The Anatomy of Violence (17 page)

After a long time he disappeared around the point of the island. He hadn’t seen me; but he hadn’t searched the water. Next time, I was sure he would, and there were no hiding places on the flat expanse of the lake. I looked with longing at the opposite shore. The hills were still distant lumps of yellow-green. The island was still very close; each branch on each tree showed clearly.

I had to reach the shelter of those trees before he returned. I started swimming back with all the speed I could muster. My shoulders ached as I forced my arms through the water. The notebook was an anchor pulling at my neck. Breathing became pain, like forcing a hot coal up and down my throat. I stopped thinking of pain and thought only of the next stroke.

At last my fingers touched silt. I dragged myself ashore and up the slope. At the top of the ridge I pitched forward, my head in my arms, the dew-wet leaves cool against my naked body. I gulped air and listened to the shrill buzz of the outboard as it went again around the island.

I
RAISED
my head as something tickled my hand. I flicked a granddaddy-longlegs off my arm and remembered the boy who demonstrated for me years ago how their legs kick for nearly a minute after they were torn off. He reminded me of Jules.

I pushed myself up and moved in a crouch up the spine of the ridge. I could watch the entire island from there, but I’d have to take cover while Jules was still in the water.

I nearly bumped my head on a block of granite hidden in the weeds. The name was inches from my eyes:
SIMON CURTRIGHT
, 1795-1850. I stood up and saw at least a dozen more headstones tilted by spreading roots into crazy angles, some with stunted crab apple trees growing on their mounds. All represented Curtrights.

I found three tended graves lying close together. One, with a border of iris, belonged to Karen, Jules’ mother. The other two belonged to John, his father, and Josh, his grandfather. Between these two lay a newer mound thickly grown with ragweed and buckbrush. Sarah, his grandmother.

The burial plot occupied the highest point on the island. I stood as though on the hump of a camel and saw the ridges curving into the water on each side. Both shores were visible.

I crawled toward one of the thickets of hazelbrush that covered the ridge. As a child I’d hidden in the tight clusters of shoots, six feet high and densely leafed. I could do it again.

I nearly fell as my foot sank into soft, damp earth. A fresh grave; so fresh that half a worm still lay at my feet. The headstone said
BAILEY CURTRIGHT
, 1840 - 1895—but I knew who lay there. It must be Jules’ idea of irony; to make Koch lie eternally under false pretenses.

There were other recent graves; not new, but too recent to fit the death dates on the headstones. I added them to the loose ends of clothing in the closet; the twittering of the birds suddenly seemed vicious and unfriendly.

Moving on, I found a thicket with a good view. I crawled in slowly to avoid breaking any shoots on the outside. There was enough space inside to sit with my knees against my chest. I broke off branches and twined them in my hair until they formed an umbrella through which only my face and arms showed. These I covered with damp earth I found among the roots.

I heard the outboard’s dying grumble at the lodge. I made a peephole in the leaves and watched Jules walk across the pier and disappear into the house. He came out the back door, crossed a grassy clearing which held a barbecue pit, lawn chairs, and a table, then he was lost among the trees.

My heart sank as I followed the crackling noise of his movement. He was coming up the hill. I sat frozen, counting on my camouflage. Then his steps went past me into the burial plot. Through another gap in the leaves I watched him step onto a headstone, raise the binoculars, and turn slowly in a complete circle. Then he dropped the binoculars and capped his hands to his mouth. “Laurie! You’ll just prolong it if you hide! Come out!”

In profile, his face had a hawklike appearance. As he lowered his hands, I thought of a buccanneer surveying a land of rich, soft cities to put to the sword, to pillage and rape. He lit a cigaret and drew slowly, his face serene. It was only a game to him, I thought, one he’d already won—how many times? I’d had no time to count the recent graves.

He jumped easily off the headstone and disappeared from sight. I glimpsed him again as he crossed the clearing behind the house. I lost him inside the house, then picked him up again as he got into the boat. I could hear the buzz of the outboard as he circled the island like a timid fly around a lump of sugar. Bzzzzzz …

“Laurie!”

My eyes flew open but I didn’t move. Through the peephole I saw him standing on the headstone with his hands to his mouth. I wondered how long I’d slept.

“Laurie! Are you expecting help? You’ll starve first! Nobody ever comes out here!” He paused, listening, then stooped and picked up a sandwich from the headstone—a sliced ham and lettuce sandwich. Moisture glinted on the lettuce. I could almost feel it crackle in my mouth as Jules bit into it. I thought of two hamburgers I’d thrown away, and the dinner I’d lost at the State Line Club.

After he’d gone I thought of moving. He’d come uncomfortably close to me twice; maybe he’d come again. Maybe he’d done this so many times that he’d acquired a pattern.

Pattern?
I counted the seconds he took to reach the house from the top of the hill. Almost a hundred. Thirty seconds inside the house. Another hundred on the dock. Almost five full minutes to circle the island. A hundred and fifty to climb the hill.

Three times I watched, cataloguing his movements from fragmentary glimpses. A tight pattern emerged. I’d have no time for leisure.

I rehearsed my movements in my mind, as I’d often rehearsed for the stage. I could reach the pier at a dead run during the two minutes he was out of sight on the other side of the island. The pier floated on oil drums, probably so it would rise and fall with the lake. I could hide beneath it as he came in; then, while he climbed the hill, I’d jump in the boat.

The boat was the weak spot. I’d been watching the movements he made to start it. I could only imitate them, as a child plays doctor with a stethoscope, without knowing its purpose.

I tightened up as he came into the dock. Next time …

But he returned to the dock with a rifle and three glasses. He set the glasses on the table then walked up the hill. A hundred and fifty seconds later he mounted the tombstone and raised the rifle. Three shots roared. The water glasses shattered, the glass-topped table remained intact.

Target practice? No, it was a message for me: if I tried for the boat he’d have to shoot me. The warning puzzled me; if he planned to kill me, did it matter how? Then I remembered Richard saying: “He’s got a thing with women, has to get close to his work.”

The sun climbed to zenith and passed it; Jules’ pattern never resumed. Sometimes he’d come only halfway up the hill and go back to the house. Once he fixed a drink and sat on the pier for twenty minutes. My nerves drew tight as an E-string as I waited. Darkness was my only chance now.

The sun hung low in the sky like a dazzling coin. Heat engulfed my airless nest and dried the mud into hard little flakes that pulled my skin. Later they turned again to streaks of mud as sweat poured from my skin. Dozens of tiny scratches smarted from perspiration. A wandering sweat bee found me—one of those little golden creatures that hover and whine before they sting. Somehow it got word to a dozen companions that here lay a vast expanse of flesh completely unclothed. They learned to hover until Jules came up the hill; then land and sting when I didn’t dare move.

Hunger was a live creature in my stomach rolling over and over in an attempt to find a comfortable position. Hazelnuts surrounded me, clustered in leaflike husks, but I knew their dry, astringent taste. I was thirsty enough already.

The sun slanted almost horizontally through the brush when Jules called, “All right, Laurie! I’m giving you one last chance to come in!”

I’d been wondering why he hadn’t been beating the bushes; now it occurred to me that he must have a rule that I had to come to him voluntarily, as Eileen had, and Ann. I’d die before I went to him.

A minute later he called again, “All right! I’ll drive you in!”

Three minutes later I heard the buzz of the boat. Five minutes and I smelled smoke; first the greasy smell of burning oil, then the autumn smell of burning leaves.

Then I understood. He planned to burn me out. The island had a thick mantle of dry, dead brush and last year’s weed stalks. Even this year’s grass was yellow and curling on the ends. The whole island would burn like a matchbox. Was he
that
crazy?

I stood up, looked down at the shore opposite the lodge, and saw that he was. He’d already set two fires fifty yards apart; I watched him pile brush for a third, douse it with kerosene, then throw a match on it. He might have been grinning as it blazed up, but I was too far away to be sure.

I crawled from the thicket and plunged downhill toward the lodge with the notebook bouncing against my back. Beside the pier I dived under water, came up with my head amond the cobwebs that matted the underside of the pier. Five minutes later Jules pulled in with the boat. His footsteps hammered on the dock over my head; a few seconds later I heard the back door of the lodge slam.

I submerged and swam toward the lighter water that marked the end of the pier. There I raised myself slowly on the ladder and rolled into the boat. I lay on the bottom to catch my breath and heard Jules’ voice at the top of the hill, taunting: “Smell the smoke, Laurie? The fire is spreading. If you don’t come in, you’ll burn.”

Still hugging the bottom of the boat, I untied the line Jules had looped around a post. I shoved at the pier and the boat moved slowly away. I crawled back to the motor, tipped the propeller into the water.

First, he’d moved a lever on the left. There were three notches, forward, reverse and neutral. Neutral, like a car? I’d try it. An arrow on the tiller’s rubber grip could be turned to start, shift, or drive. No doubt it belonged on start. I put it there and grabbed a knob protruding from the motor. Then, as I’d watched Jules do, I yanked will all my strength.

The motor burped, a small weak sound that rolled into the silence like thunder. Then it died and I nearly died with it. The choke? Where the hell was the choke?

There! I jerked again and heard another futile burp. My back itched as I heard the crackle of brush on the hill. I jerked again and again, then feet pounded on the dock. “Laurie, you can’t go any place without a tank.”

I turned and saw him on the edge of the pier, twenty feet away. He held the rifle in one hand, in the other a square red can from which a hose dangled. He laughed. “I had a hunch the fire would flush you.”

The boat had oars. I picked them up and plunged them into the water, bracing my feet on the seat ahead of me. Jules set down the tank and raised the rifle. I looked at the little round hole and kept rowing, hoping Richard had been right about Jules’ thing with women.

He was. Jules laid the rifle on the pier and removed his shirt, trousers, and shoes—quickly but without haste, as though going for a swim. I’d put fifty yards between myself and the dock when he made a low, flat dive into the water.

I pulled until my shoulders popped, but Jules knifed through the water like a torpedo, twice as fast as I could row. When he drew near I stood up, pulled the oar from the lock, and swung it with all my strength at his head. He caught the blow on his arm, twisted his wrist, and gripped the oar. He pulled gently and I tightened my grip. He grinned, then jerked. I tripped on the seat and fell forward, striking my head on the gunwale.

I wasn’t aware of hitting the water. The next thing I knew I was sinking slowly. I wanted to swim upward but I couldn’t get the message to my arms.
At least he won’t get me,
I thought, then the only reality was the darkening green world around me.

Consciousness returned with the sound of Jules’ voice close to my ear. “Don’t try to run again, Laurie.”

I didn’t open my eyes. I felt a rough blanket under my shoulders and hips, and beneath that the wide-spaced boards of the dock. A stuffy feeling clogged my nose; my lungs felt as though they’d been squeezed and twisted by strong hands.

I jumped up running. I was two steps from the rifle when Jules’ arm clamped my waist. He jerked me off my feet, picked up the rifle by the barrel, and threw it into the lake. Then he carried me to the blanket and slammed me down on my back with the force of a ten-foot fall. “I said
don’t run!”

I drew in a ragged breath and looked at him. The setting sun highlighted the fine hairs on his forehead. His stomach moved with heavy breathing and water glistened in the black mat of his chest. “Why didn’t you leave me in the water?”

He shrugged and a look of distaste crossed his face. “Drowning proves nothing.”

I coughed as the wind brought a cloud of smoke over the dock. “Does fire?”

He licked a finger and held it up. “With the wind this way it won’t come over the ridge for several hours.” He smiled thinly. “You don’t have to worry about the fire.” He pulled the journal from behind him. “You apparently considered this of value. Did you read it?”

I didn’t answer.

He caught my shoulders, lifted me, and flipped me over on my stomach.
“Did you?”
He pushed my arm up my back. “Answer!”

I bit my lip as skin stretched tight on my shoulder blade. “Dear Grandmam, If I have given you this journal it’s because you know you’re dying. I want you to learn—”

“That’s enough. Why did you want it?”

“Nothing—oh!” Something popped in my shoulder as he increased the pressure. My words were muffled against the blanket. “To … paper my bathroom.”

He laughed and the pressure went away. “I like you, Laurie. You don’t break down. Roll over.” Before I could move he flipped me over onto my back. My head thumped and sent pain down my spine. When I opened my eyes he was bending over me. “There’s one little fault. You don’t respond rapidly enough to commands.”

“How awful for you.” My head was pounding like the climax of a horse opera.

“I’ll help you learn. We have nothing to do until the fire comes over the ridge. Our boat has drifted away, and nobody will disturb us because I have a reputation for pumping buckshot at sightseers.” He opened the notebook. “This too—” he tore out the first page and flicked his lighter below it—“shall pass away, page by page.” He turned it as the flame consumed all but the corner he held. Then he flipped away the burning corner. “Leaving only the word of a nineteen-year-old girl.”

He tore out another page and lit it. I remembered Ann’s death and thought,
This is
the build-up

“Laurie, I wonder, now that you’ve read my journal—” He smiled at me through the flames. “What do you think of me?”

“I wonder.” I caught the blanket and covered myself from thighs to armpits.

“Really, I’m curious.”

My voice was flat. “Jules if they opened your head they’d find your brains crawling with maggots like the belly of a dead cow that’s lain in the hot sun for several days. The people you’ve killed are lucky because—”