Bindlestiff

Chapter 22

For the first few seconds I felt an unreasoning panic fueled by revulsion and sudden claustrophobia. There was a scream building in my throat; I struggled to keep it there, because if I let it out it would be surrendering to the panic. I opened my mouth wide and forced myself to breathe deeply, evenly. I forced myself to stand still, too, with my arms splayed out and my hands flat against the stones on either side. The wildness went out of me in slow swirls, like water down a clogged drain, but when it was gone I had myself under control again.

One of the bodies brushed against my leg, and I shuddered and backed up until my hips touched the wall. The water came to just above my waist. Something cold and clammy was pressed to my lower jaw; when I realized that and pawed it off I saw that it was a decay-blackened oak leaf. I tilted my head back. There was still nothing in the circular opening above except sky and the overhanging tree branches.

Quiet up there, too. Even the birds had quit their chattering. The person who had left me to drown or die of starvation would be headed off the property by now-the same person who had killed Hannah Peterson and Lester Raymond and dumped their bodies down here. Returned to the scene of the crime, probably to do something about Hannah’s Toyota back there by the collapsed building. Spotted me, hid in the woods until I climbed down inside here, and then slipped up and grabbed the ladder. Dead men tell no tales. But I wasn’t dead yet, and when I got out of here I would tell plenty of tales because I had a pretty good idea who that person had to be.

If I got out of here…

The back of my head had begun to throb and burn; some of the stagnant water had got in under the bandage and irritated the wound. I was shivering, too, from the chill of the water and the dank air. Move, I thought, keep moving. There’s got to be a way out.

I waded toward the far side. The stones were obscured by shadow, so that I couldn’t see if there were any handholds or footholds that would let me climb up; the moss coating them had a sleek, ugly look, like the body of a slug. I remembered the flashlight. It was still in my pocket, but when I dragged it out and pressed the switch, nothing happened. Water had got inside the battery casing and made the thing useless.

I dropped it and began to ease along the stones to my left, searching for a foothold. There were a few knobs and projections like the one I’d braced my foot on earlier, but that was all. You couldn’t climb up a vertical wall on little knobs and projections, for Christ’s sake. A frigging mountaineer couldn’t climb out of a stone well that way.

But I kept moving along the wall, pawing at it. My leg bumped against one of the bodies again; it seemed to bob away like a bundle of something heavy and discarded. Bundle. Two bundles, not one. Two stiffs in a well. Bundle-stiffs. Bindlestiffs…

Cut it out!

I got a fresh grip on my control and hung on. I was going to get out of here, by God. I was going to find a way out of here.

And I found one-the length of two-by-two.

I was looking right at it, partially submerged with the upper end cocked against the stones in front of me. About five feet long, that piece of wood. The diameter of the well was no more than four feet. Twelve feet from the surface of the water to the wooden lip up there; three feet of water; fifteen feet overall from the bottom to the lip. And I was six feet tall, with a vertical reach of maybe three feet. Mathematics. Sure, that was the answer. Mathematics and that good heavy chunk of board.

I started to reach out for it. Then I thought: No, no, find a place to anchor it first. Again I groped sideways along the stones. I had to go half way around before I located a place-a moss-filled declivity formed by knobs on two stones laid atop each other, like a tiny recessed shelf, that was on a level with my wrists. I clawed at the moss, broke a nail and scraped my fingertips raw; but I got the indentation cleared out. By the feel of it, it was maybe a couple of inches wide and the same distance high-just about the size of the two-by-two.

The board was over on my right; I caught hold of it in both hands and slid it up at an angle against the opposite wall. Then I brought the bottom part over and pushed it into the slot between the two stones. It went in all right, stayed in without slipping. I wiggled the board until the other end looked to be resting at a point directly across from the slot, its length bisecting the well at an upward angle.

So far, so good. With my arms extended over my head, I waded out under the piece of wood until I could just touch it with my fingertips. Then I bent my knees, set myself, and jumped up and wrapped both hands around it and kicked my legs over against the facing wall. There was a tearing sensation in my left shoulder, an eruption of pain. But I managed to hang on, monkeylike, jouncing my body so my weight would pull the upper end of the board down tighter into the stones, wedge it there the way the lower end was wedged. I tried to keep most of the strain on my right hand and arm, but the left arm gave out anyway after four or five seconds and I had to let go. I kicked off the wall just in time, so that when I dropped my feet went straight down and I stayed upright and my head stayed out of that damned foul water.

Panting and shivering, I waded backward and reached up to test the two-by-two. The upper end was still a little loose; if I tried climbing onto it now, it was liable to slip and I’d have to do the whole thing over again. I could not afford to take that chance. The chill water was a constant drain on my strength, and there was that weakness in my left shoulder and arm. When I went up on that board it had to be one time only, one concentrated effort and no mistakes.

I stood for two or three minutes, massaging my left arm, going through some of the exercises the therapist had given me. The pain began to ease. I moved out under the two-by-two and jumped up again, using only my right hand; but that way I was only able to hang on for a second or two. I tried it again with the same results, but the third time I managed to stay suspended long enough to wrench downward violently on the top part of the board. When I waded back to test it this time it was wedged in tight between the walls: I couldn’t move it at all.

I realized one of the corpses was lying against my leg and nudged it away. I could hear my teeth clacking together like old bones. The fingers on my left hand were stiffening up again from the cold. I needed that hand and arm-I could not make the climb otherwise-and I massaged them furiously from fingertips to armpit, exercised them, kept them out of the water. I did that for a good five minutes, not thinking about anything except getting out, getting out, feeling the sun on my body again.

Some of the cramping went away finally; I could flex the fingers almost enough to make a fist. I was as ready as I would ever be.

I squatted down until the water was just under my chin, so I could grope along the submerged part of the wall under the board’s lower end. It had a slimy, repulsive feel. But some twelve inches below the surface I found a jutting corner that seemed large enough to use for a toehold. I rubbed at it, stripping away some of the slick growth to make it less slippery. Then I got the edge of my shoe braced on the jutting corner, reached up and took a two-handed grip on the two-by-two, dragged in a deep breath, and shoved and hauled myself upward, grunting with the effort.

The board seemed to move slightly under me. I felt the panic again-and then I was out of the water and draped over the wood with my right shoulder pressed against the wall. There was no more shift in the two-by-two-I might have imagined it-but I lay still anyway for a time. The strain on my left arm had turned it numb in places, as if parts of it were no longer attached; I wanted to rest a while before I had to use it again. But my abdomen was supporting all my weight and the two-by-two was cutting into it and making it difficult for me to breathe. I had to move right away.

I pushed back from the wall, turning my body so that my head was toward the stones and inching backward up the angle of the board. Still no shift in the length of wood; it had to be wedged in pretty tight. I kept moving until I was stretched out along it from crotch to chin, then slowly swung my left leg over. And eased myself into an upright position, straddling the board like a kid facing the wrong way on a narrow seesaw.

I sat like that, not moving, sweat leaking out of me, until my breathing returned to normal and little prickles of pain erased the numbness in my arm. The rough part was next: getting my feet under me, standing up on that slender two-inch expanse. I put my head back. The top of the well was only about eight feet away now; I could see the wooden lip, I could see more of the nearby trees and the fat gold underbelly of a cloud where the westering sun struck it. God, I thought, let me get up there.

All right. I inched forward again until my knees butted against the stones; felt down along the wall on both sides. No toeholds there. I leaned up and brushed my palms over the mossy rock higher up. Small projections here and there, precarious handholds at best, but I had no other choice. I dug the fingers of my right hand into one of them, braced my left hand on the board and my right shoulder against the wall, lifted my right leg and cocked the knee over the wood. Shoved up, pulled up, got my knee down on the board-and almost lost my balance. Frantically I clutched at the stones, throwing my weight against them. If the board had shifted then I would have come right off it and toppled back into the water. But it stayed wedged and I kept my perch, kneeling on the one leg with the other still hanging down.

My hands were slick with water and sweat, but I didn’t dare let go of the wall or the board long enough to dry them. The strain was making my head ache so badly that I had difficulty keeping my thoughts together. And that was good because thinking led to mistakes in a situation like this. You had to act on reflex and instinct.

Balanced on the one knee, hands flattened against the wall, I turned my body so that I could bring the left leg up; put that knee down ahead of the other. Shifted my weight to the left leg, managed to draw the right one up far enough to get the sole of my shoe flat on the board. Crawled up the wall, pushing with the right foot, rising by inches. The muscles in the leg started to weaken, but by then I had the left shoe down too. Blank space of time, no more than a couple of seconds. And then I was standing up on the board, gasping, sobbing a little from the effort, belly and chest and the side of my face pressed against those cold, clammy stones.

When I stretched my arms upward my fingers slid over the wooden lip on top, a couple of inches beyond it. All I had to do now was grab hold of the lip and haul myself up and out. But my left arm was going numb again; I had to bring it back and down and let it hang loose at my side. Both legs had a jellied feel. I don’t have enough strength, I thought. All this way, all this struggle, I can’t pull myself the hell up there.

Then I thought: Goddamn you, yes you can. Yes you can! There’s not going to be a third corpse in this frigging well.

The tingling came back into the left arm, and pretty soon a dull throbbing ache replaced the numbness. I concentrated on the arm, told myself I could feel strength seeping through the muscles and sinews. Made myself believe it. I already had my right hand hooked over the wooden lip; I brought the left up and made those crabbed fingers fasten around the lip too.

I shut my mind down, tensed, and lunged upward.

One of my flailing legs dislodged the two-by-two; I heard it skitter loose, fall and splash into the water. Pain ripped through my left shoulder and armpit, and the arm went numb again. I pulled frenziedly, my shoes scraping against the stones, not finding any purchase. For a moment I felt my grip on the wood slipping; then my right foot dug into a niche, held long enough for me to heave upward again and fling my right forearm over the lip. My head came up out of the well, and I saw the ground and the sun blazing through the trees, and somehow I got my left forearm over the lip too, and squirmed and struggled, and first my ribcage and then my belly slid over the upper ring of stones, over the curved wood…

And I was clear of the well, lying face down in the good sweet grass.

I was out.

I lay there for a time in a patch of sunlight, I don’t know how long, waiting for it to warm me and some of the pain and tension to ebb out of my body. My mind felt sluggish, vague and dreamy. The last half-hour, all that had happened inside the well, seemed unreal, as if I had been given some kind of drug and had hallucinated the whole thing.

The police, I thought eventually, you got to talk to the police. And that made me stir, get up on my feet. The wind blowing across the clearing gave me a whiff of what I smelled like; it brought bile up into the back of my throat. I looked at the well, shuddered, and looked away again. My left arm flopped around like a hunk of sausage when I started to walk; I grabbed it in my right hand and pulled it in against my chest. It was starting to tingle again, to hurt, so maybe it would be all right.

I went around the front of the house, shambling a little, like a drunk on his way home from a wake. My car was still sitting where I’d left it. The rest of the clearing was deserted, or I thought it was until I got to the car and opened the driver’s door. Because when I did that I glanced across at the near side of the house, and somebody was sitting on a small pile of lumber over there. Just sitting, not doing anything else. Not even moving.

The skin between my shoulder blades rippled. And my mind was clear and sharp again. I shut the car door, thinking: So this is the way it ends. She never left at all. She’s been sitting here the whole time.

I understood why when I got to her. I understood a lot of things then, and all of them were ugly. Like murder. Like killing a sister.

Like Arleen Bradford herself.