Michael Koryta - Last Words

“Threatening,” Mark offered, and she nodded with what seemed to be real sorrow.

“He’s angry white trash now, right? That’s what people who don’t know him would say. Isn’t that what you’d say?”

Mark thought of the bins overflowing with Busch cans, of the rental house that was waiting on a teardown. “He’s trying to play the role, at least.”

“ That’s my point. He was given a role, and it was given to him that night in the cave.”

Mark understood something about being given a role and about the way you could play a different one if you cared to try, but he didn’t want to argue with her. He was about to ask another question when he was interrupted by an electronic chime. Danielle leaned over and punched a button on an old-fashioned intercom screen that was mounted on the wall above the kitchen counter.

“Good morning, Cecil.”

“Miss MacAlister, I think that asshole from Florida came back.”

Danielle smiled at Mark, then pushed the talk button again. “I’m aware of this. He’s actually standing here with me now.”

There was a pause, but Cecil’s voice didn’t betray any less hostility when he spoke again. “I didn’t know he was on the property. From the snow, looks like he has been all night.”

“It’s under control, Cecil. Thanks.”

The intercom light blinked off. Mark nodded at it and said, “That’s connected to the garage?”

“Yes. And he has a radio.” She shook her head and poured coffee into two mugs and passed one to Mark. “He’s quite the watchdog, our Cecil. Always vigilant. Only took him twelve hours to notice your car.”

“Yet your father has paid to keep him here for ten years. Even Cecil seems confused by that.”

She drank some of the coffee without looking at him and said, “Let’s go downstairs and get your map.”

They were back in the unfinished basement room with the map-covered walls when Mark said, “Why do you still have this place? Why let it sit for a decade?”

“That wasn’t my choice. It will be soon enough, I’m afraid. My father isn’t well.”

“Will you sell it?”

“Absolutely.”

“So why hasn’t he?”

“He promised Diane Martin he would keep the cave closed,” she said. “That was when they were still speaking. Whatever they had, it fell apart fast after Sarah died. Selling Trapdoor would have made him feel like he was profiteering when he should be suffering, I think. So he put that gate up, put the locks on, and left it to sit like some sort of monument to the dead. Any thought of selling it ended completely when Diane overdosed. He never came back to Garrison when he heard that. Not once. I’m the only person in the family to have stepped onto this property in the past four years, and I wasn’t any more eager to do that than he was. For my family, Trapdoor became a very bad place, very fast. There’s nothing but a lot of regret here.”

She sat down on the old recliner, and dust rose from the cushions. She pulled the wooden handle on the side of the chair and the footrest rolled out with a protesting creak.

“You know this was the first place I ever made out with a boy? Not kissed, I’d been kissed before, but I mean really... you follow.”

“I follow the mechanics, sure. I don’t follow why you’re talking about them.”

“It felt terrible. Not the make-out session, that’s not what I mean. At that age, you don’t know what feels good yet.”

“Then why’d it feel terrible?”

“You’re a detective,” she said.

“That’s right. But apparently not a very good one, because I don’t know why we’re talking about this.”

“Do some detecting, then,” she said. “Why does a girl feel terrible for kissing a boy?”

Beside them the furnace kicked on and the exposed ductwork above began to hum. Mark looked at her and said, “Evan Borders?”

“You are a detective.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“When he was dating Sarah?”

“Yes.”

“You were competing for him?”

“Oh, no. I had no interest in Evan. He was a sweet kid, cute and funny, but he was Sarah’s.”

“So you kissed him...”

“To hurt her,” Danielle said. “I wanted to really hurt her, you know? In the worst possible way.”

“Why?”

“Because I was seventeen years old and my father couldn’t keep it in his pants and he was getting married again and Sarah was delighted about it. She was just thrilled. She’d talk about it all the time, she’d write me notes, send these cute little messages all with the same theme: we were going to be sisters. But I didn’t want to be her sister. I wanted to be her friend, and I wanted my father back with my mother. She was so clueless about that, so obtuse, and it drove me crazy. I wanted to punish her. And what’s the best way for one teenage girl to punish another?”

“Through her boyfriend.”

“There you go. I knew it was an awful thing to do, of course. That was the point. I was trying to be awful. Because she needed to be punished, you know, for daring to act as if it were a good thing that my father was marrying her mother. For daring to want to be my sister.”

She wiped at her eyes again. “That was the last weekend I was here. I went back to Louisville two days later, feeling very self-righteous about what I’d done, about teaching that little bitch a lesson. But that’s all it was, understand? A lesson. A temporary thing. I’d see her again in a few weeks, and we’d get over it. Of course we’d get over it, because we were seventeen years old and we’d be family for the rest of our lives, right? The rest of our lives. It would be a footnote by the time we were twenty, something we laughed about by the time we were forty.”

She put the footrest down and got out of the chair, returned to the file cabinet, opened it again, removed a photograph, and handed it to him. There were nine teenagers pictured, four boys in T-shirts and five girls in tank tops that said Trapdoor Caverns. They were standing in front of the entrance to the cave, everybody smiling, the sun on their faces. In the back row, Evan Borders looked relaxed and charming, a kid ready to cruise through the world. Just in front of him, kneeling with their hands on their slim, tan thighs, were Sarah Martin and Danielle MacAlister. Their heads were close together, their smiles wide. Sarah was just a few weeks away from another photo shoot, this one in the county morgue.

“Look at those eyes,” Danielle whispered. “She had eyes that shone. Eyes that belonged to some pop love song. And when Evan came by? Her eyes took on a luminescence when he passed through. She was always smiling too. Immune to the petty and melodramatic things that you’d get between kids. Because she was trying to show her maturity that summer. Trying to act older to impress Evan. To impress me. I can’t lie about that. She looked up to me, and I knew that. How awful then that I was the one who was petty and melodramatic. I was the child to her. My God, her father had died a few years earlier, and I was so dramatic about a divorce that I wanted to punish Sarah? How awful is that?”

She stepped away from Mark and sat back down on the ancient, creaking recliner. The day was young but she looked as if she wanted it to come to an end already. The question Mark asked then wasn’t a detective’s question at all.

“What was the last thing you said to her?”

She looked at him with surprise. “Why does that matter?”

“Don’t you remember? I think most people do when they lose someone. Or if they don’t, they come up with something. They need to remember, whether it’s accurate or not.”