by Jabez Richard (1731 words)
Anxiety dreams. Dreams of Eleanor in peril, needing her mommy. Where are you, Mommy? I need Mommy!But no matter how frantically Lucy searched, her baby girl was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t in the Grand Salon. Not in the decaying cabin. Not in the hog shed. There was one place she hadn’t checked. Room 28. Her hand on the knob. Twisting. Pushing the door open. Trying to peek inside. But, before she could glimpse past the threshold, everything exploded in her face.
Awake. It took a minute for Lucy to stop shaking. The explosion from the dream seemed to echo through the open door of the hog shed. Her husband and his lover remained tied up on the floor where she had left them, but both pigs and Jen had absconded. Paul’s gag had slipped. “Lucy, I—” She replaced the gag, not ready to listen to any more of his excuses. And where was Jasper? She still had Ed’s pistol.
A gunshot jerked her attention back to the open door. It sounded like a gunshot anyway. In the past, Lucy had confused firecrackers for guns. Engines backfiring too. Her trembling had returned. This frightened, helpless version of Lucy lacked the necessary agency to deal with the current circumstances. She needed fearless, Mama Lion Lucy to rise to the occasion. Whatever new terror lurked beyond this next curtain, it certainly paled in comparison to the nightmare of raising a child in this late-stage Capitalist dystopia called America.
A dark figure loomed in the doorway and Lucy just about fainted.
“Hello?” a man’s voice, low and nasal, called into the shed. “Anybody in there?”
Without waiting for an answer, the man entered the shed. At first glance, Lucy thought it was Sicard Ficino, but from an alternate dimension. He waddled instead of walked. He was corpulent, jowly and stooped. He wore a police uniform, replete with a bushy mustache. Peering first at Peter and Paul, bound and gagged on the ground, the man sniffed indecisively before turning his attention to Lucy, who still had not spoken. The bizarro Ficino doppelganger (cop?) barely registered any interest until he noticed the gun.
“Wanna tell me what yer doin’ with that sidearm, miss?” he asked Lucy. “Maybe tell me why you got them two fellers over there tied up?”
It dawned on Lucy just how bad this all might look to an outsider. Somehow, she found her tongue and tried to explain.
“That’s my husband,” she began, “and his lover. This is a writers’ retreat. But Peter—him—and his wife and two other attendees are conspiring to…frame Jasper St. John for sexual misconduct…or murder, maybe?”
The two men on the floor wriggled in protest, making sad whining sounds through their gags. Paul looked at Lucy, his eyes pleading. Was he really a part of this mad intrigue?
Lucy’s memory suffered from the inevitable irreconcilable inconsistencies spawned by this unorthodox writing experiment at Pine Tree Lodge. “I was back in my room writing song lyrics for a while,” she rambled, “but then the pig made a noise, and I was back in the shed with the talking mouse-owl…”
The expression on the cop’s face remained stony and skeptical.
“If you can’t tell me why they’re tied up like they are,” the cop said, “I gotta arrest you.”
Lucy struggled to focus.
Peter had accidentally flipped onto his back and was kicking his legs like a beetle, trying to right himself. The cop ignored his tribulation.
“The others!” Lucy screeched. “Jane and Bunny. They’re the ones trying to kidnap people. And Charles. Charles Kowalski. I’m pretty sure it was him who shot me with the tranquilizer and tied me and Jasper up. You see? They tied me up first.”
The cop took a step back, his face expressing surprise.
“Did you say Chuck Kowalski?” the cop scoffed. “No, Chuck would never do anything like that. It would sully his honor. Cops are better than that. You must be confused.”
How did this cop know Charles? Charles had worked clear on the other side of the country. Also, something felt very off about this police officer. He hadn’t introduced himself. She was pretty sure there were at least a dozen procedural violations he had made, though she wasn’t versed enough in civic law to say exactly which codes he had broken.
“Lucy? Jen? Are you okay? There’s a fire!”
Ed barreled into the hog shed, almost colliding with the cop. Lucy wanted to feel relieved at Ed’s return, but his hysterical entrance belied a chink in the military man’s heretofore impervious Teflon. Fear pulsed across Ed’s face when he recognized the new arrival as law enforcement. Lucy wondered about the origin of the gunshot. Had it come from Ed?
“Maybe you can shed some light,” the cop said, addressing Ed. “I was just asking your friend here—Lucy? Or Jen?—’bout why are these two men tied.”
“Oh,” Ed said, strangely taken aback by the question. “They’re fairies. Who cares if they’re tied up. The real issue is I was dancing…never mind what I was doing, but when I snapped out of it, I saw a shed—I think—on fire.”
Lucy couldn’t hold back the vomit. She puked a small mouthful of bile on the straw next to her feet. Was this really Ed? The same Ed who danced to Jason Mraz? The kind, accommodating Sean Connery, who she secretly expected to save the day, possibly even steal a smooch? Even the cop seemed shocked by Ed’s unexpected, casual, homophobic flare up.
The police officer straightened his back, exposing his true gigantism. He stood well over six feet, and his heavy-set frame suggested more muscle than Lucy’s initial impression. Without any overtly threatening motions, the cop towered over Ed, looking him square in the eye.
“You’re ex-Navy,” the cop said, eyes unblinking. “Ed Tremayne.”
Ed blinked and took a step back.
“Do I know you?” he whispered.
“You probably won’t remember. The name’s Dante Ficknelly,” the cop said. “I was just a cadet when you caught your discharge for kidnapping those two other sailors and tossing them off the stern in the middle of the night.“
“They were homos,” Ed snorted. “They had no business in the military.” He spat on the floor next to Peter and Paul before remembering his original purpose.
“Look, I’m a helper, a protector,” he declared. “Keeping people safe is just what I do, and let me tell you, those two guys over there are dangerous. And why aren’t you concerned about the fire?”
“Sir,” the cop said, clearly unconcerned with the alleged fire, “ma’am, I’m placing you under arrest. You know your rights to silence and attorneys and such.”
The cop reached for his gun only to discover it had vamoosed from its holster. Lucy felt the switch to Mama-Lion-mode flip back on. Springing to her feet, she snatched up Ed’s pistol and pointed it in front of her. The giant cop lifted his arms in surrender, but Lucy trained the gun on Ed.
“Cuff him, Officer Ficknelly,” she said. “And then help me untie these two assholes, so we can finally figure out what the hell is going on here.”
“But Lucy, I need to keep you safe,” Ed pleaded. “And I’m not kidding about that fire. Seriously, instead of handcuffing me, you should be radioing the fire department.”
In the distance, a mournful wail cried out through the forest. Somewhere down the highway, a firetruck approached. Someone had seen the blaze (maybe Cybertruck) and notified the authorities. Lucy didn’t even know what was burning. Ed thought it was a shed, but now she doubted his credibility. Normally she could judge a person’s character well enough. Now, a suspicion crept into her mind that not only had Ed set the fire, but he was also behind a bunch of the other creepy shenanigans of the weekend.
Maybe everybody was in on it.
Lucy lowered the gun after Officer Ficknelly manacled Ed, but kept it in hand, just in case. What a strange time of night for a cop to show up unannounced. She most definitely had some reservations about this so-called Officer Dante Ficknelly.
***
Mavis stared in the mirror, observing herself, observing herself, observing herself. What had Ficino written about her? a truth seeker/in disguise. She was the observer. But sometimes she was also an instigator. Adjusting her glasses, she studied her face, a nothing-face. A face full of mystery. Boring, lumps of coal for eyes, like a snowman. Eyes that bored into the back of your skull, like an ice witch. A nose that barely altered the topography of her face. A subtle proboscis pointing a finger in the direction of infamy. And that smile—it hardly amounted for an expression of emotion—it was mute, blank and neutral. The smile of an instigator.
She washed her hands in the sink, hoping the sugary, floral-scented soap would remove the last traces of diesel smell. The suds filled the sink with opalescent rainbows, reminiscent of parking lot oil spills after a rainstorm. Gasoline still permeated the bathroom. Its odor, combined with the soap’s fake lavender smell, and the smokiness clinging to her clothing, made Mavis dizzy, so she sat on the floor.
When her niece, Jen, had called with the details of this writers’ retreat, Mavis could scarcely believe the synchronicity. What were the chances of Jasper St. John and Sicard Ficino in the same building, at the same time? Hastily, she put her life on pause and rushed home to Washington. Her work history more than qualified her for a seasonal job at the Pine Tree Lodge. And with Jen’s recommendation, securing a position on the staff was a cinch. She had been plotting this course for quite some time, and now it was time to bring the boat to harbor.
Mavis felt behind the sink’s wooden facade, reassuring herself that the Wusthof knife remained concealed. What peculiarities she had observed herself instigating this weekend. Who knew she had it in her? But she was a researcher after all, and good research often required pushing past the bounds of decency.
Not that she was responsible for all the madness and chaos at the Lodge. Just the big stuff. She had set the fire, anyway. How else was she supposed to dispose of that bloody rug?
