Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

  It was close to midnight when he closed the book. He pushed himself to his feet. Ralph lifted his head from his paws and looked up at him.

  “It’s time,” said Calhoun.

  Thermos of coffee, army blanket, shotgun, extra shells. He turned off all the lights, and he and Ralph went out onto the porch. He stood there until his eyes adjusted.

  Calhoun picked a different place to hide, this time just inside the clearing directly across from the front porch. From here, he had a good sweep of the driveway as it curved up the hill away from the house to the paved road. He found another good tree to lean against, and he settled down.

  Reading “The Bear” again had given him new thoughts about Lawrence Potter, and Calhoun decided he had better respect him. Maybe he was old, but he’d managed to kill Lyle. A rifle and a clever brain had a way of neutralizing differences in age and strength and quickness. He might not even come in the night next time. Maybe he’d do it entirely differently. Calhoun could not count on him falling into predictable habits.

  Anyway, Calhoun decided that he’d be better prepared if he accepted the possibility that the man with the .22 could be anyone, including somebody from the time in his life that he couldn’t remember.

  So he could never relax. Not in the daytime. Not when he was away from his house, or in his truck, or at the shop. Not until it was over. The man had certainly meant to kill him that first time, and there was no reason to believe he wouldn’t try again. He would keep trying until either he nailed Calhoun or Calhoun nailed him.

  And so he sat out the night with his shotgun across his knees and Ralph dozing fitfully beside him, fueled by the caffeine of the coffee and the adrenaline of the hunt. He listened to the night-sounds of the woods and he watched the stars rotate in the sky. Thoughts whirled pointlessly in his head until the sun came up.

  He went inside, turned on the coffeemaker, shucked off his clothes, and took a long hot shower. He did not bother dressing afterward. He called in Ralph, told him it was his watch, and went to bed.

  His mental alarm clock woke him up at eleven. His mind was clear. No dream-hangover today. Two cups of coffee later, he was ready.

  He and Ralph drove over to Jacob Barnes’s store. It was around noontime, and the gravel parking area was jammed with pickup trucks and four-wheel-drives.

  When he pushed open the door, he saw that the back corner was packed with locals. All the chairs were taken. Several men were leaning against the wall, and a few were squatting on the floor, rocking on their heels, all of them smoking and sipping soda and talking in low voices.

  No laughter bubbled up from the group. Calhoun heard none of the usual crude cursing or loud argumentation. Today the voices were subdued—somber, even.

  Calhoun had never joined one of these back-room gossip sessions. The regulars were all native-born locals who, even after five years, still regarded Calhoun skeptically. He’d forever be “from away” to them. They were always polite, even friendly, to him. But they’d never quite trust him.

  That was okay by him. He wasn’t much for gossip.

  Jacob was behind the counter loading cans into a paper bag for a woman Calhoun didn’t recognize.

  The woman hefted the bag in her arms, turned, glanced at Calhoun, nodded to him, and left the store. Calhoun stepped up to the counter.

  Jacob nodded to him.

  “Marcus abandon you today?”

  “I believe he’s seein’ what he can do for Millie,” Jacob said.

  Calhoun frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Jacob leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the counter. “You didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “About Millie’s fire?”

  “Fire?” Calhoun shook his head. “What happened?”

  “Don’t know, really.” Jacob’s eyes were solemn. “Happened in the night. Her house burned down and they took Millie to the hospital.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She ain’t dead.”

  Calhoun slammed his fist on the countertop. “Jesus,” he muttered. He’d talked to Millie in the evening. She had been fine. Her usual warm, enthusiastic self. He leaned toward Jacob. “What caused the fire? What’s the matter with Millie? Tell me what you know, man.”

  Jacob flapped his hands. “Happened sometime in the middle of the night. They drug Millie out while it was burnin’, is what they’re sayin’. Clamped oxygen on her face, raced her off to the hospital, sirens a-screamin’. Ain’t much left of her little bungalow, I hear. Gutted her right out. Personally, I ain’t seen it. Been here since six this mornin’. Folks come in, are giving me the story.”

  “What hospital?”

  “Rochester, I believe,” said Jacob. “Closest hospital. Guess they were in some kind of hurry.”

  Calhoun nodded. “Thanks,” he said to Jacob. He went out to his truck and headed up the road to Millie’s.

  A fire engine was parked out front, and behind it a black Plymouth sedan with a red light on the roof. Calhoun pulled in behind the sedan, told Ralph to sit tight, and got out.

  The logo on the side of the sedan read YORK COUNTY FIRE MARSHAL.

  The shell of Millie’s house still stood. There were big holes in the roof and smoke smudges around the empty windows and along the eaves. The front door had been broken down, and the yard was littered with wet, sooty furniture. Millie’s Jeep Cherokee crouched in the side driveway. The paint on the side facing the house was blackened and blistered.

  A short, gray-haired man wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and no necktie stood at the edge of the yard talking with a fireman, who was wearing a T-shirt, blue jeans, and knee-high rubber boots, and holding a visored hard hat in his hand. When Calhoun approached them, the man in the white shirt looked up and waved the back of his hand at him.

  “Move on,” he said. “Git your vehicle out of here.”

  “Millie’s a friend of mine,” Calhoun said.

  “Millie’s a friend of everybody,” said the man. “Hangin’ around here ain’t going to help her.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  The man shook his head and sighed. “We don’t need gawkers, friend. We’re tryin’ to figure out what happened, and you’re in the way.”

  “Can you just tell me if she’s okay?”

  The man in the jacket turned to the fireman and spoke to him quietly for a moment. The fireman nodded, put on his hard hat, and strode into the shell of Millie’s house. Then the short man walked over to where Calhoun was standing.

  Calhoun held out his hand. “Calhoun,” he said. “I live a few miles back off County Road.”

  “Chiesa,” said the man, giving Calhoun’s hand a quick, limp shake. “I’m the county fire marshal. I been here since four AM, Mr. Calhoun. I’m tired and hungry and short-tempered, and I been chasin’ folks away all morning.”

  “What about Millie?”

  Chiesa shook his head. “They found her unconscious upstairs in her bedroom. Guess she got a lot of poison in her lungs.” He shrugged. “Last I heard, she was holding her own.”

  “They took her to Rochester?”

  Chiesa nodded. “Closer than Portland.”

  Calhoun jerked his head toward what was left of the house. “Any idea what happened?”

  “Not yet. Could be electrical. She had a bunch of overloaded sockets downstairs. Coupla air-conditioning units improperly wired.” He shrugged.

  “What about arson?”

  Chiesa shook his head. “I ain’t prepared to say anything about that. That’s why I’m here. To investigate. But we only just got the fire put out. Can’t rule out arson, but usually these things turn out to be electrical.”

  “Has Sheriff Dickman been by?”

  “He’s been notified. At this point, there’s nothing for him.”

  “Millie had two cats,” said Calhoun.

  “Don’t know anything about any cats,” said Chiesa. He looked past Calhoun’s shoulder. Calhoun turned around. The fireman had come ou
t of the house and was standing there with his eyebrows arched. “What’ve you got, Eddie?” Chiesa said to the fireman.

  “Somethin’ you oughta take a look at, sir.”

  Chiesa nodded. “Okay. Be right there.” He turned to Calhoun. “Do me a favor, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t go spreading rumors. I don’t want the word ‘arson’ being bandied about down in Jacob Barnes’s back room. I know there’ll be plenty of speculating. But I don’t want anyone saying that Fire Marshal Jack Chiesa is talking about arson. You got that?”

  Calhoun nodded. “No problem.”

  “One other thing,” said Chiesa.

  “Yes?”

  “Git on out of here. No offense, but just stay the hell away. Let us do our job.”

  “You got it,” said Calhoun.

  He went back to the truck. Ralph was sitting behind the wheel. “Shove over,” Calhoun told him. Ralph shoved over, and Calhoun climbed in.

  It took about a half hour to drive to the hospital in Rochester. He left the truck in the shade of a maple tree on the edge of the parking lot, cracked the windows, and told Ralph to sit tight. Then he went in.

  The woman at the desk told him that Millie Dobson was in Intensive Care and could not see visitors. She knew nothing of Millie’s condition.

  Calhoun thanked her and went over to the elevators across the lobby. The directory indicated that the ICU was on the second floor. He found the stairway and went up.

  Two nurses were seated behind a chest-high horseshoe-shaped counter. One of them was bent over a clipboard. The other had her back to Calhoun and was watching a bank of computer screens behind them, which beeped a quiet, syncopated tune as lines and graphs moved across the screens.

  Calhoun leaned his elbows on the counter and said, “Excuse me.”

  The nurse with the clipboard looked up. “Yes?”

  “I came to see Millie Dobson.”

  She looked to be somewhere in her fifties. She wore a pale blue cardigan sweater over a white blouse. She had iron-gray hair and sharp blue eyes and a soft, matronly body. “No visitors, sir.”

  “I’m her brother.”

  The nurse cocked her head. Then she smiled, and wrinkles spread across her face. “Sure you are.”

  “Can you tell me how she is?”

  “She’s not out of the woods. Still unconscious. They may have to operate.”

  “Operate?” said Calhoun. “I thought . . .” He shook his head. “She was in a fire. Smoke inhalation or something.”

  “It’s the head injury the doctors are worried about. She took quite a severe blow.”

  “Head injury? How . . .?”

  The nurse shrugged. “They figure she bumped into something or maybe fell down trying to get out in the dark. They don’t know. She has a fractured skull. The doctors’re worried about subdural bleeding.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “Look. I got to see her.”

  “And you’re her brother.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Your name Dobson?”

  “No. I’m Calhoun. Dobson is Millie’s married name.”

  The nurse flipped through her clipboard. “It says here she’s not married.”

  “She was,” said Calhoun. “She divorced. She kept his name.”

  The nurse grinned and shook her head. “You really want to see her, don’t you, brother?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him for a moment, then nodded. “Come on. Just for a minute.”

  The nurse came out from behind the counter and led him around the corner. Millie’s bed sat in the middle of a small room, surrounded by machines. A bulky bandage covered her head like a turban. A tube was clamped to her nostrils. More tubes snaked down to her wrist, which was taped to a board. Still another snuck out from under the thin blanket that covered her and emptied into a bag attached to the foot of her bed. Wires crawled out from under the blanket that covered her chest and ran to different machines.

  She looked small and gray and old and utterly lifeless.

  Calhoun blew out a breath.

  The nurse touched his arm. “I’ll give you five minutes. Talk to her if you want. For heaven’s sake, don’t touch anything.”

  He nodded, still staring at Millie.

  He was aware of the nurse leaving. “Hey, Millie,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

  She gave no indication that she’d heard him.

  “It’s Stoney,” he said. “I came to remind you about our dinner date. You better not let me down. I’m really looking forward to it. We’ll dress all fancy, have some expensive wine, maybe go dancing afterwards.”

  Millie’s body remained motionless, but Calhoun thought he could see her eyes rolling under her eyelids. He moved close to her. “What happened, Millie?” he said. “Who did this to you? I wish you could tell me what happened. I wish you could tell me if this is my fault.”

  She gave him no response.

  He moved back from her bed, leaned against the wall, folded his arms across his chest, and watched her face. The machines lined up beside her bed ticked and hummed and breathed in the hospital silence.

  Then the nurse was at the door. “You’ve got to leave,” she said.

  He nodded, went over and touched Millie’s cheek, turned, and followed the nurse out of the room.

  Back at the counter, he took one of Kate’s business cards from his wallet and wrote his phone number on it. “Please,” he said. “If there’s any change—anything—let me know.”

  She took the card from him, glanced at it, and said, “Sure, brother Calhoun. We’ll let you know. You’re her, um, next of kin?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I guess you could call me that.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  FIRST LYLE.

  Now Millie.

  Calhoun and Ralph were sitting side by side on one of the tumbleddown slabs of granite, formerly the foundation of the bridge that had spanned the little creek behind his house. The brook trout had started sipping mayfly spinners, which were washing down the quickening current where the creek narrowed. Two fish had moved up to the head of the pool where the riffle slowed and flattened. The third trout, the biggest, held himself suspended directly under a tuft of overhanging grass tight against the far bank in a little eddy formed by a submerged rock.

  That was the one Calhoun tried to catch mentally. The others were too easy.

  He was convinced that what had happened to Millie was his fault, just as he knew that Lyle wouldn’t have been murdered if he—Calhoun himself—had taken Fred Green / Lawrence Potter fishing like he was supposed to. Millie had been doing him a favor, and now she was in the hospital.

  He got close to somebody, let them into his heart, and then something happened to them. Calhoun suspected that was the story of his entire life, although he did not know that story very well.

  “Simplify, simplify,” Thoreau had said. Calhoun realized he had let too much complication enter his life. He hadn’t intended it. He hadn’t wanted it. If he’d been stronger, it wouldn’t have happened. But he’d let Lyle become his best friend, and he’d allowed himself to love Kate. He’d guided and worked in the shop. He’d made friends with Millie and Sheriff Dickman and Jacob and Marcus, and recently Anna and David Ross. And nothing good had come of it. Now Lyle was dead and Millie lay in a coma and Lawrence Potter was trying to kill him, too.

  Well, he’d have to settle it. Then maybe he would return to the woods and start over. He would concentrate on providing himself with food, clothing, shelter, and fuel, the necessities that Thoreau had correctly identified. He would shun luxuries. He would try to convince himself that love was a luxury, and he’d try to convince Kate of it, too.

  He had come directly home after leaving Millie’s bedside in the hospital in Rochester. On the drive back to Dublin, he’d made himself a promise: No more snooping around. There’d be no more investigating and asking questions and putting his friends a
t risk for Stoney Calhoun. He’d already done enough harm.

  For the third consecutive night, he prepared to keep his vigil. He found himself feeling almost eager for it. His body had begun to adjust its rhythms to sitting alert and awake through the darkest hours of the night. He’d tuned in to the nocturnal life that scurried and flapped and slinked and buzzed in the dark. He’d heard coyotes howl, and he’d seen the slow-moving shadows of raccoons and opossums in the trees. There were nighthawks and bats and moths, flying squirrels and porcupines and deer. The gurgle of his creek sounded richer and more melodious in the night air, and he knew his trout slurped insects off its surface all night long.

  He recalled a fragment of a Whitman poem. It had struck him so strongly when he’d read it in his anthology that he’d stopped to underline the words, and just the act of underlining them had caused him to memorize them:

  I am he that walks with the tender and growing night.

  I call to the earth and the sea half held by the night,

  Press close bare-bosomed night—press close, magnetic, nourishing night!

  Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!

  Still, nodding night—mad, naked summer night.

  And so Calhoun found himself eager to get on with it.

  At midnight, Calhoun and Ralph went outside. He moved to a different location, this time almost directly across the clearing from the house, not far from where the man with the .22 rifle had been standing when he’d fired two shots at Calhoun’s chest on Sunday night.

  He wore what he’d come to think of as his night watchman’s uniform: black baseball cap, dark blue sweatshirt, blue jeans, sneakers. He sat back against a tree and spread the army blanket over his legs. His thermos of coffee stood on the ground by his left hand, his shotgun lay across his lap, and Ralph had coiled up within reach of his right hand.

  The moon was a slender comma low in the sky. There were no clouds, and the bright and abundant stars bathed the clearing in pale yellow light.

  Calhoun sat and waited. He was relaxed, absolutely comfortable, but alert, not the slightest bit tired despite three nights of very little sleep. His mind was clear and empty, and he thought idly that he probably could just sit out there in the nighttime forever, mindless and comfortable and content.