“Don’t talk about class work, dummy. Talk about life.”
“Say, Melanie, did you see that big brown stain on the bottom of Mr. Holloway’s pants? I think he sat on his science project.”
They both howled with laughter, even though the river was rolling beneath them, and Ronnie didn’t want to look over the side of the bridge into the water. It was just one of those unavoidable facts of life … as long as he lived here, he would be near the river, just as he’d been near that stupid red church before it had burned down.
Ah. Okay. It’s only water. Just the past moving on downstream.
Bobby slammed on his brakes, causing the fence posts to jostle in the bed and the tires to squeal on the asphalt. “Holy crap, did you see that?”
Ronnie wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn’t. His friend was generously helping him steal away a girlfriend, or possible girlfriend, or occasional squeeze, or whatever they were, and Ronnie couldn’t let him endure the river’s horrors alone. No matter what shape they happened to take.
Bobby was staring out the driver’s-side window, looking downstream, and Ronnie scrambled over the gear shift so that he could see, too.
“It’s just mist,” he whispered. The temperature inside the truck had to be about ninety, but he was shivering.
“Mist that looks like a bunch of people walking?”
That was exactly what it looked like. It was just like the night Ronnie had seen them walk from the red church into the river, led by Archer McFall. Only this time they were walking upstream. Back to where they’d come from.
“It’s just mist,” Ronnie repeated.
As they watched, the mist broke apart under the sunlight and disappeared. Only the river remained, silver and green and gray, winding over smooth stones toward the distant ocean.
“You’re right,” Bobby said. “Just mist. But for a second there.…”
A car that had come up behind them honked impatiently.
“Yeah, yeah,” Bobby said in defiance, using his mock-Melanie voice. “Eat my shorts.”
“It’d be a pleasure, ma’am,” Ronnie joked to break the tension.
“Humor,” Bobby said, popping the clutch and sending the pickup toward McFall Meadows. “That’s good. Girls always love that. Just don’t be a pervert.”
“You got it, Coach.”
In a way, Ronnie was no longer so scared of Melanie’s rejection. The river ghosts had returned. He had something far worse to worry about now.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“I ran that card you gave me,” Sheriff Frank Littlefield said to Cindy Baumhower. “I told the SBI lab to dust it for a robbery suspect’s prints. They didn’t ask why a thief would be dumb enough to leave a business card, and it turned out not to matter. There were no prints on it.”
“But I saw McFall touch it,” Cindy said. “He practically felt it up. It was almost like he knew what I was planning.”
“Maybe the paper fibers flaked off,” Littlefield said. “Or maybe McFall doesn’t secrete.”
“Gross. I don’t want to think about his secretions.”
“So we’re right back where we started.”
They were at Frank’s house, sitting on the couch with the flickering television as their romantic campfire. Wednesday was their “date night,” although they rarely engaged in the traditional activities of couples, such as dining out, catching a movie, or getting drunk and embarrassing themselves in public. Because Littlefield wanted to maintain the illusion of a platonic relationship until he retired, dates consisted of a home-cooked dinner, cable TV, and a leisurely coupling before Cindy slipped home.
Lately, though, Littlefield had noticed some subtle but disturbing signs that Cindy meant business. First, she had equipped his kitchen with a few wooden utensils to assist in the creation of “heart-healthy stir-fries.” As a lifelong bachelor, Littlefield hadn’t even been aware of the existence of wooden spatulas, and now he had a decorative clay canister full of them. Next, Cindy had left a toothbrush in his medicine cabinet, and a week later had swapped out his brand of toothpaste for hers. When he’d mentioned it, Cindy had said, “You need to cut down on your fluoride intake. I want you to still be around thirty years from now.” And then, of course, there were the subtle verbal hints she dropped about bringing their relationship to the next level.…
Littlefield told her about his visit to Stepford Matheson’s place and his search of the woods. He left out the part about the blood. “I kind of expected to find him dead,” he concluded.
“You sound almost disappointed,” Cindy said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “I think maybe you’re getting a little paranoid in your old age.”
“Maybe so. I want so much to believe that McFall is up to something that I’m going out of my way to nail him. But when you look at the evidence, he’s done nothing wrong.”
“Just the opposite,” Cindy said, reaching for the TV remote—another recent habit that unsettled Littlefield—and turning down the volume of Braveheart. “He’s supporting a number of community causes. He even bought a full-page ad announcing the groundbreaking ceremony for McFall Meadows.”
“He’s spreading the wealth, all right. But I can’t help but feel he’s spreading the bullshit, too.”
“I’m starting to see his good side. You’re just a little cranky. You need to release some of that steam.”
Cindy put her arm around his waist and he kissed the top of her head. “Yeah, I guess I just want a last hurrah. One more epic showdown so the marshal can ride into the sunset on a win.”
“Good gunning down Evil in the street, huh? That’s a little melodramatic even for a cop.”
“Thirty years, Cindy. Thirty years of my life spent trying to make a difference, believing I was doing the right thing. And what do I have to show for it? I’m supposed to serve and protect, but my career has created a trail of bodies that would make a hired hitman proud.”
Cindy hugged him more tightly, gazing up at him with shining eyes. “Nobody can save the world singlehandedly. Shit happens, cowboy. And not everything’s about you.”
“Well, I’d feel better if Absher and Buchanan had waited another year to kick the bucket. I guess God doesn’t work according to my schedule.”
“Whoa. Are you getting religion in your old age?”
He laughed. “Maybe it goes hand in hand with paranoia.”
Cindy disengaged herself from him to take a sip of wine from the glass on the coffee table. Littlefield, a teetotaler, was annoyed by her vice of choice, but was determined not to make their relationship a prison. He took a sip of iced tea, knowing the caffeine would make his insomnia worse. He didn’t care. All sleep did was bring nightmares.
“You can retire early, you know,” Cindy offered. “The commissioners could appoint an interim replacement from within the department to serve until the election. You’ve already got your pension locked in, and you could sure use a slight drop in blood pressure.”
Littlefield rose from the couch and paced. “You think I’m going to leave a mess like this on the table for the next sheriff? I thought you knew me at least a little bit.”
“Oh, Frank.” Cindy set down her wine and went to him, wrapping him in an embrace to stop his pacing. “I know the word ‘hero’ is cheap these days—hell, even the county maintenance workers are part of Homeland Security—but you’re the real deal.”
She pressed a palm against the center of his chest, and the warmth and firmness of her touch comforted him. “I know your heart,” she said. “You think I’d fall for just any old guy? I’m getting older, too, but I’m not desperate. I’ve been divorced and I’ve been alone and I’ve been around. And you’re the best man I’ve ever met.”
Littlefield looked into her brown eyes, where reflections from the television glinted and danced. Damn, I could really love this woman. If I could trust myself to know what love was. Maybe she was right. He wasn’t going to step down early, but why kill himself over something that would make him crazy?
Until Larkin McFall actually did anything provably wrong, the man deserved the same treatment—the same presumption of innocence—as any other citizen. Suspecting him of malice simply because of his last name was as bad as racial profiling.
They kissed, and her lips were sweet with wine. Littlefield pulled her body to his and allowed himself the brief luxury of surrender. Then he pulled away.
“What if McFall doesn’t have fingerprints?”
She gave him a playful swat on the butt. “Shut up and get in here,” she said, sliding her other hand behind his belt buckle and tugging him toward the bedroom.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bobby was on the back deck, where his dad stored old toilets, lengths of scrap pipe, boxes of fittings, and broken power tools like an air compressor and a pneumatic drill. The trailer park was in its typical state of weeknight activity, with loud televisions and stereos blaring from the aluminum-sided homes, the cacophony punctuated with an occasional domestic quarrel. The bugs had just emerged for the season, and something bit Bobby on the neck, but he ignored the pain and itching. He was seated on the lid of a closed toilet, tapping his drumsticks against the bottom of an upended plastic, five-gallon bucket.
RATTA-TATTA-TAT.
He was playing a snare march, one that might have led soldiers into battle back in the old days. He often played the rhythm as a tribute to his lost friend Vernon Ray, and sometimes—when the moon was low and the trailer park was quiet—Bobby thought he heard the cadence echoing back to him from the top of Mulatto Mountain.
Mostly, though, the beat was just repetitive practice, building up wrist strength and working on his timing. The band was only able to practice twice a week because of everybody’s schedules, and Bobby was determined that no matter what happened with The Diggers, he was going to continue honing his chops.
The porch light came on and the back door opened. “What you doing sittin’ out here in the dark?” Elmer asked him.
“Practicing,” Bobby answered, maintaining the tempo even though he dropped the volume a little.
“That ain’t practice. That’s beating on a bucket.”
“We’ve got a gig Friday night.”
“Huh.” Elmer scratched one of his armpits and the smell of sour sweat lingered for a moment before the breeze whisked it away. “What are they paying you for that, anyway?”
“A hundred bucks,” Bobby said. “But it goes in the band fund to cover transportation and equipment.”
“You can talk and beat a bucket at the same time,” Elmer said. “I guess that’s what passes for music these days.”
Bobby stopped playing and rested his sticks on the bucket. “Dad, I’m sorry I lost the game. I thought I had him.”
Elmer waved in dismissal, or he might have been swatting a bug. The moths had found the porch light, and they cast coruscating shadows as they circled it madly. “You done your best. I still bet you’re going to get drafted.”
This man’s fantasies are as wild as Ronnie’s. But I can’t blame him. Like he says, he really doesn’t have much else to get excited about besides wallowing in raw sewage until he’s old enough for Social Security.
“We’ll see,” Bobby said. “The draft is still two weeks away. A lot could happen between now and then.”
“That coach from App State call back?”
“Yeah. He told me to make sure I throw at least every other day. He doesn’t want my arm to tighten up before fall practice, when they can get their trainers working with me.”
“See, that’s real practice,” Elmer said, his round face shiny with sweat even though the night was relatively cool. “This here beating on stuff and making a racket don’t amount to nothing.”
“I’ll throw after work every day, just like I told the coach,” Bobby promised, mostly to shut him up.
Elmer spat off the porch and looked out at the thin strip of backyard, where the grass was worn and the clothesline sagged with laundry. “We had some good times out there, putting in the hours. I remember when we bought that new catcher’s mitt and I dared you to throw the ball as hard as you could.”
Bobby grinned at his memory of the percussive thwack. His dad had howled in pain and tossed the mitt away, wiggling his hand until the sting in his palm faded. Bobby wished he had a way to work that sound into his drum kit.
The howl, too. Hell, Dad’s already as good a wailer as Dex.
Elmer apparently didn’t want memory to evolve into actual sentiment. He changed the subject. “So you’re working for McFall?”
“Yeah, he’s giving me twelve bucks an hour, cash.”
“Damn, that’s sweet. Nothing beats working under the table. This McFall guy’s all right, ain’t he?”
“It’s hard work, but I like it. Keeps me in shape.”
And keeps my mind off of things.
“Did you get the contract to do the plumbing for the development?” Bobby asked. This was an opportunity for reasonable interaction with his dad on a subject other than baseball—which always tended to bring his dad around to rage sooner or later—and Bobby figured such opportunities would soon become rare.
“Sorta,” Elmer said. “McFall said the job had gotten so big that he was hiring every contractor that applied, and he’s just going to split the work up so everybody gets a piece of the pie. Like I said, he’s a square Joe. I wish all these other asshole developers were half as nice.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Bobby had been so intent on his snare rhythm that he hadn’t noticed the bruised clouds sweeping in from the northwest. The sudden drop in temperature heralded a storm, and the breeze erased the aroma of Betty Garrison’s fried liver mush emanating from next door.
“Gonna rain,” Elmer said. “I better roll up my truck windows and get your mom to bring in the laundry.”
Bobby stood, knocking his sticks to the deck, where they clacked and rolled around. “Shit. I was supposed to cover the lumber pile at McFall Meadows. We quit halfway through and I … well, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky then.”
Elmer’s benevolent mood died like a match flushed down a toilet. “You better get your ass over there, and fast. You don’t want to lose a job that good. And I don’t want it coming back to bite me, either. Too much of your shit has been sticking to me lately.”
And you should know, because you’re the world’s biggest expert in shit. Your head is FULL of it.
Bobby hurried to his pickup and was halfway to McFall Meadows when the first raindrops plinked against the windshield. He drove a little faster than usual, not quite trusting the front-end alignment but anxious to beat the worst of the storm. Builders hated working with wet wood. Not only was it heavier to handle, it sometimes warped and buckled. McFall would probably be angry if he had to buy a whole new supply.
As he sped over the bridge, he thought of the weird mist he’d seen earlier in the day. The river was usually only misty at night and under the first rays of dawn, the haze melting away as the sun rose, but he’d imagined the roiling, undulating arms and legs of people in that thick white shroud. Luckily, the river was so dark that he couldn’t see any mist even if he wanted to look for it, and he sure didn’t.
Maybe I should have just called Ronnie. He’s right next door to McFall’s property, and he could have run over and covered up the pile in a minute.
But this was his responsibility, and he knew it. Bobby was the one who’d hauled the materials and signed the sales receipts; Bobby was the one who’d received direct instructions from Larkin McFall. Ronnie was just a helper.
And it wasn’t just his personal responsibility that hurried him down Highway 321 and onto Little Church Road. He didn’t want to disappoint McFall. The guy was definitely strange, maybe even a bit spooky—it’s the game within the game that matters—but he’d been good to Bobby, paying him enough so that Bobby would be in good shape whether he went to college or not. Hell, he could even move out and get his own place.
You don’t want to play baseball. That’s why you don’t c
are that he made you throw that game. Unless you screwed it up all by yourself, on purpose.
The internal conflict kept him occupied until he found himself wheeling his rusty Toyota onto the gravel access road beside the old cemetery. The fencing material was stacked by the church’s foundation, beside a flatbed trailer that held one of Wally Kaufman’s bulldozers. Bobby and Ronnie had constructed a section of fence under the supervision of Stu Hartley, who mostly just operated the level and griped about the government.
Bobby parked his truck so the headlights were angled over the construction site and the shell of the old church, then hopped out, grateful the storm was holding off for the moment. He dashed to the flatbed trailer and pulled a wadded-up vinyl tarp from beneath it. His head and shoulders were soaked by the time he unfolded the tarp and spread it over the material. Even though it had been a week since the burning of the church, the smell of ash and charcoal still cloyed in the air.
Bobby looked around for something to hold the tarp in place against the wind. Since the grading hadn’t begun, there were no stones lying around, and all the stones in the church’s foundation were cemented firmly in place. His choice was to either run all the way down to the river in the dark, or.…
He walked over to the graveyard, his sneakers damp from the wet grass. A fallen grave marker was broken into chunks, from an event so long past that the weeds had filled in the cracks. “Forgive me, dude,” Bobby whispered, “but right now I need these more than you do.”
He bent and collected four large slabs of old gray concrete, one for each corner of the tarp. When he turned, he saw a figure rising inside the church foundation. “Huh-hello?” he said, wondering if Wally or maybe Ronnie had come out here to cover something up.
The figure was a stark gray silhouette in the truck’s headlights, slogging toward him through the bed of ashes. The person looked like he was made of ash, some kind of freaky ghostly statue that was still smoldering deep inside, smoke and steam trailing behind.
Bobby dropped the chunks of concrete, one of them bouncing painfully off his foot. He sprinted toward the Toyota, not wanting the person—the stack of smoke and ash—to get close enough for him make out the details of its face.
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