Hard Limits Page 13

  Twenty minutes later, with her core temperature at ninety-three, Lucy entered the second stage of hypothermia. Opening her eyes, she looked around in wonder. Where am I? She wouldn’t remember how she got here, beside this granite angel in this unfamiliar place. Thoughts floated through her mind that she was unable to grasp, they teased her from the edge of memory. Something from her past?

  Maybe a scene from a slasher movie she saw as a teenager. If you become lost in the woods while you are running from a maniac, what do you do, what do you do? If you become lost in the woods, find shelter, yes, that was it. Find shelter. I need to find shelter, Lucy might have thought. But how? How? She would have looked at the axe in her hand and at the trees, standing guard over the forest. I’ll build a shelter.

  But a moment later, at ninety-one degrees, apathy would have taken over. Suddenly, Lucy no longer cared about the idea that seemed so urgent only a moment before. She didn’t care about building a shelter or living or dying. All she wanted was for this thing, this immense cold, to be over. Dropping one more degree to ninety, Lucy entered the third stage, profound hypothermia, the final passage before death. Lucy’s mental awareness now lingered between this world and the next, between darkness and light. As her body reached an internal temperature of eighty-eight degrees, it abandoned its final vain effort to warm itself through shivering. Lucy felt a sudden urge to urinate as the last liquids in her body were squeezed through her kidneys.

  At eight-six, her heart, now working at less than two-thirds of its normal capacity, went into arrhythmia. Lucy was only dimly aware of the fluttering in her chest as her heart attempted to pump oxygen to her brain. Shadows came to life, voices cried out from the ground. The trees marched forward like soldiers in step, obliterating the sky. Lucy was experiencing the visual and auditory hallucinations of the last stage of hypothermia.

  There’s a paradox about freezing to death. EMS responders have a saying, You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. At eighty-five degrees internal temperature, as she slipped into unconsciousness, Lucy felt as if her skin was burning. In a last-ditch effort to save itself, her body had opened the blood vessels of its circulatory system wide, causing her flesh to feel scathingly hot. Ironically, Lucy’s last clear thought might have been this: I am on fire.

  A girl on fire. Death followed shortly. Her breathing ceased. Her heart stopped. Her flesh turned waxy and stiff. Her lips were now blue, her skin ash-white. Her eyes were open, her pupils dilated. By the time I found her, Lucy looked like a Greek statue. She was not beautiful in death but some of her ugliness was gone. She had stared into the face of the snake-haired monster and been turned to stone.

  I looked around, getting my bearings, adjusting to my new circumstances. I hadn’t meant for the situation to end like this, I really hadn’t. I wasn’t even sure that I was going to kill her. I was going to keep her as my slave until the trial was over. That’s as far as I had gone in my thinking. Short-sighted, I know, and unlike me. But all I knew at the time was that I needed to punish Lucy for what she had done to Skyler.

  She was punished now. She had punished herself. Lucy killed herself. It wasn’t my fault. But still, no one would see it that way. I had been holding her against her will. That was abduction and it would look like murder if it ever went before a judge or jury. Manslaughter at the least. I’m not going back to prison, I thought. And it would be adult prison this time. No way. Not happening. I’ve got to get rid of the body.

  I hiked back to the cabin and returned with the deer-drag sled. Maneuvering Lucy’s frozen body onto the black pod, I pulled her back over the frozen earth. The sled moved more easily than I would have expected, slipping easily on the compacted icy snow, to where my truck was waiting.

  From the slave cabin, I retrieved the carpet and placed it on the frozen ground. The sun felt warm overhead. The snow was starting to melt. Pulling Lucy’s body off the sled, I dropped it onto the rug. She was still in rigor mortis or perhaps just frozen solid. She was on her back, her arms up over her head, covering her face. Her legs were straight. For a moment, I wondered why she hadn’t curled up in the fetal position, for warmth. But then I remembered that her last feeling would have been of extreme heat. She would have felt as if she were on fire.

  I found my emergency rope and a roll of duct tape in my truck. I rolled the body in the rug, tying the middle and ends. Then, for good measure, I duct taped it shut. Tossing the rope and duct tape back inside the shell of the Ranger, I popped one end of the bundle against the tailgate. I lifted and pushed and struggled to get her in. I angled her up and then pushed the rug all the way in. I slammed the tailgate shut.

  Inside the cab I let the engine idle while the truck warmed and I thought about next steps. I didn’t know what to do. Bury Lucy somewhere? In Old Hemphill Cemetery? There were empty graves just waiting for a body. But the earth was frozen, too hard to dig. Burn down the slave cabin with her corpse back inside? No, there would still be bones and teeth. Stuff her into an industrial drum and dump acid on the body to let it slowly dissolve? And how, exactly, would I go about getting those supplies without being noticed? Put her in a freezer? Drive to the ocean, rent a boat and dump her in the Atlantic? But I’ve watched the TV procedurals, seen the movies, read the New York Times bestsellers. They’re not real. They’re entertainment. In reality, there is no practical way to dispose of a dead body.

  I hadn’t planned this. This isn’t what I had meant to happen. Lucy wasn’t supposed to die. Not yet, anyway.

  Then it came to me. The perfect solution.

  I drove back to my cabin with the carpeted corpse rolling around in the covered bed. Inside the house I drank a cup of coffee while I logged onto my desktop. The answer was right there in County records. Fifteen minutes later I was back in the Ranger and had set the Magellan to the address I’d found online. I headed out, down the dirt road, slipping and sliding even in low gear, even with my all-terrains. No accidents, not now, not with a body in the back.

  I made it to Metcalf Creek Road where it looked like snow plows had done their job. The blacktop glistened, the road was clear and the snow heaped off to the sides. Turning right, I headed northwest. For about fifteen minutes I was the only one on the road in either direction. I turned on the radio. A country song came on, annoying me. I turned it off.

  I became aware that my heart was racing. I could feel it beating in my chest. I reminded myself to breathe. I needed to pace myself. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax. I noticed my foot had been heavy on the gas pedal. I lightened up.

  But not soon enough. I heard the siren before I saw the blue lights flashing. In my rearview there was a patrol car. It was a white Ford Crown Victoria. That’s the Hemphill County Sheriff’s vehicle. Fuck.

  Whoop, whoop.

  I slowed to five miles an hour as I pulled over.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Be cool, stay cool.

  I lowered the window and watched in my side mirror as the patrol car door opened and a uniformed officer got out and strolled toward me. An officer I recognized.

  “Deputy Sheriff Fletcher,” I said.

  “I thought that was you,” she responded.

  She lowered her Wayfarers onto her nose and looked over them and down at me.

  “License and registration, please.”

  “Seriously?” I asked and immediately regretted it. She gave me a stern look.

  “Oh sure, sure,” I added quickly.

  I pulled my wallet out of jacket pocket and my registration out of the glove compartment.

  “Everything is up-to-date,” I said, handing them to her.

  Wynonna looked them over. My heart was racing again. I was afraid my voice would give me away. I cleared my throat. I tried to concentrate on appearing normal.

  “Do you know how fast you were going?” she asked.

  “Yeah, no, uh, I noticed I might have been going a little fast so I slowed down. Right before I saw you.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “The speed limit on t
his stretch is forty-five. You were going fifty.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  It was all I could think to say.

  She glanced toward the back of the truck. The windows of the shell were tinted, too dark to see through.

  “You in some kind of hurry, Brett?” Wynonna asked.

  Shit.

  “No, I was just…”

  I was just what? Think, think! What was I just doing?

  “…heading out to Maggie Mae Valley. There’s a biker shop there that stocks some pretty nice leather goods.”

  She nodded.

  “Crazy Bob’s,” she said. “I know it very well.”

  She returned my license and registration.

  “I’ll let you off with a warning,” she said. “This time. But you need to watch your speed.”

  “I will,” I said. “Thank you. I will. It won’t happen again.”

  The Ray Bans went back over her eyes.

  “You have a good one,” she said.

  “You, too.”

  In my side mirror, I watched her walk back to the Victoria. I continued watching until she started the engine, eased out and drove away. My hands were trembling as I opened the glove compartment and put back the registration. I slipped my license into my wallet. An old Doors song came into my head, Jim Morrison’s menacing incantation. “There’s a killer on the road. His brain is squirming like a toad.”

  That was too fucking close.

  Wynonna

  Brett had a routine. From what I could tell, nearly every day about one in the afternoon she drove to the YMCA in West Altamont. She parked in the lot across from the remodeled building and carried a navy gym bag inside. She was there two, maybe two and a-half hours. Sometimes after she was done, she stopped at Whole Foods or Ingles to shop. Otherwise, she drove back to her cabin on Savage Mountain. She drove a 2012 Ford Ranger with a camper shell on the back. It was flint gray, exactly the color you’d use if you were trying to fly under the radar.

  The morning I’d caught her speeding, I had pulled her over out on Metcalf Creek Road. She said she was on her way to Maggie Mae Valley, to a biker shop there. Metcalf turns into Highway 19 and then the Blue Ridge Parkway, so it made sense. What didn’t make sense was her change in routine. I had let Brett off with a warning. But I was watching her.

  Brett

  Wynonna was watching me. I knew it even before she pulled me over that morning. One afternoon there had been a patrol car idling at the far end of the Y parking lot. I hadn’t walked over to look but I was sure that if I had, I would have seen Wynonna inside.

  We were halfway through October, and I was curious to know what had happened to the present I’d left for the boys at The Compound. But I knew enough by then to leave well enough alone. After my close call with Wynonna, I had taken it nice and slow down Metcalf, all the way to a private drive that led me to 110 Bryson Road. Luckily, there had been no gate at the turnoff, so I was able to follow the rutted road a couple of miles in before I got to the fence. It was chain link with spirals of barbed wire on top. A wide gate was secured by two separate chains with large padlocks. On the left a yellow sign warned in red letters, “PRIVATE PROPERTY.” On the right there was “NO TRESPASSING.”

  I had angled the Ranger around until it was backed up close to the gate. I dropped the tailgate then and pulled out the cargo. The rug with the body inside fell with a thud onto the hard ground. One of the ropes had come loose, but I didn’t bother retying. I looked around. There were no cameras that I could see and nobody and nothing in sight. The gate was at the bottom of a hill. All I could see was the upward slope of the land, dirt and rocks and melting snow, bare limbs and gray-green Fraser fir. I slammed the tailgate shut and climbed back in my cab. I gunned it and got the hell out of there.

  Less than half a mile down Metcalf I had needed to pull over to the side of the road. I got out, took a few steps into the woods and vomited up black coffee, all I had in my stomach. Then I got back into the Ranger and drove home.

  What I wouldn’t have given to have seen Mosby’s face when his Aryan brothers told him Lucy was back.

  But I still had a problem. I needed to do something about the slave cabin. Lucy’s DNA was all over it. It was just a matter of time before Wynonna showed up at my door with a warrant. Damn her anyway. She was taking an unnatural interest in this case. It wasn’t even her state. This case belongs to Georgia, for Christ’s sakes. At the same time, though, I kind of admired her doggedness. I liked high-spirited women and she would have been a challenge to subdue.

  I could have bleached the cabin, but I’d seen the TV shows. Bleach doesn’t remove blood and Lucy bled when she broke her way out of the window. I needed to burn it down. Fire was the only solution. I would disassemble the cage and haul it to the County Landfill. When that was done, I’d put logs in the stove. I’ll leave a trail of tinder from the open glass door down to the warped wood floor. I wouldn’t use kerosene or anything obvious as an accelerant. I’d let the fire burn naturally, from the source to the floor to the walls. With enough combustibles inside including a pile of newspapers and a stack of old books, the fire would take care of itself.

  Nobody would be surprised, cabins burn down on occasion in these mountains. Lightning, arson. Locals will think the fire was a native, acting out a long-buried, righteous rage at an outsider from California living in this ‘hood.

  Following my plan, I loaded the broken-down steel frame of the cage into the back of my Ranger and drove out to the Landfill down by the French Broad River. No one noticed anything, not the man in the Riverside Dump cap who took my twelve dollars at the booth on my way in, not the flannel-shirted rednecks in their pick-ups tossing bags of trash from their beds, not the scavenger birds flying overhead.

  If I’d been another sort of sadist, I could have chain-sawed Lucy’s frozen body into hard pieces and contract-bagged her remains to be been rolled over by the seven-foot high tires of the yellow Cat compactors. They would have compressed her bones into bits, but I’m not that sort of sadist. I’d done the right thing. I gave her to the pros. If anybody knows how to get rid of a body, it’s The White Resistance. They’re professional killers. I’m not. I’m not like them.

  Wynonna

  The Altamont Times, October 17, 2013

  A log cabin burned to the ground after firefighters had weather-related issues while responding to a 9-1-1 call from a neighbor. Hemphill County Volunteer Firefighters said they couldn’t reach the cabin because of its location on the top of a hill near Old Hemphill Cemetery. The road leading up to the cabin was too icy, they said.

  The fire is believed to have started in a wood stove, left burning and unattended by the cabin’s owner who was not present at the time of the blaze. The owner is out of the state and unavailable for comment.

  “There wasn’t much we could do, given the road conditions,” Volunteer Fire Chef Randy Kirby said. “We sort of just stood at the bottom of the hill and made sure it didn’t spread.”

  Chef Kirby added there is no evidence to suggest arson. No investigation is expected.

  I was in the office with Carlene Kirby when I read the story in the morning paper.

  “Carlene,” I said, getting her attention.

  “Wut?” she said. She’s homegrown, like me, but without the education.

  “Your husband know anything more ‘bout this cabin fire?” I asked.

  She looked over my shoulder at the folded newspaper in my hand.

  “Not much more than made The Times,” she said. “That used to be the Fluharty place. Your granddaddy woulda knowed them. Don’ know who the owner is now. Damn shame. The boys couldn’t do nothin’ but watch it burn.”

  “Who called it in?” I asked.

  “Festus Demsey. You know the Demseys? Been here awhile.”

  “Not the owner, huh. The owner didn’t call it in?”

  “Nah.”

  I know why, is what I was thinking.

  Driving home from work at the end of my
shift, a name came to mind for some reason-Kelly Thompson. It was the name Brett said when I asked why she was sent to the Reformatory. Kelly Thompson did it, not me. Back at the farmhouse, I opened my laptop and started my search. There were six hundred and forty-three Kelly Thompsons currently living in California. Brett was in a juvenile detention center when she was a teenager, that would have been the 1960s. So, Brett’s Kelly Thompson may be somebody around her same age, I figured.

  That eliminated most of the women in my search results. Of the thirty-six who were left, all of their criminal records looked pretty clean, but then they would if Brett took the fall. It took me more than an hour before I found the name and then it was by accident. An old story popped up from a historical newspaper archive. “Two Dead in Brutal Slaying” was the headline.

  Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, November 19, 1963

  A 12-year-old girl has admitted killing her foster parents in a violent crime that detectives described as “brutal.” Kelly Thompson told LAPD officers that she shot her foster father, Heinrich Schmidt, twice in the head while he slept. Sometime later her foster mother, Hedda Schmidt, arrived home from church. Thompson said she then shot her foster mother twice in the head as well. Both victims were pronounced dead at the scene.

  According to Thompson, Schmidt had been molesting her for as long as she could remember. She described abuse that began with fondling and proceeded to full-on sexual intercourse by the time she was ten. She told officers that there had been other children in the Schmidt home who also had been molested by the couple. Thompson painted a dark picture of life in foster care in which she was regularly raped anally, vaginally, and orally. She said the Schmidts threatened that if she revealed the abuse, she would be tortured and then killed. She said she lived in terror.