But that boy was gone.
Gone to the hazy recollection of a seven-year-old girl.
Melissa could not remember Marcus’s face, and the harder she tried in her mind’s eye to focus on his features, the more impenetrable in shadow his aspect became. He was a van Gogh painted in black. But she could feel the memory, and the memory was cold and lonely.
That’s who Marcus was. Marcus was the center of sadness.
And the wantonness in her heart to soothe this hurt is what compelled her. Had driven her to Coldwater to pursue the guilty brother who had killed the innocent.
That’s who Michael was. Michael was the first mover in catastrophe.
But he was also a lost brother, was he not? He had disappeared from her past at the same time as Marcus. But was he not in some way salvageable from the wreck of history? Marcus was dead, but was Michael dead to everything as well?
Melissa felt a tear form in the corner of her eye.
No. No. She could not entertain this thought. Justice for Marcus was what mattered most, and empathy for his killer, even though it was her own kin, would sacrifice that goal. Composing herself, she opened the door and stepped outside.
She left the motor lodge and drove east of town, down several dirt roads, frustrated by the lack of road signs. She backtracked and drove on, over and over, back and forth, until she was sure she had gone in circles multiple times. Finally, she saw it. A rusted road marker that said “Old State.” Turning south, she followed the road until it went deep into the woods, turning gently as it meandered through the trees. Up ahead, on the right, the trees cleared and she saw the brick posts that held the edges of an old gate.
Behind the gate was the cemetery.
The grave markers looked old, older than the trees, but the grounds were well manicured. Either the county mowed the property, or a good Samaritan did, but in the end it really didn’t matter. Someone cared for the property, and that simple act took the mystery out of the place.
Melissa got out of the car and walked in. The gate wasn’t locked and it squealed on its hinges when she pushed it open. She walked into the center of the plots and read the names on the headstones. In the middle of the property, there was a cinder-block outbuilding used for storage. The shed stood out as a snapshot in her mind. She remembered standing near it when she was seven. They had all gathered there at one point in time.
She started making ever larger circles around the building, peering on the ground to read the markers as she passed. Some were worn almost too smooth to be recognizable; some, glistening marble; others, a fieldstone sticking out of the grass. North of the shed sat an angel kneeling on a white slab, its eyes pointed down. The shade of a nearby tree darkened its wings. It looked to be relaxing from an arduous flight.
Melissa followed the eyes of the statue toward the ground and saw a small placard nestled in the lawn. She walked over to it and knelt down. Her hand came to her mouth and the sadness that had enveloped every memory of her childhood in Coldwater wrapped around her like her own set of wings.
The marker had just a name and age on it. A small stone for a small life.
MARCUS SULLIVAN. AGE 7.
sixty-six
MICHAEL STAGGERED SOUTH down the train tracks. His stab wound had festered into a burning numbness, and he dragged the leg behind him more than used it to walk. With each step he felt the wound open and close, blood rolling down his leg into his shoe and leaving a trail of gore on the rocks behind him.
His head was in a daze. The beatings, the wandering, the dehydration, the lack of sleep had all wound together in a cocktail of agony that clouded his consciousness and left him in a state of delirium. The train that had awoken him was gone and the forest echoed with birds gathering around to witness this new creature invading their woods. If the train had returned, or if one had followed up behind, it would have rolled right into Michael and he would not have noticed it, would not have cared, would have embraced the mountain of moving steel as the natural evolution of all that he endured. But a train never came, and Michael trudged on in a slowly decaying ambulation that brought him ever closer to home.
His head would swim and he would stumble, his arms at his side not breaking his fall against the stone and timber ties of the tracks. By some feat of will he would force himself up again, forever south.
The tracks soon crossed Countyline Road, and he had no perception as to how long he had been walking since the viaduct. Michael stood at the crossing and gazed out with vacant eyes into the distance. He looked but did not see, his body working on automatic pilot and running a self-preserving program but not taking in any data. He staggered across the road.
Several days earlier, many miles to the west, he had calculated his crossing with as much reservation as a soldier charging across no-man’s-land. Down that road was where the truck had rolled, where James and Kyle lay broken and bloody. He had been running away, but now he was dragging himself back to the community that had tried and failed to bury him from their sight.
His fear was gone. The pain had sapped all energy from him and there was no more to spare for that emotion. Just the steady stepping of a blackened soul.
There was no more thought.
No thinking of what he would do when he arrived home.
He walked down the tracks, and in his mind, walked out of the cave he had dreamed about. Both were equally real and Michael cared not which world he was in.
He fell, banging his head on the track, and the shock echoed through his skull like a miner’s hammer sounding in the caverns of the earth.
With his strength diminishing, Michael still managed to get back on his feet.
Forever south.
The sun moved overhead. He had no idea what time of day it was.
He kept moving, a frame of skin and muscle with no conscious mind, swaying in an endless painful journey.
The hours passed and soon Michael could see another crossing in the distance. It was a road he knew. It was the road into Coldwater, the one he had walked down many times before. He had come full circle.
Michael stepped off the tracks and headed west through the woods, his muscles relying on memory to take him home. His feet sank into the soft earth, the shaded wood cooling the air around him as he felt for familiar ground.
sixty-seven
HAYWOOD, FRANK, AND EARL ARRIVED at Michael’s house in the woods. They had made a stop at Haywood’s on the way, and the two men watched as Haywood went into the garage, grabbed two large gasoline cans, and put them in the back of the truck. Frank and Earl remained quiet on the drive out to Michael’s place, but in their minds they had guessed at what Haywood was cooking up.
The woods looked especially ominous on this trip, as if nature knew what Haywood had come to do and had donned mourning attire in anticipation. The limbs of the overhanging branches drooped low over the road.
They arrived at Michael’s, and Haywood parked the truck, got out, and retrieved the gas cans. The two men remained in the truck. Silent.
“Well, come on, guys!” he snapped at them, and with reluctance the two lackeys got out of the vehicle.
“Haywood, what are you doing?” Frank asked.
“He’s come back. Or he’s on his way back. This will let him know there is no reason to stay.”
“You can’t do this, Haywood. This has gone too far. We can’t burn his house down.”
“We can and we will, Earl. We are going to wipe him from Coldwater once and for all. If he’s got no place to go, he might just keep on moving.”
“No.”
“What’s that?”
“No. I’m done, Haywood. I’m done. I ain’t doing this no more,” Earl said. “I can’t go back and change what we did, but I can make sure I don’t make it worse.”
“He’s right,” Frank added. “This is where we stop. We ain’t killers, we never were, and we sure ain’t arsonists.”
“So you boys are just going to sit by and wait for Michael to come for you?
Wait in your house, hiding in your closet, and when he pounds down the door, you going to apologize for burying him in the hopes he’ll be merciful?”
“If that is what it comes down to, yeah. That’s what I’m going to do,” Earl said. There was a tremolo in his voice. The fear of Michael mixing with his fear of standing up for himself.
“You get this straight, Earl. That’s not what’s going to happen. He is going to find you, find all of us, and it isn’t going to be pretty. It’s going to end in the worst possible way.”
“It already has, Haywood,” Frank said.
“Cowards!”
“No. We were cowards ever listening to you,” Earl replied. “Cowards for following you on this . . . this . . . vendetta of yours. But I’m done. I’m done with this. I ain’t doing this no more. You want to burn down his house? Chase him down and kill him? You’re doing it without me.”
Frank nodded in agreement.
“Fools!” Haywood yelled.
He picked up the cans and stomped toward the house and up onto the porch. He walked through the door, splashing the gasoline as he went inside. Before long he was back outside with the empty cans. He pulled a book of matches from his back pocket and prepared to light a flame.
“Stop, Haywood! Just stop!” Frank yelled.
“I’m never going to stop. Not ever!”
He lit the match and tossed it on the porch. He walked back to the truck as the house was engulfed in flames, burning high into the darkening sky. Haywood put the empty cans back into the bed of the truck and climbed into the driver’s seat. He started it up and yelled at the two men standing before the burning wreckage.
“Don’t come begging for help when Michael comes banging down your doors. Maybe the long walk back to town will clear your heads and get you both thinking straight!”
And with that he drove off, leaving Frank and Earl stranded in the dead woods.
The two men stood in silent repose as flames licked the sky.
“So what are we going to do now?” Earl asked.
“Walk home, I guess,” Frank said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.”
“You think he’s going to kill us?”
“Michael?”
“Yeah.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe I would be forgiving.”
“You wouldn’t be.”
“I know.”
“We’ll stick together. Me and you.”
“Thanks.”
“We’ll stay at my place. In town. Be as close to other people as we can.”
“Sounds good,” Earl said.
They turned from the fire and stared down the dirt road.
“We might as well start walking.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll stick together.”
“Okay.”
The two men started on their way back to Coldwater, their hearts jumping at every sound that the forest produced, as if judgment would come with each noise of the dying woods.
sixty-eight
SMOKE DRIFTED THROUGH THE FOREST like the tentacles of a prehistoric beast reaching up from the depths looking blindly for prey. Michael, half conscious from the beating and blood loss, limped through the woods. He was walking on instinct, his compass directing him home. The haze from the far-distant fire blurred his vision. The wound in his leg reopening with each step.
Soon he came to the dirt road that ran across his path. His road. Without thinking, he stepped onto it and turned south. He took no care into looking for cars, or people, or life. Driven on by the idea of home, his gait out of sync, he stumbled down the road, his leg dragging a groove in the dirt behind him. He came to his place.
His home.
His inferno.
The fire consumed every part of the house. Flames shot out of the roof, the windows, and smoke rose to the sky. Michael walked forward until the smoke choked his throat and the heat scorched his skin.
It was gone. It was all gone.
The last place he could escape to was no more, engulfed in a blazing fury and falling to ash. He was an orphan of the earth. There would be no place to call home. The north woods had cast him out into a scorched world that burned away every memory of him.
The men of Coldwater had erased him.
Michael’s legs gave out and he collapsed to the ground. The wind blew, sending soot and smoke pouring over his body as he breathed in the dirt from the dead ground. His hands scratched at the soil until he could feel the pressure beneath his fingernails.
Why had he dug himself up from the grave?
Why had he not just lain down in the deep and awaited the forever night to carry him off to the other side of his last breath?
He had been a fool to hope. He had no right to hope for anything in this life. That right had died when he shot and killed his brother.
Michael coughed to clear his lungs of the pungent stench of the burning house. The timbers collapsed on themselves, bringing down the roof, sending another large plume into the sky. His eyes burned as the world around him burned.
Every step along this journey he had fought to live. From the grave, to the north woods, down the tracks, until his body screamed in agony. But here on the bonfire of his life, he had no more strength. This is where it would end. It would end where it all started. The home he destroyed in spirit, so many years ago, now crumbling under its own burning weight.
Maybe at last, justice was served.
The dirt was his bed, the smoke his blanket. He wished for sleep. He wished for eternal sleep.
sixty-nine
MELISSA WALKED BACK TO HER CAR, leaving the gravestone of Marcus Sullivan to lie lonely in a field of green. And though the memory of her brother was more of a data point than a living, breathing emotion, what she felt was the anger of a lost lifeline. The grave marker was the pivot point in history that changed everything her life was meant to be. She was supposed to have her mother, her father, a normal life filling photo albums with birthday parties and graduations, weddings and holidays.
The aunt who had taken her in was not a mother. Her childhood in South Falls was robotic, automated. She was looked after but not cared for. Life had been hollowed out, and all that she was given was a shell of an existence.
Marcus, in death, was luckier than she had been. He had missed out on the tragedy that his death, his murder, had unleashed.
And it was murder.
That was one point that she always, always, took to heart.
And Michael was the one who had done it all.
Now, in this corner of the world where nobody bothered to look, after years of brewing the resentment in her heart and the resolve to finally bring justice—complete justice —for Marcus, the board had been set so incredibly in her favor that all Melissa had to do was follow through. The town had tried to kill Michael. They had failed. She could prevail, all while having no fear of anyone ever linking her to the deed. She was absolved ahead of time. All accusers complicit in what would be the perfect cover.
Melissa could walk right up Main Street, shoot Michael in the head at high noon, and no one in town would dare say a thing, lest their own guilt be brought out into the light. Their own hearts would stand convicted should they even dare to speak.
All she had to do was wait. Wait for Michael to show himself.
But where was he?
Melissa pulled the car to the main road and sat thinking.
To the left was Coldwater, to the right was the old cabin. Her old home. Michael’s home. The faint smell of burning graced her nostrils as she saw a truck approach from the east. It sped past her, and in the driver’s seat she saw Haywood. He was alone, his face determined. Her gut told her to go to Michael’s—something, some reason, that was the place to go.
She turned right and headed for the cabin.
A mile from the turnoff, she saw two men walking, headed back to town. As she drove past, she eyed them and she could feel their eyes upon her
. The interaction was in slow motion, but she recognized them as part of Haywood’s posse. She had seen them before, masked by the windshield of a pursuing truck. Two more accomplices.
The men slowly grew smaller in her rearview mirror. Melissa noticed, before she turned onto the dirt road and into the cover of the forest, that they had stopped walking and were watching the car as it veered off toward Michael’s.
The woods were awash in a gray smoke that hung heavy in the trees. The smell of fire came through the vents on the dashboard, and even with the windows rolled up, the fumes were becoming almost unbearable.
Melissa drove up to the cabin and saw hellfire leaping into the sky, burning the house down to its foundation. The only thing saving the forest from incinerating was the dead ring around the cabin, which kept the flames contained like a giant fire pit.
Whatever memory she had of the place was now ash and charcoal.
The smoke blew in scattered gusts, the heat hitting her in waves.
Before her was hell on earth.
But there was more.
Through the haze she could see a body lying on the ground. Blood pooled in the dirt around one of the legs.
Melissa pulled the collar of her shirt up over her nose and mouth, jumped out of the car, and ran to the body. She grabbed the man’s legs and dragged him toward her car. Her breath pushed against the fabric that covered her face as the heat and suffocating stench of the fire forced its way into her mouth. She pulled and pulled until the vehicle blocked the heat from the fire. She rolled the man over and looked down on him.
There before her, unconscious, beaten and bloody, was the murderer of the life she should have known. The destroyer of everything she ever wanted. There, lying in the dirt, was her brother Michael.
Her heart leapt in her chest. He was here. The time was right now.
She went around the car to the driver’s door, opened it, and pulled the gun from its hiding place. Without thought, without hesitation, Melissa walked back to where Michael was comatose on the ground. She aimed the pistol at his head and committed herself to finally bringing justice into the world.
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