by Roger Hayden
“Really sorry about having to give you that ticket, Mr. Deckers. Don’t worry, I went with the lowest fine allowed, ten dollars.”
“That’s fine,” Bob said curtly.
Curtis placed his hands on the steering wheel, deeply conflicted. The time to put a stop to everything was nearing an end. Deputy Ramirez’s unexpected appearance was a godsend, and Curtis felt it was his only chance to stop Bob before it was too late.
Could he mouth the word “help!” Would the deputy understand if he did?
He knew that once they got to the Bechdel mansion, Bob would be in complete control. He and Mary could be easily disposed of in complete privacy.
“Well… I guess I’ll let you gentlemen get on your way then.” Curtis readied to turn the ignition when Ramirez’s hand mic crackled with chatter. “Bravo Six, this is Alpha Twenty. What’s your status?”
“Go!” Bob seethed with his teeth gritted.
Curtis’s hand gripped the keys, ready to turn on the engine, but the deputy’s arm was still resting on the door as he answered the radio. During the time they had been pulled over, the blue autumn sky had gradually transitioned from something bright and inviting to gray and foreboding. There was a storm rising, and Curtis couldn’t help but wonder if the weather itself was mirroring the trajectory of their descent.
“I can’t!” he whispered forcibly to Bob from the side of his mouth. “You want suspicious? That’s gonna look suspicious.”
“I’m here at a traffic stop, over by the Bechdel property,” Ramirez said into the mic. Curtis recognized the voice on the radio as that of Chief Riley himself. As partners, the two officers made a good pair, in Curtis’s opinion. When Mary raised suspicion that the police chief and deputy were in on the conspiracy, Curtis couldn’t imagine it.
Bob suddenly pulled his gun out from under his coat, fingering the trigger. His bulging eyes were fixated on Ramirez as the chatter on the radio continued. They could faintly hear the chief talking but couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Roger that,” Chief Riley told the deputy. “I’m at the fair with a county detail. Keep your eyes peeled, Deputy. Spoke with Anna, who runs the little coffee shop there on Michigan. She reported two men taking off in a blue Volvo. Said one of the men looked pretty beat up and the other one had a gun.”
Ramirez froze without responding. His eyes darted back to the car, examining it inside and out. The connection was meaningless to the deputy. He knew both Bob and Curtis and knew them to be friends and associates. If anything, his expression showed an acknowledgment of a freakish coincidence.
“I’ll keep an eye out,” he said into the mic. “Over and out.”
Curtis felt a deep sigh of relief, but when he quickly glanced in Bob’s direction, he could see the pale, panicked face of a man about to make an abhorrent mistake.
Ramirez tapped on the door again and then caught a glimpse of Curtis’s beat-up face, previously concealed. He suddenly straightened his posture and gripped the handle of his holstered pistol. “What the hell happened to your face, Curtis?” A stark realization came over his face as he backed away from the Volvo, taking in the blue color and once again noting the strange and low-key demeanor of its passengers.
“What are you two up to?” he asked as though it was impossible for either of them to do something wrong. Ramirez should have known better.
Just as Curtis opened his mouth to offer assurances, the barrel of the pistol entered his view and blasted two deafening shots into Deputy Ramirez’s head, dropping him instantly. Curtis flinched and felt the hot singe of an ammo casing striking his cheek.
There was a loud ringing in his ears, and for a moment, he thought that it was he who had been shot. As if to prevent any resistance, Bob jammed the pistol into Curtis’s temple, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Get the hell out of the car, now!” Feeling as though he were on autopilot, Curtis placed his hand on the door handle and pushed the door open.
He didn’t understand why Bob was yelling or what had just happened. But as he stepped out of the car in a daze, he saw Deputy Ramirez’s motionless body lying flat on the ground, face-up, with blood oozing from his skull and forming a thick puddle on the pavement.
Curtis felt his knees buckle and his stomach twisting in knots. The shock was too great. He vomited on the side of the road, inches from the deputy’s body. As he straightened up, choking in the air, Bob rushed around the car, shouting to him to help drag Ramirez into the brush unless he wanted to join him.
“Get it together, Curtis! You don’t have much time.” He was already at Ramirez’s arms, pulling him to the side and into the grass. “Grab his legs. Come on! Hurry up!”
Curtis mustered the will to make it over to where Bob waited panting, pistol in hand. Everything felt surreal. He thought of nothing else while grabbing Ramirez’s legs and carrying his heavy body into the nearby forest. None of it felt real—not in the slightest.
***
Mary moved around the floor of the barn with intense concentration. She didn’t fully understand why Phil would hide something in the barn as opposed to the house, only that it would be less likely to be found. She called out to Phil in her mind, hoping for guidance, but nothing tangible came through. She still felt shaken to have shared a moment of genuine telepathy with Theo.
They seemed to be linked somehow, beyond just possessing similar psychic abilities. Mary believed that whatever they were looking for held answers to many of her questions—starting with the claim that she had been to Redwood as a child. She didn’t know why she had such expectations beyond a premonition of things to come. Straw floated down from the second-story platform as Theo moved haystacks around, scouring the wooden floor for clues. In Mary’s mind, she saw a small hole or compartment under the floorboards. She had shared this with Theo, much to his relief. She asked him repeatedly if he had seen anything yet. He told her that he hadn’t and hypothesized that the visions weren’t being shared with him for a reason he couldn’t pinpoint beyond his being an outsider.
“So am I,” she had told him.
As Theo continued his search upstairs, Mary grabbed the pitchfork from the wall and began moving aside haystacks as quietly as she could.
Mary scraped against the dusty floorboards. It seemed a hopeless search, save for tearing the place apart. She rested the pitchfork against the wall and stood for a moment, scanning the area. It was exhausting work. Theo’s footsteps continued above as Mary pondered the whereabouts of their mystery items.
If they failed to find anything in the barn, she knew they’d have to revert to searching the house—which had many rooms and endless possibilities. And if they failed to find anything there, she had to consider his acres of property and all that would be entailed in that. The search was beginning to feel hopeless. Theo said as much as he leaned on the upstairs railing and called to her in a quiet voice.
“I mean, really. It could be anywhere,” he said, looking as dirty and exhausted as she felt.
“Doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere soon,” she responded. “So, might as well keep looking.”
Theo nodded with a vacant stare on his face and then walked to the ladder and climbed down. Mary began to lightly tap the floorboards around her, listening and feeling the area out. There were still plenty of haystacks to be moved. For all she knew, the mystery item could be stuffed in one of those perfectly symmetrical square blocks of hay, which looked nearly impossible to sift through.
“Maybe Phil never wanted it to be found. Whatever it is,” Theo said, approaching her.
Mary gazed at the floor. “I don’t know. Something tells me he was planning to share everything with me. He just wanted a couple more days.” She turned and looked at Theo, her expression serious. “He was a very cautious man. I think that’s how he stayed under the radar for so long.”
A beam of sunlight crept into the barn through a small window high above them at the front of the barn. Mary followed the shadow cast by the pitchfork to a co
rner of the room where two columns of hay were stacked neatly. It seemed almost as though the pitchfork were pointing to something. Theo continued his own search, systematically mapping and looking but also thinking again and again about their earlier telepathic episode.
“I can’t believe it. Speaking to each other like that. Have you ever experienced anything like that with anyone?”
“No…” she said, still following the shadow deep into the far corner.
“Why don’t we try it again?” he said. “This could be a real breakthrough.”
Mary stopped and tried her best, telling Theo that their mystery item was close, but he didn’t seem in a receptive state.
“Are you trying?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“Maybe we have to be under duress or something like that. What I want to do is figure out how we did it.”
“Me too,” she said, continuing her careful advance to the corner. She remained alert, but not so much to what Theo was saying. After a few more comments about their breakthrough, he finally realized she might be on the brink of a major discovery.
She arrived at the corner and stood in front of the haystacks without moving and closed her eyes. Her mind felt free of burden. No longer was she thinking of the Taylor brothers or the town conspiracy or Beatrice Thaxton, the elderly socialite who had toyed with her the other day in the corner store, or anything not related to the mission at hand. The only thing she could focus on was whatever was hidden beneath the floorboards.
“What is it?” Theo asked, approaching her. He then stopped and listened carefully to the sounds outside the barn. The Taylor brothers were nowhere to be heard. Were the brothers silently stalking them, preparing an ambush? He turned back to Mary. “I think it’s only a matter of time until we’re made. Whatever we’re looking for, we need to find it fast or get out.”
“I think we already have found it,” she said, kneeling down. “Phil… I think he’s guiding me.” She rubbed her hands across the surface of the floor in a circular motion, dirtying them with hay and dust.
“I don’t sense a thing,” Theo said. “I can’t hear your thoughts. Nothing.” It sounded strange to hear Theo even say such a thing. No one would believe them if they made such a claim, especially Curtis. Their earlier telepathy may have been a fluke or a collective figment of their imaginations.
Mary suddenly stopped gliding her hands along the surface of the floor and turned to Theo, pointing toward the other end of the barn where tools were hanging.
“Grab that shovel and saw.”
Theo spun around, noticeably thrilled, but with questions of his own. “Is it here? Are you certain?”
“No,” Mary said. “But I’ve got one heck of a hunch.”
Theo wasted no more time and dashed over to grab the tools. Mary stood up and pushed part of one haystack column aside, followed by the other. The effort made her lightheaded. The blocks hit the ground with a soft thud when suddenly a voice entered her mind—not Theo’s, but someone else’s.
“Enough running around. You’re going to have a child, remember? Stop this nonsense.”
Mary froze, wondering if it was her own thoughts, but she had no control of them.
“Who are you?” she asked, the words not leaving her mouth. “Why are you in my mind?”
“Do you recognize my voice?” the man asked.
“No.”
“I came into your room the second day you moved into the Bechdel mansion. Do you remember? You were about to get into the shower. I asked you what you were so afraid of.”
Mary fell to her knees in shock, and Theo placed a hand on her shoulder. “Mary?” he whispered in a fearful tone. “Are you all right?”
She snapped out of her trance and whipped her head around, a startled look in her eyes filled with questions. “Yes… I… I don’t know what happened.”
“Your eyes looked like they were about to roll into the back of your head. You were muttering something, but I couldn’t hear it.”
“Really?” Mary said, rubbing her forehead. “It’s so weird hearing all these voices. Your voice, and now… some stranger.”
“You sound like a crazy person,” Theo said, gently hovering over her.
Mary laughed softly and then noticed the shovel he was holding. “It couldn’t have been Phil. The voice, I mean. He said he spoke to me before. Weeks ago.”
Theo motioned with his head. “You also moved those haystacks out of the way and drew a circle.”
Mary turned around quickly, verifying Theo’s claim. Sure enough, drawn in the thin layer of sand and dust covering the floorboards was a perfect circle, pinpointing the location of their search. Or it was just a circle indicating nothing? Either way, Theo was quick to move.
“Some people draw X’s, you draw circles. That’s fair.” He knelt down and felt around the floorboards, leaving her circle intact. “Yeah. Something’s definitely under here.” He looked up. “It’s giving off some kind of warmness. Kinetic in a way.”
Suddenly, they could hear distant voices. The Taylors were back outside.
One of the brothers yelled, “I don’t care where they ran off to, we gotta find ‘em. Sons of bitches took my gun!”
“Calm down, Liam,” another brother said. “We got their license plate info. Now let’s get out of here.”
The brothers sounded close, as if they were speaking from the back porch. It was strange that none of them had mentioned the barn yet or seemed to have any interest in it.
“Enough of that. Get your shit together,” a gruffer voice interjected, which Mary assumed to be Garret’s. He carried himself as the leader of their group, so perhaps he was the oldest. Perhaps he was just a natural leader.
Mary thought of her vision a few nights ago, shared, she believed, from the recesses of Julie’s memories. A scarred face had stared down at her in the moonlight. She recognized that face the moment she saw Garret at the funeral and trembled at the thought of being near a man who would shoot a child in the face. It made her sick to her stomach.
“Hey…” Theo whispered, not making a move. “Whatever we need to do, we need to do it fast. They’re going to check this barn eventually.”
She felt that Theo and she were close to a discovery. Just a few more minutes were all they needed. She was sure of it.
Suddenly, Garret continued talking, close by outside the barn. “Listen, you two. We can’t piddle around here anymore. We don’t know who was here or why. We don’t know where they went, and we don’t know if they alerted the authorities. So we need to leave before the brass show up.”
Mary sighed in relief, but Theo stayed alert, listening. The Taylor brothers said little more and went back inside the house. Was it a setup? Mary wasn’t sure.
“All right, let’s do this,” Theo said, dropping down to a knee. He positioned the saw over one of the floorboards and brought his arm back, prepared to begin.
Mary looked ahead, past Theo, to where she noticed something off about the very board he was about to saw. “Wait,” she said, holding her arm out. Just then, they heard the front door to Phil’s house open and slam shut and then the sound of movement and voices carrying across his yard. Then the distant chatter between the Taylor brothers faded, followed by the sound of their car doors opening.
“Wait a minute,” Jeffery’s voice said, laughing. “I got something for these folks.”
Mary pondered what he meant by that comment but found out all too soon when she heard the sound of glass shattering and more laughter.
“Quit screwing around, Jeff, and get your ass in the car,” Garret barked.
Their engine roared and car doors slammed. Mary was still suspicious of whether they were actually leaving or not.
“What did they do, smash a window out?” Theo asked.
“Sounded like it,” Mary said.
“Bastards…” he said.
“If that’s the worst they do to us, we can count ourselves lucky,” Mary said. She turne
d her focus back to the floor where she noticed that the entire floorboard in question was slightly off—it had a brighter color, barely noticeable, yet different from the rest. Mary got up and walked to the wall where the board ended.
“What is it?” Theo asked.
His own abilities had seemed diminished since they entered the barn, as though Mary was the only one privy to Phil’s secrets. She pulled up the board and noticed that it wasn’t nailed down like the others.
Theo took a step back, surprised, as Mary began lifting it up. He grabbed the midsection and they removed the board from the floor, revealing the tamped earth beneath the barn.
Theo looked into the gap in the floor and saw darkened orange earth with a damp, musty smell. He ran his hands through the clay-like dirt, barely able to contain his excitement. “I can’t believe it.” He then placed the saw onto the flooring as though it no longer served any purpose. “You did it, Mary.”
Mary paced along the gap and waved him off. “We did it, Theo. We’re a team, remember?”
“We are?” Theo said. He then looked down, thinking to himself. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He took the shovel in one hand and nudged at the dirt below. “This is about where you drew that circle.”
Mary stood across from him and nodded. “We’re so close. I just know it.”
Theo began digging, pushing the shovel hard into the ground with his boot and then bringing up a shovelful of dirt that he placed to the side. “Although you did tell me to grab a saw for no reason. We can’t all be right all the time.”
“Very funny,” she said, brushing her hair out of her face. “Just keep digging.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Theo said in a heightened, mocking fashion.
Mary couldn’t take her eyes off the hole he was digging. Therein lay all the answers to the secrets that had plagued her since they had arrived in Redwood—or so she believed.
Theo kept digging, and the hole got deeper with more and more dirt piled to the side. Though she had felt guiding forces bringing her to this very spot, she could not envision what lay buried there. That was still a mystery. As was Pastor Phil. Who was he, really? What had happened to his children? His siblings? All she knew for certain was that his wife had passed away some years ago. If only she could have talked with him for a few more days. Her mind stayed on the hole. She paid no attention to the cell phone in her pocket even as it vibrated. Theo heaved and dug the shovel in again and again, growing exhausted.
