Coldwater

by Samuel Parker

  “And you, Lila? Are you scared of him?”

  Lila thought about it for a minute. “Yeah, I believe I am. It’s hard not to be. I haven’t seen him for a while now. But I usually see him coming into town, walking, hood up to where you couldn’t see his face. Always gave me the creeps a little bit. I can see why people tell stories. It’s easy to attach stories to loners, I guess.”

  Lila walked away, this time for good.

  Melissa sat in the booth a little while longer. She reached for her coffee cup, remembered how they made it here, and put it back down. She got up, threw some money on the table to cover her meal, and walked outside.

  She thought about it. It had been years since her childhood in Coldwater. It seemed like a different lifetime. But the feeling that always accompanied any thought of those years, thoughts of her childhood in the woods, were thoughts of fear.

  And anger.

  A slow-burning anger that began in the pit of her stomach and grew to an all-consuming boil until she felt too tight in her own skin. The people in Coldwater had every right to fear Michael. Sure, they had created folklore around him as all small towns will for people like him. But though the tales they invented could have been far flung, the resulting fear they created was justified, even if in a roundabout way.

  And it was why her own fear and anger were justified.

  It was why her trip back to Coldwater was justified.

  It was why the plan she brought with her was justified.

  Melissa had lived it, the fear that these backwoods people speculated about. She had been witness to the destructiveness of Michael’s actions. How they had burned down her childhood and spread the ashes to the wind. Her doubt receded, and she was doubly determined to move forward with her plan.

  twenty-five

  THE REST OF THE POSSE had gathered at Gilly’s that Saturday afternoon. The daylight snaked down the long hallway from the glass door facing Main Street. They sat around the table in the back room, nursing their beers and occasionally glancing at each other. This was the first day back into the routine that they had perfected over many years. In just two days their mundane lives had been forfeited for ones none of them could have described the week before. Several seats around the large circular table were empty.

  James wouldn’t be coming back.

  Kyle, if he ever made it back, would arrive in his own chair, and leave in it as well.

  They sat waiting for someone to start the conversation. Clinton, after taking a calculated sip, broke the silence.

  “Anyone seen Haywood?” His voice was deep and solid. If their group had a member made out of granite, it was Clinton.

  The others shook their heads.

  “Heard he was going down to South Falls to check on Kyle,” Davis replied.

  “Probably making sure he keeps his mouth shut,” Earl said.

  “What does that mean?” Frank said.

  “Haywood wouldn’t do anything to Kyle,” Clinton said.

  “You sure about that?” Earl said. “You don’t think he would do to us what he made us do with Michael? Shoot, man. I mean, he was the mastermind behind all this, am I right?”

  “Now Earl, we all went up there of our own free will,” Clinton said.

  “Did we?” Frank shot back. “Do you think if it wasn’t for Haywood that we would have buried . . .” The volume of his own voice caused Frank to check himself. He leaned closer to the others. “. . . you know . . . done what we done?”

  “He’s right,” Earl said. “This is all Haywood’s doing. We should go to the cops and tell them what happened. What happened to James and Kyle. What happened to Old Man Jackson.”

  “And what did happen to them, Earl?” asked Haywood, who now stood by the open doorway that separated the back room from the bar. They hadn’t noticed his arrival. He slowly walked over and sat down in James’s forever-unoccupied seat. He looked around at the boys who now tried to bury their eyes in their own beers.

  “You boys think this is my fault, what happened to James and Kyle?”

  The men said nothing.

  Haywood reached over to the pitcher, raised it to his mouth, and took a sip. He then looked each man in the face, slowly making his way around the table.

  “I miss James just as much as anybody. Kyle, now I’m just crushed about Kyle, but he’s going to make it. And he’s going to need us once he gets out of the hospital.

  “Now you all are sitting here wondering about what we did. You’re probably wondering how this mess came down on us, what we could have done differently that would have changed our current situation. Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it the whole time. What we should have done. But what we should have done is something that none of us were willing and capable of doing. That’s the problem.”

  “What we should have done is left the man alone,” Clinton said. “He was minding his own business—”

  “Now you know that ain’t true,” Haywood responded. “You think Morrison just drove out into the woods, sat next to a tree, and blew his face off?”

  “No,” Earl said, “the problem is that we let you convince us it was Michael who did all that. James and Kyle would be sitting here right now drinking with us if you hadn’t forced us to drug Michael and drag him up . . .”

  “I didn’t force anyone, and don’t you all forget it. You’re grown men. You did what you wanted. So you should ask yourself why you all chose to go along. I’ll tell you why: because deep down inside you know I’m right. You knew that Michael was dangerous. You’ve known it all along. When they found Morse out in the woods and people asked how that could have happened, whose face popped up into your mind? I’ll tell you. Michael’s. And do you know why that is? Because somewhere in those thick heads of yours you know what evil looks like. You’ve seen it.”

  “What happened to Morrison was an accident,” Earl said.

  “It was no accident. When Michael moved back to town, while you all went on with your lives, I’ve been waiting . . . waiting for that maniac to start killing at random. And then it happened and I knew we had to do something about it.”

  “So why didn’t you just call the cops, man?” Davis said, his exasperation at the long speech evident. He was a man of few words, the countersilence to Clinton’s deep baritone. The conversation was obviously annoying him.

  “Why do you think? It took all I had to convince you guys that something had to be done, and you’ve known me all your lives. What do you think the cops would have done?”

  “Put you in a straitjacket, I reckon,” Frank said with a nervous laugh.

  “You’re probably right,” Haywood said, a thin smirk on his face in an attempt to ease the tension out of the group. “So, rather than harping on each other, we need to start thinking about what we are going to do now. He may be gone, but he’s not gone forever. I bet he’ll be back. And I bet when he comes back, he ain’t going to come back quietly.”

  twenty-six

  THE GLOCK ALWAYS FELT HEAVY TO HER, its grip just a bit oversized for her slender fingers. Melissa sat on the bed of her room in the Coldwater Motor Lodge, the lights from the parking lot shining through the window like a scene from a David Lynch movie, light reflecting off the barrel of the gun.

  Night had descended on the town, and before there was a thought, the day was coming to an end.

  She sat in silence, looking at the weapon.

  In the gun she saw the tool of justice. The instrument that would bring order back to her life.

  Melissa had never visited her brother after he went to prison. She was too young to remember the trial, the sentence, the short celebrity status that the event had given Michael. But even as a little girl she knew that he was the reason for the disintegration of her childhood and family.

  After Michael went to prison, her mom escaped into another world, locked inside her own mind. She would drift in and out of the house, sometimes being gone for days, and then wander back in quietly, never saying a word. In fact, if Melissa
thought hard enough, she wasn’t sure if her mom ever spoke again after the event. She had become a shell of a person, her heart ripped out, and all that was left was a walking cadaver.

  Her father lasted as long as he could, but was never well to begin with. He died not long after, and soon Melissa was left to the care of her zombie mom. Melissa’s aunt stepped in and took her to live with her in South Falls. She was ordered never to talk about her brother, never to ask about him, to shut off that piece of her past as if it had never existed.

  But it had existed.

  And through her life, Melissa was fixated on her brother.

  It wasn’t a white-hot fixation, but a low, underlying anger that seemed to be embedded in the cells of her skin. Rage was a passion, this was so much more cerebral, long lasting. Over time Melissa wanted Michael to pay dearly for the chaos he had caused, the family he destroyed, the childhood he had robbed from her. Having him locked away pacified that need for retribution for the longest time.

  But then he was released and she felt the feelings of anger intensify.

  How could justice be served so quickly with her father dead and her mom blown to the four winds, insane and wandering the earth. It was up to Melissa to bring order back to the cosmos. It was up to her to make sure justice was served up in its entirety, not delivered half-heartedly and with a level of disinterest as the state had done.

  She had come to Coldwater to kill her brother.

  As she looked across the room, she caught her reflection in the mirror above the sink in the corner. Her hair covering half her face, the gun in her hands, her arms on her crossed legs. She had all the appearance of a casual assassin. But she knew that she wasn’t. There was one thing holding her back. Holding her back from finding Michael and killing him. That one thing was herself.

  Her anger still had holes in it where fear crept in. She didn’t know if it was fear of getting caught, fear of killing another person, or fear of coming to learn that she liked the experience. Knowledge of what it felt like to take another person’s life still escaped her. It was on the other side of a door, a door with only one handle, and it led to a room that, once entered, she would never be able to leave; the door would close behind her and there would be no way to exit. It was a room that her brother had entered when he was a boy. In killing him, she would take his place. Once she had the knowledge of what it was like to kill someone, she would never be able to unlearn it.

  But she was not like him. Michael had acted out of selfishness, out of hatred. He had done what he did out of pure contempt with no remorse. She was justified. She was righteous. She was good.

  Wasn’t she? Her motivation, the reason she was here to kill Michael, would absolve her of all guilt, of all judgment. She was completing justice, was she not? All she wanted was to set things right. She owed it not only to herself but to the family that Michael had destroyed.

  She laid the gun down on the bed, stretched out her legs, grabbed one of the bullets that was lying on the comforter beside her, and rolled it through her fingers.

  Such a small thing. Such a world-shattering thing. The bullet was the key to the room. It just needed to find its lock.

  And as she gazed at the bullet between her fingers, she wondered if she was capable of opening the door.

  twenty-seven

  LILA STEPPED FROM BEHIND THE BAR AT GILLY’S—her normal night gig now that the diner was closed—grabbed Earl’s arm, and led him to the corner of the room. The music was playing loudly and the cacophony of voices mixed in the air with beer fumes and cigarette smoke to blanket their conversation in a haze of solitude.

  “I need to know something,” Lila said.

  “Anything,” Earl said, his heart rate elevating just as it always did when he was close to her.

  “There was this woman, I’ve never seen her before. She was over at the diner and was asking questions.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “Questions about the accident, about Old Man Jackson.”

  “Who isn’t talking about that?”

  Lila looked over her shoulder, nervous eyes scanning the bar. “There’s more.”

  “More what?” Earl asked. His mind was half on her words, and half on the perfume he could smell coming off her. She was rough, no doubt about that, but there was also beauty locked in there somewhere. Earl was brought back to the here and now when Lila smacked him upside the shoulder.

  “You hear what I said?”

  “What?”

  “She was talking about Michael. Asking questions,” she said. She startled and looked around, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “But it was more than questions, you know. She was asking where he was, what people thought of him.”

  “What you tell her?”

  “Not much. She asked if I had seen him lately.”

  Earl opened his eyes wide and concentrated on every word coming out of Lila’s mouth. All of a sudden he felt exposed, like a giant light was being turned on and the actions of the past days were coming into view. Lila noticed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t ‘nothing’ me, Earl.”

  “It’s nothing . . . really.”

  “You know something . . . I can tell.”

  “I don’t know anything, and if I did, which I don’t, why would I tell you?”

  “You’re the worst liar in town.” She glared at him and he quivered under her stare. She took a step back and really looked at him.

  “Were you here on Thursday?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Glenn told me there was an incident here. Said that Michael came in, and that a bunch of guys took care of him.”

  Earl fidgeted. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “What you do, Earl?”

  “Nothing, I told you.”

  “Earl!”

  “Like Glenn said, we took care of him. Haywood, Frank, all of us.”

  “James and Kyle too?” she asked.

  Earl looked at her dead in the eyes. He nodded. Lila gasped and put her hand over her mouth.

  “What did you boys do?”

  “I told you,” Earl said, “nothing. Now quit grilling me about this and leave it rest. If you want to know so bad, talk to Haywood. It’s his show.”

  “And this woman, the one who is suddenly interested in where Michael is, who is she?”

  “I don’t know, but we need to find out. Haywood is going to want to know.”

  twenty-eight

  HAYWOOD WAS BECOMING more and more unhinged as the days went on—at least that was the perception of Frank and Earl as they stood on his porch the next morning and knocked on his door. Haywood opened it with the chain still attached, his body hidden behind the frame so as to avoid being shot through the door. Even when he saw it was just Frank and Earl, his eyes fluttered to the driveway and road before letting them in.

  Last night at Gilly’s, Haywood told them to be at his house first thing in the morning, which wasn’t hard since none of them had had a good night’s sleep after they took Michael out into the woods. Each one of them had been tormented in the silence of the dark by their own conscience. Earl had made it a habit of checking each window and lock of his own house every fifteen minutes, a routine that had become so habitual that even when he did drift off into dreamland, his body would wake him and send him on the circuit again.

  It was fear. Plain and simple.

  Fear of what they had done. Fear of being found out. Fear of the sleeping dog they had awoken and buried in the woods, of their own ghosts of guilt haunting them in the night.

  Haywood appeared before the two men the worse for wear. Over four days, his fear had morphed into an obsessive compulsion. He looked as if he had been standing up all night, pacing back and forth, fueled by a bottomless cup of coffee and a mind that was running faster than any words could express.

  On the table in the dining room was a map of the surrounding area. Haywood had marked it up w
ith a black Sharpie with symbols and signs that resembled the frantic scratches of a child. The men had all lived in the area their whole lives, but looking at Haywood’s markings on the map transformed the familiar into a world unknown to them.

  There was a circle around the location of Michael’s house, an X where they had taken him to Springer’s Grove, a line following the river over to Old Man Jackson’s store. The place where James and Kyle had flipped the truck was marked too. Both Frank and Earl studied the map. They saw several lines starting randomly on the north of the map, slinking down and terminating at different locations. One of those locations, Frank noticed, was his house. Earl saw the same thing for his house. Haywood’s also.

  Haywood had mapped out the paths Michael might take to launch his offensive.

  “What . . . what is all this?” Earl stuttered, pointing to different marks on the map.

  “These are where he might be,” Haywood said.

  “You really think so?” Frank asked.

  “Absolutely,” Haywood said. “And don’t act all surprised. You think he’s just going to run off and stay gone? Would you?”

  Frank and Earl were silent.

  “You know I’m right. I know you’ve been looking over your shoulders the past couple days, worried that he is going to sneak up on you.”

  Frank looked at Earl and the two men’s eyes held a silent conversation. Haywood was absolutely right. They thought about that one step over the line of everything normal and knew it had proven to be a line that they could never go back over. They were on the other side until the end and they hated it. Hated that they had gone along with Haywood’s madness. Hated that they had not seen the evil they were doing when they took Michael away. Haywood had convinced them so soundly as to the righteousness of their action, how they were protecting their families, their children, their community. But now, they slowly started hating themselves for what they had done. Even more so, they began to hate Haywood for dragging them all into the pit with him.