Henry scratched his thin black beard. “So . . . I guess, now we just wait?”
Jamie Astley walked into the kitchen as Walter said, “No. I’m gonna piss, then me and you are gonna head outside and follow the river downstream—try to fish out the other body.”
“You just got into a serious accident, Walter,” said Nigel. “You really think you should go out trudging through the forest at night, in a severe rainstorm like this?”
“If I might save someone’s life, sure.”
“What about tonight?” piped in Jamie, trying to sound assertive, but failing and sounding even more meager for the effort. “We have things to talk about. Important things.”
“Obviously that’s not going to happen anymore,” Nigel spoke curtly. “You can tell everyone to leave. They can get their food out of the fridge.”
A flash of protest came to Jamie’s eyes, faltered, and then she just looked hurt. She didn’t say a word as she turned and retreated back down the hallway.
Walter, in truth, felt bad for her, but he didn’t express anything to this effect. Instead, he taunted Nigel on his way to the bathroom, “Someone’s not getting any tonight . . .”
In the bathroom, Walter couldn’t avoid catching sight of himself in the awkward full-sized mirror beside to the toilet.
Walter Boyd could be a good-looking fellow if he wanted to be. He had dirty-blonde hair that, when washed and unburdened by grease, wove lightly along his forehead like the pretty-boys on cheesy TV dramas. His face, when shaved smooth, could appear strong and assertive, symmetrical as most of it was—except for his left ear, which he was sure was lower than his right. Unfortunately, his hair became greasy if not washed daily, and would clump and form to his skull in an unpleasant way, and his beard grew in in wiry patches, so when he neglected to shave, instead of making him appear rugged—like Henry told everyone his did—his facial hair just made him appear ragged.
It should come as no surprised that faltering personal hygiene coincided with Walter’s increasing substance abuse, and more and more of late he looked like trailer-trash.
That night he had actually tried to make himself presentable, yet the man that stared back at Walter through the mirror, as he peed into the toilet, looked like absolute hell.
When he came back out into the kitchen, Walter found that Henry had already thrown on his dirty cardigan jacket that he usually wore dirt-biking and had located a set of flashlights.
“Okay, Nigel you talk to the cops when they show up. Tell them where we are. I’ll try to call if we find the body.” Walter took one of the flashlights.
“Sure. Just, don’t go crazy out there. I’m sure they will want to talk to you about everything, Walter,” said Nigel.
Walter agreed shortly, and then he and Henry went out the back door and took an infrequently-used trail down to the river.
• • •
“Well, it’s no hunting for Horcruxes,” said Walter, his voice barely rising over the loud rushing of the river.
“Wow,” said Henry Potter, running his flashlight along the frothy buildup of sticks along the high river bank. “Just wow.”
Walter smiled as he hobbled along beside Henry.
They had been trudging through the woods for ten minutes. The rain had subsided and was now less apocalyptic.
Walter’s comment had been a successful attempt to crack the uneasy tension. He had already chosen not to share with Henry his fear that a psycho-killer was on the loose that night. He felt that the basic nature of what they were doing was creepy enough already. Seeing more of the river, a roaring testament to nature’s power, it was becoming harder and harder for either man to imagine fishing out alive anyone who’d been swept up in it.
Henry found that he preferred focusing on something other than seeking out a likely-dead body in the water, walking farther and farther from Nigel’s house, out in the dark forests of rural Vermont.
He said, “So, you seemed to know the deal with the dinner party, huh?”
“Nigel pretty much told me last night.”
Henry laughed, “I think we both know who really planned it.”
“She’s a good girl,” Walter commented with a shrug.
Henry gave Walter a serious look that could not be seen in the dark, “It’s good you showed up, though.”
Walter said nothing.
As active thoughts relating to the topic steadily fell from their minds, a nervous mood crept back over the pair. Unconsciously, the two beams of light began getting directed more often into the gloomy woods behind and around them, instead of exclusively switching from their immediate footing to the wild water. Like irrational children checking under their beds for monsters.
They continued on, and they continued to discover nothing but water and trees and darkness and uneasy feelings. By way of distraction, this last item—powerful as it was—helpfully kept the aching pain all through Walter’s body more or less tolerable.
“You’re sure you saw someone in the river, right?”
“Yeah,” said Walter. “I mean . . . at the time my head was reeling from the accident . . . and from seeing the most fucking horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life . . .”
“So . . . you’re not sure?”
“No, I’m sure,” said Walter, in an unsure kind of way.
“Well, either way . . . at this point . . . it must be over a half-hour since you saw him . . .” Henry stopped short of saying it outright.
Walter understood. The floating man probably was dead, if he existed. Additionally, he had freshly reminded himself of the horror scene in the Jeep, and the surrounding darkness was making it difficult for him to banish the chilling, nauseating mental image.
“You’re probably right.”
He stopped and took his flashlight off the water. Eagerly, so did Henry.
Nothing more was said as they turned and began back upstream.
• • •
The frantic red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles were obvious as Walter and Henry labored up the steep trail behind Nigel’s house, even muffled as they were by the heavy atmosphere.
Going in through the backdoor, they found Nigel and Jamie alone in the living room, sitting on a luxurious brown wraparound sofa in front of a large, blank, wall-mounted TV.
“No luck,” said Walter.
Nigel started immediately, “You didn’t tell anyone that the dead guy had a huge rock pinning his gas pedal to the floor, or a knife stuck in him.”
“I didn’t?”
“No!” Henry answered for Nigel, morbid intrigue lifting his eyebrows high.
“If you had,” said Nigel, “your declaration that the driver of the Jeep was a ‘murder victim’ would have made a lot more sense.”
“Oh,” Walter shrugged, faintly embarrassed. “I guess I was . . . whatever. You’ve talked to them?”
“Yes. They want to see you, obviously. Officer Corey just left to grab someone, and they were going to head out downstream after you.”
“Where is—” Walter didn’t need to finish.
The four in the living room heard the front door swing open, and a gruff male voice called out, “So where’s your backdoor, Nigel?”
“In here, officer. I mean: they’re back.”
Officer Tom Corey came around the entranceway to the living room. He had a weather-worn face that appeared locked into a permanent frown. Even under much more pleasant circumstances, it was impossible to picture his face with anything approaching a warm smile.
“My god, Walter. Take a seat already.”
Although Officer Corey’s tone had been more sympathetic than commanding, Walter had previously learned the wisdom in being obedient with the police. He sat next to Nigel (who under normal circumstances would’ve flinched at someone so filthy touching his couch).
“I commend you for having the courage”—the emphasis could well have been a question mark—“to wander off in the dark right now.” A younger officer with a weak face stepped
in behind Officer Corey. Officer Corey went on, “Eugene here had to talk me down from calling my mommy crying after seeing what was in the front seat of that Jeep. A few officers already lost their dinners. None of us will be sleeping for a week, at best.”
Usually the first to laugh at humor drawn from wholly humorless things, Walter didn’t even smile, “I can’t imagine the kind of lunatic it would take to do that to someone . . .”
“Hm,” was all Officer Corey said, and he rested a hand on his well-laden belt.
“What?”
Officer Corey said, straightforward as always, “Of course we’re not ruling out homicide . . . but some things don’t add up with that scenario.”
“Like what?”
“For one, even though the slate rock was wedged in there pretty securely, none of the brake lines had been cut, and the driver had full access to both foot and emergency brakes . . .”
“Well . . . obviously the murderer is completely deranged . . . maybe he wanted the poor guy to have some control, so he could suffer longer . . .” Even as he defended it, Walter began to see the many thin spots in his initial mental outline. He continued with less conviction, “And maybe the guy meant to hit me, hoping to get someone’s attention before he bled to death . . .”
Officer Corey shrugged. “There’s going to be a full investigation into this, you can bet your house on that. We won’t allow there to be any chance of a psychopath like that loose in Sutherland. But, with the way you’re seeing it—which, to be fair, is how most of us saw it at first—there’s a huge amount of flimsy variables holding everything together. When you think about the pure logistics of it . . . well . . . there’s just a much simpler explanation.”
Walter finally saw the alternative.
“You think he did all that to himself?”
Tom Corey’s lips fidgeted as he prepared his words, “The reality is, no matter how this picture comes together in the end, it will never be a sensible, pretty one—not with the ghastly bits we’ve already seen of it. But, as with anything, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And, my feeling is, if someone can be insane enough to do that to someone else, they can be insane enough to do that to themselves. After all, don’t they say that self-hate is the strongest form of hate?”
“Well, a sociopath can’t feel another man’s pain, but he usually can feel his own, so there is that . . .”
“Point. But what if you add heavy doses of drugs to the equation? Not that I should be telling you all this, but we found a few empty bottles of what might’ve held prescription painkillers in the back.”
“Damn, you sure the bottles were empty?” joked Walter offhandedly, without thinking.
Nigel cringed.
It appeared as though a second frown came over Officer Corey’s default one. In such a small town, rumors of Walter’s drug-related hijinks had certainly reached the local police department.
Walter laughed at his flub, “I just meant . . . my neck and back are sore. I was in a crash.”
“Yeah, and how are you? Usually we would have you immobilized and in an ambulance by now, but seeing how you’ve already been out hiking for twenty minutes . . . we missed the boat on that procedure, I guess.”
“Really, I don’t feel any worse than I would after a good hockey game,” said Walter. Physically speaking, he was telling the truth.
Officer Corey nodded. “I’ll buy that. No sign of the floater?”
“No . . . and at this point . . .”
Officer Corey nodded again. “And you’re sure you saw someone?”
“Ninety percent. Eighty, maybe.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll send out a tracking team with some dogs, and keep an eye on the missing persons reports. Are you going to stay here tonight?” It was more of a statement than a question.
“I guess.”
“Good. Anyway. As far as what we were talking about goes, you can trust that we’ll leave no stone unturned. We just put in a call to some detectives out of Rutland. They’ll be down soon. We’re going to treat this as a homicide until we can prove otherwise. They’ll want to get a statement from you, I’m sure.”
Walter bit his lip and nodded.
Officer Corey sighed, “It’s going to be a long night.”
He had no idea.
• • •
Doris Hanes was content with her life. She had even thought it over one time, and she had decided that she was content with the very notion that that’s how people who knew her might summarize her life, if anyone ever cared to ask. Which they didn’t, which was fine.
Her youngest offspring, a daughter of twenty-four, had just completed an internship at a medical research facility, and was currently weighing job offers. Her firstborn son of twenty-seven taught music at the high school level. Both had moved out of the house years ago, leaving Doris alone with her cats and her goldfinches. They both called no less than once a month to tell of their pleasant lives, however, and Doris was happy with this arrangement.
The antagonistic nature of Doris’s choice of pets provided the bulk of the household’s activity, which already implies that the house was busier than it really was: the cats were lazy, and their passing swipes at the large birdcage were always halfhearted.
A frugal lifestyle had allowed Doris to retire at the still-going age of sixty, and these days she occupied herself almost exclusively with two quiet things: mystery novels, and her recent hobby of whittling and polishing wooden cooking spoons, a few of which she had brought to and sold at a local craft fair.
She and her ex-husband had bought the house twenty-five years ago. She had divorced him after the birth of their daughter, and she had held onto the only things, deep down, she had wanted out of the marriage: the kids and the house.
It was a lovely house. Not a drop of paint touched the interior or exterior. It sported a natural wood finish throughout, and Doris’s decorative and furniture choices went with this minimalistic and naturalistic aesthetic perfectly.
It was her sanctuary—her deserved reward for fulfilling her duty as a human female: raising two well-adjusted progeny and releasing them into the world.
That night, however, it was less of a sanctuary.
The house was perched in a clearing high up on the side of a hill, and its large enclosed porch overlooked, on most days and nights, a quaint, tranquil valley.
The storm blew in moments after the sun had set. Initially Doris had embraced it, sinking down into her dusty armchair at one end of the porch, sidled up beside one of the porch’s many large windows, wrapped in a quilt, reading her newest literary selection from the library by the soft light of a lantern.
However, the soothing nature of the rain on the roof steadily bent, and then broke, as the storm worsened, and as the sound of it reminded her more and more of the time she had had a group of workers over with a power-washer to refinish her walls. She started getting up regularly to check the basement, to ensure that it wasn’t getting flooded by the run-off water that was collecting into muddy streams lining the hill, cutting recklessly through her gardens.
Her ability to enjoy her book was further hindered when she began to notice—only their diminished headlights showed through the downpour—a curious number of cars pulling into Nigel Kensington’s house halfway down the hill, on the other side of the road.
“Strange time for a party,” Doris had remarked to her grey tabby cat, Toot.
It took a while, but at last the storm eased up enough to quell Doris’s immediate fears of having her house washed down the hill. The lull in the storm came at a time when there had been no recent activity down at Nigel’s house, and so Doris was finally able to return to her story.
No more than a half-hour later, however, her peaceful gaze was stolen from the words on the pages by a glimmer of light.
Doris looked up. Above her she had hung an arrangement of sun-catcher crystals which scattered rainbow colors all over in the bright of day, and presently, though faintly,
the crystals were refracting blues and reds throughout her porch. She would see such a display so regularly in her day-to-day life that, for an instant—only an instant—she didn’t react.
And then she jerked her head around, to the window.
All of the first-responders were already on the scene. There was one set of lights flashing in front of Nigel’s house, and then farther down the hill, on the far side of the bridge, there was a much heavier cluster of the colored strobe-lights.
“Oh my word,” breathed Doris.
Her first guess at the situation was reasonable. She envisioned someone, in the horrible driving conditions, hydroplaning off the road either while going to or leaving Nigel’s party. She leaned towards the latter option, as it better allowed for alcohol to be a factor.
Alcohol was not a factor, however.
There was, presently, a man standing outside, in the dark, in Doris’s muddy garden. He was soaked in water and blood, his clothes and his skin were sliced into hundreds of neat little shreds, and he was clutching—with a strong sense of worth—a short, bloody knife. This man, his ravaged body convulsing wretchedly, was staring up at the silhouette of Doris. He was smiling.
• • •
Walter had talked to the detectives as soon as they had arrived. He’d answered all their questions, and now his obligations that night were supposed to be over.
Presently, Walter, Nigel, Henry, and Jamie were seriously considering putting on a cartoon before anyone attempted to sleep, out of a blunt effort to soften the mood.
Jamie had her own apartment, but it wasn’t unusual for her to stay over. Henry had decided to spend the night, too, and had offered to drive Walter to work tomorrow after Walter had insisted that he wouldn’t want to call out in the morning.
They were weighing the offerings of the various kid-centric cable channels when they heard it. The faded blast of a rifle, or a shotgun.
Walter was the first to his feet.
“No one’s gonna be out hunting now,” he stated the obvious.
Blue Stew (Second Edition) Page 3
