by Chuck Hogan
Bucky looked fast at Maddox. "That's him," he said to Hess. "That's Maddox's car."
Maddox's surprise was pure and convincing.
Bucky stared at Maddox as though he was owed an answer.
Hess said, "Any reason you know of?"
Maddox shook his head.
Bryson went on. In another peeping shot, Sinclair had experimented with holding the camera away from his eye. In the dim reflection of the glass, his face appeared like an eerie double exposure, a ghost without eyebrows superimposed over a sleeping boy.
Hess said, "So he was dressing up in black, riding his bike around after dark, and sneaking into backyards to snap pictures of little boys sleeping in first-floor bedrooms. Until twelve forty-three A.M. on June twenty-fifth, the time and date stamp of the last picture."
Bryson said, "One week before the night the insurance salesman, Heavey, said he heard a shot in the forest, near where this camera was recovered."
Hess said, "And then there's this."
There followed five flash-lit images of a basement in an apparently abandoned house, the paneled walls kicked in and defaced: spray-painted devil's horns, various "666" designs, and, in dripping red like a comic-book howl, the words, Black Falls is Helllll!
Hess said, "Recognize any of this?"
Bucky and Maddox took turns shaking their heads.
"Cult stuff," suggested Bryson.
Hess watched Maddox's face sour in disagreement.
Then came more early images, many of them unclear, either too dark or with the sleeping child obscured. Sinclair learning by trial and error.
When the next one he wanted came up, Hess said, "Stop."
A two-story house at dusk, the image taken among trees across an otherwise empty backyard. The house had a rear deck, and the bit of the front yard visible around the left side looked like wetlands.
Bucky leaned in. He got right up over Bryson's head, examining the screen. He straightened and looked back at Maddox.
"That's his place," said Bucky, pointing. "That's Maddox's damn house."
Maddox was still absorbing the image. He did not deny Bucky's claim.
Hess said, "Maddox?"
Maddox said, "Looks like it."
Bucky said, "Scarecrow was fuckin' taking pictures of you?"
Hess asked, "Why would he take a picture of your house?"
Maddox shook his head, as much out of disbelief as I-don't-know.
Bucky Pail pulled back, formed a wide grin. "'Cause he's fuckin' gay. They're gay together. You and Scarecrow got something going, Maddox?"
"Yeah," said Maddox, turning to Bucky. "He likes me to handcuff him and slap him around. Says you taught him."
Hess said, "All right, all right."
Bucky's eyes were dead, staring at Maddox. But Maddox's attention had already returned to the screen. Figuring out this house mystery was more important to him than jousting with Bucky Pail.
Hess said, "Maddox, what do you have to say about this?"
"I have nothing to say. I'm looking at this just like you. I don't know what the hell it is."
"Sinclair's a fan of your work? Your own backyard paparazzo?"
"I have to answer for him?" Maddox said. "What do you want me to say?"
"It disturbs you."
"Sure it does. But not as much as those pictures of the sleeping boys."
Hess nodded, having gotten what he wanted out of Maddox. "They looked quite dead, didn't they."
Maddox looked up fast like he hadn't thought of that.
41
VAL
VAL SAT IN HER WHITE yard chair at the long edge of the white resin table on the back porch. The turf beneath her slippers was a fuzzy green indoor-outdoor carpet, and two citronella candles were set in the middle of the table, near the empty umbrella hole, both jars blackened, the wicks burned down to the bottom. The back porch was screened in, but insects were still a problem, because of the smell. The septic company garage out beyond the low chain-link fence at the edge of their property drew gnats and mosquitoes and chits and no-see-ums out of the surrounding woods. Blue-bulb zappers hung from three corners of the roof, snapping and sizzling all day and night.
She had taken a glass and a half of rosé at about ten and only another small glass with lunch, so she was certain he couldn't tell. Donny Maddox sat at the shorter end of the table, his back to the yard. Keeping his distance because of the kissing in his car. She watched the smoke feather up off her cigarette and then ribbon in some mysterious, unfelt crosscurrent. This was where she did her thinking. Later she would revisit the conversation as though he were still sitting here, veering off into unexplored dialogues, playing with alternate endings.
She already remembered the way he had looked at the plastic tray of annuals on the newspaper in the sunniest corner, when he first joined her out here. The flower petals parched and dead. And the memory of his lookso recent it was more of an echo than a memoryalready colored her responses. She didn't want him turning that same look of pity on her. The unplanted violets represented the flare of a good morning some weeks before, a few hours of get-my-life-in-order-starting-with-this-house energy, which, as always, soon burned itself out.
She turned the cigarette over in her hand to disrupt the smoke stream. "This is my weight loss program," she told him. "My exercise regimen and my portion control." She inhaled, savoring the hit. "Best part is, it works. Kane hates it. Hates the smell, which is ridiculous, coming from him. But I need it. Anything to cover up this." She pointed across the side lawn to the septic garage.
Donny turned to look, just being polite. He seemed reluctant to tell her why he had come.
Val said, "Dill didn't do what they say he's done. You know that, right? He's a lot of thingshe's sickbut he's not a murderer."
Donny nodded, still fretting. "You still have no idea where he is?"
She shook her head. "I go back and forth now between hating him and pitying him. He was always so lost and different and weird insidebut not evil. How I think of him now is like a piece of fruit left out too long. Parts of it are still okay, but the parts that are black and spoiled, you can't eat around them." She smoked. "They still trying to make something out of his magic? Cults and black masses and that?"
Donny said, "How'd you know?"
"The head trooper, when he had me in there, asked if I was a witch."
Donny frowned, either at the notion or at the mention of the head trooper. "What do you think of that?"
"It was just tricks. Stupid tricks. He was a lonely little boy cutting cards and waving scarves down in our basement. Obsessed with it. And my fatherGod, he hated it. Taunted him mercilessly. Humiliated him. I mean nightly. Calling him a fairy. So of course, what does Dill do but practice that much longer, that much more obsessively. Started dressing in black, you know, playing up the part. Living it. Becoming this kid his father hated." She picked at a ridge in the table with her fingernail. "Just tell me you'll try to help him, if you find him."
"They found a camera in the Borderlands today. His camera. You're not supposed to know about thisno one is. But inside, taken over the past few months, were these pictures of sleeping boys."
Val showed him that she was not shocked. "That's what you came here wanting to know about? Are you asking for that trooper? Or for yourself?"
"Just me."
She sat back. "I feel like everything with Dill, everything, is this attempt to get back his childhood."
"Get it back? From where?"
"I remember one time I found him in our basement with a noose all tied, elaborately coiled like in the movies, strung up over one of the ceiling supports. He said he was working on an escape trick. Sure he was. I told him at the time, I said, 'Don't leave me here alone.' That was my biggest fear. Now I know he would have been better off."
"Alone? But what about your father?"
She let stillness settle like night.
Donny started to ask, then thought better of it. He sat back a bit
in his chair, not knowing what to say, what to do.
Val flicked some ash, surprised he hadn't known already. She smiled, not happily, and looked past him through the screens, through years. These were things she saw from this porch table.
"But then he did leave, he ran off to Boston. I threw myself into the scholarship as my way out. And then, after I lost that I guess now I can say that I had a collapse. I didn't see anyone, I didn't do anything. Didn't eat or sleep. All I did was go on these marathon walks. With my sketchpad and a little bottle of water, anything to get away from my house. One day I wandered out near the dump. But instead of garbage, I smelled mulch. Wet, fragrant mulch, and it drew me. And there Kane was out in front, spreading it with a pitchfork. A steamy hot day, just like this one. Putting in a little stripe of garden in front of the dump, and I thought, you know, how perfectly odd."
She felt a smile bunching her cheeks. Not the sweetness of memory, no, but rather the wisdom of a girl grown so much older.
"I was heavy into contradictions then. Pretending I could still be an artist, live like an artist, see like an artist. The contrast, the poetic futility of the gardenall that appealed to me. Like when you find something in the outside world you think perfectly reflects what you're feeling inside? You respond to it. And I remember thinking to myself, about Kane Ripsbaugh, That guy looks exactly like how I feel."
She licked her lips in an effort to douse the bitter smile, then swallowed, as though memories were food you could chew down once and for all.
"You were nineteen," said Donny. "He wasforty? Older?"
"Well, marrying for lovedo you know how new a concept that is? There are marriages of advantage and there are marriages of convenience, and I wanted out. If not from the town, then, at the very, very least, from my house. From my father. Kane owned his own house, and he wanted me. He promised me things. He even seemed to love mewho would have guessed that? The scrawny little mess I was at the time. I think I imagined I'd be like the heroine in some thick French novel, a peasant girl who claws her way out of the mud of the countryside into Paris society. I'd start with the septic man and move up, ruthlessly. Only, there never was any up."
"Kane's a good man," said Donny. "I mean, he may not be " He was wise to give up on that. There were numerous things Kane Ripsbaugh wasn't: handsome, sweet-smelling, tenderhearted, talkative. Interesting. Young. "Nobody's perfect. But he'll stand by you."
"He took me back, you mean."
Donny didn't want to go there. Val stubbed out her dying cigarette, already wanting another. "There are these hinge moments in life, you know? I sit out here, and I think about them. Critical turning points where your life could have completely changed, one way or the other. You know?"
"Well, sure."
"You're thinking I'm going to bring up the scholarship again." Another smile opened up her face, this one bittersweet. "You won't even remember this, butLynn Gavel's party? For the yearbook staff, our senior year? We were right in the heat of our rival thing, and my ride, she had left without me, and you had your mom's car so you were going to give me a lift home? And it was getting late, and I knew you wanted to go, but I was being all pouty and do you remember, I wandered off down to the pond at the end of her street, and you had to come looking for me?"
"I do."
"I wanted you to come after me. I went off on purposeI even sent my ride homeso that you would have to leave the rest of them and come to me. I was a pout because I couldn't figure out how to get you interested. Interested enough to kiss me."
He started to say something else, then settled for, "No, I never knew."
"Of course you look at me now and you think, Thank God. But that's the thing. I would be different if I had wound up with you. So different. Not straitjacketed here. I always felt close to you, Donny. Like we had a connection. If only it weren't for that that damn scholarship "
She blotted her eyes with a knuckle, harshly. She watched him try to come up with something to say other than I'm sorry, fail, and glance at the porch door.
"I'm scaring you off, huh?" Her words came out on a weird laugh.
"No, no," he said. "It's just that, I have to get out to see Pinty."
"Do you ever think about what your life would be like if I had won the scholarship? Your life in this town, what it would have been?"
He nodded, begrudging her nothing. "Every day since I came back."
"You'd have been a cop, right? Probably. And with you in there, maybe the Pail family wouldn't have taken over. Things might be a lot different. For everybody. Probably you would have married someone in town."
"Maybe."
"Maybe someone like me."
"But you wouldn't have been here, right? You would have won the scholarship." He got to his feet as though afraid she would try to kiss him again. "You'd be long gone."
"That's right," she said. "Long gone."
She reached for another cigarette, knowing that, as soon as the door shut behind him, she would begin spinning their conversation around and around inside her head, her mind like a spider threading a web so elaborate, it could catch even imaginary prey.
42
BUCKY
THE CLASSICAL MUSIC record popped and crackled on the old hi-fi turntable. The album was one of a boxed set of six that Bucky's mother had ordered from the television soon after he was born. She bought it to play for him and Eddie in the afternoons, hoping it would somehow calm them down. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Play Your Timeless Classics, it was called, the cover showing a bloody sun setting behind the tuxedoed conductor, who was some Einstein-looking guy. Oh, how he and Eddie used to hate it. Used to jump around the room just to hear it skip. Tried scratching it up with the needle when they were big enough to reach. Played it on 78 rpm and whipped pillow cushions at the stereo. But those goddamn thick old wax discs were indestructible.
The records found their way back out of the cabinet after his mother died. Daddy played them at night to help him fall asleep in his chair. And if Eddie or Bucky ever turned it off, the man woke up in a rage. Daddy never slept in a bed again.
Now Daddy was gone and Eddie and Bucky had split up the albums, Bucky sticking Eddie with the faggy piano pieces and keeping the Apocalypse Now music for himself. They didn't live together. Pails had owned Jag Hill for almost as long as there was a town named Black Falls, two separate family homesteads set on opposite slopes of the otherwise undeveloped hill. Eddie stayed in the larger house a half mile away, the one they had grown up in, because Bucky preferred his uncle's old place, which had started out as a hunting lodge and still had a pair of antlers nailed to the front door. Still had the curing shed and the old camper out in back.
Bucky was cooking up a late lunch of toasted bologna, watching the edges curl off the browning bread through the window of his toaster oven, and thinking about that freak-ass Scarecrow. When Frond first turned up dead enough to bring the staties to town, Bucky had been pissed. Everything had to be put on hold, he figured. But now he welcomed the distraction. It was perfect. Everyone running around looking for Scarecrow, the town whipped into a frenzy. And once they found him and left, then Bucky's position in Black Falls would be stronger than ever. Pinty would be gone, along with his pet Maddox, leaving no obstacles in Bucky's way. Total freedom to finish his "experiments" before moving on to the next stage.
This town was nothing more than a laboratory to him now. A proving ground. When he was through with Black Falls, he would toss it at Eddie's big feet like a bone gnawed clean. This was going to be a town full of zombies by the time Bucky was done.
They say summer colds are the worst, and a bad one was spreading through town. A cold that was to become a countywide flu, which would eventually burn through all of New England like an epidemic.
Bucky saw now that Ibbits had come to him as a kind of prophet. A hobo prophet, appearing out of the desert as they often do, living in his car, on the run from California. A carrier of the disease, and yet, at the same time, a
doctor, a medicine man. But a prophet first and foremost. Of doom. Bearing scripture, in the form of a prescriptionin the form of a recipe. A simple little recipe with simple, everyday ingredients.
A recipe for plague.
Ibbits said meth was the perfect drug if you only did it once. Trick was: How? How do you win a fortune with one pull of the slot machine leverand never walk into a casino again? Fuck the hottest chick on TVand never expect to touch her again? Learn the most mind-shattering truth of the universeand never allow yourself to think it again?
