Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  It was quiet everywhere, except for the low rumble of Hallie’s own pickup engine. Hallie approached the car first. There was no one inside. Which was odd because the way the car was shoved tight up underneath the grain truck, the dashboard crumpled downward and the steering wheel smashed, there was no way a driver could have gotten out.

  But there was no driver. No blood. No sign that anyone had been inside when the truck hit it. And maybe that was it. Maybe they’d seen it coming. But if that was the case, where were they?

  Hallie crossed to the grain truck, hopped up on the runner. The driver’s-side window was open, a half-eaten sandwich perched on the passenger seat and a take-out cup of coffee in the cup holder. She jumped down, looked around. There was nothing here. The closest house was at least a mile and a half away—not even visible from where Hallie was standing. She looked in the car again, like she’d missed the driver earlier.

  Jesus.

  She called it in.

  The dispatcher said it would take twenty minutes for a car to get there. Hallie turned off her pickup, pocketed the keys, and walked around the car and truck again. There were no tire marks, as if neither the truck nor the car had tried to stop. They sat in the center of the intersection, which seemed weird to Hallie. The truck was two or three times heavier than the car; she’d have expected the wreckage to be on the opposite side of the intersection. But no, dead center.

  There were still no other cars, which was unusual but not unprecedented. It was empty out here, not much traffic on an ordinary day. She leaned against a telephone pole for a while, noticed something on the opposite side of the road, and shoved herself off to investigate. Two small evergreen trees growing in the ditch had died, the needles dry and still falling in the wake of a brisk westerly breeze.

  The grass around them was dead too. Hallie bent and brushed her fingers through the dry bristly stalks. All dead underneath, even the newest growth. She hopped the old fence into the adjacent field. Dead grass out to nearly twenty paces; past that, there was dry grass, sure, but green underneath, small cedar trees in good shape and one largish stand of goldenrod still in flower despite the season.

  She circled the accident—field, cross the road, field, road and back, everything dead out to thirty yards. She found two dead birds next to a north-leaning fence post and the corpse of a rabbit in the far ditch.

  No ghosts. But something wrong, all the same.

  She leaned against the utility pole and studied the accident scene through narrowed eyes. What the hell had happened here?

  “Ask him about his wife.”

  Hallie startled so hard, she could feel her muscles snap. She jerked away from the utility pole. A man stood in the middle of the road, halfway between her and the wreckage. He looked older than Hallie, maybe thirty-five or forty, wearing lightweight wool dress pants, polished leather shoes, and a navy V-necked sweater. He had an odd half smile on his face, and his hands were shoved into the pockets of his trousers.

  “Who the hell are you?” Hallie asked, though what she meant was, Where did you come from?

  He took half a dozen casual steps toward her. Everything about him was clearly designed to seem casual, relaxed, and easy.

  Everything about him was a lie.

  He stopped a judicious ten yards from where Hallie was standing. “Sometimes you think you know a person,” he said. “You’ve, say, been through hard times, one of you has been shot or, I don’t know—” He shrugged. “—died.

  “But do you ever really know anyone?”

  “I don’t see a car,” Hallie said. She shoved her hands in her pockets and leaned back against the utility pole because she could see what he wanted—his entire purpose, maybe—was to shake her up. And Hallie never liked giving people what they wanted. “And you weren’t here when I got here. I’d have seen you.” She paused. “You’re not a ghost.”

  The man laughed. “Does it really matter who or what I am?”

  Hallie could hear a car. Maybe a mile away, maybe ten—hard to tell sometimes out on the prairie. “Oh yeah,” she said. “It matters.”

  “What matters,” the man said, and his voice was suddenly significantly less easy, “is what I want to matter.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “No.”

  “Ask him.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “Boyd.” Because she did know. But she didn’t play games. And this guy? This guy—or whatever—was all about the games. “Why?” Hallie asked. “Because you want to drive a wedge?” She was two paces from him, and he was so … off, it wasn’t funny. “You want me to mistrust him? Why should I care what you say? I don’t know you.”

  “You don’t know him.” He laughed at her, like the whole thing was a joke … the cars, Boyd’s past, his own presence in the middle of the empty road.

  Fuck you, Hallie thought. She grabbed the front of his shirt. He was solid, real in that respect, but he wasn’t alive in the human sense. She could tell by the stab of pain through her head, like she’d been skewered. Not cold, like the ghosts, but unreal all the same.

  “I know him,” she said. The car she’d heard was definitely closer.

  “You only think you do,” he said.

  Then he was gone so quickly, she thought she must have blinked, though she hadn’t. Cold wind ruffled her hair, like a quick blast from an arctic clime.

  5

  The wind whipped dry grass and a few scattered leaves down the edge of the road as Hallie waited for the sheriff’s car, which she could see approaching, though it was still a half mile down the road. A quick eddy of twigs and gravel right in front of the little red car’s bumper, then the wind died, abrupt, like it had hit an impenetrable wall.

  She looked up and the car was there, all white and gold and shiny, like it had just been through a car wash. And though it should have been impossible—all the Taylor County patrol cars were exactly the same, she recognized this one, whether by the way he drove or by how neat as a pin and shiny it was—Boyd.

  And that was good. It was.

  The car stopped on the other side of the intersection. It didn’t pull to the shoulder. It just … stopped, right in the middle of the lane.

  A small bird—a sparrow, maybe—flew quick, like it was panicked, across the road, almost hitting Hallie in the head. She stepped back.

  Boyd opened his door and got out of the car.

  He looked like he always did—like he’d just stepped out of the barbershop, his hair perfectly neat and precisely trimmed. His white shirt and his creased khaki pants looked as if they’d only that moment been slipped from a plastic bag, everything completely smooth, completely under control.

  He didn’t say a word, walked right past her with barely a sideways glance. He walked around the car, around the truck. For a long minute while he was on the other side of the truck, Hallie couldn’t see him. Then, he reemerged, notebook in hand, writing down the license plate of the truck, like this was just another accident, like he was just another cop, though Hallie could tell from the way he moved and the tension in his muscles that neither of those things was true.

  A ghost drifted around the truck behind him. Hallie sucked in her breath. She had seen that ghost before. Twice. It was a girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, with short hair dyed blond, dark roots showing through. She wore a long skirt, engineering boots, and a leather wrist cuff. When she reached out and touched Boyd on the shoulder, he flinched.

  Hallie said, “Boyd—”

  He looked at her. His face was … blank, like he was in shock, like Boyd would naturally look if he were in shock, like he was trying so hard to control everything both inside and out that there wasn’t room for anything to show. Hallie could hear him breathing, and it was weird because he didn’t seem to be breathing particularly quickly. Just that she could hear him, like the entire rest of the world had gone silent.

  His cell phone rang. He reached down and turned it off without looking at it.

  “Wha
t the hell is going on with you?” Hallie asked him.

  She saw movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to see the black dog flopped down in the gravel by the side of the road.

  She wanted to ask if it, the black dog, had anything to do with the two wrecked vehicles or with the man who had been here earlier and who had disappeared. Because black dogs were all about death, and there was a lot of death right here—grass and birds and trees, not to mention whatever had happened to the people in the vehicles.

  Boyd still hadn’t said anything, but Hallie could see that he was angry, really bone-deep pissed off in a way she’d never seen before. It didn’t show in his face, but she could tell, in the rigid set of his shoulders and the wire-tight line of his jaw.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  Hallie blinked. “I called it in.”

  “Goddamnit,” he said, and it was almost under his breath, almost not directed at her. “I mean,” and now he was addressing her, “why? Why does this kind of thing happen around you?”

  “What are you talking about?” She’d closed the gap between them, and now they were standing almost toe to toe. “This is an accident.” Even though it wasn’t, even though there was the thirty-yard zone of death around the intersection, even though there had been a man who appeared out of nowhere and disappeared the same way. Even though …

  “Does this have something to do with your wife?”

  Boyd jerked back, like she’d hit him. And he looked hurt, like she’d gone down a path she wasn’t supposed to go down, or even know about, and ripped open a door she was never supposed to enter.

  “Boyd—,” she began again.

  “Leave it alone, Hallie,” he said. He stepped even closer to her, nearly vibrating with what she’d been thinking was anger, but maybe also was fear. Or desperation. “Get in your truck and drive away.”

  Hallie stepped back, like they were dancing, only not with each other. “No.”

  “I can make you leave.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  He stepped back too, but only so he could put his hand on her arm. She almost shook it off. Almost.

  “I can ask you, then. I’m asking you, Hallie.” And it might have sounded better if he weren’t gripping her elbow so hard it hurt, and if he weren’t so pissed off and trying so hard to hide it. “This is an accident. Two vehicles in the middle of an intersection. I’m here now. I can take care of it. You don’t have to sign anything, you don’t have to stand out here in the wind.

  “Just get in your truck and go.”

  She let him finish because he wasn’t listening to her anyway. Let him finish even though by now she was vibrating with anger herself. Because he should know better than this. He should know. In September, with Martin and Pete and calling the weather, had he told her to get in her truck then? Had he asked her to leave it to him? Well, he had, actually—at least once, but they got better. They were better than this.

  There was a brisk cold wind running straight down the county road from the north. The sky was a thin bright blue directly above them, but along the western horizon a band of clouds sat like a stark gray wall. “Look,” Hallie said, “I get that you’re pissed. I don’t know why, but I get it. But you need to stop being pissed for a minute and listen to me.”

  She watched his right hand clench slowly into a fist so tight, it turned his knuckles white; watched as he visibly willed himself to stop, to think. She wanted desperately to know what was going on, what this accident meant to him, meant something she couldn’t see from looking at it, meant something about the wife she hadn’t known he had. And it felt so strange to be the calm one, to be the one who waited, to be the reasonable center. She didn’t really want to do it, wanted to stand toe to toe with him and feed his anger right back to him word for word, unfairness for unfairness.

  But she did it. Because he would do it for her.

  A minute passed.

  The ghost touched Boyd on the shoulder, and Hallie saw something stop in him.

  Just stop.

  She laid a hand on his arm and he shuddered; his arm felt rigid as steel underneath his shirt.

  She closed her eyes and took a breath. She had to be careful, so careful, and careful wasn’t what she was good at. She said, “I don’t know what this is. I need you to tell me.”

  He looked at her, but she was pretty sure he still didn’t see her. The wind had shifted, straight out of the west, and the thick bank of clouds moved slowly in their direction, fading out the sun so that the day wasn’t dark, exactly, but gray.

  “Really. You should leave,” he said, though she could tell his heart wasn’t in the words, or he’d finally remembered that asking her to leave was practically the same as demanding that she stay.

  She grasped, finally, that he wanted her safe, out of there, away from cars without drivers and men who appeared and disappeared and thirty-yard dead zones. Which wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t. If someone wanted to plunk an accident down in front of her, they were going to have to deal with the consequences.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  He didn’t respond immediately except to let out his breath, like he’d been holding it. He closed his notebook, put it in his shirt pocket, and buttoned the flap, each movement precise and deliberate. He started to walk, circling the wreckage, like there was some angle he hadn’t seen yet. When he spoke, it was like he’d rehearsed it—concise and smooth and all in one breath.

  “I was married,” he said. “She died. She died in an accident like this one. Exactly like this one.”

  Not one of those words was a surprise to Hallie, and still, they felt like it, like hammers that hit her square in the chest. Because none of those words were ones she’d expected to hear at the beginning of the day. Yet, here they were.

  “I was nineteen,” Boyd continued after a moment. “I was a sophomore at Iowa State. Majoring in Animal Science.”

  Another surprise, because Hallie would have guessed he’d always been a cop.

  “I was going back to the farm,” he said, as if Hallie had actually asked. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, and Hallie wondered if he was cold. She wondered if he would know he was cold even if he was. He’d stopped walking, was standing three feet away from her, and it felt farther, like he’d pulled himself away, like if she wouldn’t leave, if physical distance couldn’t keep her safe, maybe emotional distance would.

  But he would tell her the truth anyway. Because he was Boyd.

  “Her name was Lily. Lil.” He swallowed. “We met at a party. Some guys were harassing her. I walked her home.”

  So simple. A girl and a boy and a party. But also the most complicated thing in the world.

  “She’s here,” Hallie said. Wasn’t sure why she said it. Not right then, though she’d have told him sooner or later.

  “Really?” She could see him swallow hard.

  “Pretty sure. She’s been following you for a while.”

  Boyd didn’t turn around, didn’t try to see, which he couldn’t and he knew it. “There was this guy,” he said.

  “At the party.”

  “No,” he said. “Those were just guys. But there was this other guy.”

  He leaned against his car, facing the wreckage, like he had to keep it in sight, like everything depended on it. Hallie could see his anger in the tight corners of his mouth, the tension of the skin across his cheekbones, in the way his left index finger tapped against his right thumb.

  “At first I thought it was a coincidence,” he continued. “Lily and I would meet at the union after class and I’d see him in the hall on my way into the food court. I’d run into her in the library studying and he’d be at the main desk talking to a librarian. I’d pass him on central campus or sitting on the steps at Curtiss. And it was nothing. You see people like that all the time.

  “But he never had books or even a briefcase. And there didn’t seem to be anything regular about where he’d be, like he was going to
class or to his office. Only Lily.” He took a breath and continued. “She was from south central Iowa, originally. There are some good farms down there, but a lot of it’s scrabble land, empty and rough to make a living on. Her stepfather got into debt to this guy he’d grown up with. Thought he was a friend, but then he got mean or desperate or just greedy. I don’t really know. And her stepfather cried—she said he cried. Because all he had was the farm. He didn’t even have—it was all he had. But the guy, this guy her stepfather owed money to, wanted to marry Lily.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It sounds like a barter—marry me or your stepfather loses the farm. But she didn’t say no. She just said she wanted college first. Her stepfather and this guy, they agreed.”

  He’s not a guy, Hallie wanted to say, but she held her tongue. Let him finish. Because she sensed that right now he needed to finish, to lay it all out.

  “I don’t know if she was really going to do it—marry him. I don’t know if she even knew herself, but it was there and she’d have to deal with it sooner or later.”

  “We weren’t dating then, not really, but I liked her. I liked her a lot. She was smart and funny, but not—she didn’t know a lot about the way the world worked. She kept trying to figure out how to get a job that paid real money, how to get her stepfather out of debt. She switched majors a lot, looking for the one that would be her ticket to fortune. She bought lottery tickets every Monday afternoon.”

  “So you married her.”

  “Her stepfather died,” he said. He seemed to be staring hard at something in the middle distance. Hallie hoped he was seeing her, Lily. Hoped they’d had some good times, not just stalkers and getting married too young. She wondered if she was supposed to be jealous. She didn’t think she was. Nineteen was a different world.

  “It was the end of her freshman year. Heart attack or something. The farm got sold. She didn’t have to marry anyone she didn’t want to. But sophomore year, there he was. On campus. Pushing at her. Really pushing. He had a contract, he said. There were debts. And that’s when we got married.”