it,” I said.
“It wasn’t an affair. It was the Lord’s work. We prayed before and after.” The image was nauseating.
“Did Francy know about it?”
“That little scatterbrain? You must be joking. Too busy picking weeds with her witch-friend and fooling around with my Eddie, who is turning out to be just as sinful as his father, Freddy Einarson. I wouldn’t be surprised if that Beth wasn’t my granddaughter. That’s a sick little thought, isn’t it? No. John married Francine because she was pure, and when she dirtied up, he turned to me. She was too wrapped up in her baby to notice.”
My head hurt, but I had stopped crying. Now, I was just ragingly angry.
“Carla, what’s all the fuss about the crucifix? After all, nobody knows about it but me. You Holy Lambers don’t even like crucifixes. Nobody thinks it’s important at all.” Dumb thing to say. But I was thinking out loud.
“Exactly,” she said, glad that I had pointed out why she had to kill me.
“But the cops—I mean, I could show it to the cops, say that I found it and gave it to Francy, tell them that Samson put it in the coffin, but what would that prove? You could easily say you lost it somewhere, or you could deny ever knowing anything about it.”
“I could, but then they’d start wondering about me, wouldn’t they? I don’t want that. Can you give it to me now, please?” She said it quite sweetly, holding out her hand.
“Before I do, could you tell me why you killed my best friend? I just need to know.”
She told me. It made a weird kind of sense, if your brain worked the way Carla’s obviously did. It was ugly, though, and stupid. A stupid reason. Just like the stupid reason she had for killing me.
“Now, I think it’s time to stage a little accident. Just toss me the cross, would you?” I did. I was numb with fright, and I had a hideous vision of her cold hands rooting around in my clothing after I was dead. She caught it deftly.
“This won’t take long, Pauline,” she said kindly. “You won’t feel a thing. Just don’t move around.”
I lost it. I fell to my knees and gibbered. I used all sorts of God-words which hadn’t passed my lips since my parents died. I even started saying the Lord’s prayer. I closed my eyes, heard a heavy rustling in the bush off the trail and knew all at once that my power-animal the bear had come to take me to the other side. I yelled, there was an enormous noise and my heart exploded.
Thirty
Here is the cycle of living and dying
solemnly sung by the waves
in the throat of the bay.
—Shepherd’s Pie
The bear was Upon me, licking my face and whining. I threw my arms around it and wondered if it would be safe to open my eyes. I was ready for anything. My chest hurt, but that was because the bear was so heavy. Well, not that heavy, actually, but I supposed that things were different in the afterworld.
I heard something big moving towards me, but I figured my bear would protect me, and anyway, I was dead, so what did it matter? I opened my eyes and found myself looking into the bear’s mouth, which was big and red and smelled like dog kibble.
“You okay, Polly?” If that was the voice of God, I was definitely in trouble. It was Morrison. I sat up carefully, my arms still around the bear, which looked suspiciously like Lug-nut.
“Oh God. I’m not dead. Oh God.” At the same time somebody else was saying “Oh God Oh God” too, over and over.
I looked over at Carla Schreier. She was crumpled in a small heap, shivering and moaning in fright.
“Make it go away, Jesus,” Carla whimpered. “Make it leave me alone.”
Things happened pretty smartly after that. Some other cops I didn’t know showed up and everybody asked a lot of questions. Lug-nut stayed glued to my side, which I liked a lot.
Carla insisted that she’d been attacked by a bear and had shot at it in self-defence. But there was no sign of any bear.
“I didn’t see a bear,” Morrison said to a superior who wasn’t Becker. Where was he, anyway? “I saw Carla Schreier pointing a gun at Polly, and I drew my own weapon, but I didn’t have time to use it. Schreier screamed, the gun went off, and then they both fell to the ground. I thought she’d got you, Polly.”
“If there had been a bear, Lug-nut would be chasing it right now,” I said.
“There was a bear, I tell you,” Carla insisted. She was flanked by two police officers, and the shotgun had been whisked away. “It came out of the bush straight for me, roaring. That’s why I fired. Look, it scratched me.” She offered her sleeve for inspection. The sleeve was perfectly okay, the skin unharmed. She stared at it in astonishment and then went apeshit.
I made sure the cops had the crucifix in hand, although it didn’t really matter. Carla was incriminating herself all over the place and praying for me to be struck by lightning. She called me a witch a dozen times, and they took her away, shrieking and struggling.
Morrison drove me to the Laingford cop-shop to make a statement. Becker was there waiting for me in a drab little interview room, tapping a pencil and looking like he hadn’t slept in a week. We sat opposite one another, a battered wooden table between us. Someone had carved their initials into the surface—“D.W. was here”—and I wondered fleetingly what D.W. had used to make the marks. They’d searched me for weapons. Hadn’t they searched D.W.?
“I have to go fill out a report,” Morrison said. “You want a coffee or anything, Polly?” I shook my head and he left us.
Becker’s face was tight and he was all business. He banged out question after question concerning the past hour or so, and I answered as truthfully as I could, trying not to feel aggrieved. I didn’t think I was going to get an apology from him. After all, he had just been doing his job. The only thing he did wrong was to get involved with a suspect—me.
When we got to the part about Carla and the gun, I got a tad emotional. I wanted to tell him how frightened I had been, to explain that looking into the face of Death had been monstrous and horrible, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that anything I said would be chalked up to my own drug-dependent flakiness.
“Now, you said that Carla told you why she killed Mrs. Travers? Tell me about it,” he said, pencil at the ready.
“Won’t that be hearsay, Detective?”
“She’ll tell us something, I expect, but from what Morrison has said, she’s gone off the deep end, so your testimony will be important.”
“Will it be admissible?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m a pot-head whose friend was murdered. How can you be sure I’m telling the truth?”
His face softened a little and he reached across the awful table
