8. Affairs In Order
Affairs In Order
Heather was going to die. Heather had to die, and Marlowe had to be the one to do it.
Fuck.
Marlowe was in a trap, with a gnawed-off leg or a bottomless river being the only way out.
She could still find another person. A hitchhiker, maybe—there were always a few along the main highway—or the man at the gas pumps who smiled at her with too many teeth. Heather didn’t have to be the one.
But Heather had to be the one sacrificed to Pike, because if she wasn’t, Marlowe would still have to flee the state to avoid murder charges, and Heather would be free, and alive, and Marlowe would rather eat her gnawed-off leg instead of accept failure.
Calling Fish and Wildlife had been the right, upstanding thing to do and Marlowe shouldn’t have expected anything less from Miss Perfect—the camp would reopen once the floodwaters fully receded and canoes and boats and gangly, sunburned limbs would fill the lake now haunted by a monster.
The kids didn’t deserve to die a horrible death.
Most of them, like Marlowe had been, were church kids sent by their parents.
They felt a sense of unease at daily chapel, but sat in the back anyways, friendship bracelets taped to their Bibles, sweaty shoulders bumping with whispered jokes, waiting until the final prayer finished so they could rush out the chapel doors like wild animals and go back to Camp Atonement being just a summer vacation instead of a place rotten with judgment and abused power.
Pike had to go.
And so did Heather.
Marlowe scraped her teeth against the mark in her palm.
Heather had been on the phone a minute ago, so she had to be away from her cabin in the rec room or offices.
But it was Wednesday, and Camp Atonement was so bent over by tradition that even with the camp in shambles the counselors would be hosting their weekly sing-along around the fire, shitty guitars and all.
She could wait for Heather in her cabin. Take her to the lake. Pike was hungry—they wouldn’t leave any evidence. Marlowe would be across the border by the time Fish and Wildlife caught Pike. Done with this town, over Heather, free from Pike.
Marlowe sat up, head pounding in time with her heartbeat.
Pike wouldn’t know anything was coming until it was too late. Marlowe didn’t care, but her stomach felt queasy again. They’d served back-of-fridge hotdish tonight. Must be why rocks settled in her gut. Hospital food was always shit.
She paced the length of her galley kitchen, shaking out a cigarette and lighting it with her spare lighter. She sucked it to ashes in half the time and lit another one, smoking away the thought of Pike’s Lake being dredged and searched.
If she had more time to plan, she’d do this quietly with a syringe or two smuggled from work. Heather wouldn’t struggle. But she had to figure out another way—something discrete in case she was interrupted before she reached cabin 9.
Stubbing out the rest of her cigarette, Marlowe braced her hands on the kitchen counter between mounds of dirty dishes, and inhaled deeply.
Heather wasn’t defenseless. She’d have to catch her by surprise.
The edge of a cast iron pan bit into her elbow as she folded her arms on the counter.
Marlowe straightened. Something quiet, something discrete.
The heft of cast iron in her hand could be explained as self-defense, not murder.
It rode next to her on the bench seat all the way to Camp Atonement, leaving small smears of grease with every jostle and slip of the truck as Marlowe floored it through the recently flooded forest.
She felt the snag of tires bogged down in mud a second before her truck lurched and slowed. Marlowe swore as the truck fishtailed and tires spun helplessly in slick mud. Engine hot, the truck sputtered, and she cursed again and let up on the pedal.
She rolled her shoulders, shaking away nerves.
Cabin 13 loomed in her truck headlights, a husk of what it had been 9 years ago. The furthest cabin from the camp center, it had been used as an overflow space, briefly as storage, then as a prison. Quarantine was what the director told the others.
Heather had played the perfect director’s daughter, bringing Marlowe meals, slipping flattened origami boats under the door, marching a line of mossy-brown pebbles along the windowsill like a row of scooped-out hazel eyes.
Marlowe flipped the brights on the truck, illuminating the full rotted truth of the cabin. An ugly watermark still striped the side.
Right under the top bunk.
Paper boats made of Bible verses had cornered Marlowe, and she’d been stuck in that stinking, drowned cabin for two days before the lock broke from the outside and she escaped into sewage-soaked floodwaters.
Marlowe grit her teeth and wrenched the truck into reverse, stomping on the gas, and the Chevy bucked before lurching out of the mud. She chose her path carefully, this time avoiding the low areas.
Marlowe jammed it in park outside of cabin 9 and stared at the cast iron pan.
“Jesus Christ.” The thing was so heavy it would be as effective to lob a brick at Heather. “Don’t let her talk,” Marlowe whispered to herself. “Get in, wait for her to get back from the campfire, get out and drag her back to Pike. Easy. Sure.”
Marlowe swiped her hair away in her hoodie and wrinkled her nose at the sheen of sweat sticking to her collarbones. She stared at herself in the shoddy rearview mirror for one more moment before she hauled the cast iron across the seat with her before she could back out.
Woodsmoke hazed the air as Marlowe quietly clicked the truck door shut behind her and ghosted through the forest. A dark path curved into the towering pines beyond the cabin, leading to the rest of the camp. Marlowe would have a perfect vantage point from the two square windows.
A number 9 was hewn into a rough slab of wood and tacked to the cabin exterior with a rusted nail. An orange tabby cat lurked under the pine-board porch.
Marlowe experimentally swung the pan and it swooshed heavily through the air. The cat blinked green eyes at her and twitched his striped tail.
“What’re you looking at?” Marlowe made a quiet hissing noise and the cat leisurely stretched and melted into the dark forest.
Good. No witnesses.
A lantern swung from the peaked roof and cast Marlow in a harsh light as she stepped onto the spongy, needle-flecked porch. Sticks lashed together with twine made 9 crude crosses nailed across the doorway. A pale-yellow glow struggled through the grimy windows.
Marlowe smiled wryly. Heather didn’t turn off lights at the motels either.
Swallowing the sudden bitter taste in her mouth, she tried the iron door handle. Cabin 13 was still the only one with a lock. Danger, of course, could never be found at Camp Atonement unless it was of the perverse, lustful nature.
Heather’s cabin door gave way with a soft creak.
A figure hunched in the corner.
Marlowe’s stomach dropped.
Short, wavy blonde hair. Plaid shirt. A man, not Heather. A man, sitting in Heather’s cabin, on Heather’s bed.
He turned. “Did you find your—”
Behind gold-rimmed square glasses, his wide blue eyes grew even wider. His lips parted slightly, the crumbled remnants of a s’more sticky in the corner.
Marlowe stared. The cast iron pan dragged against her side, the handle hot and slick under her grip.
A lone owl shrieked outside.
“Who the fuck are you?” Marlowe’s hand tightened on the pan handle.
“Kenny.” The rest of the s’more sprinkled the patchwork quilt on the bed in front of him as he hastily wiped his hands on his pressed slacks. “Who the heck are you?”
Marlowe ran through a dozen different clips. Heather was here a moment ago, Heather went to find something, man in cabin, man with Heather, Jesus Christ, were they a thing?
Marlowe winced in sympathy once it sank in. The pan grew unbearably heavy and she adjusted her grip, fumbling for a moment before she glanced back at him.
The wrinkles in his forehead under his bowl cut fringe told her Kenny was registering, for the first time, how incredibly odd this was. He started to get up, gaze darting to the open door.
Marlowe’s half-smile slipped. “Sorry, Kenny.”
The pan found its mark with a meaty thud. His head snapped back.
Shit.
Kenny tipped back onto the bed in a limp pile, arms flopping to the side and rattling the nightstand.
Cast iron bruised Marlowe’s leg as she dropped it, and it bounced off the rag rug at her feet.
This wasn't how it was supposed to go. Lover Boy was supposed to be Heather. She should’ve been the one with a dainty goose egg on the back of her head, neatly bundled into Marlowe’s backseat.
Instead, her man stained her floral sheets a muddy shade of red.
Heather’s Bible tilted at the edge of her nightstand. The book thudded to the floor.
Papers slipped from the gilt edges. Marlowe toed at them with the edge of her sandal as Kenny’s weakened breathing hissed through the cabin.
Heather’s neat writing tainted each one. Lists of Marlowe’s last three jobs, addresses from her last two apartment buildings, a blurry picture of her with a woman outside a bar, the circled phone number of her supervisor at the hospital.
Her scalp prickled.
“You don’t want this, Marlowe.”
Marlowe’s whole life had hung on unraveled threads, and she hadn’t even known.
An anonymous tip to Mercy Hospital was damning, but the rest of it?
Marlowe would’ve been on the streets. Heather had only been waiting for her shame to outweigh her desire, and she would have destroyed Marlowe with her hatred before ever trying to live in freedom.
Marlowe wouldn’t give her another chance.
Only one of them would leave Pike’s Lake tonight.