God, how could she do this? She KNEW he couldn’t handle that.
Maybe it was a test. She constantly teased him about being cursed, and a couple of times she’d even called him “Deathboy.” He had to admit, finding bodies had brought him some notoriety and attention. It was the only thing that separated him from the herd.
He eased the Dodge into the same gravel turnout where Dex had parked, hoping Larkin McFall wouldn’t cruise by in his Lexus. He turned to Melanie. Were they going to kiss? What should he do? Why were his hands numb?
“Tell me about it,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Finding Darnell Absher.”
“It was.…”
What? Gross? Thrilling? Interesting?
What would Bobby say?
“It was weird,” he managed.
“Weird?”
“I was just swimming and sort of bumped into him. I mean, it’s not like I was splashing around looking for dead people.”
Melanie peered out at the water, which ran low and clear. The current cut soft ripples in the reflected sunlight, and rounded stones glistened along the riverbanks. Upstream, a man in green hip waders was casting a fly rod. A lawn mower chewed grass in the distance with a hungry grumble.
“You were there when they found that burned body in the church,” she said, not looking at him.
“So were you. And a lot of other people.”
“You called out your brother’s name. Why did you think it was his body?”
Ronnie swallowed. “I didn’t mean to … it just came out.”
She suddenly directed a smile at him. It was like the sun had blazed into the van in an explosion of heat and light. “You’re protective of him. That’s so sweet.”
Damn. I don’t know a whole lot about all this, but I’m pretty sure “sweet” guys stay virgins until they’re married.
Forget about Bobby. The way this was going, he might as well act like Dex. “I meant what I said the other day. I’m glad that goddamned church burned down. I hated seeing it there, looking like a middle finger giving God the bird. Too many people have died because of it.”
Melanie was shocked by his outburst. “Chill out, Ronnie.”
“People think I’m this freak, just because I live near a haunted church and I believe in Jesus. Well, I didn’t ask to be born here. It’s not my fault that the Days have land next to the McFalls or that this Larkin McFall guy chose to move to Pickett County. It’s not like—”
Melanie’s cell phone rang and Ronnie realized he’d been yelling. He gripped the steering wheel and forced himself to breathe.
Melanie answered her phone. “Yeah … okay … be there in five minutes.” She clicked off and said to Ronnie. “Mom. Gotta go.”
Ronnie started the van and rolled across the bridge, mulling the great weight of water below them, which carried everything to the sea, where it would churn in the tide and evaporate and fall again from the sky and seep up from beneath the deep cracks below the earth’s mantle.
God, why do you make me think of stuff like that?
He forced himself not to cry, because that would be worse than “sweet.” That would be “sensitive.” Such guys died virgins.
When he pulled up to the Ward double-wide, Melanie’s dog, Frizzell, came bounding across the yard. The yellow Labrador retriever’s tongue lolled half a foot out of its mouth. Ronnie opened his door so the he could pet the dog.
Melanie said, “I’d invite you in, but.…”
“Yeah,” Ronnie said.
“Thanks for the ride.”
Before he could answer, she leaned across the parking-brake handle and planted her lips on his cheek. They were as dry and soft and light as a butterfly, and then she was out of the van, bounding up the metal steps and into the rundown trailer, Frizzell at her heels.
Ronnie started the van again and drove home.
She’d kissed him on the cheek.
Sweet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Stepford Matheson had grown up hunting these mountains.
At the age of seven, he’d shot his first squirrel with a .22 rifle. Two years later, he’d bagged his first buck, an eight-pointer whose rack still hung on the wall of his cabin. He’d taken a few trips out west to hunt elk, but the peaks out there were too harsh and bleak. Stepford liked the Southern Appalachians for its diverse range of critters, there for the shooting.
Even though deer season had long since passed, Stepford had a good excuse for carrying a loaded .30-30 Winchester through the woods. Two of his hound dogs had been torn to shreds, and he knew it was the goddamned coyotes. Those furry bastards were all over the place out west, but the Pickett County Cooperative Extension Service agent had told him coyotes had migrated to the Blue Ridge Mountains to fill the void left when the panthers and wolves had died out. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” the egghead had told him. Stepford wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he took it as proof that coyotes didn’t belong here.
That made them invaders, outsiders, and no creature was going to mess with Stepford’s property while he had anything to say about it. And he was happy to let his Winchester do his talking for him.
He followed paw prints that led away from where he’d found the ravaged dog carcasses and up a little creek that tumbled down from the shaded rocks high above. At one point, the tracks sank deep into the mud, a sure sign that the predators had stopped to drink from a little pool. The tracks were only half filled with seepage, so that meant they weren’t far away. Coyotes mated for life, the extension agent had said, and they ferociously defended their territory if they had spring pups.
The agent had assured Stepford that coyotes posed no threat to humans. They were opportunistic, just as content with roadkill, spilled garbage, or fruit as with fresh meat from rodents or geese. They would attack dogs only if cornered, or if they were suffering from rabies. The agent had grown up in Raleigh and had two college degrees, but he didn’t know a damn thing about the way the real world worked. Coyotes couldn’t read, so they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to kill dogs.
And these coyotes had killed the wrong man’s dogs.
Stepford moved with more urgency, staying low. Dusk, when coyotes were most active, was setting in, so he had a small window in which to shoot them. Even if he got only one, he’d be happy, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to walk back home in the dark. Not when one of them might be rabid.
He climbed over a sagging barbed-wire fence the McFalls had built sometime in the 1980s, when they’d rented out pasture land to his uncle Lester. Stepford was damned sure they had overshot the property line by a good fifty yards, but he wasn’t going to pay a surveyor and then fight with the crooks and lawyers that hung around the county courthouse like vultures. No, he’d ignore it. People tended to steer clear of the McFalls—those who didn’t often ended up on the wrong side of the grave, like Cole Buchanan.
Stepford would bet his gun collection that the sheriff was going to let Cole’s murder slide right on by, like he always did. But at least the church was gone. A man could sleep easier just on that.
Once the coyotes were cleared out.
In a laurel thicket, the two sets of tracks split and veered off in opposite directions. That was weird. Coyotes were pack animals.
Well, I’ll just get one, and come back later for the other.
Stepford followed the set of prints to the right because the terrain was more level and the undergrowth sparser, although shadows were stretching longer and the canopy overhead shifted into a deeper shade of sunset red. He’d only walked for about two minutes before the tracks ended.
What the hell? Did the mangy varmint step into a hot-air balloon?
Stepford knew it was stupid, but he peered up into the branches of the surrounding buckeye and poplar. A panther or bobcat could climb, but he’d never heard of a coyote doing so.
He sensed a slight movement behind him before he heard the low growling.
He tucked his finger gently ac
ross the Winchester’s trigger before he turned. With the weapon held high, across his chest, he’d have to make several coordinated motions to bring it into firing position.
Got you outfoxed.…
He spun, slipping the rifle butt into the crook of his shoulder, raising the barrel. No time to use the scope—he’d just have to eyeball the sight and let fly.
The coyote crouched low, almost bellying the ground, its broad face and pointed nose projecting a menacing intelligence. Its fur was like Joseph’s coat of many colors, which Stepford only knew about from the Dolly Parton song, not the Bible—patches of red, gray, black, and gold.
Stepford aimed for the center of the forehead and—
“Stepford!”
Stepford jerked as he fired, like some sort of stupid weekend warrior, and the bullet sailed high, clipping branches as the percussive crack echoed off the rocks and trees.
Forgetting the coyote, Stepford turned toward the voice. It was coming from the direction he’d been tracking the set of prints. That devious son-of-a-bitch Larkin McFall stood on a flat protrusion of granite, a grayer silhouette against the blackening forest. He was dressed in athletic wear, like some damned banker who had to have a special outfit before he could let himself sweat. Beside him, the second coyote squatted like a loyal pet.
Stepford peered at the tracks again. No goddamned way the coyote could have jumped that far. And where are McFall’s footprints?
“You’re trespassing.” McFall’s voice was hollow, and that city-slicker smile turned in and swallowed itself. “That’s not very neighborly.”
“The … them coyotes ate my dogs.”
“No,” McFall said. “That was me. They are still hungry.”
The first coyote slammed into Stepford’s back, covering the gap in half a breath. The impact knocked him to his knees. The Winchester flew from his hands and slid across the damp leaves. The moist, stinking doggie breath was at his ear, and the slobbering almost sounded like a whisper.
Except the whisper was in McFall’s voice: “You’re mine, bitch.”
The extension agent had assured Stepford Matheson that coyotes never attacked humans, not even in cases of extreme hunger or entrapment. Stepford swore to God that he’d never trust a goddamned Raleigh egghead again.
It was one promise he was able to keep.
The teeth closed on his neck as McFall laughed.
EPISODE THREE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bobby Eldreth tucked the baseball behind his back, squeezing it between his fingers as he leaned forward. The catcher flashed him the sign for a curveball, but Bobby shook it off. His curveball hadn’t been breaking today, and the whole game was riding on this play. He wanted to go with his best bet.
The Pickett High Pioneers were ahead 2-1 in the bottom of the seventh. Under the convoluted rules of the conference playoffs, Vance High was considered the home team and was batting last, even though the game was being played at Pickett. Bobby had pitched well, giving up only three hits, but one of them had just come with two outs and a man on base. There were runners on first and third, so he needed to go for the kill, and that meant a fastball.
Normally, Bobby was in the zone while on the mound, and although he remained aware of the entire game situation in case the ball was batted back to him or a runner tried to steal, his main focus was on the opponent standing in the batter’s box.
The enemy.
But he had lost his focus. His first mistake was letting his gaze roam over the bleachers, which on a typical day might have held fifty or sixty people. Since Pickett was in the conference finals, though, more than three hundred spectators had shown up. Bobby could handle the crowd, as long as he let them melt into a giant, roaring blob. The problem was that too many individual faces were surfacing in the mass of cheering people.
There was Elmer, in his usual seat right behind the backstop where he could dispute every call made by the home-plate umpire. He was relatively sober, since the game had started at 3:00 p.m., but his face was still bright red from beer. “Wipe ‘im out, Bobby!” his dad bellowed. “He ain’t got no stick.”
The batter with “no stick” was Ramon Stinson, Vance County’s best slugger, a well-developed guy with a full goatee who looked to be about twenty-five. Bobby had faced him four times during the season, striking him out three times but also giving up a home run—one of only three he had ever allowed. Stinson had homered on a hanging curve ball, yet another reason Bobby wanted to go for a fastball.
Bobby glanced over at Coach Harnett in the dugout. Wearing his school windbreaker despite the heat, Coach had his arms folded over his chest. He dropped one hand and flashed his fingers in a signal to the catcher, who then relayed the call to Bobby.
A slider? I can’t throw a slider. What’s he thinking?
Bobby shook off that signal as well. He was going to throw a fastball come hell or high water. Because there was a scout in the stands, and he had a radar gun. Bobby had seen Harnett talking to the scout, who was dressed in ratty gym clothes and looked like someone out of an old sci-fi movie, with his brushy mustache and wild gray Einstein hair. Coach hadn’t mentioned anything about it to Bobby, but he was one of those old-school assholes who believed kids couldn’t handle pressure and what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.
Elmer, on the other hand, had spotted the radar gun right off, and had sidled up to the dugout after warm-ups to tell Bobby a scout from the Braves was in the stands. The guy was almost certainly not from the Braves, but whoever he was, he’d want to know the speed of Bobby’s fastball. Vance’s pitcher threw mostly knuckleballs and curves, so the gun definitely wasn’t for him. No, that scout was here to measure Bobby’s heat—and his future.
Stinson, tired of waiting for the pitch, stepped out of the batter’s box, and the tension in the crowd eased just a bit. Bobby almost grinned. He remembered what Larkin McFall had said, about him being a rock star while on the mound. The whole crowd—the whole conference championship—was waiting for him.
But that was another face in the crowd that bothered him. McFall was sitting in the third row behind Elmer, his pretty blonde wife by his side. McFall clapped calmly, and although he didn’t shout, his voice was distinct among the whistles, cheers, and chatter. “Come on, Bobby. It’s your game.”
Stinson stepped into the batter’s box, did the obligatory crotch-grab to adjust his jock strap, and dug in for the pitch. Bobby intended to throw a high, inside fastball out of the strike zone, hoping that Stinson would lunge for it. By throwing high, he’d be able to reach eighty-five miles per hour, which was pretty smoking for a teenager.
Bobby adjusted his grip so his fingers lay across the seams. That would give the ball a little more hop, so that it would rise in the air as it neared the plate. The scout would be impressed both with his velocity and with his wily baiting of the slugger. A game-ending strikeout to clinch the championship would look pretty good on the scouting report.
But you don’t want to play baseball, do you? You don’t want to go to the minor leagues and ride buses between small towns for years based on the slim hope of someday reaching the Big Time. That’s a stupid dream for a kid from the trailer park.
Bobby’s breath caught and he swallowed hard. He stepped off the pitching rubber to buy himself a little more time, pretending to stare down the runner on third base. Instead, he glanced past the runner to the home-side bleachers, where Melanie and Ronnie sat in the crowd. Melanie was yelling something, but he couldn’t make it out. His ears were roaring.
You don’t want to play baseball.
If he got a nice signing bonus from the pros, maybe he would ask Melanie to marry him. She probably would. It was a ticket out of Titusville, and a cheap one at that.
Bobby stepped back on the mound, realizing that only five seconds had passed since Stinson had re-entered the batter’s box. Time was fat and slow, like when he was a kid and had broken a tooth and got dosed with nitrous oxide by the dentist. This moment was cramm
ed full of details—the stink of chili from concession-stand hot dogs, Melanie’s hair swaying in the breeze like some sexy shampoo commercial, Harnett spitting a wet brown rope of tobacco juice onto the dirt, Stinson wiggling his bat up and down, a slight scuff on the baseball’s surface where it had skipped across the infield earlier. This moment was wide and opulent.
This moment was big.
And through it all came McFall’s voice again, clear, calm, and somehow rising above everything. “Remember what I told you, Bobby.”
The game within the game.
Maybe McFall really had bribed the ump. It sure did seem like Bobby had gotten the benefit of the doubt on several called strikes, ones that might have painted the corner of the strike zone but were probably an inch outside. Maybe Bobby just needed to cork something up near the plate and let the ump call Stinson out. Game over. The ump was a doughy, nondescript guy who looked like he’d roll over for a little cash.
No, that wasn’t what McFall was trying to tell him right now. What he meant was that Bobby could do it if he wanted. He could have it all. The championship, the signing bonus, the girl. Everything.
Bobby didn’t know the how or why of it, but he knew it as surely as he knew the pitcher’s mound was sixty feet, six inches from home plate. It was a fact. If he wanted it badly enough, McFall would make it happen.
You don’t want to play baseball. You’d rather play drums. Even if you never get anywhere, even if it’s shuttling between gigs in a crappy van instead of between stadiums in an air-conditioned bus, you’d STILL take the drums. Baseball is a sport, but music is life.
He looked around, checking the two runners, glancing up at the cheering Melanie and the expressionless Ronnie, then at McFall, placidly smiling next to his wife, then at the scout who had the radar aimed over home plate to record his arm speed. Just before Bobby went into his wind-up, he made the mistake of looking at Elmer.
His old man looked like he was on the verge of a stroke, his cheeks purple, a thick blue vein throbbing in his temple, a strand of drool hanging from his gaping mouth. “C’mon, Bobby, just like I taught you!”
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