Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

Using my thumb, I pressed the shells back into the clip. Cassandra wiped the tears from her face and took some deep breaths, composure regained. I couldn’t get the image of that Ace bandage wrapped around her torso out of my mind. I wondered how many weeks or months along she was. She couldn’t have been that far into the pregnancy, because she was only just showing.

“What do you plan on doing now, Keeper?” she inquired. “We can’t stay up here forever and I can’t take any more of your damned third degree. I saved your life, for God’s sakes. Remember that.”

With the.45 in hand, I stood by the heavy wooden door that led to the carport, beside the corner where my grandfather stored his fly rods. I turned and looked at Cassandra.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is, after all that, you’re not thinking of leaving me, are you, Keeper?”

I slammed the clip back into the.45 and returned the weapon to my belt.

“I need you,” I said. “And I think you need me. But there’s something we have to do first, and like I told you before, it involves getting Pelton and Schillinger in one place at one time. And that place has got to be here, in this cabin, because this is my turf and this is where I’ll have the most control.”

I went into the kitchen and took a beer out of the refrigerator. I cracked the tab with my thumb and took a deep drink. Cassandra followed me. She suddenly seemed far from tears, curiosity and concern having replaced fear and loathing.

“What about all the others?” she said. “What about the guy who turned you in? What about Mike Norman?”

I drank the rest of the beer in one long swallow and fired up a cigarette.

“Norman’s dead,” I said. “They found him late last night, hanging from a steam pipe in his office in Albany.”

Cassandra went pale. She reached out to the kitchen table for balance.

“It could have been suicide,” I added. “Or it could have been murder. But the result was the same.”

I took another beer from the fridge and opened it. As opposed to the last one, this beer would get sipped.

“They got to him, didn’t they?” Cassandra said. “The bastards got to him, too, just like they got to Eddy and almost got to us.”

She stood up straight and breathed and took the beer out of my hand and drank deeply.

“How can I help you?” she said, handing the beer back to me. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Please, just tell me.”

My father used to tell me that when things got bad, all you had to do was sit down, regroup, think things out, and make a plan. Just the act of making the plan, he said, seemed to make you feel better, like you were in control again. And that’s what I was about to do. And I think the strategy was about to pay off because Cassandra seemed to perk up just a little bit.

“Cassandra,” I said, “how good are you at working a video camera?”

THERE WAS A REMOVABLE panel in the wood floor of the great room between the fireplace and the door. While most of the cabin had been built on a concrete slab, my grandfather had dug out a small cellar to use as storage for onions and potatoes. Occasionally he used it for smoking trout or perch or venison strips. Just a room in the ground, maybe six feet deep by eight feet wide, accessible only by a removable panel and a stepladder. A great hiding spot for me when I was a kid.

I turned on all the lamps in the great room, and I got on my knees and began feeling around for the edges of the removable panel. The edges had been smoothed out in the many years since the cellar had been used and had I not known it was there, I would never have known the difference. Dirt had filled the tiny groove between the square panel and the planks that surrounded it so that the surface of the cabin floor appeared perfectly homogeneous. But once I began my search, I found the edges right away.

I went into the kitchen and took two steak knives out of the drawer. I got back on my knees and stuck each blade into opposite ends of the panel while Cassandra stood over me. I braced myself and lifted the panel off the floor.

As I’d expected, the hole was dark, and a cool, moist air rose from it. I asked Cassandra to look under the sink for a flashlight. She found one and brought it to me. I hit the switch and shined the bright light into the hole. The place was covered with spider webs and, aside from the insects, seemed absolutely dead. Until I heard the distinct sound of something scurrying back and forth on the dry plank floor at the bottom of the hole. I must have disturbed some animal. From where I lay on the floor, I was amazed to see the shriveled remnants of petrified potatoes and onions left behind by my grandfather on the wooden shelves lining the walls of the cellar. Still, I wasn’t able to make out the far side of the crawl space -the portion covered by the cabin floor.

“I’m going in,” I said.

“Better you than me,” Cassandra said.

With flashlight in hand, I eased myself down onto the stepladder, pressing my weight onto the top rung to make sure it was sturdy enough to support me. Shining the flashlight on the floor, I stepped into the hole. The change in air temperature was immediate. The hole was warm but clammy, and the air smelled funky. I swiped away at the spider webs and ducked under the floor structure and it was then that I discovered the source of the animal sounds. In the far corner of the otherwise empty space, a family of snakes had taken up residence. Garden snakes, the biggest I’d ever seen. The snakes were piled up into one corner like a stack of black-and-yellow garden hoses. Maybe four of them. I wasn’t the type to be spooked by the occasional spider or rat or multi-legged insect. But snakes were a different story. Just the sight of a snake, even on television, had a way of making me catatonic if only for a few seconds until I was able to pull myself together. So here’s what I did: I pulled out the.45, emptied the entire six rounds into them, watched their black-and-yellow flesh bounce and tremble from the blasts.

The entire cellar lit up like the Fourth of July.

“Keeper!” Cassandra screamed. “What’s happening?”

I climbed up the ladder, the three dead snakes in hand.

“Oh my God,” Cassandra chanted, backing away fast. “Oh dear sweet Jesus.”

“Don’t worry. They’re dead and the hole is now clean.”

“So why should I be worried?” she said, as I went for the door of the cabin, opening it and tossing the dead snakes out beyond the woodpile. “What’s that hole got to do with me?”

“That cellar,” I said, closing the door behind me, “is going to be your post tomorrow night during the party.”

“Party,” she said. “What party?”

“The TV party we’re going to have with our good friends, Wash Pelton and Marty Schillinger.”

IT TOOK SOME DOING to convince Cassandra that the cellar would be clean and that no snakes could possibly get into it again. And she agreed that snake phobias-like all phobias-made little sense, considering that garden snakes, at least, were harmless. I told her that for a psych 101 correspondent student, she had certainly covered a lot of territory. Knowing the truth about fear, she said, didn’t make it any easier for her.

“Me neither,” I said, although my sympathy did little to calm her nerves.

We took the car into town and rented a VCR. Then we drove thirty miles to the closest Radio Shack in the little ski town of North Creek. As luck or providence would have it, I was able to charge a video camera along with a thin, flexible scope that could take pictures from any place and any position at any time of day. The snakelike lens cost about ten times what the camera cost, but would be worth its weight in diamonds if my plan succeeded.