripped a riding crop, tapping the leather tip against her boot.
Slowly, Adair mounted Fête d’Or, a small, uncharacteristically docile Arabian.
“I’m beginning to think you don’t like me,” Cecelia said.
Adair let her eyes glide up Cecelia’s leg. Her riding pants showcased her lush body. I hate you. Adair steadied herself on Fête d’Or’s back. The horse whinnied. Adair stroked its silver-gray mane. “Come on,” she said.
They rode for thirty minutes, climbing steadily toward Wyatt’s Bluff. When they reached the familiar spot, Cecelia and Shen Yun veered off the path and into the forest, now shrouded in a canopy of maple, birch, and ash. Adair followed her into a little clearing. When they were hidden from the bluff, Cecelia rose off her saddle, and struck Adair across the shoulder with her riding crop.
Adair sighed. The blow was not enough to dispel the pain that ground into her bones, but there would be a moment when the pain of Cecelia’s crop would release her from all other suffering, she knew. She dismounted, tossing her shirt to the ground, waiting for Cecelia’s crop to bite her bare skin.
The ritual was familiar to both of them.
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Cecelia had come to her the day she road Naples Peach to the edge of Wyatt’s Bluff. Adair had tied the reigns and then sent the horse home with a kiss on its nose and swat to its massive haunch. Below, the valley was thawing, patches of green broke through the snow. A red barn glistened like a tiny train-set replica.
She remembered clamoring up these hills as a child, her long hair flying behind her, her clothes covered in dirt and smelling of leaves. She had licked the stamens of wild honeysuckle and drank creek water. She remembered taking her college girlfriend, Soledad, to the bluff. She remembered Soledad in her brightly striped sweaters, knit by a Mexican grandmother who could not fathom why anyone would leave the barrios of LA. As she stood on the bluff, she remembered Helen’s body, and how she had dreamed of taking her hiking in the forest surrounding the estate. She had had so many dreams.
Then she had lifted her boot to take the last step off the bluff, but she had hesitated and in that moment, Cecelia had found her, alerted by the scraps of her suicide note emptied from the trash by a conscientious maid. In the distance, a helicopter roared.
Cecelia came toward her with outstretched hands. “You can’t do this, Merrill. We’ll find a way. Remember when your mother died? You thought it was the end, but it wasn’t.” Cecelia squinted into the light of the valley.
“That was different,” Adair said. Her voice sounded far away, as though she was already falling.
“No. It wasn’t. You were starving yourself because you thought you couldn’t bear the pain, but you did. I helped you.”
Adair remembered. “I don’t want that anymore.”
“I know.” Cecelia stepped closer. She was not wearing the violent lipstick, and her dark hair was pulled back into a simple bun. “I know none of this is what you want, but you don’t want to die.”
The buzz of the helicopter drew closer. Cecelia pulled a two-way phone out of the inner pocket of her riding jacket. “Get back, Cyrus,” she barked. “I’ve got her. Just give me a minute.”
Cecelia had almost reached her. Adair knew she had only a second in which to fall backwards into the valley, and she knew simultaneously that it was too late. Cecelia grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the edge and into the forest. Beneath one of the evergreen pines, Cecelia released her. “On your knees!”
The crop had struck Adair’s back. Almost without volition she had slipped out of her coat and lifted her shirt. She had wept as the pain of Cecelia’s crop released her from the pain of her illness.
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Now Cecelia removed the leather straps from the saddle pouch. Stripped naked, Adair lay down. Cecelia bound one strap around Adair’s wrists. She secured it to a maple sapling. She repeated the process with Adair’s ankles, pulling the second strap tight. Adair’s back arched. Her arms strained. It was too tight. Her shoulders burned. But that was the point. It was a knowable pain.
Cecelia stood above her, straddling her, fully clothed, her crop raised. Adair felt her skin burn where the leather connected. “Again,” she whispered. “Harder.”
The crop struck her arms, her thighs, her breasts.
“Do you deserve it?” Cecelia demanded.
The leather snapped again.
“Yes.” Adair closed her eyes, the leafy canopy above her disappearing. When she opened her eyes, Cecelia was naked except for an enormous, handcrafted leather dildo that hung off her hips, as long and black as the stallion’s penis. Adair took a deep breath, waiting.
Behind Cecelia’s head, the golden maple leaves sparkled. Every leaf was lit with sunlight. They sung with green, with life, with spring. Some part of Adair’s mind—the woman she had once been—recognized that. Then the thought disappeared.
Cecelia’s hips pressed down. The leather straps bit Adair’s wrists. Adair felt the pressure of Cecelia’s cock stretching the walls of her dry sex. The saplings bent.
“Yes.” Cecelia clamped her hands on Adair’s hipbones, rocking back and forth. “Oh!”
For a moment, with Cecelia pressing her down into the sharp rocks, Adair felt a curtain lift, as though the real pain finally dispelled the phantom agonies that tore her apart without leaving any mark. It was not release. She never came with Cecelia. But for a second she could feel the gold in the leaves above her. It’s wrong, she thought. Cyrus, I’m sorry.
Cecelia climaxed. Then she rose. “I’ve rented us a flat,” she said conversationally, staring down at Adair. “It’s rather a squalid little place, horribly middle-class, but it’ll do.”
Adair tried to remember the glimpse of gold she had seen as the rocks cut her back, but the scene was nothing more than a paper cutout from a faded calendar page. “No,” she said, offering no further explanation.
“If this is about Cyrus, you’re being childish.” Cecelia planted her hands on her hips, the dildo still hanging erect in the open air. “I’m not cheating on him any less because you insist on getting moss in your hair. Not that I mind, he’s your brother. It’s your conscience.”
Adair closed her eyes. She did not have the energy to explain to Cecelia that she wanted to stay near the edge. She never wanted the plunge to be too far, that even as she bared her body, she was planning her descent.
“What will we do in the winter?” Cecelia asked. Cecelia bent down and kissed Adair on the lips. She loosened the ties at Adair’s wrists.
Adair sat up, rubbing the marks on her skin, while Cecelia untied her ankles. “I won’t do this in the winter.”
“No!” Cecelia’s eyes grew dark and hot. “I won’t let you leave me.”
Adair stood, dusted the leaves off her naked body. “I’ve already left, Cecelia.” She put on her shirt. For a moment, she thought she would run for the edge and leap, like a child leaping into a pool, but her knees ached and her vision clouded. “I think you know that.” Adair pulled on her pants, then sat for a moment with her head between her knees, waiting for the dizziness to pass.
Cecelia was silent for a long time. Finally she said, “Why is that, Merrill?”
Merrill. The family name.
“What?” Adair asked wearily.
“Why do I love you, and you never love me back?”
“You love this.” Adair gestured to the clearing. “That’s all.”
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That night, Adair took the tiny Seacamp pistol out of her safe and cleaned it with a cloth and bottle of Ballistol. She tried to catch the familiar smell of the gun oil, but the Texidol had begun to dull even her sense of smell. The only thing that was familiar was the feel of the gun, 13.25 ounces fully loaded. She remembered Cyrus’s lesson. At close range, one never needed a large gun.
From the diary of Charity Kimball
There was a night when we were still very young. It is the last night I remember her being stronger than me. First, we prayed with Mother and Daddy and Billy, and afterward we said our own prayers. Then Prudence made me get out of bed. She told me to take off our night gown.
“But that’s a sin,” I whispered.
“Nothing that God makes is a sin.”
So I pulled off my half of the gown and she pulled off hers, and we stood in front of great-grandma’s mirror, and I saw it for the first time. I don’t know how I could not have seen it before, but I hadn’t.
“Do you know what Billy looks like?” Prudence asked me.
“No.”
“Do you know what Mother and Daddy look like?”
I said “no,” although of course I did know what they looked like with their clothes on, but that was not what Prudence was asking.
“Do you see it?” she asked, looking into the mirror.
“Because we have our arms around each other,” I said. It was part of a story Mother had told us. “We love each other so much that we always have our arms around each other, forever and ever.”
“Then let go.” Prudence’s voice was cold.
“I can’t.” I felt the first tears. I pulled away a little bit, but of course, I could not pull away from Prudence, not then, not ever.
“It’s God’s will,” Prudence said, and she pulled the gown back over her head.
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As I grew, I learned about cities. They are like great congregations of people who live without God. And I learned about doctors. I dreamed of going to a city where I could kill her, and they would excise her from my body. I would lose her arm. I would limp unbalanced forever. I would fall out of God’s love. But I would be free!
They say we were made in the image of God’s inseparable love. We are bound to each other as we are bound to God. That is what Prudence believes. But I think it is because we are so different from everyone, so lonely. That is how we are like God. I feel His loneliness like the stars. We are one. She is pure light, and I am pure darkness.
Chapter Seven
Helen Ivers watched the overgrown bushes that lined Patrick’s yard. Fireflies blinked on and off in the boxwood. Behind that, in the empty lot that bordered his property, her sister Eliza—dead now three years—shuffled and twisted, not an object but an intention, her voice a vibration in Helen’s bones.
At her side, seated in a matching plastic lawn chair, Patrick raised a can of beer. “Cheers,” he said, waiting.
Helen said nothing.
“Do you see her?” he asked.
“No.”
Eliza reappeared, closer this time, and then disappeared faster than a blink and as intimate. In the pocket of her blazer, Helen’s phone rang with a shrill, standard-issue ringtone. She had not silenced it since she called her friend Terri two weeks earlier. Now she froze when she saw his name on the screen. “I’m sorry,” she said to Patrick. She stood and walked to the end of Patrick’s gravel driveway. The sky was clear but the moon had not risen yet, and it was very dark. Helen accepted the call. “Terri?” she whispered. She could hear Terri sigh on the other end of the phone.
“I looked into your friend Adair, like you asked.”
Helen held her breath. He was bracing her for the news.
“I looked up death records in New Hampshire and the other forty-nine. I put my best intern on it.”
“And?”
“These systems aren’t perfect, Helen.”
“She’s really dead.”
Terri hesitated.
Helen glanced back at Patrick who remained seated in his plastic lawn chair, although his whole body was focused on her. In the house behind them, the radio played Bruce Springsteen. Patrick’s husband, David, called after their adopted niece. The child laughed.
Helen turned away. She did not want Patrick to see her when Terri delivered the news. A day. A place. A method. Suddenly she couldn’t bear the image of Adair’s cold body. She didn’t want to know. She wasn’t sure why she had called Terri and begged him to discover the details. “Closure,” her therapist would have called it, but she had stopped seeing Irene Thompson-Hasseldorf the day she received Adair’s letter.
