The Taker-Taker 1 Read online

  We stood and watched from a hilltop overlooking the cemetery, Jonathan and I. We watched the mourners press around the dark, hollow plot. Somehow they had managed to excavate a grave site though the ground was beginning to freeze, and I could not help but wonder if it had been her father, Tobey, who had dug the grave. The mourners, specks of black against a white field far in the distance, shifted to and fro restlessly, as Pastor Gilbert pronounced words over the deceased. My face was tight, swollen from days of crying, but now, in Jonathan’s presence, no tears came. It felt surreal to be spying on Sophia’s funeral—I, who should be down there on my knees, begging Jeremiah for forgiveness, for I was responsible for his wife’s death as surely as if I’d pushed her into the river myself.

  Next to me, Jonathan stood silently. Snow began to fall at last, like the release of a long-pent-up tension, tiny flakes swirling on the cold air before landing on the dark wool of Jonathan’s greatcoat and in his hair.

  “I cannot believe she is gone,” he said, for the twentieth time that morning. “I can’t believe she took her life.”

  I choked on my words. Anything I could say would be too weak, too palliative and altogether untrue.

  “It is my fault,” he croaked, raising a hand to his face.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself for this.” I rushed to comfort him with the words I had said to myself over and over the past few days, as I’d hidden in feverish guilt in bed. “You knew her life was miserable, from when she was a child. Who knows what unhappy thoughts she carried with her, and for how long? She finally acted on them. It’s hardly your fault.”

  He took two steps forward, as though longing to be down in the graveyard. “I can’t believe she had been carrying thoughts of self-injury, Lanny. She had been happy—with me. It seems inconceivable that the Sophia I knew was fighting the desire to kill herself.”

  “One never knows. Maybe she had an argument with Jeremiah … perhaps after the last time you saw her …”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “If she was troubled by anything, it was my reaction when she told me of the baby. That is why I blame myself, Lanny, for my thoughtless reaction to her news. You said”—Jonathan lifted his head, suddenly, looking in my direction—“that you might think of a way to dissuade her from keeping the baby. I pray, Lanny, that you didn’t approach Sophia with any such plan—”

  Startled, I jerked back. I’d thought these past few days about telling him everything, as I’d struggled with my guilt. I had to tell some-one—it was not the kind of secret a body can keep without doing irreparable harm to the soul—and if anyone would understand, it would be Jonathan. I’d done it for him, after all. He’d come to me for help and I had done what was required. Now I needed to be absolved for what I had done; he owed me that absolution, didn’t he?

  But as he searched me with those dark, willful eyes, I realized I could not tell him. Not now, not while he was raw with grief and capable of being carried away by emotion. He would not understand. “What? No, I came up with no plan. Why would I approach Sophia on my own, anyway?” I lied. I hadn’t intended to lie to Jonathan, but he surprised me, his guess like an arrow shot with uncanny precision. I would tell him one day, I resolved.

  Jonathan turned his three-cornered hat in his hands. “Do you suppose I should tell Jeremiah the truth?”

  I rushed up to Jonathan and shook him by the shoulders. “That would be a terrible thing to do, for yourself as well as poor Sophia. What good would it do to tell Jeremiah now, except to appease your conscience? All you would accomplish would be to ruin Jeremiah’s illusion of her. Let him bury Sophia thinking her a good wife who honored him.”

  He looked at my small hands clasping his shoulders—it was unusual for us to touch each other now that we were no longer children—and then looked into my eyes with such sorrow that I couldn’t help myself. I collapsed against his chest and pulled him toward me, thinking only that he needed comfort from a woman at that moment, even if it wasn’t Sophia. I will not lie and say I didn’t find the feeling of his strong, warm body against mine comforting, too, though I had no right to comfort. I nearly wept with happiness at the touch of him. Holding his body against mine, I could pretend that he had forgiven me for my terrible sin against Sophia, although, of course, he knew nothing of it.

  I’d kept my cheek against his chest, listening to his heart beat beneath layers of wool and linen and breathing in his scent. I didn’t want to release my hold of Jonathan, but I sensed he was looking down at me, and so I looked up at him, too, ready for him to tell me again of his love for Sophia. And if he did, if he said her name, I resolved, I would tell him what I had done. But he didn’t; instead, his mouth hovered over mine for an instant before he kissed me.

  The moment for which I’d waited went by in a blur. We slipped into the protection of the woods, steps away. I remember the wonderful heat of his mouth on mine, its hunger and forcefulness. I remember his hands pulling on the ribbon that closed my blouse over my breasts. He pressed my back against a tree and bit into my neck as he fumbled with the fall of his breeches. I lifted my skirts so he could claim me, his hands on my hips. I regret that I didn’t have even a glimpse of his manhood for all the clothing between us, coats and cloaks, skirts and petticoats. But I felt him in me, suddenly, a great firm hotness pushed up inside me, and him bucking against me, grinding me into the bark of the tree. And at the end, his groan in my ear sent a shiver through me, for it meant he had found pleasure with me, and I had never been so happy and feared I would never be so again.

  We rode together on his horse through the woods with me holding tight around his waist, as we had as children. We took the least-traveled trails lest we be seen together without a chaperone. We didn’t exchange a word and I kept my hot face buried in his coat, still trying to come to grips with what we’d done. I knew of plenty of other girls in town who had given themselves over to a man before marriage—with Jonathan often the recipient—and had looked down on them. Now I was one of them. A part of me felt that I had disgraced myself. But another part of me believed I’d had no choice: it might have been my only chance to capture Jonathan’s heart and prove that we were meant to be together. I couldn’t let it pass.

  I slipped from the back of his horse and, after a squeeze of his hand, hiked the short distance to my family’s cabin. As I walked, however, doubts began to set in as to what our tryst had meant to him. He swived girls with no thought to any consequences: why did I imagine he would attach consequences this time? And what of his feelings for Sophia—or my obligation, for that matter, to the woman I had driven to take her own life? I had as good as murdered her and here I was fornicating with her lover. Surely a more wicked soul did not exist.

  I took a few minutes before proceeding to my home, to compose myself with deep breaths of cold air. I couldn’t go to pieces in front of my family. I had no one with whom I could talk this over. I would have to keep this secret hidden inside until I was calm enough to think on it rationally. I pushed it down, all of it, the guilt, the shame, the self-hatred. And yet, at the same time, I was filled with tremulous excitement, for though I didn’t deserve as much, I’d gotten what I’d wanted. I exhaled, dusted the fresh snow from the front of my cloak, squared my shoulders, and trudged the rest of the way to my family’s cottage.

  TEN

  AROOSTOOK COUNTY HOSPITAL, PRESENT DAY

  Sounds are heard out in the hall.

  Luke looks at his wristwatch: 4 A.M. The hospital will come to life before long. The mornings are busy with injuries common to farm country—a rib shattered by a kick from a dairy cow, a slip on a patch of ice while lugging a bale of hay—followed at six by the shift change.

  The girl looks at him the way a dog might regard an unreliable master. “Will you help me? Or are you going to let that sheriff take me to the police station?”

  “What else can I do?”

  Her face glows pink. “You can let me go. Close your eyes while I slip out. No one will blame you. You can tell them y
ou went down to the lab, left me alone for just a second, and I was gone by the time you returned.”

  Joe says she’s a murderer, Luke thinks. Can I let a murderer walk out the door?

  Lanny reaches for his hand. “Have you ever been in love with someone so badly that you’d do anything for them? That no matter what you want, you want their happiness more?”

  Luke is glad she can’t see into his heart because he has never been that selfless. He’s been dutiful, yes, but he’s never been able to give without a tug of resentment and he doesn’t like how that makes him feel.

  “I’m not a threat to anyone. I told you why I … did what I did to Jonathan.”

  Luke looks into those ice blue eyes filling with tears and he tingles from his scalp to his gut. The pain from loss overcomes him quickly, as it tends to since his parents’ deaths. He knows she is feeling the same sadness as he, and for a moment they are together in this bottomless grief. And he’s so tired of being imprisoned by grief—the loss of his parents, his marriage, his entire life—that he knows he must do something to break free of it, do it now or he never will. He’s not sure why he’s going to do what he’s about to do, but he knows he can’t think about it in advance or he won’t do it.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  Luke slips down the narrow corridor to the doctors’ locker room. Inside his dented gray locker he finds a pair of scrubs, wadded up and forgotten. He rummages through a couple of other lockers and comes up with a white lab coat, a surgical cap, and, from the pediatrician’s locker, a pair of women’s running shoes so old that they curl at the toes. Luke brings these back to the examination room.

  “Here, put these on.”

  They take the shortest route to the back of the hospital, pushing through janitors’ passages to the loading dock in the service area. An orderly coming in for the day shift waves as they cross the parking lot, but when Luke waves back his arm feels rusted tight with anxiety. It isn’t until they’re in the parking lot, standing beside his pickup truck, that Luke remembers he’s left his keys in his parka back in the doctors’ lounge.

  “Damn it. I have to go back. Don’t have my keys. Hide in the trees. I’ll be right back.”

  Lanny says nothing but nods, hunched against the cold in her thin cotton scrubs.

  The walk from the parking lot to the ambulance entrance is the longest of his life. Luke hustles because of the cold and his nerves. Judy or Clay may have already noticed he is gone. And if Clay is still asleep on the couch, Luke might wake him when he goes into the lounge to retrieve his keys and then he’d be caught. Each step gets harder and harder, until he feels like a water-skier being dragged under the surface after something has gone horribly wrong with the tow line.

  He pushes back the heavy glass door, so on edge that his shoulders are pinched high around his ears. Judy, at the nurses’ station, frowns at her computer, not even looking up when Luke walks by. “Where have you been?”

  “Having a smoke.”

  Now Judy is paying attention, fixing Luke with the beady eyes of a crow. “When did you start smoking again?”

  Luke feels like he smoked two packs last night, so what he’s told Judy doesn’t feel like a lie. He decides to ignore her. “Is Clay up?”

  “I haven’t seen him. The door to the lounge is still closed. Maybe you ought to wake him up. He can’t sleep here all day. His wife will be wondering what happened to him.”

  Luke freezes; he wants to make a joke, to act as though everything is normal in front of Judy, but then of course, Luke has never joked with Judy in the past and that in itself would seem abnormal. His inability to lie and cover his tracks only makes him more self-conscious. He feels like he’s fallen through the frozen skin of a pond and is drowning, sucking frigid water into every crevice of his lungs, and Judy sees nothing. “I need coffee,” Luke mumbles as he heads off.

  The door to the lounge is just a couple of steps away. He sees immediately that it is slightly ajar and dark within. He nudges it open another ten degrees and plainly sees the empty sag on the couch where the policeman should be.

  Blood rises to his ears, the glands in his throat swell to four times their normal size. He can’t breathe. It’s worse than drowning: it feels as if he’s being strangled.

  His parka hangs to the right from a hook on the wall, waiting for him to reach into the pocket. The jingle tells him that the keys are right where he expected them to be.

  On the way back, his walk is direct and purposeful. Head down, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his lab coat, he decides not to take the service hallway, it’s too indirect, and marches toward the ambulance entrance instead. Judy’s head jerks up as Luke passes the duty station.

  “I thought you were getting coffee.”

  “Left my wallet in the car,” he tosses over his shoulder. He’s almost at the door.

  “Did you wake Clay?”

  “He’s already up,” Luke says, backing into the door to push it open. And at the far end of the hall, there is the deputy, seemingly having materialized at the mention of his name. He sees Luke in return and raises his arm the way he’d hail a bus. Clay wants to talk to him and starts jogging down the hall in Luke’s direction, hand waving … Stop, Luke. But Luke doesn’t. Throwing all his weight into the hip check, Luke knocks the door back.

  Cold slaps his face as he bursts out on the other side, bobbing to the surface of his real life. What am I doing? This is the hospital where I work. I know every tile and plastic chair and gurney as well as I know my own house. What am I doing, throwing away my life by helping a suspected murderer escape? Have I lost my mind? But he continues, compelled by a strange itching in his blood, ricocheting through his veins like a pinball, driving him forward. He speed-walks across the parking lot, frantic and off-kilter, like a person trying to remain upright while descending a steep hill, knowing he must look like a lunatic.

  Luke squints anxiously at his truck, but the girl is gone, not a speck of the telltale aqua of hospital scrubs to be seen. At first, he panics—how could he have been so stupid, leaving her outside unattended? But a small kernel of hope expands in his chest as he realizes that if the prisoner is gone, so are his worries.

  The next minute she is there, wispy, ethereal, an angel dressed in hospital clothing … And his heart leaps at the sight of her.

  Luke fumbles with the ignition while Lanny slouches low, trying not to watch and further the doctor’s nervousness. Finally, the engine turns over and the truck leaps out of the parking lot, launching recklessly onto the road.

  The passenger stares directly ahead, as though her concentration alone is keeping them from being discovered. “I’m at Dunratty’s hunting lodge. Do you know where that is?”

  Luke is incredulous. “Do you think it’s smart to go there? I’d think the police would have tracked you to your hotel by now. We don’t get many strangers this time of year.”

  “Please, just swing by. If it looks suspicious, we’ll keep going, but all my things are there. My passport. Money. Clothing. I bet you don’t have anything that would fit me.”

  She is smaller than Tricia but larger than the girls. “You’d win that bet,” he confirms. “Passport?”

  “I came over from France, where I live.” She curls on her end of the bench seat like a cat trying to conserve its warmth. Suddenly, Luke’s hands on the steering wheel feel large, outlandishly huge and clumsy. He’s having an out-of-body experience from the stress and has to concentrate not to jerk the wheel and send them hurtling off the road.

  “You should see my house in Paris. It’s like a museum, filled with all the things I’ve collected over many, many years. Want to go there?” Her tone is sweet and as warming as liquor, and the invitation is intriguing. He wonders if she’s telling the truth. Who wouldn’t like to go to Paris, stay in a magical house. Luke feels his tension start to melt, his spine and neck begin to relax.

  There are hunting lodges like Dunratty’s all over this part of the woods. L
uke has never stayed in one but remembers seeing the inside of a couple when he was a kid, for some reason he can’t recall now. Cheap cabins dating back to the 1950s, nailed together from plywood and filled with thrift shop furniture and mold, cheap linoleum and mouse droppings. The girl directs Luke to the last cottage on Dunratty’s gravel driveway, and the cabin’s windows are dark and empty. She extends a hand to Luke. “Give me one of your credit cards and I’ll see if I can open the lock.”

  Once inside, they draw the shades and Lanny snaps on a light. There is a chill on every surface they touch. Personal belongings are strewn about, left out, as though the inhabitants had been forced to flee in the night. There are two beds but only one is unmade, the crumpled sheets and dimpled pillows looking wanton and incriminating. A laptop with a digital camera attached to it via a cord sits on a shaky table that was once part of a kitchenette set. Open bottles of wine litter the side table, two tumblers smudged with fingerprints, lip prints.

  Two bags, open, rest on the floor. Lanny crouches next to one, stuffing loose items into it, including the laptop and camera.

  Luke jingles his keys, nervous and impatient.

  The girl zips the bag shut, stands upright, then turns to the second suitcase. She fishes out an item of men’s clothing and holds it to her nose, breathing in deeply.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  As they go down the drive past the front office (surely closed at this hour of the morning, Dunratty Junior upstairs asleep), Luke thinks he sees the red gingham curtains move, as though someone might have been watching them. He imagines Dunratty, in his bathrobe, coffee cup in hand, hearing the sound of tires on gravel and going to see who’s driving by; would he recognize my truck? Luke wonders. Forget it, it’s nothing, just a cat going by the window, or so Luke tells himself. No sense in looking for trouble.

  Luke is a little unnerved as the girl changes clothing while he drives, until he remembers that he’s already seen her naked. She slips on blue jeans and a cashmere sweater more luxurious than anything his wife had ever worn. She drops the scrubs to the car floor.