CUTTER'S GROVE

by Patrick Dakin

44

  “I can’t believe this," Beth says. "It’s him.”

  “Looks like it.” I flick the button to disengage the Jeep’s interior lights and then get out and walk around it, kicking out the running lights and brake lights as I go.

  When I get back in the Jeep Beth says, “What did you do that for?”

  “I had to or we’d give ourselves away as soon as I started the engine or stepped on the brake.”

  I fire up the Jeep, maneuver it out of it’s hiding place, and point it in the direction of the road. The ride is bumpy because, without lights, I hit every rock and hollow along the way. Once on the road it’s not much better. This is the section of roadway chock full of potholes and it takes a toll on us even though we creep along.

  We can no longer see the lights of the vehicle we’re following. We’re not sure whether it’s because of the heavy rain or if the lights have been turned off. Maybe he’s already reached his destination.

  When we get to the spot where the vehicle left the road we see tire tracks. “I don’t like this,” I tell Beth. “He’ll hear us for sure if we drive.”

  “But he might be miles out there,” Beth says.

  “I don’t think so. Even in this downpour we’d still be able to see a little of his lights.”

  “Alright,” she says, “let’s hoof it.”

  “You got the gun?”

  “Oh yeah, you better believe it.”

  I’ve got a flashlight with me but I don’t dare use it. It’s a big, solid thing, though, and it feels good to have something in my hand.

  The rain continues to teem down and the night is as dark as any I’ve seen since my arrival in desert country. By crouching down, with my face practically on the ground, I’m just barely able to make out the tracks well enough to follow them. We stumble along, trying to make as little noise as possible. Every so often we stop and listen for any indication we’re near our quarry. But it’s raining too hard to hear much of anything beyond the incessant rain hammering into the earth around us.

  All at once three or four giant streaks of lightning fork down across the horizon, illuminating the desert for miles around. Beth and I drop to our stomachs in the mud.

  Just before the sky goes dark again, though, I catch a fleeting glimpse of what looked like the back of a pickup. It’s not more than fifty feet in front of us.

  I put my hand on Beth’s arm. “Don’t move,” I whisper directly into her ear.

  We strain to hear any sound.

  Nothing but the rain. That and the clatter of my teeth.

  Then, very faintly, I hear what could be a shovel scraping through rocky soil. Beth hears it too. I feel her tense up.

  It seems to be coming from the other side of the pickup.

  I start to edge closer to the vehicle, with Beth close on my heels. The ground is cold. Mud is plastered to my body. The thought crosses my mind that Beth’s gun might not work if she got mud in it when we dropped down in this muck. But there’s nothing I can do about it. We’re committed to a confrontation with Arliss now. Maybe he came out here unarmed. After all, he’d have no reason to suspect trouble.

  We can only hope.

  I smell the pickup before I see it. The familiar odor of oil, spent gasoline, is pungent. I crawl under the box, next to the rear tires. I feel Beth slide up next to me.

  My hands are numb from the cold. I just want to get this over with. But I also want to make sure Arliss completely unearths Anne Marie’s body before making a move on him.

  We lay still, waiting. A few minutes later the sound of digging stops. A moment after that we see the beam of a flashlight pointing at the ground. We can see a figure bent over, reaching into a hole.

  It’s time.

  I nudge Beth to move out, away from the pickup. We rise to our feet. We’re within twenty feet of Arliss now. I reach out to Beth to make sure she’s got her gun at the ready. I feel it in her hand. She’s shaking like a leaf. I’m hoping it’s from the cold and not from fear.

  I turn on my flashlight and point it in the direction of our target. A hunched figure comes immediately to full height. As he turns to face us, his eyes are bulging. He’s stunned into immobility. I’m reminded of a deer caught in a car’s headlights.

  Heart hammering wildly, stomach threatening to disgorge it’s contents, all I can think of is what a bloody fool I’ve been. How I’ve completely misjudged the man I’ve come to like and trust so much. A man I’ve been proud to call my friend.

  I try to sound authoritative even though I’ve never felt less imposing than I do at this moment. “Put down the shovel, Sonny,” I say. “It’s all over.”

  45

  Beside me I hear Beth gasp in disbelief. “Sonny?” she says. It’s almost a cry, a plea for understanding. She’s trying to make sense of his presence here. But nothing makes any sense at all. It can’t be … and yet it is.

  Sonny continues to stare at us. He’s struggling, I guess, to come to terms with what’s happening to him. He’s always struck me as a proud man. A little out of the ordinary maybe - a little eccentric some would say - but content with who he is and not offering apologies to anyone. But now he looks pitiful and beaten. Through the roar of the rain I don’t hear what he says but I see him mouth my name. “Lucas.”

  I reach over and take the gun from Beth’s hand. I don’t want her suddenly going ape-shit on me and deciding it’s justified to blast Sonny into another hemisphere. She offers no resistance. She’s in a daze.

  I tuck the barrel of the gun into my belt at my back. Despite what I’m seeing I can’t think of Sonny as a threat.

  He looks down at the hole beside him and suddenly falls to his knees. He cups his head in his hands. His sobbing is plaintive and mournful. I count it as among one of the most painful things I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness.

  I approach Sonny cautiously and take his shovel in my hands. I steal myself for a look into Anne Marie’s grave, but when I shine my light into the muddy chamber I’m spared the sight of her corpse. Mercifully, she’s covered in a tarpaulin and all I see is the faint outline of her skeletal remains. I don’t have the stomach to peel back the sheeting for a better look.

  I steer Sonny to his pickup and put him in the passenger seat. By now Beth has regained her wits and looks at me questioningly.

  “You drive,” I tell her. I nudge Sonny over and get in beside him.

  He’s silent, staring morosely at his muddied knees.

  We’re all covered in mud. We look like we’ve been through a very wet and very dirty war.

  Beth fires up the pickup and we jostle and bump our way back out onto the road, maybe a quarter mile away.

  When we reach the Jeep, Beth says, “What shall we do?”

  “Leave it here,” I say. “We’ll be back with the law before long.”

  On the ride to Cutter’s Grove no one speaks. My mind is occupied trying to acknowledge the reality of Sonny as a child killer. I once thought of myself as a fairly decent judge of character. Obviously I was wrong about the woman I intended to marry but I can’t believe I’ve been this wrong about Sonny. I really thought I knew him well.

  Half way there, Sonny looks over at me. In a quiet voice he says, “It’s not what you think, Lucas.”

  I can’t force myself to respond. The simple act of talking to him seems too disrespectful to the memory of that poor child laying out there in the desert in a muddy hole. I turn away from him. “Save it for the cops, Sonny.”

  “Please, let me explain,” he begs.

  Without warning Beth suddenly pulls the pickup over to the side of the road. “Go ahead, Sonny,” she says, barely able to restrain her rage. “Explain it. By all means, please explain how you could do what you did to that innocent little girl.”

  Sonny shakes his head. “I didn’t do nothin’ to hurt that little girl,” he says softly.

  “Oh, yeah?” Beth screams at him. “Well, she didn’t just walk out in the desert and jump in that hole and wait to die.”
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  “It was Luther,” Sonny says, almost in a whisper.

  “Luther?” I say. I know that name. But I can’t think of where from. “Who’s Luther?”

  “Luther Proctor,” Sonny explains. “Him and me were good friends. The best. He was a good man. Wouldn’t hurt nobody on purpose.”

  Now I remember. The poker player that committed suicide after he’d been diagnosed with cancer. “What do you mean ‘it was Luther?’” I ask. “What did Luther do?”

  “He had come out of the pharmacy that day. He’d been to the doc’s and got the word that his cancer was spreadin’. I was with him … he wanted the moral support. We'd just picked up his medicine and we were out behind the pharmacy gettin’ into his car. He was all tore up inside, not thinkin’ straight. You gotta understand, he’d just found out he had maybe three, four months to live at the most. And they weren’t gonna be good months neither. He backed his car up too fast, without lookin’, and … he ran over little Anne Marie. Near as we could figure, she was chasing after a kitten or something. It was an accident. He was tore up worse than I’d ever seen him when he realized what he’d done. We jumped out of the car and tried to save her but it was too late. She was dead. I was gonna run for help anyway but Luther begged me not to. ‘There’s nothin’ anybody can do for her now,’ he says. ‘All that will happen is I’ll spend my few remainin’ days bein’ despised by everybody in town - most likely in jail. Please, Sonny,’ he begged me, ‘don’t do that to me.’ I knew it was wrong, but I also knew Luther was a good man and he didn’t deserve to suffer more than he already was. So I helped him put little Anne Marie in the trunk of the car and we took her out in the desert that night and buried her. There hasn’t been a day gone by since then that I haven’t regretted what we did. But, at the time, it seemed like it was the right thing to do.”

  So, I ruminate, Thelma Paige had it right after all.

  Except for the bracelet. “I could buy it, Sonny, if you weren’t caught in the callous act of robbing her grave to get the bracelet you thought she was wearing.”

  “That wasn’t what it looked like neither,” Sonny says. “When you told me how broke up Bonnie was I just wanted to get it back to her. To give her some measure of comfort, that’s all. It wasn’t for me. I swear it.”

  Beth is quiet, digesting all that Sonny has explained. For me, there’s no disputing the veracity of what he has said. It simply has the irrefutable ring of truth to it.

  The three of us sit here for several minutes thinking our own thoughts before Beth fires up the pickup and we resume our journey back to town.

  46

  It’s nearly three a.m. when we arrive at the garage. We’re all exhausted. Sonny waits for us to decide what comes next. He seems resigned to the worst.

  “I’ll call the police,” Beth says, and heads for the phone in the office.

  I look at Sonny. Then I follow Beth into the office. She’s reaching for the phone when I put my hand on top of hers. “Don’t,” I murmur.

  She looks at me, questioning my purpose. “What do you mean?” she says. “We have to.”

  “Beth, honey, the worst he’s guilty of is stupidity. At best, loyalty to a dying friend.”

  “Lucas, we can’t not report this. We’ll---”

  “He’s not a criminal. You know as well as I do he didn’t have anything to do with Anne Marie’s death. But the law won’t see it that way. He’s sixty-four, Beth. He’ll be lucky if he ever sees the outside of a prison again if we turn him in.”

  “Lucas, do you have any idea what you’re suggesting here? We’d be as guilty as Sonny is if we hide this.”

  There’s not really anything I can say to persuade her to do what I want. She’ll come to her own decision in her own good time. I simply look at her, hoping my eyes convey what my words cannot.

  She glares at me for a long minute. “Damn it, Lucas.”

  “Go to bed, Sonny,” I tell him when I go back out to the garage where’s he’s waiting by my workbench.

  He looks at me, shocked. “What are you doin’, Lucas?”

  “Never mind. Just go to bed. We’ll deal with this in the morning.”

  He looks near death he’s so worn out. He doesn’t argue.

  Beth and I go to my room. She takes a shower while I sit on the edge of my bed with my head in my hands. I’ve got some decisions to make. First, what do I do with Anne Marie’s bones? I can’t just leave her out there in the desert. If I believe what Thelma Paige told me about Anne Marie’s strictly held beliefs in Catholicism, she’s never going to rest until she’s buried in consecrated ground. Second, if I do cover for Sonny I’m committing a major felony. Am I willing to put myself in that position? Not only me, but Beth?

  Beth comes out of the shower with one towel wrapped around her body and another around her hair. She sits beside me on the bed. “What are we going to do?” she says. She sounds scared but she's trusting me to do the right thing, whatever that is. Do I have the right to put her freedom in jeopardy, to take the law in my own hands?

  “Get dressed. Put on my jogging pants and a T-shirt. I’ve got something I have to do.”

  She looks more scared than ever. “What is it, Lucas?”

  “You have to drive me back out there.” I tell her.

  “Oh, no …”

  “Come on. We don’t have much time. It’ll be light in another half hour.”

  The first faint hint of morning light is just beginning to show on the horizon when Beth drops me at my Jeep. The rain has stopped and the desert now shimmers under a pre-dawn cloak of mist. “Get back to your place,” I say. “Go to work at your usual time and try to act like nothing’s happened.”

  “What are you going to do?” Her voice is a whispery plea for understanding.

  “Never mind. Just get going.”

  She knows better than to argue at this point. She guns the engine in her old Ford and takes off. I hop in the Jeep and head for Anne Marie’s burial place.

  When I get there it’s light enough that I don’t need to use my flashlight to see into the pit containing her bones. At first glance it looks like she’s not there. The rain has muddied the hole so badly the tarpaulin is completely unrecognizable. When I reach down to try and gather up her remains it doesn’t work. As revolting as it is, I end up having to climb into the hole to accomplish my task. The bones, of course, are mostly unattached. Her skeleton falls completely apart and I have to feel around in the mud to make sure I get all the parts. It takes ten minutes for me to find them all and get them securely wrapped in the tarpaulin. The task is made even more gruesome by the fact that the shrivelled skin of her skull contains what appears to be a full head of long black hair, though it’s matted and caked with mud and barely recognizable as hair. The bones alone would not have been so hard to deal with. It’s the existence of Anne Marie’s hair, more than anything else, that gives me a serious case of the willies. It’s only with a monumental mind over matter effort that I’m able to get this done.

  I use the shovel to fill in the hole and put my grisly parcel behind the back seat of the Jeep. When I go to climb behind the wheel I find I have to stop. For several moments I stand hunched over with one hand on the Jeeps door, fighting back the urge to throw up; despite coming close I manage to somehow avoid doing so.

  It’s full light when I pull out on the road.

  My plan, such as it is, consists simply of delivering Anne Marie’s bones to the only doctor in Cutter’s Grove. I’ll leave them encased in something other than Sonny’s tarpaulin just in case the police might somehow be able to trace it to him.

  Maybe it’s not the world’s best plan but at least it will get Anne Marie identified and properly buried and, hopefully, put an end to the torturous netherworld existence she seems to be locked in. It’s my fervent hope that it might also give some much needed peace to Bonnie and Paco.

  47

  By the time I get back to town and find a box big and anonymous enough to hold Anne Marie’s remains
, it’s too late for me to chance depositing the container at Doc Taylor’s door. When he discovers it there will undoubtedly be a massive effort made to learn who delivered it, and I don’t want anyone to be able to associate me with this in any way. So, it’ll have to wait until tonight.

  There are a couple of minor jobs awaiting me at the shop but I’m far too tired to give any thought to work. I stumble into bed and crash for four hours. It’s early afternoon before I make an appearance in the garage. I get two phone calls soon after.

  The first is from Beth. She’s scared witless about what we’ve done. She’s even more upset when I tell her what I did with Anne Marie’s remains. “Oh, shit, Lucas,” she says. “What if they find out?” They being the law, of course.

  “Nobody’s going to find out anything. Sonny sure as hell isn’t going to say anything and that just leaves us so---”

  “You can’t tell Deborah about this, Lucas. I mean it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise. I won’t say anything.”

  “Get rid of … you know, as soon as you can.”

  “I fully intend to.”

  “Please be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “Call me later?”

  “Okay.”

  The next call, like it was scripted, is from Deborah. “Hi, Lucas,” she says. She sounds very tired.

  “Deborah. Where are you?”

  “In Bakersfield with Harold. I had Adele drive me in to Tehachapi and then I took a bus from there.”

  “Is everything alright? How’s Harold?”

  “He’s okay physically, but he hates this place. He can’t understand why I can’t just take him home.”

  “Any word on how long he’ll have to be there?”

  “No. The doctors aren’t speculating on that yet. But I talked with the head doctor here today and he told me something very encouraging. Something that’s been troubling him about Harold’s case.”