Twilight

by Nancy Pickard

  Cleo was off her bike already and racing toward him.

  But it was the man—the stranger—who flung himself toward the boy and the highway first. He grabbed Chappie, lifted him off his feet, and threw him back onto the trail, practically into Cleo’s arms. Then the man, stumbling from the force of his own efforts, fell into a crouched position in the road.

  Chappie lay in the dirt and started to cry.

  Cleo was crying, too, as she knelt beside him.

  So I was the only one left to witness the accident.

  Dumping the bike I’d been on, I trotted up to Cleo and the boy, and then started to step toward the stranger to see if he needed help. But just as I neared the asphalt, I heard an engine. I looked up to the top of the hill. A pickup truck was cresting it, right where the stop sign should have been visible, but I couldn’t see the sign. Something long and brown covered it from the top down. And so the truck drove on, never stopping, picking up speed as it came on down the hill toward us.

  When I looked back, the man who had seized Chappie was still in the middle of the road, still down on his knees and his hands, as if he were hurt or winded, or both.

  I screamed at him to move.

  When he didn’t, I stepped into the road to wave down the truck.

  I could see the driver clearly, but I realized the setting sun was directly in his eyes. When he didn’t slow down, I knew he couldn’t see us. Suddenly, I felt hands on me, and—like Chappie—I was shoved violently out of the way.

  Even as I rolled to safety, I saw it happen:

  The grill of the pickup truck struck the stranger full on his chest, pushing him forward and then down, and then rolling horribly over his body.

  The truck driver, realizing he’d hit something, pulled to a stop, opened his door, and let out an anguished cry when he saw what he’d done. In the road, the stranger pulled himself up, and dragged himself like a mortally wounded creature to the side of the road, and plunged into the trees. We all heard him crashing through the brush.

  None of us could seem to move to help him.

  Cleo was still hovering over the boy.

  I was stunned and hurting, and the truck driver looked paralyzed with shock. He said to me in a horrified voice, “I didn’t see anybody! The sun was in my eyes! I didn’t see anything in the road!”

  Cleo was the first of us to get up and to go after the man.

  For a few moments, I still couldn’t seem to move, and even then I felt compelled to go to Chappie first. “Honey …” 1 crawled into the leaves near him. “I’m so sorry this happened to you. Listen, you’re not in any trouble with me, or anybody else. I know you were only trying to help your grandpa, and I don’t blame you at all. And everything’s going to be all right, really it is.”

  “I made that man get hit!” he exclaimed.

  “No, no! It wasn’t you! It was the sun in the driver’s eyes.”

  “Really, it was?” Chappie’s face crumpled up, and he started to cry again. “I’m really sorry. I was just—”

  I put my arms around him and held him and stroked away the bits of leaves that clung to his face. “I know, it’s okay, you just wanted to help your grandpa, because you thought I was mean to him, right?”

  He looked up at my face. “Were you?”

  I smiled a little. “Let’s say that your grandpa and I are not best friends. But I know you love him, and I would never want to hurt a boy’s grandpa. Besides, he’s a big guy. Don’t you think he can probably take care of himself?”

  He nodded, with more tears. But he also said, “I really knew you were okay. I did. I just saw the bag—”

  “Never mind.” I crooned. “We can talk about it later, if you want to, or we can forget it. Now, stay right here and wait for us, okay? I want to go check on that man, okay? Promise me you’ll stay here?”

  “Yeah. My bike’s broken anyway,” he said sadly.

  When I stepped back onto the highway, I saw that the driver had not been helpless. He had parked off the road, then used a telephone in his vehicle.

  “I called 911,” he informed me. “Goddamn, you think I killed him? What was he doing in the middle of the road, anyway? What’s the matter with the boy? What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Let’s go look for him and my friend,” I said. “And I’ll tell you.”

  We scrambled about a quarter mile through thick brush, with him leading the way and pushing branches back out of the way for me. In the very thickest of the woods, in between the trail and the creek bed, we followed a faint path down a slope and came upon a strange sight.

  There, in the dark recess of the trees and earth, was a junk pile, with Cleo and the injured stranger in the middle of it. The man lay huddled into himself, on his side. Cleo sat cross-legged about five feet away from him, watching him. She looked up, acknowledged our arrival with a nod of her head, but then went back to watching him.

  Then I realized it was not a junk pile that surrounded us—it was a kind of camp, artfully constructed to look like nothing more than junk and litter mostly covered by leaves and dirt. I saw fresh food—one whole grocery bag of it, in fact—and various plates and cups and pots and pans that looked as if they had come from many different kitchens. It looked to me as if we had found the Ghost of God’s Highway. But then I saw that we had found much more than that.

  Stuck back in the farthest recess of the earth, nearly invisible in the growing darkness of the twilight hour, there was a black Volkswagen Beetle car.

  Cleo saw me staring at it.

  The truck driver, who had run directly to the stranger’s side, looked up now and said, in a stunned, emotional voice, “He’s dead. He’s dead.” The driver stood up slowly, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and told us he would go back up to the highway to wait with the boy for the arrival of the emergency vehicles.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said as he trudged past me. “We’ll tell them so.”

  Cleo was silent until he was gone back up through the brush.

  Then she said, “He told me he got caught in the flooding that day. The water came up over the bridge and washed him downstream, and the car lodged up there. And he stayed here. He knew what he’d done. He knew he didn’t have anyplace to run to, and he figured he’d hide here, until they found him. Only, they never did.

  “He must have gone a little crazy, because he got the idea that he should save people from getting killed on the highway. He would make voices at the edge of the trail to startle them, so they’d stop and notice the highway. One time he saw a teenager on a motorcycle try to hit a woman on the road, so he blocked the highway to trap the motorcycle rider, and then he beat him up.”

  My God, I thought, and I stared at the healing abrasion on the back of my hand. That woman was me, that teen was David.

  Cleo’s voice was quiet, calm. She looked at me, and I came and joined her there on the ground. “He wanted to atone,” she said.

  “He told you that?”

  “Not that. The rest of it. I just think that’s what he wanted.”

  There were questions I wanted to ask her. In the near distance, I heard sirens. It was now quite dark in Johnny Vaught’s junky campground by the creek.

  “You probably want to know,” she said, “if I could have saved him.”

  “Cleo—”

  “I let him tell me. That’s what I did. He asked me who I was.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Yes. He asked for forgiveness.”

  I waited for her to tell me if she gave it to him, but she never did say. Before the police came down, however, she reached into the fanny pack she had on at her waist and pulled out her rune bag. She reached into it and pulled one out and looked at it When she saw that side was blank, she turned it over, but the other side was empty, too. Cleo walked over to the stranger and slipped the rune into one of the pockets of his dirty jacket.

  After the police had taken over the camp and the body … after I had used the truck driver’s
car phone to locate Chappie’s mom and dad to tell them he was on his way home … after Cleo and I had bundled the boy into a police car (very thrilled and not at all intimidated) and she got in with him … after I had told all that I had seen and heard … after I’d asked them to hide the bikes someplace safe until we could come back for them … and after they’d taken custody of the valuable black pouch … after all that, I gratefully accepted a ride, but only as far as Nellie and Bill Kennedy’s house.

  As we crested the hill, I saw Nellie pulling into her driveway, with a Jeep right behind her.

  “You can let me out here,” I told the cops.

  I walked up the driveway, past Bill Kennedy, who—wearing house slippers and a cardigan buttoned wrong over a white shirt and Bermuda shorts—was raking leaves onto a large brown tarp that was spread flat on the ground.

  I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t look up.

  Most of the leaves he was raking were flying away in the breeze. It was a strange time to be raking, because twilight had already surrendered completely to the night.

  I left him there, raking in the dark.

  At the Jeep, Geof was waiting, and he said, “I was just about to put out an all-points bulletin on you. David thinks you’ve been kidnapped.” As we walked together up to Nellie’s back door, I told him all that had happened on the trail, and then I asked, “What about Nellie?”

  We went into her kitchen before he could tell me.

  I wanted to tell Nellie about the “Ghost,” and his death, but she was sitting at the kitchen table, quietly crying. I was, myself, too tired and hurting to do much more than sit down beside her and cover one of her hands with one of mine. 1 looked up at Geof, waiting for him to explain, but all he did was sit down there with us, until finally he said, “Bill set the fire, Jenny.”

  Nellie looked at me out of eyes as anguished as those of the driver of the pickup truck. “Bill’s been getting sick. His thinking, his talking, even the way he walks. It’s all gotten … sick. Ardyth told me I was imagining it, she won’t believe me when I try to tell her how strange he’s become. The way he doesn’t make any sense in what he says. He can’t even dress himself right” Tears fell down her cheeks. “Did you see him outside? The way he’s dressed? Raking leaves in the dark?”

  I nodded, filled with sadness for them all.

  “I knew it was Bill who set the fire, because I caught him with a candle and matches in his hands. But Ardyth wouldn’t believe her dad could do that. She said it would ruin her election chances if her dad got arrested for arson.”

  Nellie paused to wipe her eyes on her sleeve.

  The gesture reminded me of the truck driver, who had also wiped his eyes, and who would forever be haunted by the ghost he had killed—because Nellie didn’t have the courage to face the terrible truth about Bill, not any more than their daughter did. If Ardyth had denied it, so, too, had her mother.

  “I couldn’t tell anybody that Bill did it, but I couldn’t let that innocent man go to jail, either,” she said.

  “Meryl Tyler, you mean?” I asked her. When she nodded, I said, “Nellie, does Bill have Alzheimer’s?”

  “He’s only fifty-seven years old!” she cried, as if that were an answer. “I’m only fifty-six! It can’t be that, it can’t!”

  Geof and I glanced at each other, knowing it could be, or if not Alzheimer’s, then some other dreadful, similar form of dementia. Geof said quietly to me, “Bill hallucinated the intruders. He thought people were in the house, and that Nellie was one of them, and he started hitting her.”

  “He didn’t know who I was,” she said, sobbing. “And then when I convinced him, he tried so hard to be sane. He was so frightened and so brave, and he’s been trying so hard to hold himself together for me and for Ardie. I’m tough on him, * I shouldn’t be. I know I snap at him sometimes. But he does the craziest things, like order things we don’t even sell, or ship the wrong things off to customers, like that hideous tarantula you got. I always tried to keep him out of the way of the shipping clerks, but sometimes he’d get in their way, I get so frustrated, and I keep thinking if he’d just try harder … but he does try, he does.”

  That was when I had to tell them both what I thought I had learned that evening.

  “Nellie,” I began, “when there was that wreck last winter and I stopped here while Geof went down the hill to help, your Christmas tree was lying across your driveway and I drove over it. I thought Bill had dragged it there for the garbage collectors to pick up, but that wasn’t it, was it? Bill had propped that tree in front of the stop sign, hadn’t he? And so a driver missed seeing it, and ran the sign, and that’s what caused the wreck …”

  I looked at Geof.

  That death was the first, and it was a death we had all practically forgotten about—an anonymous somebody, whether a driver or a passenger in one of the cars that crashed that snowy night—and whose name probably none of us even knew.

  “No!” Nellie shook her head violently.

  Geof was watching, carefully.

  “Well, that’s only my guess, Nellie,” I admitted. “But I know that Bill’s tarp was draped over the stop sign tonight when a pickup truck ran it—”

  She gasped and uttered a little scream. “Oh, no!”

  “Nellie,” I said, “what really happened when the little Talbot girl died and when Ben Barney was killed?”

  The kitchen clock ticked and ticked until she gave up entirely.

  “When the child died … that evening … it was a Sunday, and we were home,” she said, completely defeated. “Bill was out mowing the yard. When I heard a woman screaming, and I ran outside, I saw at once that he had draped his jacket over the stop sign, while he was mowing. I took it down before I even went down the hill, and I never told him what he had done. I thought he never had to know, that no one did, because it was a hit-and-run, and because it would have killed him to know he had hurt a child.”

  Geof said, “And Ben Barney?”

  She took a tremulous breath. “I’d been so careful with Bill. I suspected about the Christmas tree—” She looked at me, and I saw the shock of truth in her eyes. “I thought maybe he had propped it against the sign, and then it had fallen over, but I only knew for sure about the child. I didn’t think anything so horrible could ever happen again, but I watched him anyway. Except that day. I was sick, I don’t know what it was, the flu, and I told him to stay in the house, but he always wants to be helpful.” Her face collapsed in grief, and she struggled to go on. “While I was asleep, he went outside to dig out the ditches along the side of our driveway. And only God will ever know what there was in his poor confused mind that made him do it, but he took one of the black leaf bags and he put it over the stop sign.”

  And Dorothy Wilheim—the sun in her eyes, entranced by the view—had driven on through to a fatal collision with Benjamin Barney.

  “That driver faces serious charges,” Geof commented, and for the first time I heard undertones of anger in his voice.

  “You tried to help her, too,” I said, thinking of how Dorothy Wilheim had told me that it was Nellie who provided her lawyer’s name. But I knew that nothing could alter the fact that Nellie had allowed Wiiheim to suffer in order to protect Bill and her own family, and that she had caused terrible suffering for Melissa Barney, her boys, poor Cleo, even the “Ghost” and the man who hit and killed him. David, too. Even Meryl Tyler.

  “Forgive Bill,” Nellie sobbed. “God forgive me.”

  There wasn’t much doubt about God, I thought, as I put my hand over hers again, but what about the law?

  Epilogue

  “THE LAW WILL NOT BE SO FORGIVING,” WAS GEOF’S PREDICTION.

  Ardyth had come out to the Kennedys’ house to be with her parents; lawyers and prosecutors were notified, and soon they would begin the long, terrible process of legal unraveling. As for us, we drove into town and parked in front of the common, to watch my cleanup crews prepare the grounds for the final day of the fe
stival.

  “It’s really sad, Geof.”

  “For a lot of people besides the Kennedys,” he reminded me, but of course I knew that. After a moment, he touched my shoulder. “Still think you’ll do a second annual?”

  “Festival? You bet.”

  “Will it be anything like this one?”

  “I certainly hope not,” I said, and he laughed.

  We couldn’t sit close together, so we settled for holding hands over the gearshift, while we watched the moon rise.

  “How did our ghost manage to blockade the highway?” I wondered, marveling at the seemingly impossible feat of timing.

  “He had time,” Geof observed. “The highway signs were already there, off the road and ready to use. I’d guess he put up the one by the bridge first—”

  “While I was talking to David.”

  “—because that was the direction he thought David would go.”

  “So then when David gave me a ride back up the hill, instead—”

  “Our ghost only had to run up there behind the cover of the woods and pull out the other highway signs.”

  “He just wanted to halt David long enough to attack him, I guess. We really had him running.”

  “Guilt’s a hard driver.”

  Cleo Talbot gave me a set of runes for Christmas that year.

  I looked up, in the book that came with them, the name and explanation of the blank rune that she had slipped into Johnny’s Vaught’s jacket pocket before his body was removed from his camp. Its name was: Odin: the divine. It was a talisman and a meditation for the spiritual warrior who steps alone into the unknown. After the festival, I finally remembered to pick up those photos I had taken at the crossing the day Mary and I went for our walk. In one of them I thought I saw the back of a ragged man as he slipped off into the woods with a cellophane-wrapped egg salad sandwich in his hand.

  Sigrid Estrada © 1991

  NANCY PICKARD has won numerous mystery awards for her short stories and novels, including an Anthony Award for Say No to Murder, a Macavity Award for Marriage Is Murder, and two Agatha Awards for Best Novel, for Bum Steer in 1990 and I.O.U. in 1991. She was also nominated for an Edgar Award for I.O.U. A former reporter and editor, she is a past president of Sisters in Crime, the international association of mystery writers and fans. She lives in Kansas.