by Tom Saric
"You were right,” I said as I slid back into the passenger seat. “Useless."
"Mmm hmm," she said. "Do you want lunch?"
"Thanks, but if I could just get you to drop me off at home. I'm beat. And I've got to check on Anna."
Sheila pulled back onto the old highway. The ride was mostly silent, giving me time to reflect. I realized how exhausted I was. I had been pushing myself on adrenaline the past few days and it was bound to catch up with me. My back was aching. I hadn't taken my medication again.
I wished I had the courage to tell Sheila everything, including my missing gun and memory lapses. I felt like each omission put distance between us. As though with each lie I was drifting further and further away. But there was too much to explain, and doing so was to risk her giving up on me.
Sheila left me at the edge of my driveway. I went directly inside, got Anna on her leash, and let her relieve herself. Then I left her inside, hopped in my truck, and tore back up the gravel road.
Wes was a well-known figure in town. People generally kept a wide berth except when they were dropping off the essentials of life. Once a week the Rotary Club dropped off a week’s worth of frozen lasagna, casseroles, and dessert. Three times a year the Catholic Church donated a box of clothing so that Wes could stay warm.
He lived in a leaning shack of a house but had enough firewood for the year, also donated. That left him his entire welfare check to buy whatever else he needed, which ended up being tobacco, mainly.
Wes had chronic schizophrenia of the most severe type. Thirty years ago someone like him would have lived in an institution. But in the eighties, the importance of liberty overtook safety, and institutions were emptied. Mentally ill people were dumped onto the streets to fend for themselves. Most ended up addicted to crack or heroin, or in prison. Or both.
So, in a way, Wes could consider himself lucky.
He lived in a fantasy world. His mother also had schizophrenia, and he was severely neglected from birth. As a result he was emotionally stuck in infancy. This meant that his internal world was still at a preverbal stage of his development, so I could never truly understand it. I once asked Wes to paint his representation of the world. He came back the next session with a canvas covered in dirt and mud.
Some things were too abstract for me to understand.
I loosely knew Wes's favorite junkyard-hunting spots, and given that it was fall and the trees were almost bare, he would be visible from the road. So I decided to systematically drive through the county roads until I found him.
The problem was that even if Wes had been near Ned's and saw everything that transpired, he would be a completely unreliable witness. But if he could identify who else he saw there, I could at least tell Ernie. It would be a start.
After two and a half hours of driving, I saw Wes at Zinck's Auto Salvage. The attendant let me in. I drove through the rows of dented cars and trucks missing doors or hoods or windshields. Mounds of tires and rims lay behind the vehicles. The yard had previously been owned by Ernie Weagle, before he became sheriff and sold it to the Zinck family.
I saw Wes through the trees wearing his favorite dirty overalls and flannel shirt. He had a thick, tangled beard that reached his eyes and he was wearing an old trucker hat. A cloud of cigar smoke surrounded him. He was rummaging through a pile of scrap metal, methodically throwing pieces side to side as though homing in on a specific find.
I parked about twenty yards behind him and hopped out. As I got closer, through the sound of the crashing metal I realized Wes was humming a song.
Find him, find him
Put him in a cage
Smash his fingers
Throw him down the drain
I approached slowly, trying to get in his sight line. But Wes was too focused on what he was doing to notice me.
Until he wakes up terrified
Buried in his grave.
"Wes, hi," I said gently.
He looked up and stared at me, took a few puffs on his cigar, and then got back to work.
Doctor, Doctor, gimme the goods
I got a bad case of it
No pill’s gonna cure me now
"Wes, I'm sorry to bug you, but I need your help."
"You need my help?" His voice was shrill on the word “help,” and it made my skin crawl.
"Yes," I said.
Wes stopped what he was doing and propped one foot up on a rusty car engine. He put one elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand in an exaggerated attentive pose.
"Someone told me that you were at Ned's last night."
"Night Hawk Ned,” Wes said, holding up his finger. "Ned’s dead.” He nodded.
"Yes, Ned was murdered yesterday. You know that? You were there?"
"Ned's dead. I was not there. Not there, not in my underwear."
"How do you know he died?"
"What's that?" He turned his head abruptly away from me. Wes was attending to an auditory hallucination. "No, the doctor didn't. Doctor didn't kill him." Wes then turned to me.
"Wes, were you there?"
"Not there, not me."
"Wes, listen to me, I need you to focus. Someone killed Ned yesterday, the same person that I believe killed Wanda Flynn."
"Ned died?" Wes began crying, then turned and spoke as though someone were behind him. "Wanda, Ned's dead. Don't cry, Wanda."
"Wes, are you talking to Wanda?"
"Wanda says 'shut up.'"
I knew Wes was taking his medication because a nurse gave him an injectable antipsychotic once a month. But Wes was more disorganized than I had ever seen him, which made me suspicious that he had witnessed something stressful. And now that he was having hallucinations of Wanda, it made me think that he may have heard her name spoken.
"Did you hear Wanda say something?" I said.
"I hear with my ears. My ears."
"What did you hear, Wes? What did you hear?"
Wes stared at me and took a big haul on the cigar, sending a cloud of smoke in my face.
She will keep on riding
It was starting to get dark. I was getting nowhere with Wes.
The ol’ yellow bus in the dark
"What, what did you say?"
Wes looked at me, his expression blank.
And the station pumps out the good ol’ oldies
"Did you say yellow bus?"
And she runs from the yellow bus with me
"Ned? Did Ned tell you about the yellow bus?"
Wes didn't answer. He got back to sifting through scrap metal.
But he gave me a lead. It was enough for me.
Ten minutes later I was parked a mile back from Ned's property. He owned about four acres and his house was built in the dead center of his land, the maximum distance from any neighbors. The police would be searching his home, bagging evidence, and scouring the property, at least during daylight. I knew the school bus was parked on the far corner of his lot. So while the investigators might have been on the property, I doubted they had the manpower to monitor its entirety.
I walked through the woods, the sun low and its rays shining orange light through the trees. I saw the school bus ahead, leaning against a bush like it wasn't sure if it wanted to lie on its side or not. Its front wheels were missing. Yellow grass grew around it, tall enough to reach the top of the back wheels and poke out from under the hood. It would be easy for the police to have a quick look and then dismiss the bus as mere junk, destined for Zinck's.
I waited in the bushes, observing to ensure no police were nearby before walking toward the bus. The windshield was cracked in three places, and the wipers were missing. The bus leaned on its side, but because it was missing the front wheels it also tilted toward the nose. I had to step in carefully in order for it to not tip over altogether.
Inside, the seats were torn and looked like they had been chewed up by squirrels. Mud and dust caked the inside.
I searched up and down the aisle. I looked around the driver's cab and then un
derneath seats for the safe that Ned described, but I didn't see anything. I stepped out and examined the outside for anything resembling a safe. As I explored, I came across a steel box on the bottom of the bus. It was attached to the frame inside the rear bumper, beside the exhaust pipe. I tried to budge it, but it was welded in place.
I returned to the bus and walked to the rear, bracing myself with the seat backs to get up the incline. When I got there, I crouched down and pulled back the floor, finding a dial for a combination safe.
I regretted not having written down the combination after Ned had told me. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself and slow my heart rate. If I was relaxed, my memory would return more easily.
The numbers flashed in my mind, but they were just a bit too blurry to see. As though they were obscured by a thin fog. I waited for it to dissipate.
Newton.
I twisted the dial, expecting it to click open, but nothing happened. It was too easy.
Ned wouldn't risk something that straightforward. Anyone who spent more than ten minutes with him would have heard that he expected the world to end in 2060, as Isaac Newton had predicted.
I smiled as I tried it again backward.
The safe opened. It was getting dark and hard to see, so I used the flashlight on my phone. As I pulled out the contents and laid them out on the floor, it was immediately clear that the safe contained more than just information about Wanda's murder. There were old receipts, loose papers with Ned's scrawling handwriting across them, newspaper clippings, and ticket stubs.
He had a map of Zinck's Auto Salvage with crosses drawn in several spots. There was a theory circulated by a few people in town that the bodies of several missing people were buried underneath the auto salvage. The rumor was especially juicy because the business used to be owned by Ernie Weagle.
I found a picture of Wanda grinning at the camera. It looked like an old graduation photo.
A flash of blue light caught my peripheral vision. I looked out the side window and saw a light bobbing through the bushes toward me. I immediately turned off my phone's light. On the silhouette I could make out a belt and weapon. Combined with the police-grade flashlight, I knew it must have been someone from the sheriff’s department.
I began packing Ned's materials so that I could review them at home. I was collecting them into a pile when I noticed something on one of the crumpled pieces of paper. I unfolded it and smoothed it on the floor, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. It was handwritten.
Doug Steele - seen with Wanda - not his real name
The blue light shined at the window. I tried to quickly pick up the papers, but half of them slipped out of the pile and fell to the floor.
"Hey, who's there?"
I looked out the window. The officer was thirty yards away.
I pressed the latch for the side window and pushed, but it would only open halfway. I squeezed through, hanging onto the remaining stack of papers as I pushed with my hands to get my hips through. The flashlight was on me now, so I gave a final thrust and popped myself out of the window.
I fell six feet, dropping the papers, and they fluttered away in the breeze.
I heard the officer's footsteps pounding around the bus, so I sprinted into the woods, racing past trees and over branches. I ran until the flashlight was far enough away that it looked like a firefly, and then I walked back to my truck.
I nearly lost my footing stepping into my truck, and banged my shin painfully against the running board. I got myself inside, stretching the seatbelt across my lap as I pulled away. I startled at the sound of cars being crushed at the junkyard. I drove onto the old highway and along the shoulder, then parked in a field in front of an old, collapsed barn. I pulled out the pack of cigarettes I'd shared with Renee, lit one up, and leaned back against the headrest.
Doug. Ned suspected Doug. Ned lived with a sickness inside his brain that affected his perception and his ability to separate fact from fiction. It locked him inside his own little world. All of us are trapped inside of what we perceive, or at least what we allow ourselves to sense. And I was no exception.
Was I simply seeing what I wanted to? But he wrote Doug's name. What about him? Maybe it was just another loose thought, unanchored by any foundation, that floated around an insane man's mind. Maybe he wrote the name because it was the next thing on the conveyor belt of conspiracy theories in his head.
I wanted Doug there, at Ned's. If Doug was there, it meant I wasn't the only person who saw Ned. Doug was a grieving father, but maybe he just played the part. My first reaction when I saw him was that he was a psychopath.
But a killer? That would be sick. Anyone was capable of murder, though. That darkness was in all of us. We kept the beast tamed, but with the right circumstances the lock pins could align. And the monster would be unleashed.
I thought about calling Debbie Parks and telling her Ned suspected that Doug killed Wanda. But my words would lack context. I had as much chance of getting Debbie to tap dance to a show tune as I did of getting her to follow up on a rambling man's suspicions.
But even if I had something more concrete that placed Doug at Ned's place the night of his murder, I couldn't in good conscience go to the sheriff. I still owed Doug a duty of secrecy, and that duty held unless I thought there was reason to suspect he would kill someone else. Calling Debbie with nothing but a name seemed desperate and would do little to prove my innocence. I was scared.
My cigarette had burned down to the filter, so I tossed it out the window and pulled back onto the road. The sky was turning neon pink as the sun descended. I drove through town, and by the time I passed the Irvine gas station I had to turn on my headlights. Night came quickly at this time of year.
I didn't have a clear plan forward, but I decided to call Sheila with my next step. She picked up and asked me where I was.
"Just going out for a drive."
"Driving where?"
"Through town." I decided not to tell Sheila anything more. I didn't want to pull her in until I had more information. "Could you give me Doug's address?"
"Doug Steele? The patient?"
"Yes."
Sheila must have sensed something in my tone, because she didn't ask any questions and gave me the address.
"Thanks. Goodnight." I was about to hang up when Sheila spoke.
"Gus. Be careful."
I hesitated ending the call. I wanted to tell Sheila what I found in Ned’s safe, but it felt too flimsy to bring up and risk my relationship with Doug. I decided to deal with it on my own and find out more information before throwing around half-baked theories. At least Sheila knew where I was going.
After a five-minute drive, I pulled up to Doug's place, a thirty-foot trailer dropped on a patch of gravel in an area of cleared woodland. There was no deck or outdoor chairs. A few rusty propane tanks leaned against one side. The curtains were pulled tight on the two front windows, and the house was dark.
I kept the car running with the headlights pointed at the house as I approached the door. A couple of cars raced past on the road. After they left, it fell quiet.
I wasn't sure what I would say if Doug opened the door. I hadn't thought that far ahead. I couldn't expect him to admit to being at Ned's. But if I talked to him, I might be able to draw the truth out of him.
I opened the screen door and knocked a few times, waited a minute, then gave another series of knocks. Nothing. I pressed my face to the glass to try and see through the quarter-inch gap between the window frame and curtain but could only make out the corner of a couch.
I tried to turn the doorknob but it was locked. I was creeping toward the back when a call blared through the speakers on my truck's Bluetooth, shattering the rural quiet.
I rushed over to my truck and pressed talk on my steering wheel.
"Well, finally." It was Renee. I glanced at my phone in the cup holder. Six missed calls.
"Sorry." I opened the door and jumped into the driver's seat. "Running a bit
late."
"It's okay. Karen is here." Karen. I winced at her name. I almost missed her. And I invited Renee over at the same time.
"Shoot, I am sorry."
"No," Renee said. "It's so nice that you invited me to meet your daughter. And we are having a great time. Isn't that right, Kay?"
I heard Karen's voice in the distance. "Hi, Dad."
19
I managed to race to my cabin in under thirty minutes without skidding off the road or getting caught by a cop. Two cars were in the driveway. I recognized Renee's electric-blue Golf and assumed the other belonged to Karen, so I parked on the side of the road to avoid blocking them. I stayed in my truck for a few minutes, pondering how I would explain being late for what would be the most important dinner date I'd had in years.
I got out and walked toward my house. I could hear Waylon Jennings's “Luckenbach, Texas” on my record player.
This was the first time I'd seen Karen in three years. And I nearly botched it. Karen wouldn't tolerate any excuses from me. She'd heard enough.
Karen had been poisoned by her mother to hate me. And I didn't exactly help the situation. When Karen was twelve, I promised her Princeton as long as she got straight As and overcame her fear of public speaking. She held up her end of the bargain; she never got less than an A+, and she played Annie in the school musical. I knew I could save the money through my work as an expert witness.
I had been up three hundred and fifty grand. If I'd walked away she could've gone to Princeton twice. I carried the guilt of that decision like a cross on my shoulders. Every month that I sent her money in those unmarked envelopes, it was as though I was slowly repaying my debt to her. But her opportunity had already passed.
Part of me wondered whether she came because of money. Either to take the cash she'd accumulated and throw it in my face or ask me for more. I secretly resented that our relationship had been whittled down to nothing but a series of financial transactions that flowed only one way.
