When You See Me

by Lisa Gardner

  “Who sent ya?” Walt demands now.

  Again, I peer at Keith. I’m not sure how to answer. We came on our own? Does that comfort a loner or seal our doom? Maybe we should say the police are right behind us.

  I feel a rising bubble of . . . something. Hysteria? I don’t get hysterical. I’m Flora Dane, with universal handcuff keys tucked in the knot of my hair and a butterfly blade in the top of my boot and homemade pepper spray in my pants pocket. Time to end this—

  “Sir,” Keith says. “Do you recognize her?”

  Walt’s rheumy blue eyes fly to my face. “You’re dead,” he whispers.

  “No, sir,” Keith speaks up before I have a chance. “But she needs your help. Immediately. We’re in danger. They’re coming. Please. Help us.”

  Appealing to the paranoid? The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Them and They are such powerful enemies, of course we must be very good friends?

  “Quick,” Walt says. “Follow me.”

  He strides toward the log cabin and just like that we’ve gone from being his latest victims to his newest charges.

  “How did you know?” I murmur to Keith as we jog behind a shotgun-wielding lunatic.

  “Took my best guess.”

  “If he has lampshades made of human skin inside there, I’m going for him.”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Are we on a date?” I ask Keith, as Walt clatters up to the front door, grabs the barely attached screen door, and throws it open.

  “I hope so,” Keith tells me. “Because let’s face it. This is one helluva story to tell our future children.”

  * * *

  —

  WE CROSS THE THRESHOLD INTO Walt Davies’s home, which may just be our final resting place.

  No lights are on. Given the sunny day, it shouldn’t be an issue, but—no surprise—thick dusty curtains have been pulled tight. I whack my shin, then my knee, as I realize stuff is everywhere.

  Walt is already sidling up to the nearest window. He pulls back the edge of the curtain, which appears to have been fashioned from layers of army surplus blankets, and peers out. He mumbles something, then crosses quickly to the other side of the cluttered room. More squinting and muttering. Then he disappears down the hall, leaving Keith and me to stand alone in the cabin.

  Now that my eyes are adjusting to the gloom, I can make out details. We are in the main room, with a massive stone fireplace before us and a significantly smaller dining space to our right. The kitchen features a pump sink and old-fashioned cast-iron stove. It appears to have been installed a hundred years ago and never updated since.

  The entire space is low ceilinged, which I understand once upon a time made it easier to heat. Now it makes me feel claustrophobic, especially given that every square inch is filled with broken furniture, jumbled piles of bound newspapers, and of course a massive moth-eaten deer head mounted over the mantel.

  “Again, one sign of human skin . . .” I murmur to Keith.

  He squeezes my hand.

  Walt returns. “Don’t see ’em. So far, so good. Why are you here? What did you see? Where did you go?”

  He’s still carrying the shotgun, now down at his side. I should make a move to disarm him, but I’ve dealt with his kind of scary strength before. It won’t be easy. And for the moment at least—when we are part of Us, hiding out from Them—maybe it’s better to play along.

  “They were chasing us,” I say vaguely. “Our ATV ran out of gas. We ran here for help.”

  Walt nods somberly, as if this makes perfect sense. “Mountains are no place for a girl,” he says seriously. “Not even one with a boyfriend. These are dangerous times. Daytime’s hard enough. Don’t get caught out after dark.”

  “What happens after dark?” Keith asks.

  “The hills come alive,” Walt whispers. “It ain’t safe. T’ain’t safe at all.” He stares at me so hard I have to resist the urge to fidget. Slowly, he reaches out an age-spotted hand, as if to brush my cheek. Or assure himself that I’m real and not some ghost from his past. I recoil automatically, hitting the box behind me and sending half the room’s contents tumbling to the floor like a chain of dominoes.

  Keith belatedly tries to right whatever he can reach. I’m still staring at Walt Davies, who I swear has tears in his eyes.

  “It don’t matter,” he says, as Keith tries to pick up. “I’ll get to it later. Gives me something to do at night.”

  “How long have you lived here?” I ask.

  “My whole life.”

  “You have any family?”

  “Had a sister. Gone now. Had a woman. Son. Gone, too. These woods aren’t safe.”

  “Is that why you have all the new spotlights?”

  “Can’t be too careful.”

  “When was the last time you saw Them?” I venture now. “They approached your property?”

  Walt narrows his eyes at me. There’s a particular kind of cunning there. Once more: a dreadful feeling of déjà vu.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “I’m dead?”

  Now there’s no denying it: Walt Davies’s rheumy eyes fill with tears. Two track down his bristly cheeks. “I came back for you,” he says hoarsely. “I swear it!”

  Before I can even think it through, I say: “I know.” I don’t understand what he’s telling me, but his agitation pains me. “I should’ve waited for you.”

  “I made a promise. I meant to keep it.”

  “Mr. Davies,” Keith speaks up, “what’s in the barn? I couldn’t help noticing . . . that’s quite some lock.”

  “Why? What’d ya hear?” That fast, the cunning is gone, replaced by rampant paranoia.

  “I, um, I’m wondering if that might be a safer place to, uh, you know, hide. From Them.”

  “You know, don’tcha? Someone talked, someone told. You want what I have.” Before either of us can blink, the shotgun is pointed at Keith’s chest. “You can’t have it!”

  “Please, Walt, please!” I place my hand on his arm without thinking, making my voice as high and feminine as possible. It works, his attention pinging back to me. I am someone to him. I’m not sure who. Sister, wife, girlfriend? But I am someone important, maybe even someone he loved, now back from the dead.

  The most basic tenet of survival: Use what you’ve got.

  “I’m scared . . .” I whisper. I feel like the scantily clad heroine in a slasher film. Walt focuses entirely on me, while Keith draws a ragged breath.

  “It’s so dark in here,” I continue. “I don’t like the dark.”

  Walt hesitates, shotgun still pointed at Keith, but his attention on my face. I can’t read any of the thoughts running through his sad eyes, across his hollow cheeks. I wonder how long ago his woman and child left. How long he’s been alone on this giant property, stringing barbed wire, hanging floodlights, and waiting for the mountains to attack.

  I don’t feel afraid of him anymore. We are kindred spirits. Two people lost in the shadows, preparing for the worst and never feeling safe again.

  “They all want it,” he says seriously. “If I show you . . . you can’t tell. Can’t share what you see. Everyone wants my secrets. What makes it grow so fast. So green.”

  Grow? I finally get it. What had brought us here in the first place. Walt is the local dope farmer. Chances are, that’s what is in the barn. His growing operation. Which would also explain all the roads exiting the property—for middle of the night shipments.

  Walt leads us out the front door. Glance here, glance there, then he hustles us across the open yard to the massive barn. We press against the side of the building, staying out of sight of . . . Them? Drones? The ghosts of the mountains? He undoes the padlock with a key he wears on a long chain around his neck.

  He has to set down his shotgun to push back the heavy sliding doo
r. Neither Keith nor I make a move. We are holding our breaths, preparing to encounter a jungle of dope plants that will only add to the surrealness of our day.

  Which makes it all the crazier when Walt steps inside the warm, humid space, flips on a bank of overhead lights, and proudly declares, “Yes, sir. I grow the purest crop in all of Georgia. Behold. Davies’s Microgreens.”

  * * *

  —

  “THE TRICK IS COCO MATS,” Walt explains proudly. “No soil, no pesticides. Just plenty of love and water. I got four different crops, from micro mustard plants to pea shoots. I harvest every ten to fifteen days. Just me. Load it up, head to Atlanta. Gotta real following among the swanky chefs at high-end restaurants. Microgreens are very healthy, you know. High in vitamins, some even fight cancer.”

  I honestly have no idea what to say. Standing beside me, I can tell Keith is equally stunned. We are staring at row after row of metal shelving units. Each holds eight shallow trays of densely packed, tiny green shoots, like a parade of Chia Pets escaped from the 1980s.

  I walk closer, inspecting the setup. There are tubes running from each tray.

  “Hydroponics,” Walt explains. “Makes for faster growth.”

  I get it, the watering system. While hanging from the ceiling above are huge banks of lights, emitting a whitish glow.

  “LED lighting,” Walt volunteers again, clearly proud. “Provides the best balance of light and heat. I got ’em digitally programmed. Different growth stages have different needs. You don’t gotta be too fancy about it, but I take care of my own. Best damn microgreens in Georgia,” he boasts again.

  “How long have you been doing this?” Keith asks. Like me, he has started wandering the aisles.

  “Three years.”

  “How did you learn all this?” I ask, waving my hand around. Because digital lights, the automated watering system . . . With his unkempt hair, tattered jeans, and stained flannel, Walt doesn’t exactly look like an advertisement for sophistication, and yet this is clearly a high-tech operation.

  He shrugs. “Here and there. I’ve always been good with my hands. Running a farm, fixin’ buildings, maintainin’ equipment, takes more know-how than people think.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Plus,” he adds matter-of-factly, “I grew dope for years. This is easier. More profitable and I don’t gotta worry about being arrested.”

  “Of course.”

  “I wasn’t always a good person,” Walt says abruptly. He’s standing near the door. For the first time, I realize I don’t know where the shotgun is anymore. Still leaning against the outside of the barn? Or tucked somewhere behind him? For that matter, is there a second egress to this place? Or if he wanted to, could Walt take three steps back, jerk closed the heavy sliding door, and lock us in with his precious microgreens?

  I don’t know why he’d want to do such a thing. And yet, the hair is standing up on the back of my neck. Farther down the aisle, Keith turns and I can tell he feels it, too. A certain wrongness. A change in the air that doesn’t bode well.

  Maybe a guy like Walt doesn’t need a reason. Maybe Keith and I have allowed ourselves to be lulled by trays of tiny green shoots while forgetting the obvious—crazy is crazy, and Walt Davies has spent decades earning a reputation as the town lunatic.

  “I drank,” Walt whispers now.

  Has he moved? I shift slightly, trying to calculate my distance to the open door. If I bolt now, maybe I could cut him off.

  “I doped and drugged and drank my way through life. If there was an illicit chemical around, I injected it. If there was a fight to be had, I picked it. I hit my girl. Smacked around my kid. Then beat them more for making me feel bad about it. I was a mean son of a bitch.”

  Keith and I don’t say a word. Walt doesn’t seem to be paying attention to us anymore. He’s telling his story, and the confessional air once again makes me shiver.

  “Then, I got lost. In the mountains. These very hills where I had lived my whole life. I’d gone hunting, and ’course, packed more booze than common sense. I was on a trail. Then I wasn’t. Night came and it grew cold.

  “I don’t know how long I staggered about. Day after day. Till my beer was gone, my flask dry. I’d packed a sandwich. Ate that the first afternoon. Then, with no booze, I started to get the shakes. Can’t exactly hunt when you’re too weak to hold a rifle. Hell, I couldn’t even manage to light a match for a fire. But the night sweats, hunger pangs, bone-deep thirst, they weren’t the worst part.”

  “What was the worst part?” I drift toward the open door.

  “The woods.” Walt speaks in an almost reverent tone. “They came alive. The trees whipped at me. The bushes clawed at my feet. And the night screamed. Of every wrong I’d ever done. And there were so many.

  “I screamed back, that first night. I shook my fists at the moon. I howled like a goddamn animal. The mountains wanted a piece of me? I was angry and mean and I wasn’t going down without a fight. But then, every time I closed my eyes, I saw them. All the people I’d hurt. The wrongs I’d done. My boy’s bruised eyes. My woman’s shattered cheek. The woods, they showed me the darkness of my soul.”

  Walt pauses, he looks at us for the first time, and his eyes are not completely sane, and yet, the pain in them feels real. I know something about the darkness of a person’s soul. Of spending long nights facing your sins.

  “By the third night, I had no rage left in me. I was a broken man, destroyed by my own evil ways. I dug a hole with my bare hands. Long, deep. Tremblin’ and sweatin’ and out of my mind with the fucking pain. I prepared my grave and readied myself to die alone, with only the screaming trees for company. I deserved it. Lord, I deserved it.

  “I prayed that final night. No atheists in a foxhole, right? I laid myself down in the earth, folded my arms over my chest, and out of my mind with the need for booze, I begged and cried like the fool I was. One more chance. Lord, give me one more chance.” Walt raised his gaze heavenward. “And you know what happened?”

  Keith and I shake our heads.

  “Nothin’. I sweat it out. The withdrawal, the pain. I lay in the earth and shook till I thought my bones would break.

  “Then . . . I slept. When I woke up, I was thirsty. Parched down to the core. But not for beer or whiskey. For water. Good, plain, clean water. So I climbed out of my grave and I staggered my way forward till eventually, I came to a stream where I drank my fill. Then I followed that stream till it led me to a trail and I finally found my way home. I’d been gone six days, with nights that dropped below freezing conditions. But I lived.”

  “You sobered up,” I say.

  Walt nods, but it’s not a triumphant gesture. His shoulders are bowed and I realize now his cheeks are damp with tears. Did the mountains save him or break him? I wonder if he knows.

  Walt clears his throat. He has moved toward a rack of microgreens. He strokes the velvety shoots now.

  “When I got back,” he says, “my woman was gone. Boy, too. Cleared out. Maybe they thought I was dead. Maybe, they just saw a chance to escape and took it. I couldn’t blame ’em. I woulda run from me, too. Course, you can’t escape yourself. So I stayed. I dumped out the booze. Every damn drop. I cried, like a sniveling little boy. And I walked. Every night. I had to listen to the woods. I needed the trees to talk to me. I had to learn what they needed to say.

  “Maybe I went a little crazy. Locals say I am. They cross the street when I come into town. The store owners take my money but they keep their distance. I’m sober now, been clean for well over four decades. But all that drinking . . . It’s possible I pickled my brain. I don’t know. I still hear the woods at night. I still walk among the trees, listening to the wind tell its stories.

  “And sometimes, I hear screaming. There are ghosts in these mountains, and they’re not all in my head.”

  “What do you hear, Walt?” I ask g
ently. Because whether he knows it or not, he’s crying again, silent tears running down his bristly cheeks. And there is something so mournful about him, I’m sorry I was ever scared of him, even as I wonder if this is just a different shade of crazy.

  “I hear you,” he says quietly. So quietly, I’m not sure I heard correctly. He looks up. “I hear you crying in that box. I hear all my sins, all the things I can’t undo, including my biggest sin of all.”

  I can’t speak. I can’t breathe. Keith has moved closer to me. What Walt is saying doesn’t make sense, and yet, I already know it does.

  My pervasive sense of déjà vu.

  “I told him to let you go. I told him it wasn’t right.”

  “Who did you tell to let her go?” Keith, his voice strong and even, which is good, because at any moment I’m going to collapse.

  “I was a mean son of a bitch. The things I did to my family . . . But I still didn’t understand the full awfulness of what I’d done. Till he came back. Reap what you sow. I don’t want to grow that kind of anger ever again.”

  I try to open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

  “I begged him,” Walt murmurs. “I begged him to be better. But I could tell. The booze, the drugs, they had him, too. Or maybe, blood simply runs black in this family.

  “My boy, showing up as a grown man. Strutting around these woods. If the trees screamed at him, he liked it. If the wind fought, he yelled back. I thought I was something terrible, unnatural, evil. Then, I met my own son.”

  I have to put out a hand. I find a metal rack, grab on for dear life. Then Keith is there, taking my arm, shoring me up.

  “He took me to the cellar,” Walt whispers. “He showed me what he’d done. He was proud. So damn proud. I heard you, whimpering like a kitten. A poor broken girl who just wanted out.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

  I’m shaking my head. At least, I think I am. His words are too much, bringing back the unforgiving feel of the hard wood against my head, the stench of urine as I lay in my own waste, and the gleeful sound of Jacob’s voice.