Averil Dean - The Undoing

A sour taste convulsed Julian’s mouth. No, he wanted to say, I didn’t see a thing; it’s nothing to do with me. But the words were swimming in water and he couldn’t get them out.

“Oh,” Emma said. “So who was murdered?”

Kate slid behind the desk and switched on the computer. “My friends. My three best friends.”

Emma was taken aback. “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought...if you don’t want to talk about it...”

“Celia Dark. Celia’s stepbrother, Rory McFarland, and her boyfriend, Eric Dillon.”

The computer chattered to life, an alien presence in the gothic gloom.

“We don’t need to go into it.” Julian’s temple ached from gritting his teeth.

“I don’t mind.” Kate smiled and gave Emma a little half shrug. “It was a long time ago. And anyway, there’s no escaping the topic here on the Ridge. It was all anybody talked about for months. You couldn’t get away from it, not if you lived here.”

Julian walked to the other end of the room, where the boxy new furniture was arranged around the fireplace. It looked nothing like it had five years before, nothing like the way he remembered it.

After the murders, Kate had sent snapshots of the common room and kitchen, along with a bundle of newspaper clippings she’d carefully packed and mailed to his mother’s address in New York. Block headlines at first with thick chunks of text, then smaller, sketchier pieces, featuring standard-issue high school pictures of the three victims and a bigger photo of the Blackbird Hotel. The news petered out at last to a single column of newsprint from the obituaries page: Eric Dillon, Rory McFarland. Their faces grinned out at him, blurred as if by smoke, the ink like soot on his hands.

There was no obituary for Celia. Julian never knew whether the paper hadn’t run one or whether Kate had simply forgotten to include it with the others.

“So did they catch the murderer?”

“There was no one to catch.”

“You mean, one of them killed the others?”

“Maybe. It’s hard to tell for sure. We know that Celia’s stepbrother, Rory, was killed first. He was in the kitchen, shot once in the chest. The room was in a shambles—broken dishes everywhere, chairs overturned. Apparently he and Eric had been fighting. There was a broken bone in Rory’s hand and two in Eric’s face, blood everywhere. Which was exactly what you’d expect from any fight Rory was involved in. The police assumed at first that Eric had left the fight and came back with a gun to finish it. But that didn’t seem to make sense when they looked at everything else.”

“Why’s that?” Emma asked.

“Because Celia was the one left holding the gun.”

It occurred to Julian that Kate must have told this story a hundred times. It had the rhythm of a recitation, a prayer-like cadence. He wondered what it was like here on the Ridge, afterward, what the locals made of it. He had almost no memory of the town itself. Its residents were part of the peripheral setting in his mind rather than personalities in their own right. Reddened, snow-scrubbed faces, thick hands, everyone booted and stomping in doorways, swallowed up by their winter clothes. No one outside the Blackbird had penetrated his consciousness far enough to leave more than a faint impression.

He went to the window. From the sun-dried slopes, crossed with lift lines and dotted with dusty snowplows, the mountains stretched north for hundreds of miles. Though the hills and valleys were covered with trees, they felt barren to Julian, motionless and devoid of life. He wished he’d come back in the wintertime, to see the mountains caked with snow and everyone outside enjoying it.

Kate went on.

“So they thought maybe she was trying to stop the fight and shot Rory by accident, then blamed Eric for what happened and killed him, too.”

“And where was she?” Emma said. “Your friend?”

“Upstairs, in her bed. Shot through the heart. The gun was still in her hand.” Kate’s gaze fixed on him. “Julian’s gun, actually.”

Emma looked at Julian doubtfully, and Kate laughed.

“He was with me at the time,” she said. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

“So it was all an accident, in a way,” Emma said. “Why do people always fight when they go on vacation?”

“Oh, they weren’t on vacation.” The computer had booted up, and Kate sat down in front of it. “They owned this place, the three of them together. They were in the process of renovating to turn it into a B&B. There was a little tray of spackling paste in the kitchen, still wet. Celia had been prepping the walls for a coat of paint when the trouble started.”

“What were they fighting about? Money?” Emma looked disappointed, as if the ghost story had let her down.

“That’s a good question. The only question that matters, really. But it wasn’t money. They weren’t like that. No one could understand what had changed, why they suddenly imploded that way. It didn’t make sense.”

A memory crept into Julian’s mind: a dead sparrow in the grass, its legs curled like dried twigs, and the revulsion on Celia’s face as she looked at it. Celia hated death. She was terrified by it. Yet she’d taken her own life and the lives of her two best friends. She loved them and she killed them and she killed herself. What they were fighting about didn’t explain a thing.

Across the room, a jingle. Kate was trying to give them a room key.

“No,” he said. “I told you—we’re going to the Adelaide.”

“Oh, but I want to stay here,” Emma said. “Maybe we’ll see a ghost.”

Kate handed her the key. Emma turned to him, grinning, dangling the key chain over her thumb.

“Why did you buy this place?” he said. “What was the point?”

Kate sat back, light from the computer washing over her face.

“I don’t know, Julian. I guess I just couldn’t let it go.”

He held his face impassive, but his throat was tight with grief and something akin to fear. He picked up their bags. They seemed much lighter now than they had ten minutes ago; he could barely feel them.

As they reached the foot of the winding staircase, Emma paused to look back.

“What were they like?” she said.

“Oh,” Kate said, as if this was something she’d never considered. “They were...”

Silence crept into the room. From far away, Julian could hear the echo of laughter, the bright crackle of the fire, a murmur of music and voices.

Dead. All dead, and they had taken him with them.

Kate turned her head toward the kitchen, the half-open door. Her answer came just as Emma started up the stairs, leaving only Julian to hear.

“They were really young.”

* * *

Kate stayed at her desk as Julian and his girlfriend disappeared into the upstairs hallway. She could hear the girl’s voice, still chattering, exclaiming over the old hotel, and Julian’s grumbled responses. A door opened and closed, leaving Kate alone in the silence.

For a few minutes she sat where she was, staring out the window. A blue jay hopped along the gnarled branch of a spruce tree, tipping its head to get a look at her. She imagined herself from the bird’s point of view, framed by the windowpanes, alone at her desk, how she’d still be here when the bird looked down from high above.

I’m lonely, she thought, surprised.

She opened the right-hand drawer of the desk. Under some folders and a stack of bills, she found a photograph, still in its heart-shaped frame. Eric had taken that picture. She remembered looking back at him, with the whole snowy mountain laid out at their feet and Julian’s arm snug around her shoulders. Both of them grinning so hard at some joke of Eric’s, Celia and Rory flanking the camera, doubled over with laughter. She wished she could remember what they all had found so funny, two months before the laughter died.