His eyes fluttered open several hours later to the sounds of Sarah preparing for bed. He lay under a quilt that she had apparently thrown over him. Without turning his head he could see her pass across his field of vision, dressed in a lightweight nightgown, her figure silhouetted against light spilling out from her bedroom. From the other side of the room, a television flickered, though the sound was turned off. Tom lay still and kept his breathing regular, deliberately allowing her to believe he was sleeping, even when she moved close enough that he could feel the air fanned by her efficient movement.
“How late are you going to be up?”
Her voice was low to guard Tom’s sleep.
“It’s Friday,” Ray Jr. replied. “No school tomorrow.”
“Well, you still need your sleep.”
Tom felt an impulse to stir and draw her attention and test her response. He imagined how he might be able to push the intimacy of the moment by sighing loudly and then tossing on the couch so that the quilt fell to the floor, inviting her to replace it. If she did, he might press up against her, and she might welcome his touch. He wanted to lie there in the warmth of Sarah’s living room until morning, and maybe longer, but there was another thought lurking on the edge of his consciousness that he couldn’t push away. He had left something undone, something important, something he’d meant to do and could no longer avoid: the incriminating fire poker still lay where he’d tossed it aside after killing Brubaker with it, just waiting to be discovered if he didn’t return to the scene of….
Tom interrupted his own train of thought, resisting the obvious descriptive, “the crime.” But what should it be called? To call Brubaker’s shack a crime scene would inevitably lead to the wrong conclusion, that the tweaker had been murdered, since only Brubaker’s killer knew that what had happened there was not murder but an act of self-defense. Likewise, the fire poker was not exactly a “murder weapon,” though it was unquestionably an instrument of death. These distinctions were all-important to Tom. The language and plotting of a detective novel were dangerous because they left him vulnerable to the killer’s classic misstep, the essential but ruinous return to the scene of … the incident.
And yet, as he lay there waiting for Sarah to turn off the lights and for Ray Jr. to finish his video game and go to sleep so that he could slip away without having to offer an explanation, Tom knew he had no choice but to return to Brubaker’s shack, and not out of any latent psychological compulsion to be caught. On the contrary, he was determined to avoid detection, and that’s why the fire poker had to be retrieved, though it was a chore he anticipated with mounting dread.
Tom drifted in and out of a light sleep, but in his restlessness he could not stop reliving the incident with Brubaker, asking himself how it might have gone differently, how he could have avoided it altogether by minding his own business and letting the mystery of Ray Walker go without his investigating it, or, if his need to investigate led him inevitably to Mark Brubaker, how he might have managed the encounter differently so that it could end without violence. But as he revisited every step he had taken to Brubaker’s door he found that it always ended the same way: he was standing naked over a dying Brubaker with a bloody fire poker in his hands, which he dropped and left carelessly behind, forcing him now, not three days later, to have to go back in order to dispose of it.
Sarah had long since gone to bed and Tom gave up the hope that Ray Jr. would stop playing his video game any time before sunrise, so he rolled off the sofa and stood up. Ray was staring at him. Tom put his finger to his lips and gestured in the direction of Sarah’s bedroom door, indicating he wanted to avoid waking her up, and Ray nodded his complicity. Tom made his way to the door and stepped outside. The night was cold, the sky clear. He was thankful that his car engine turned over immediately, a credit to the missing mechanic who had maintained it and whose sleeping wife was now the beneficiary of his skill. He watched the doublewide recede in the rearview mirror as he pulled away, glad to see that it remained dark.
Fifteen minutes later he pulled up to Brubaker’s equally dark cabin. It looked exactly as it had just days earlier, when he’d fled the scene, the glistening semi parked by the side. Tom sat in his car for a moment, listening intently and hearing only a coyote yelp far in the distance. “This will be quick,” he thought, imagining he would walk inside, spot the fire poker immediately, grab it, and retreat. He would avoid looking directly at Brubaker’s corpse, though he anticipated that he might have to step over it.
Was there anything else he needed to do? Anything he was forgetting? Better to think of it now so he wouldn’t have to return again later. Again he relived the half hour he’d been there, moment by moment, blow by literal blow. Was there anything besides the fire poker he had touched, anything that might retain his fingerprints?
Maybe the shower faucet. He would wipe it down. Had he adjusted the showerhead? He didn’t remember, so he would wipe that down, too, just in case. After killing Brubaker, did he drink water from a glass?
Steady, Tom told himself. You’re going overboard. The fire poker would be enough! With that self-admonition, he purposefully stepped out of the car and pushed open the door of the house, only to have his resolve instantly undone by the stench of Brubaker’s death. The odor was a physical force and it pushed Tom back on his heels, back outside, where he doubled over and retched.
He covered his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his shirt and pushed his way back inside.
Brubaker’s corpse lay just where it had fallen, but was so bloated that it looked as if it might explode. The air inside the shack was warm and moist with human decomposition, and there were insects everywhere, mostly houseflies, and their maggots, crawling on the naked body. Brubaker’s skin had blackened to the point that his tattoos were barely discernable.
Tom looked for the fire poker, but didn’t see it where he remembered it falling from his grasp. Now that he was back in the shack, every detail was crisp and perfectly matched his memory of the scene. Only the fire poker simply wasn’t there. It was like one of those games in a children’s picture book in which two highly detailed photographs are positioned side-by-side. Can you see what’s different in the second picture? Why, the instrument of death is missing, of course.
Tom felt sick to his stomach as he stumbled out of the cabin back to his car. Was it the stench? The sight of the rotting corpse? Or was it the shattering discovery that someone had been there and had taken the fire poker?
Tom sat behind the wheel of his car and gazed at the cabin. He had left the door open. So much the better, as it would only hasten the decay of the scene and any incriminating evidence still inside, by letting the coyotes and other vermin in. He thought he could see movement, probably the movement of rodents already on the job, just inside the door.
What an open door could do, broken windows and running water could only help along. Tom walked around the cabin and smashed every window with a stick. Realizing that he had just created another piece of evidence – the stick itself – he tossed it into the ravine. He forced himself to go back inside and using a piece of cloth to avoid planting more fingerprints he opened the tap on the kitchen and bathroom sinks and the shower, plugging the drains so that the water would soon overflow and cause a flood. He opened the refrigerator. He thought about setting the place on fire, but that would only draw attention and ensure a visit from authorities.
Hopefully, nobody would investigate Mark Brubaker’s disappearance for months, and by the time anyone did nature would have cleansed his shack of everything organic, even Brubaker’s bones, if Brubaker had been right about the coyotes’ diet, leaving it clean and odorless. Like Whispering Jim and like Ray Walker, Brubaker would have vanished. Hopefully, whoever had been there and had discovered the corpse and had taken the fire poker was someone who had no reason or inclination to report what they had found to the law or to look any deeper into what had happened there.
These were admittedly frail hopes, but they were all Tom had.