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 and touched my hand. I grabbed it and held on.
“Polly, you blush like a mad thing whenever you lie. Top to toe. You know that,” he said.
“So you do remember. I wondered if you’d just wiped it out of your mind.”
“I won’t ever be able to do that,” he said and extricated his hand, massaging it as I had done when he took he cuffs off me ages ago. “I’m still kicking myself for it. It was a mistake. We shouldn’t have done it.”
“‘Shoulds’ really piss me off,” I said. “Somebody says ‘should’ and I immediately avoid doing whatever it is. Somebody says ‘don’t’ and it makes me want to do it more. Tell me, Mark Becker. You had a good time, didn’t you? Before, you know, I made my oh-so-tragic mistake?”
“Yeah. I did. But please don’t want more, Polly Deacon. We’re incompatible. I’ll see you around and I don’t want to think every time I do, that I made a dumb move and I ‘should’ re-think it. I’m too damn busy. You need some sensitive artist-hippie-guy who doesn’t care what you do to yourself, and who has the time to double-check every move he makes. That’s not me. Now can you tell me what Mrs. Schreier said, please?”
I got my face under control, whipped my mind back to Carla and the forest and told him.
“Could you tell me why you killed my best friend?” I’d said to her. Carla had taken a moment to gaze up at the tree I was standing under. There was a slight breeze blowing, making that whooshing sound pine trees make when they’re dancing with the wind. I had thought it was one of that last sounds I’d hear, ever.
“Well, that was just a little mistake of mine, actually,” Carla said. “I didn’t realize it until you told me just now that you’d given my cross to her. Where did you find it?”
I had told her briefly about Poe.
“What a pity, “ Carla said. “Maybe she didn’t have to die at all. You see, after John’s death, I felt badly for her and went over to see if there was anything I could do and to tell her about my baby—-you know, share some womanly conversation. When I got there she was acting strange and she was wearing my cross. The last time I’d seen it was the night John died. I was wearing it when Eddie and Francine came home, telling me that Eddie had hit John. I reached for it and held it and prayed, oh, I prayed that John was dead. Then, after I’d put them to bed with a nice hot drink, I went over to see for myself.
“I still had it on when I called Freddy to come help, because he smiled at it—he gave it to me, you know. It must have fallen off when we were moving the body. That’s why Samson put it in Francine’s coffin. He told me that part of our lives was behind us now.”
“So you killed Francy because she was wearing your crucifix?”
“Of course. She had found it, don’t you see? She knew it was mine. I’d worn it for years, when she lived with us. It was a part of me. Oh, I know it went against Pastor Garnet’s ideas, but I found it comforting. I figured she’d found it in her house and I’ve only been there once, when I went to execute John. I’ve worn it for sixteen years. She wore it to mock me.”
“She didn’t, Carla. She just said it looked familiar, that’s all.”
“Well, how was I to know that? She looked at me. She knew. So I made her a nice hot drink there in her kitchen to help her sleep.”
“Then you wrote the note and strung her up like a bag of potatoes?”
“Oh, she was much heavier than a bag of potatoes. But we farm-women are strong, you know?”
“I know.”