Honest Philomena
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
Three weeks later, after the security fence and the alarm system had been installed, she received another visit from the sheriff, who informed her that the meth cook cousin of Enid’s boyfriend had been critically burned in a chemical explosion that destroyed his remote mountain lab, and he was not expected to live. The resulting shortage in the local methedrine supply was causing “price-hike panic” among the county’s crank addicts, and he expressed relief that Philomena had so promptly heeded his advice to protect herself from housebreakers. She asked if he’d heard anything about Enid.
“Sure you want to know?” he asked, avoiding her unsettling stare by engaging in a tug of war with Shams and his rope toy.
“What do you think?”
“It’s Corey, the boyfriend. He’s been beatin’ on her, and pretty regularly, from what I hear. This is third-hand, mind. She hasn’t reported him, but then, he hasn’t put her in the hospital yet.”
“Can’t you do something?”
“Not unless I catch him in the act, or she swears out a complaint. And that’s not likely to happen as long as he’s her main supplier.”
“Thanks. You’re a huge help.” She paced agitatedly around the yard. “I can’t just stand by and do nothing, Rick. This is killing me.”
“I know it is. But Enid’s over eighteen. You can’t even put her in rehab without her consent. I’m sorry, Philomena, but that’s the law.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?”
“If I can get her on possession alone, the judge might order rehab in lieu of jail time. But that’s a smart girl you’ve got. She’s very careful where she uses, and who she sells to. If she gets caught dealing, and trust me, she will sooner or later, chances are she’ll do time. After that, she’s on her own.”
“I don’t suppose prison’s any refuge from crank?”
“It’s no refuge from anything.”
She slept little that night, her head filled with obsessive, imaginary arguments with Enid. It was the only way she could talk to her anymore. Her daughter had long since destroyed the cell phone she’d given her and pointedly not called to give her the new number, though Philomena couldn’t quite let go of the belief that Enid would eventually call her, that this terrible judgment of silence, during which a year had felt like eternity, would soon end and they would be reconciled.
The sheriff had told her that Corey and Enid moved frequently, leaving trashed apartments and unpaid rent in their wake, and not knowing where she lived, she couldn’t attempt a rescue even with the slimmest chance of success. The truth was, her daughter was lost to her, and she was to blame. It was her fault that Enid hated her, her refusal to listen to the girl’s need for a stable social life in the city, her insistence on moving to the country over her daughter’s objections, her pride, selfishness and misanthropy that had delivered her child into the jaws of this curse.
She saw herself as a Caliban in civilized society, unfit to be with people, much less raise a child. But her most unforgivable sin was in stripping away Enid’s nourishing illusions at those times in childhood when she needed them most. She could hardly be surprised that the normal rebelliousness of a teenager had, in Enid’s case, escalated into bloody revolution, or that her enforced separation from her daughter was anything but a just punishment. More than anything else, she dreamed of another chance at repairing the rift between them or, failing that, simply to avert a catastrophe.
That chance finally came three months later, in a way she could not have foreseen.
A software program she’d designed for a biotechnology company in Maryland had developed a glitch that required her presence at the company headquarters in Gaithersburg. She’d been able to correct the problem the same day, but it was almost dark when she left the building with Shams short-leashed at her side, as he’d been the entire afternoon, granted special dispensation by the management.
After giving Shams a short walk on the company campus, she loaded him into the back of her Land Rover and began the ninety-minute drive back to her mountain property. She was hungry, tired, and too impatient to be home even to stop for dinner. Another reason for her haste was the realization that she’d forgotten to activate the alarm before leaving the house that morning. It wasn’t the first time.
While driving the steep gravel road up to her house, she spotted a car parked a few yards up a seldom-used dirt path about a quarter mile from her mailbox. She slowed to a stop, not recognizing the beat-up sedan as belonging to any of her half dozen neighbors. There was a light rain falling, and it was even darker than usual on the mountain, but as she drove warily up the driveway to her house, wishing that the shotgun was in her truck and not under the bed, she saw that the motion-sensitive lights were on all over the yard, and the gate of the chain-link fence was open.
Shams was up and prowling in the back, a deep warning growl in his throat. She had to assume that whoever owned the furtively parked car on the dirt path was now inside her house. She switched off her headlights, turned the truck around for a quick getaway, then dialed the sheriff’s number on her cell phone. But as she was about to press the Send button, she saw through the kitchen window a woman’s outsized head and skeletal shoulders clearly illuminated by the light over the sink. She was shocked, appalled, thrilled: it was Enid, and she appeared to be washing dishes.
Philomena got out of the truck, leaving the engine running and, opening the back door and keeping a tight grip on the leash, led Shams through the gate. The cut-off padlock lay on the ground. On her way around to the back of the house, from her position several feet below the window and partially concealed by rhododendrons, she saw Enid’s large eyes and glassy expression in the bruised, wasted wreck of her face. She saw that the girl was washing herself, not dishes, and that there was blood on her clothes. Philomena climbed the back steps, panting with fear, unlocked the door and entered, Shams tense and growling at her side, his hackles raised.
Sprawled on its back in the middle of the uncarpeted pinewood floor of the living room was the skinny, shirtless, grotesquely tattooed corpse of a man who might have been twenty or sixty. The dead man was both covered with and apparently basking in a huge, viscous pool of blood so impossibly red that Philomena felt her gorge rising at the merest thought of her own body brimming with the same atrocious, living syrup. The room reeked of cordite and fresh kill. It was hard to believe that this pathetic stick of a man could hold so much blood, and the blasting sight of him, combined with the so-long-wished-for presence of her daughter, who had apparently done this thing, brought her dangerously close to panic.
She entered the kitchen and stopped, the dog bristling at her side. Enid had turned and was facing her now, leaning against the sink, the water still running behind her, water dripping from her arms and face. Philomena’s shotgun was propped against the counter no more than a foot from the girl’s left hand. She was wearing water-soaked jeans that hung on her sharp little hips, and a wet, blood-spattered tank top. Tattoos crawled down her arms and up her neck like a rampant skin disorder. Her lips, swollen and purpled from what looked like multiple blows, and still oozing blood around her lip ring, were slightly parted. Her gaze briefly met her mother’s, then slid away. She seemed stunned, listless, shocked out of all possibility of action or reaction.
“Turn off the water,” Philomena heard herself say.
The mother’s words seemed to switch on some corroded connection in the daughter’s brain, and she did as she was told. Snapped out of her momentary daze, she started shaking. She looked at her mother and made a small, useless gesture with her hands.
“I don’t want to know,” Philomena said, taking a step closer. “It doesn’t matter. Where are the keys?”
Enid shook her head as if trying to clear it. “Keys?”
“To that car down the road. Where are they?”
“In his pocket.”
“Go get them.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. If I do it, I’ll have to tell them that when they come. You know that, don’t you? Go get them, Enid. Do as I say.”
The girl lurched into motion. As she passed, Philomena gripped her arm. “Does he have a gun?”
“Waistband. Underneath him. He never got it out.”
“Leave it where it is.”
Enid went and, after a moment, Philomena could hear her sobbing. She took Shams into the bedroom and with a few words in his ear told him to stay there, then closed the door and went back to the living room. Enid was standing by the door, holding the keys in a bloody hand, waiting to be told what to do.
“How much money do you have?”
She shook her head. Philomena went into the kitchen and came back with a wad of bills. She stuffed them into her daughter’s back pocket.
“There’s a hose by the front door,” Philomena said. “Go and hose yourself down. Make sure you get all the blood off. Then walk to your car and drive home. Dispose of the clothes you’re wearing in a trash bag, then take a shower and scrub yourself down, real hard, especially your hands and arms. Drop the trash bag in a dumpster far from your house, then go home and wait. The police will come and arrest you, but not for murder. You were here, and you know I can’t lie about that. But you can. Tell them you waited in the car while he went in, and then you heard the shot. You came up here and and saw what happened. I advised you to go home and wait for the police. Can you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Get going.”
“Mom—”
“Call me from the station. I’ll come as soon as I can.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“Go, Enid. Please.”
Philomena watched until she was out of sight down the road. Then she went out to the car, turned off the engine and locked it up. She went to the shed and came back carrying an aluminum ladder, which she set up over the body. Enid had only used one barrel of the 16-gauge, which gave her a little hope that her plan might work. She rubbed down the shotgun with a kitchen towel, then stuffed cotton in her ears.
Carrying the gun, which she’d never fired before, she climbed to the ladder’s second highest step, and bracing herself as best she could with her knees and ankles, aimed downward in as near an approximation of a straight trajectory as she could, then fired the other round into the corpse’s already shattered chest. The sound was horrendous, and the gun’s kick almost knocked her off the ladder. She climbed down, placed the shotgun in plain sight, then folded up the ladder, took it outside, hosed off the blood spatter, and put it back in the outdoor shed.
She rehearsed what she planned to say: “He broke in. He was armed. I shot him.” It was all true, but the forensic evidence might not match her account. Rick could have already asked around and learned about her peculiarity, and one direct question about Enid could force her into a betrayal. If pressed, she would try to portray the break-in as a home invasion, the brazen act of an armed, half-crazed drug addict.
Her only advantage, if one could call it that, was Rick’s feelings for her. She went back inside and let out Shams, who’d been barking nonstop since the gunshot. She calmed him down, then took him into the kitchen, fed and watered him, and thoroughly cleaned and rubbed down the area around the sink. Then she drew a glass of water, sat down at the kitchen table, and called the sheriff.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
