Mary Austin stood with her hand gripping the doorknob, young eyes wide, her face a barren mask of shock. “What do you mean?”
“Hurt, Mary,” Veta said, putting a hand on the young teacher’s arm. So young, yet so talented. Only three years teaching and already she had the wisdom of many of the hair-in-a-bun veterans Veta had seen come and go during her tenure. The Mary Austins, those possessing the true gift of teaching, were the rarest of the rare, and each held a special place in the secretary’s heart. This one more so than others, because Mary Austin had done more than teach. Veta had seen her work miracles. “Come on. The nurse is on her way there now. Come on.”
Mary watched Veta Nelson take a few steps before she, too, began to move. Just into the hall the bell ending recess sounded, a staccato clanging that followed Veta and Mary as they ran out of the main building and across the playground toward the sixth grade bungalows.
* * *
Nan Jakowitz passed Bryce as they neared a crush of students swarming outside Room 18, pushing through the chest high mass until she broke into the center and stood facing a distinctly separate group of five children gathered in a tight arc. They were staring at her feet, and when she looked down she saw the crimson sheen formed around her tan flats and understood why.
“Jesus, JESUS, JESUS,” Nurse Jakowitz said in rising tone, giving her exclamation of horror a tinge of religious declaration. Her feet stepped gingerly out of the blood covering the ground to Guy Edmond’s front, and moved to a spot near his back where she knelt and put two fingers to his neck.
She counted silently, One... Two... Three...
And nothing. Her eyes flitted from Guy’s neck to the ground, and she saw the bat, its fat end splashed grotesquely red.
Four... Five... Six...
Her eyes came up from the bat and fell upon the arc of children fixed close to the body. Bryce had joined them. They were six in number now, and they looked at her with eyes that seemed collective, individuality gone from their expressions. The littlest girl, held close by a bigger girl in one protective arm, sniffled, but her gaze never broke.
“What happened?” Nan asked, directing her question to Bryce.
“We found him,” Joey answered for the class treasurer. For them all.
“Found him?” Nan pressed.
Five of the six nodded. Elena simply bore reddened, gaunt eyes at the nurse.
The breeze swirled through the fence and over the crowd, reminding all of the season. It might have chilled Nan Jakowitz, but a prickly rise of goose bumps had already done so.
She looked again to the body, counting, Seven... Eight... Nine...
Nothing. Not a hint of a pulse. Nan Jakowitz drew her hand away from the neck and swallowed hard. Her eyes played over the wet red asphalt. There’s too much blood, she thought immediately. Not enough left in his body for CPR to do any good. He’s really dead. She looked up at the six again, at Bryce in particular as someone pushed through the outer crowd.
“Is he going to be okay?” Bryce asked.
Nan’s head cocked at the almost vacant concern in his voice. The quizzical expression still showed when Veta Nelson and Mary Austin made it through the students and gawked first at the little body, then at the blood, then at the nurse.
“How bad?” Veta asked, drawing deep for composure. Mary stepped just past her, eyes glued on Guy Edmond.
Nan shifted her attention to Veta and said, after a short pause, “He’s dead.”
Five of the six stole sideways, leaden glances at one and other. Elena shuddered upon the nurse’s pronouncement, then quickly stilled. One girl in the crowd stumbled back toward the fence and covered her mouth with clenched fists, her blonde hair tossed across her face by the wind. Dozens of youthful mouths repeated the news in hushed tones.
Dead? He’s dead. Guy’s dead. Dead?
Dead....
“Dead?” Veta asked, eyes narrow, as if she’d just been told something incomprehensible. An impossibility.
Nan nodded and rose from her crouch.
“Oh dear God,” Veta said, putting a single, trembling hand to her mouth and reaching for Mary’s arm with the other. It found only space. Mary was backing away, inching steps that cleaved an opening in the crowd. “Mary?” How this must hurt... “Oh, Mary.”
The six looked to their teacher, and she now to them, forcing her eyes from the crushed little head spilling life onto the blacktop.
“Mary?” Veta repeated.
And as quickly as it had begun, Mary Austin’s retreat ceased, but not because of words. Her eyes had moved from Joey, to Bryce, to Michael, to P.J, to Elena, and then to Jeff. When it settled upon him, all energy drained from her, pouring down some invisible channel ripped through her core, cascading from her chest, washing hot through her stomach, and leaving through legs drawn hollow and made papery. For an instant she tried to tell herself what she had seen was just a twitch. A nervous tick. Expected. Normal, considering.
But it wasn’t. As clear as the horror that was strewn between them, she knew it was no twitch, no involuntary response. It was what it was. And what it was was a wink.
Jeff had given her a slow, purposeful wink, one that existed between only them.
She shook her head as her knees went weak, legs turning soft, the vast gray sky above becoming a great fuzzy spiral that followed her as she twisted and twisted downward into a harsh, icy blackness.
Part One
Dead Notes
Two
It was Sunday, and it had begun to rain.
Not in pearly drops that clicked when they hit one’s coat or umbrella, but slowly, almost silently, a cold, wet blur descending.
Dooley Ashe turned his collar up and hunched his shoulders against the elements, his hands burrowed deep in the lined pockets of his parka, and looked back through the weather as the last visitors gate closed behind. Anchor Bay State Prison was already lost somewhere in the settling haze.
“Excuse me...”
Dooley turned sharply toward the voice.
“Are you Dooley Ashe? Detective Dooley Ashe?”
The stranger wore a gray overcoat and held an umbrella in a black-gloved hand, and stood at the steps leading down to the visitor’s lot with a casually friendly smile uneven on his face.
“Who are you?” Dooley asked. He was not smiling.
Another black-gloved hand appeared from a pocket and flipped open an ID wallet. A gold badge struggled to shine in the flat light. “My name’s Joel Bauer. I’m a detective with the Bartlett Police Department.”
“Bartlett,” Dooley said, mostly to himself, mental circuit breakers tripping. He walked past the detective toward his car. Footsteps behind told him he was not rid of the stranger.
“It’s a few hours east of here,” Joel offered.
“I know where it is.”
“You haven’t returned my calls,” Joel said. When they cleared the steps and were in the lot he sped up and walked next to Dooley, eyeing him with eager glances. “I’ve left like twenty messages. Your machine must be busting by now.”
Enough of the misty rain had accumulated on Dooley’s outback hat that full drops now fell from its wide brim with each jarring step. He looked straight ahead, through the secondary downpour, and told himself to say nothing. Told himself to just walk, give the stranger a polite nod once he reached his car, and drive away. End of interlude, he could hope.
End of nothing, he feared.
“How’d you know I’d be here?” Dooley asked, his eyes still forward. His step had slowed.
“I sat across from your house for ten hours. A man can hold only so much coffee before he gives up. So, I went to your supervisor. He told me you’d be here today.”
Dooley stopped at the rear of a rusting Dodge Dart and looked to his unwanted company. “I don’t have a supervisor anymore, buddy. Detective whoever-you-are.”
“It’s Bauer.”
“Good, Detective Bauer. Now leave me be.”
“Your lieutenant sa—
”
“I don’t have a lieutenant. I’m retired. Okay? Goodbye.”
He started off toward his car again, but quick, persistent footsteps caught up.
“Lieutenant Evans told me you were on vacation. Using the comp time you built up from the Vincent case.”
“Clean your ears, Detective Bauer; I’m retired,” Dooley repeated for good measure, and to remind himself. Just walk.
“Not officially,” Joel contradicted, and for that he now had Detective Dooley Ashe’s full attention. And then some.
Dooley aimed his body toward Joel and kept walking, faster now, forcing the younger detective to backpedal awkwardly.
“Who do you think you are?” Dooley demanded as the target of his suddenly risen anger could skitter back no more and found himself half leaning, half sitting on the trunk of an old Nova. Two young faces stared at the commotion through the foggy back window. “You don’t fucking question me. I’m retired. I’ve done my twenty years. I solved my last case. I’m done.”
A little hand wiped condensation from inside the Nova’s back window. Dooley noticed the motion and looked past Joel for a moment. Faces with chocolate-stained mouths, framed by stringy, unwashed blonde hair, looked back with little surprise at the conflict they were witnessing. They had obviously seen worse.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Joel said from his awkward position. “Just that you’re still a cop. Officially.”
Even in light that robbed feature and warmth from whatever it bathed, Dooley could tell that the childrens’ eyes were blue. A pretty, tainted blue that probably still sparkled on Christmas morning, even without a tree, mom drunk with a new boyfriend in bed, and dad God knows where. Children might not be innocent, Dooley had learned, but they were resilient.
Far more resilient than adults.
“I just wanted to talk to you about—”
Dooley took a step back and held a silencing finger in the air between him and his unwanted company. “No. I’m done. You got it? Save your breath.” He continued to step away, but kept his eyes on the detective. “No more.”
“We need your help,” Joel said. As he did, Dooley turned and moved quickly toward a Chevy Blazer. “We had a kid murdered.”
“Join the club,” Dooley muttered, and hurried into his shiny black 4X4. He backed out of the parking space and sped toward the exit. In the rearview he could see Joel Bauer’s head dip, eyes going to the ground as rain spilled off his umbrella like tears.
* * *
Cougar Mountain rose like a blunt pimple from the forest one hundred and fifty miles east of Seattle, its peak salted white and its slopes flushed pink and blue by tired sunlight that fanned through breaks in the coming storm.
Autumn seemed willing to cede its time to winter, yet with each breath taken Mary Austin tasted spring. A false spring.
She stared at the cold, fiery beauty of the mountain from her living room, curled comfortably into a downy armchair, a forgotten mug of hot chocolate cooling on the end table and lesson plans neglected on her lap. Her being was here, quiet in her home, but her thoughts were there. Over the mountain. In a place she could not see, but which her mind could imagine. A pasture of green stabbed with bolts of granite and marble, a sad, pretty place where the dead rotted in ornate boxes.
She had attended only one funeral in her life, that of her father when she was eight, an event which had fogged in her memory, taking on the quality of a celluloid dream. Snippets of motion and feeling, out-takes from an old reel of the movie of her life. One was of a dark, deep rectangle and leaning forward hesitantly to peer down into it, mother holding her hand and she that of her five year old sister. Then standing back, together, watching as the casket sank slowly out of view. Beyond it some man trying to bolster her with a smile. When the years had passed she came to understand that his expression had been meant to console, but back then she had wondered why someone was smiling when most other people were crying.
Some, like her mother, had not cried, and Mary had followed her lead and swallowed hard when her eyes began to burn. Her little sister, though, was too young to muster the fortitude, and the tears had trickled silently down her reddened cheeks as they walked away from the plot on that sweltering Illinois summer day, following men whose dark coats were slung over their shoulders and who repeatedly dabbed their brows with fists of rumpled linen. Mary had looked back just before they reached her aunt’s big Lincoln, and had seen the man who had smiled at her going about his business, puffing on the stub of a cigar and tossing shovelful after shovelful of dirt into the hole.
Her father’s hole.
Now there was another hole.
Over there, now, in the lowlands beyond the mountain, people would be gathered around the one dug just for Guy Edmond. How many people would be there? Mary wondered. His family, to be sure. An officiate who had to be there. The man to shovel the dirt. Six, seven, eight, maybe. And the rest?
What ‘rest’? The rest would be cheering the little league games at Farnsworth Park, or playing backyard chef to steal some grill time before the weather changed. Burgers sizzling and brave little bodies going head first into second. Just another Sunday. Purposely so. A collective good riddance by way of evasion.
It was payback time. The people of Bartlett were giving Guy Edmond the bird in the only way that mattered to the dead. They were living, giving it that little extra oomph this day, Mary suspected. Playing a little harder, laughing a little louder, putting extra pickles and ketchup on the burger. Downing a cold one. The benign equivalent of dancing on his grave.
They were here, he was gone. Game, set, match.
In short order he would be a memory, Mary thought. Just an ill wind that had blown through. They were already forgetting. She was trying hard to...
‘...forget the bad. Move on.’
The bad. Bad things. The garbage truck broadsiding her father’s pickup, that had been bad. Almost the worst thing ever. And the past week, that had been bad.
Events could be very bad at times.
‘Runners fly right over hurdles. They hardly even notice them. Their eyes are on one thing, way beyond the obstacles. And when they’re past each hurdle, it’s gone. Out of mind. Forgotten.’ That was her mother’s equivalent of ‘Into every life a little rain must fall,’ with the likely additional caveat, ‘so think dry.’
People could also be bad. Even a child.
Hurdles.
Guy was bad. Bad to the core.
Forget him. Move on. Her mother’s advice, her creed, had stuck. It was hers now, too.
But...
...one of her kids was dead. Someone had killed him, and she felt...
What?
...something. Sorrow? Loss? What emotion was it that was bubbling inside her? It was...
What? she pressed herself for the answer.
...not loss. She had known loss, in many ways. Her father’s decapitation as he crumbled through the windshield of his rust-red stepside was a loss. This was not like that. Nor was it sorrow. With sorrow came tears, and she had shed none.
When did I cry last?
When?
When Mom heard ab— And that memory died half born.
Enough of that. Forget. Forget. Move on.
She felt...something strange. Something bordering, she believed, on inappropriate. Like...
...when Uncle Louie got drunk after the funeral and said that dad was always losing his head? That was inappropriate.
It was a sensation, far back in her chest, behind the liquid pulse of her heart, the warmth of a door opening on a summer day and letting the sweet breeze wash in. It was a lightness within. A knot untied. It was bursting through the surface of the water after a deep dive and tasting the soothing freshness of a breath.
It was all those things, but it should not be. It was wrong to feel that. As wrong as Jeff’s wink, she thought.
But wrong or not, that was what welled inside her, clawing to get out of a hole not unlike Guy Edmond’s now and fu
ture home. A place she’d guiltily tried to secret it. A place it was freeing itself from with every passing moment. She felt it. She knew.
A hollow, welcome bliss.
Or call it relief. Same difference. A worry had been swept away. Gone.
She swallowed hard, wanting to hate herself for feeling that way, but unable to. Something in her understood. Something in her made her believe that it was okay he was gone. That it was good he was gone. That whoever had put Guy Edmond in his own personal hole deserved a parade. Something told her that, something screamed it in her head, painted it in her dreams, as if trying to convince her.
Forget the bad. Move on.
He was bad, and he most definitely was gone.
I wonder who did—
Forget the bad.
Was forgetting the same as accepting? she wondered.
Who? Who?
Move on.
Struggling with the urge to know, Mary stared hard out the window, lost in thought, rapt with the vision of Cougar Mountain blushing at her, admiring the view until...
...the ring of the phone jerked her gaze from the window, for the first time in— she looked at the clock on her picture wall —two hours. Two hours? She blinked the surprise from her eyes and glanced back outside at—
—a curtain of rain sheeting past the yellow glow of the streetlamp. Darkness had come.
Dark?
Mary’s fingers rubbed at her eyes as the phone rang a second time. Dark at three twenty-five? she questioned herself, and gave the clock another, closer, look. The big hand was on the five and the— No, wait; that was the little hand. Big hand on three, little hand on five. A quarter past five?
Four hours? she thought incredulously, the phone wailing on and finally garnering her attention.
“Hel—hello.”
“Sweetie?”
Mary rolled her head and let herself sink further into the chair. “Hi, Mom.”
“You sound strange,” Jean Louise Austin said. “Were you... Did I wake you?”
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