The Prophet

by Michael Koryta

  Eleanor Ruzich lived in a two-story brick house with a detached garage on the northwest side of town, apple trees lining one edge of the property, filling the air with a sweet scent. Her husband had been a doctor, dead now, and she lived alone in the sprawling place. A woman in her mid-sixties, gray hair cut short and stylish, trim figure, sharp eyes, intelligent face. She accepted his private investigator’s license without the reluctance he’d feared, and he soon understood why: she was horrified, and eager to help.

  “I can’t begin to imagine going back there,” she said, the two of them sitting at the kitchen table, Adam with his notepad and pen out, Eleanor Ruzich with a cup of coffee. “It’s been empty for a long time now, but it could still bring back nice memories. Sometimes when my kids come back in the summer, we’ll run up there for a day or a weekend. It’s changed so much, it’s a very different sort of place than what it was when we bought it and they were still children. Different people. A lot of drinking, a lot of… carrying on. The kids want me to sell it, but what could I get out of that place? This economy, this market, and that lake in the shape that it’s in? I just don’t see the point. So I say that I’ll hold onto it, the taxes aren’t so much, and maybe someday the right people will come in and clean the lake up and it will be like it once was again. I’ve kept ours up, just had the roof replaced this summer, had it painted summer before that. It’s still in excellent shape, but it’s about alone in that regard. Sad, really.”

  “You’d never heard of Rachel before?”

  “Not until the police came to see me, no.”

  “And did you ever rent the place out? Or was it strictly for family use?”

  “Family and friends. As I said, it’s been empty for a long while now.”

  “The friends who knew about it…”

  “Wonderful people, all of them. And elderly, now. My husband’s colleagues, mostly, and he was eight years older than me. So if you think a senior citizen committed this heinous—”

  “What about kids?”

  She frowned. “Pardon?”

  “The friends who used to visit. Did they bring children?”

  “Sometimes. They were wonderful families, though.”

  “I’m sure they were. All the same, the names would help. Maybe one of those kids mentioned the place to the wrong person. I’m not saying it’s likely, Mrs. Ruzich, I’m saying it has to be checked. You chase every possibility.”

  She took a deep breath and nodded. “You want a list?”

  “If you can provide one, yes. Anyone who spent time at the property, over the years.”

  She motioned for his notepad, and he slid it over.

  “I understand the idea,” she said, “but I can’t believe it will help. And it’s not as if whoever did this was staying there, anyhow. They picked the spot because it was empty, right? Empty and isolated. So it’s far more likely that it was someone who happened by it recently, thought about breaking in, maybe did break in. But of course they didn’t take anything. Nothing had been disturbed, they just used it for… for that. Just used it as a place to kill that poor girl.”

  Adam sat quietly, letting her talk and write. This was good. She was telling him things that he did not know, telling him things that she would have learned from the police.

  “The mailboxes out there,” he said when she fell silent, scribbling names, “are all bunched together at the end of the road. Correct? No mail goes to the actual cottages?”

  “Correct. All of the boxes are together. We never used them except to send postcards or letters out, occasionally. It was a place to go with the children and get some sun and swim and fish. A place to relax. It was never any sort of home. And now…”

  Yes. And now.

  “So no one checks the mail?”

  “No. Not even when I do go out there. There’s a box and an address, that’s all.”

  There would also be a local carrier, and on a rural route like that, it would be a consistent carrier, most likely. The rare breed to whom a handful of letters might stand out, particularly when placed in an ancient box that had not seen mail before.

  Eleanor Ruzich slid the notepad over to Adam, fifteen names written neatly in a column.

  “I think that’s everyone,” she said. “I also think that it’s a waste of your time. I understand the need to, what did you say? To chase every possibility. I understand that, of course. I just think there have to be more fruitful possibilities.”

  “I think so, too. But it’s good to have this one if I need it. I appreciate your cooperation.”

  She nodded. “I will give that place away rather than set foot inside it again.”

  “I understand that feeling. I’m sorry it happened there.”

  “A pale concern in the grand scheme of the tragedy, but I’m sorry, too, Mr. Austin. I am, too.” She tilted her head, focusing on him again, and finally asked the question she should have asked before she let him through the door. “Who was it who hired you? The girl’s mother?”

  He shook his head.

  “So who sent you here?”

  His stock answer, the one he’d been ready to offer at the start, was that his client’s identity was confidential. It didn’t come, though.

  “I’m here on behalf of my sister,” he said, and then he got to his feet, thanked her again for her help, and left the house.

  None of the names offered much potential. He ran them all through criminal records checks and got nothing more exciting than a speeding ticket. That wasn’t to say they were innocent—Rachel’s killer didn’t have to have a criminal history—but there were no scents that seemed promising enough to start a chase, either. For the most part, the names she’d provided belonged to people in their sixties or older. They lived nice lives in nice homes and did not intersect with the Jason Bonds or Penny Gootees of the world. Knowledge of the family seemed imperative. Only one was familiar to Adam: Duncan Werner, a local dentist and one of the football team’s prominent boosters.

  That sent him back to the start then, but he willed down the frustration. You had to keep your motor running, had to pursue, pursue, pursue even if you weren’t having the opportunity to make plays. Those opportunities did not come to those who waited.

  On Monday afternoon, he waited at Shadow Wood Lane for two hours until the mail carrier arrived.

  “Minute I saw all those cars down here on Saturday, I was curious,” the man said. He was an older man with a gray mustache and hound dog jowls. “Trying to figure out which cottage it was, you know, because there are some problems down here in the summer, but the place is pretty much dead the rest of the year. I don’t deliver much of anything.”

  “I’d imagine. You been delivering much of late?”

  “Letters to 7330.”

  Adam nodded. He was wearing sunglasses and jeans and a plain brown baseball cap and a matching jacket. No logo on any of them, but he knew that he looked like a cop, and he knew how to carry himself like one, too, and how to talk like one. From the postal worker’s cooperation, he was fairly certain that the man believed he was police, but that was safe, because he had not been misinformed. Adam had a recorder running in his jacket pocket, and if this became an issue, they would not be able to say he had identified himself as law enforcement.

  “The last one, you remember when that was delivered?”

  “Wednesday,” he said confidently. “Only thing that went in any of the boxes. Like I said, it stands out. This place is pretty well shut down after Labor Day.”

  This is what Adam had counted on. He nodded, thinking that Wednesday would have given enough time for an immediate response by mail, but also that Rachel Bond had probably offered a cell phone number. Cell phone, e-mail, one of the fashions of communication preferred by a teenage girl, particularly one in a hurry. From Wednesday’s letter to Friday’s meeting, details could have been arranged quickly.

  “When did they start?” he asked. “Or was that the only one?”

  “Only one coming in.” The mail
carrier had no hesitation. This was the great thing about rural routes: everything stood out. Adam couldn’t help feel some petty tug of pride that the man clearly hadn’t been interviewed by police yet.

  “But there were some going out.”

  “Yes, sir. Round about Labor Day, I think. I hadn’t put a damn thing in that box for a good while, and then the letters started coming, so it sticks in my mind, you know?”

  “Sure. How many, would you say? How often?”

  “Once a week, maybe twice. I’d say I picked up, oh, a half-dozen.”

  “Any chance you remember the handwriting?”

  “Typed.”

  “Never saw anyone put them in the box?”

  “Never saw a soul. I’d come out, flag was up, and that was that. Always surprised me. I’m in the habit of blowing right by here, you know.” He sighed and spread his hands. “I wish I had more to tell you, Officer.”

  Adam let him go then, because he didn’t want to push the police impersonation any further, and he didn’t feel the man had anything left to offer. When the mail truck was gone, Adam walked back down to the cottages, watching the quiet pond ripple under the wind, sun-speckled and beautiful, and he wondered what it had been like when she arrived, tried to recall the weather on Friday afternoon. It had been colder then, and overcast. The pond would have been bathed in shadows and the decrepit cottages would have looked forlorn and ominous, and still she’d pulled in and gone to finish her task.

  A brave girl, and a determined one.

  “I’m working on it, Marie,” Adam whispered. “I’m working on it.”

  It wasn’t until the words were out of his mouth that he realized he’d meant to say Rachel.

  What next? Where else to look? There was the prison, possibly, but he doubted that Jason Bond would be willing to see him, and knew without question that approaching the man would trigger police attention to Adam’s quest that would only slow him down. Likewise with any effort to interview Rachel’s friends. But maybe it was time. There were not many other options.

  He turned and gazed around the cottages with frustration. He’d been sure this was the right way to start. The kill site had not been random. Everything about it worked too well, from the isolation to the opportunity to send the letters from an active address but a vacant home. It had been carefully selected, and that required knowledge of the place, but none of the names Eleanor Ruzich had given him seemed promising. Who else might have known about the cottage? There were the neighbors, of course. He hadn’t pursued them yet. It would be hard to determine which cottages had actually been used recently, they were all so run-down. Except for Eleanor Ruzich’s. She had not exaggerated when she said she was alone in her efforts to keep the place in good shape.

  He’d turned full circle, his back to the pond again, and was staring at the cottage.

  I’ve kept ours up, Eleanor had said. Yes, she certainly had. He called her from the dock and found her at home again. He told her he was still working on the Shadow Wood leads and was now searching for potential witnesses.

  “You had some maintenance done recently,” he said. “The roof was replaced, isn’t that what you said?”

  “Yes. Roof replaced this summer, the exterior painted last summer.”

  “Do you recall what company did that work? It seems that the activity with your address began in the summer, so I was—”

  “It wasn’t a company,” she said. “It’s a man who’s been our caretaker for years out there. He works for the hospital in some sort of maintenance job. My husband met him there.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Rodney Bova,” she said. “That’s spelled B-O—”

  “I know Rodney,” he said.

  “You do? How?”

  He hesitated, then said, “I played football with him once. A long time ago. Thanks, Mrs. Ruzich. Maybe Rodney will be able to help.”

  14

  RODNEY BOVA WAS A GHOST’S name, an attachment to vague and receding memories. He’d been one of those kids who flitted around the periphery of Adam’s life but never stepped into focus.

  His place among the memories had been etched by rumors and gossip. Adam couldn’t recall his face, his voice, his family, or even what position he’d played. He remembered only two things about Rodney Bova—he’d been on the team briefly, and he’d left it when he was sentenced to a juvie lockup. He had, for a short time the summer before Adam’s senior year, taken a starring role in the team’s conversation by getting himself arrested. There was a live-in camp every August, the first week of practice, the kids practicing twice a day and spending the nights in sleeping bags on the gym floor, a bonding-by-boot-camp exercise that Walter Ward designed. As Adam recalled, Bova was missing during live-in camp, and nobody was sure why, but some of the kids had heard rumors. Adam’s interest in the situation was minimal, Bova being a couple of years younger than him and not a starter. Had a contributor been arrested, had they lost a playmaker, that would have been different. Bova was a nobody, though, and so his flare of fame had faded fast.

  Rodney Bova, the caretaker at 7330 Shadow Wood Lane.

  Maybe it shouldn’t have felt like so much. Maybe the mind was teasing him into believing this connection had value simply because it was the only connection he’d found, an unanticipated link to the past and to crime. Maybe the right thing to do was simply to give old Rodney Bova a call and ask the questions—when had he logged his hours at Shadow Wood this summer, who had he seen, which of the neighbors were talkative, which were suspicious.

  Somehow, though, that didn’t feel like the move to make.

  The voice that whispered in Adam’s head when he was chasing skips, the one that was usually right, was telling him to circle Rodney Bova, and do it quietly.

  At least to start.

  The team began approaching practice with distraction where passion belonged, and while Kent understood it, he also had to fix it.

  Rachel Bond’s murder was in all of their heads, he knew that. Grief and gossip, faith and fear. The conversation inside the school would be swirling amidst those four cardinal directions right now, and it would be ceaseless. There were a few on the team—Colin Mears foremost among them—to whom the loss was truly and deeply personal. There were more to whom it was distant and would now be made personal. That strange magnetic pull of tragedy. Kent had known it too well, for too long. Classmates who’d never spoken to his sister began reminiscing over time spent with her. Strangers in town would approach him in the grocery store or at McDonald’s or on the street, tears in their eyes. Often, they wanted to touch him while they offered their condolences. He was struck by the frequency of that—hands on the arm, pats on the back, awkward embraces. Seeking some contact with the tragedy, but minimal, of course. Minimal. As if somehow that offered a vaccination. If they got just the right amount of contact, incubated just the right amount of terror and horror in their own hearts, they’d be protected.

  You had to find your refuge. The place of consistency in a world gone mad. For Kent it had been the football field. Walter Ward had understood so well what nobody else seemed to: Kent and Adam needed some level of normalcy. Had to have it. Kent did, at least. Adam started missing practices. Never missed a game, and never played better than he did down the stretch after Marie was killed, but until kickoff he was uninterested. Kent had gone the other way. Taken more reps, watched more film. Immersed himself. Ward had helped him to do that.

  Now, twenty-two years removed, Kent watched Colin Mears in the receivers line, saw him glancing over his shoulder, and followed the boy’s look. Three of his teammates engaged in earnest, whispered conversation. Kent could guess the topic, if not the specifics.

  He turned away, his cap pulled low, and chewed furiously on his whistle. It was a lifeguard’s whistle, soft, waterproof rubber, and he liked it because he could bite on the thing so hard that it was almost like having a mouthpiece back in, almost like having the helmet on and lining up under center with the crowd in y
our ears and the lights on your face.

  We are going to lose, he thought. We are going to lose.

  Byers was barking and pacing and cussing, but Byers always barked and paced and cussed, and so the kids paid him little mind. Kent watched his linebackers run through a drill, banging off the tackling sled with cursory attention, nobody coming close to earning a bruise, which made him furious—this point in the season, the point that mattered most, and they didn’t want to hit? Then he swiveled his head and watched his offensive linemen execute what was supposed to be a zone-blocking scheme but looked like blindfolded kids being chased by bees, and he knew they were going to get beat.

  Again.

  Just like every other year.

  Hickory Hills might not beat them, even if Chambers extended this passionless effort from the practice field to the game. But on the opposite side of the bracket waited Saint Anthony’s, a school Kent had never beaten, led by a coach, Scott Bless, Kent had never beaten. There was no team in the state he wanted to beat more desperately. In his two state championship appearances, Saint Anthony’s had marched off the field with the trophy two times.

  Kent’s jaw was beginning to ache from chewing the whistle. He turned downfield, watched his receivers, who were working on snap counts, Steve Haskins trying to confuse them with a mix of cadences, making sure they’d jump only when they were supposed to, and Colin Mears bristled with energy, crisp on every play, then back in line, slapping helmets and demanding focus and providing reminders.

  Kent blew the whistle, and most of the field went silent, but not enough of it. Not enough. His defensive secondary was laughing through their drill, and it was the worst kind of laughter to have on the football field. Cocky laughter. The kind that suggested they thought they’d already won, when they’d never walked off the field at the end of a season without a loss.

  “This is funny to you?” he screamed, and now he was walking toward them and everyone was backing up. “Practicing for the playoffs is entertainment? Is that what I’m to understand?”