The Method Read online




  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  Copyright © 2017 by Duncan Ralston

  Cover design by Michael Bray

  Also from Duncan Ralston

  Salvage (novel)

  Gristle & Bone (collection)

  Where the Monsters Live (novella)

  WOOM (novella)

  Wildfire (novella)

  Visit www.DuncanRalston.com

  for updates and a free thriller.

  For Sherri,

  through it all.

  Contents

  1 — Trap

  2 — It’s Not a Cult

  3 — Authority

  4 — True/False

  5 — The Other Couple

  6 — Polite Dinner Conversation

  7 — Mixed Signals

  8 — Dogs

  9 — Refuge

  10 — FUBAR

  11 — Right Place, Wrong Time

  12 — Fire in the Hole

  13 — The Old Place

  14 — Love Is Pain

  15 — Turn of the Screwdriver

  16 — End of the Line

  17 — The Delusion of Freedom

  18 — Asylum

  19 — We Do What We’re Told

  20 — Closure

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1 — Trap

  “We’re just going around in circles! There it is again!”

  The edge in Linda’s voice was sharp as razors, but Frank was immune, having heard it countless times before. That edge was part of the reason they were here, trudging around—in circles, he thought, sure, maybe, likely—in the middle of these godforsaken woods.

  Not that he didn’t accept a good share of the blame for getting the two of them to this place. His signature was on the contract right beside hers, after all.

  “There what is?”

  “That. It’s the same tree we saw earlier.”

  “It’s not the same tree,” he grumbled, although he knew saying it would only piss her off more. She was always in charge of the maps because she’d always been better with directions. Frank, who would do the driving, was a creature of instinct. With no time restrictions, he would gladly go where the road took him.

  “It’s the same fucking tree,” she said, on the verge of growling as she stomped up alongside him in her ergonomic walking shoes. “Look! That’s the same knot that looks like a vagina with the same initials carved into it!”

  Frank couldn’t help but laugh, even though he knew it would aggravate her. But he saw she was right. Engraved in the tree, below what looked more like a weeping gash to him, were the initials HK + JD.

  He was still laughing as he stepped on something hard that shifted beneath his shoe. His laugh became a yelp of surprise a split second before the pain struck his calf like a snakebite.

  Except it wasn’t a snake. He’d heard a sharp click. A rusty squawk of metal. The crunch of bone.

  Frank dropped to his knees and the pain followed him down, metal grinding against bone like nails down a chalkboard.

  “What the hell, Frank?” Linda turned, flashing with anger. When she saw what had happened, her eyes went wide.

  The agony swelled up his calf and down into his shoe like a swarm of fire ants. Screaming, he rolled back on his buttocks, scrabbling at the metal jaws of the bear trap.

  “Stop moving!” Linda dropped to her haunches beside him and groaned, her eyes preceding her head as she turned away in disgust.

  It was far worse than he thought, if such a thing was possible.

  He didn’t want to look. He had to.

  The thick, rusty teeth had torn into his calf. The wounds gaped on both sides of his leg, red muscle and yellow fatty tissue exposed. Blood had already soaked the rolled-down white tube sock like a nosebleed handkerchief.

  In fevered glimpses it was difficult to tell if the bone beneath was broken or merely fractured. Pain and adrenaline came in waves to the drumming of his heart, his vision alternating from gray to Kodachrome bright, each wave threatening to pull him under.

  Need a tetanus shot, he thought.

  “Okay, everything’s gonna be all right,” Linda said, her eyes still wide with fear as she lied. Her trembling hands hovered over the trap. She was too worried to touch it for fear she’d make it worse. “Just breathe, honey. Breathe.”

  Even through the mind-shattering pain, he noticed she’d called him honey. Was it loving? Nurturing? Or simply professional, like an ER nurse or a waitress? He couldn’t tell. Every phrase between them these days was a secret code the other was never meant to decipher. Every look loaded with hidden meaning.

  He let out a hiss and sucked in a shivering breath. The trees seemed to close in around him, mirroring the trap they’d been caught in for hours, for years, circling them like carrion birds, spiraling ever closer to the pain at its center.

  To the metal jaws.

  To this sharp-edged metaphor of their imploding relationship.

  He held his wife’s gaze, forcing a smile. Jaw quivering. Teeth chattering. Tears burning his cheeks. He tasted them from the corners of his lips.

  He thought, Is this where it all ends?

  Linda reached for his sneaker. “I’m gonna take off your shoe, okay?”

  “What . . . for?” he breathed.

  “Because when I pry this thing open, I want you to yank your foot out as fast as you can, okay?”

  Frank nodded, his whole body shaking as he blinked away sweat from his eyes. He lost control of his muscles during another wave of pain, and his upper body swayed toward the ground. He struggled to remain conscious, to hold himself upright.

  As delicately as possible, Linda untied his shoe. She looked up to gauge his reaction, to see if she was hurting him too much with just this tender movement.

  She thought, Did I give up on him too soon?

  The shoe slipped off his heel, and she cast it aside urgently. The scattering of dead leaves where it landed made a distinct metallic clink.

  Linda scowled in the direction of the sound.

  Frank followed her concerned gaze and saw nothing.

  She grasped the loop of rusted chain fastened to the trap. Frank gritted his teeth in agony as she tugged on it, pulling it up from the ground. He wanted to tell her to stop, but her determined look made him think better of it. Her pulling exposed more and more rusty dirt-clodded links, previously hidden beneath leaves and roots and earth, snaking off toward the big tree with the initials carved in its bark.

  “What the hell . . . ?” she said.

  Frank saw the chain tied around the base of the tree and wondered how they hadn’t noticed it the first time around.

  “This wasn’t there before.”

  “Someone just put it there in the twenty minutes since we last came around?” He didn’t want to start another argument, but the pain made him reckless, and so often now, they argued just for the sake of it. “That makes no sense, Linda.”

  “It wasn’t there, I swear.” She shook the chain in frustration, causing another searing wave to travel up his leg and settle in his groin.

  “What does it matter?” he growled in agony.

  Linda’s gaze snapped
toward him, and all her anger instantly evaporated. “You’re right.” She lowered the chain gently to the ground. “It doesn’t. Let’s get this thing off you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Frank thought, Is it too late to take it all back? The arguments? The complaints? The name-calling?

  She grasped the jaws, her fingers streaking with his blood. “On the count of three, okay?”

  He nodded eagerly, tensing against the impending pain.

  “One . . .” Her voice hesitant, her gaze unsure.

  They both thought, Can’t we just start over?

  “. . . Two.” More assuredly now, determination returned to her warm brown eyes.

  They thought, Can’t we go back to what it was like before?

  “. . . Three!”

  Her muscles strained as she pried open the jaws, tearing them free from the meat of his calf. Blood-slicked fingers slipping, her fingernails tore on clumps of rust and the trap clamped down harder than before, juddering against naked bone.

  Frank’s howl of agony sent a host of sparrows fluttering from the branches of a nearby aspen. In the silence that followed, they both heard the dogs, and Frank wondered, Was Linda right about the chain?

  2 — It’s Not a Cult

  Pain seized Linda’s left calf, and she might have cried out if not for the men above and below her.

  She’d climbed above the trees just fine but had suddenly found herself forty or fifty feet above the rocky ground without a foothold and nothing within reach of her straining hands.

  In an extremely risky dynamic leap, she’d launched herself too far from any previous holds, the crimp she held in both hands barely deep enough for her fingers to maintain their precarious grip. Her strained leg quivered as she scoured the rock for somewhere to place the other.

  With her friend Trevor belaying, she could easily have given up, called “Falling!” and just let go, hanging in space until he lowered her down. But Frank had assured her he wasn’t up to the climb and that she wasn’t either. As much as she wanted to prove her husband wrong, she also wanted to prove to herself how far she’d come since the Year From Hell.

  The trouble was Dillon and Trevor weren’t just experienced climbers, they also appeared to be in the best shape of their lives. Dillon was already nearing the top of the rock, climbing like a sexy little gecko on methamphetamines despite baby Clayton snuggled in a papoose on her back. Trevor leisurely picked holds and glided languidly from one to the next in a semi-doped haze.

  “So she cheated on me,” he shouted down at Linda, oblivious to her pain. “Do you believe that?”

  Linda knew he expected a reply, so she hummed in disbelief, even though she could actually believe it. She’d known Trevor far longer than Dillon had. They’d even dated briefly in college, back when his ego could have received its own honorary PhD. He’d mellowed since then apparently, but the last time the four of them had gotten together, Dillon and Trevor had gotten into a huge fight about some slight he’d committed, and Dillon had stormed off. Now that Linda and Frank were having trouble, it seemed like Trevor and Dillon were suddenly the perfect couple.

  “You all right up there?” Frank called up from a good ten feet below, looking up between her legs. He probably noticed her twitching. His concern, tinged with an obvious “I told you so” edge, pissed her off, but at least he was good enough not to call attention to it.

  “I’m fine,” she grunted.

  “There’s a hold right there.” He let go of his own hold to point to a crimp she hadn’t noticed.

  “That’s a crozzler,” Trevor said, looking down through rainbow-tinted sunglasses. “Crumbled under my foot. Careful there.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Frank mumbled something under his breath.

  “What’s that?” Linda asked, unwilling or unable to just let it go.

  “I said, ‘You’re welcome.’“

  If he had said it, he’d done so in a snarky tone. She let it go and felt the crimp for give. It seemed solid enough. Trevor must have crumbled off a layer of loose rock.

  She relaxed her leg, putting more weight on the other. The cramp in her calf lessened to a dull throb, and she rotated her shoulders one at a time, relishing the crackle in her joints.

  Of course, now that she was safe, the pressure on her bladder returned. She’d have to pee relatively soon. She just hoped she could make it to the top of the cliff first.

  “So yeah, she cheated on me with three other guys,” Trevor continued. “Not at the same time. But I deserved it, you know? I was a prick. Took her for granted,” he said, pronouncing it like granite.

  “And you forgave her?” Frank said, forgiving the mispronunciation.

  “Oh yeah. We got to the root of the problem just last week. But we worked through it, didn’t we, Dee?”

  Instead of answering, Dillon shouted, “Rock!”

  Trevor jerked his head back just in time. A large chunk of slate shot through the space he’d left. It struck the cliff face a few feet above Frank, smashing into smaller bits that rattled on his helmet and rolled off his shoulders.

  “Shit!” he cried out.

  “Guess who didn’t want to wear a helmet,” Linda mocked.

  Trevor flashed down a toothy smile that would have melted her like butter in their college days. “Oh, you gotta wear a helmet, bro. One hundred and ten percent.”

  Frank scowled up at Linda. She gave him a big, self-satisfied grin.

  If asked, she could have pinpointed the exact moment hers and Frank’s relationship had become like navigating a barbed wire fence. The fact that the root of their problem wasn’t entirely either of their faults had turned their marriage following their Year From Hell into a battle of wills, neither of them willing to admit their share of the blame. Both of them wore their guilt on their faces like flashing road signs.

  It could be that they’d always been hurtling toward the edge of a metaphorical cliff like Thelma and Louise. Their favorite fictional couples had all been contentious: Maddie and David from Moonlighting, Sam and Dianne from Cheers (although Frank preferred Sam and Rebecca—of course he preferred the hot one over the one with brains), Buttercup and Westley from The Princess Bride. When she was young, Mr. and Mrs. Twit had been her favorite storybook characters. Frank, believing himself a special child merely lacking in parental nurturing, had preferred Charlie Bucket.

  There’d been an element of teasing and toying to their relationship from the very beginning, of push and pull. They’d met at a college basketball game rooting for rival teams, enrolled in rival schools.

  Frank had picked her up with a classic technique of pointing out how great she would look “if not for that stupid hat,” in reference to the team cap she’d been wearing. In retrospect, it likely wouldn’t have worked on her if she and Trevor hadn’t had their huge public breakup a few weeks prior, but when she’d told Frank it was a terrible pickup line, he’d laughed and admitted to it.

  “So let’s trade,” he’d said.

  “Trade? Caps?”

  “Yeah, why not? What’s the worst that could happen?”

  She’d given him a suspicious look. “Head lice?”

  He’d laughed and she’d loved it immediately. It was uproarious, infectious. Not like these days, when he usually just uttered a sharp and sardonic “ha” rather than dare to really let go.

  “I don’t have lice,” he’d assured her. He’d taken off his cap and held it out for her to inspect. The band had been sweaty but it appeared to be free of bugs. “What, are you afraid they’ll catch us on the JumboTron and all your friends’ll disown you for rooting for the bad guys?”

  “Oh, come on. You’re not bad guys.” She’d smirked, being playful.

  Frank had grinned. “Some of us are . . . ”

  He’d played the bad boy during those first few weeks of courting, but he just hadn’t had it in him. Linda had seen the nice Canadian boy in him from the very beginning. Her breakup with Trevor, a true bad boy
back then, had practically thrust polar opposite Frank Moffat into her bed.

  Whether it was ironic or inevitable that she had been the one to end up filling the bad guy role after the Year From Hell, Linda wasn’t sure, and she didn’t want to think too deeply into it.

  She reached up for a bucket hold far above her head, pushing with both feet. The tips of her fingers scrabbled against it. Straining, her cramped leg buckling, she thrust upward with all of her remaining strength and slipped her hand into the groove.

  “Nice one,” Frank said, without a trace of his usual sarcasm.

  Trevor was pretty, but Frank was unconventionally handsome and far more intelligent. Where Trevor had provided excitement and spontaneity both in bed and elsewhere, Frank had a better sense of humor, wit, and at one point, romance as well. They were comparable when it came to their sexual appetites and prowess, although Trevor was slightly more inclined toward self-gratification.

  Frank and Linda had dated for six years and had been married for three. She’d gotten sick a few months after the honeymoon.

  But she wouldn’t think about that. Not here, clinging to the edge of death. Not now, with Trevor above her and Frank below.

  “How’d you do it?” Frank asked.

  For a moment, Linda didn’t know who or even what he was asking. Then she remembered Trevor’s admission. Dillon cheating with multiple men. Him forgiving her. As far as Linda knew, there had been no such transgressions in hers and Frank’s own relationship.

  If only it was that simple, she thought.

  She reached for a hold and pulled herself up.

  Trevor grunted as he wedged himself into a ledge just wide enough to rest a single butt cheek. He sat with his shoulder and hip against the rock, breathing evenly, and brought out a joint from his fanny pack. He twisted the precise flame of a butane lighter around its tip, taking a luxuriant drag.

  Linda noticed bruises on his legs and arms she hadn’t spotted before. Climbing injuries, she supposed, or from any number of extreme sports he and Dillon participated in. But the gash on his right forearm looked nasty, like it had only recently been infected. Multiple stitches stood like black barbs around the wound.