by Jamie Mason
Bart retrieved it and presented the note to the detectives. The indulgent mix of self-pity and blame cleared away all doubt as to the motive and culpability behind the murders of Reid and Katielynn, and in admirable detail for such a small scrap of paper. It was well speckled with flecks of long-dried blood and the braille of a few more substantial bits of the man, which gave Bayard, as case-hardened as he was, a shiver. Suicide pinched him in a place other deaths couldn’t reach.
Of course, Bart was now in his own bog of felonies and misdemeanors, but Bayard and Ford had got what they needed from the interview. They left the remainders for East County, all laid out and orderly to downplay that it was really only table scraps. With much ceremony and fraternal back-patting, Tim and Ford turned him over to the sheriffs who’d showed up after the meat of the case had already been eaten.
Back in the truck, Tim massaged the bridge of his nose. “What, is it just fashionable now to dig your own holes? Who needs funerals? Who needs cemeteries? Just plant ’em yourself—no fuss, no muss. Jesus.”
Ford puffed out his cheeks in a restrained sigh. “Well, that is about as tidy and easy a case as we’ve ever had.” He cut his eyes at Tessa and Bayard. “Except for the dog part. I almost needed a change of shorts.”
This gave both men a brief case of the snorting chuckles. The residue of fear that had been gumming up their thought processes fell away behind the funny. In its wake, a peaceful silence settled. Tessa dozed in the back, while, in his mind, Tim batted questions over the net. The answers bounced back, neat and quick, off Bart Montgomery’s tight story. The resolution was simple, but dismal. East County would inherit the task of exhuming Boyd Montgomery and prosecuting Bart for his fraud and for the do-it-yourself funeral he’d staged for his brother. A couple of death notifications and a few hours’ worth of paperwork would wrap it up for Bayard and he’d be on to the next thing.
“Guess we can call off our own dogs, so to speak,” Ford broke into Bayard’s trance. “No sense in Lyle and his team destroying Mr. Getty’s place. I think it’s safe to call this one closed.”
“Yeah. I suppose.”
They rode on for miles without further comment, the road noise whooshing a lullaby in the wake of such a hard adrenaline burn.
“You can’t hear that?” Ford was both amused and annoyed.
“Hear what?”
Ford thrust an accusatory finger at the floorboards on Tim’s side. His cell phone quivered and buzzed like an angry bumblebee.
“Oh!” He snatched it up and looked at the screen and grinned. “Well, speak of the devil and name him Lyle,” he said after flipping it open to take the call. His eyes traced the horizon, unseeing in concentration as the crime-scene investigator chattered into his ear. Tim’s replies and their tone chipped away at the calm. “Where’d you find it?” “And the others?” “That’s just weird.” “Okay, Lyle. Thanks. I’ll have a look. Bye.”
Tim chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Ford, if you were distressed enough to kill yourself over feeling so guilty about murdering your wife and her lover—so upset that you had to get it all out on the back of a phone bill, in gory detail, before you ate a bullet—would you leave one out?”
“One what?”
“Another murder.”
Ford risked a glance from the road. “What are you talking about?”
Tim frowned at the landscape rushing by. “I don’t know. Lyle’s got something to show me. I know you need to get home, but drop me at Getty’s place first, if you don’t mind.”
7
Jason had been one turn away from home when he noticed the bulky red pickup truck up ahead of him. The bobbing, overlong aerials brought the realization full circle. He’d eased off the gas and let the distance accumulate between the detectives and himself.
The day had been horrible enough, being dismissed from his own home knowing the police would be there for hours, excavating the mulch beds and poking around. His lie had forced him into a pretense of alliance, and he’d had to smile while handing over the keys with hands that he willed not to tremble. His fingers obeyed well enough, but the giblets took on all the flutter instead. He was hot and cold with a belly full of brimstone, but the tech never looked twice at Jason.
He’d hidden, scared rigid, all day behind an industrious calm. Pins and needles sparked in his toes before his feet finally went numb because Jason never once moved from his chair. He remained blindly bent over his work, clamping his desk phone’s stealthily disconnected handset to his ear. No one bothered the busy bee, so the only thing Jason heard all that day was his own pulse and the voice inside his head promising his jelly heart that the technicians, like the landscaping crew, would find only what they were paid to look for.
The craving to be alone in the woods had been lit in him even before he was positive that the two cops were en route to his house. Once their turn gave them away, Jason knew more than ever that he needed the time alone to steel himself for another face-to-face with Detective Bayard.
• • •
Jason was navigationally challenged. He always had been. And it made him feel less of a man. He wore the cliché too easily, the reluctance to stop for directions, but stereotypes are often thick, ugly plaster over a framework of truth. Sometimes it took him a dozen passes at a route before he was comfortable enough to risk the distraction of the radio. If his concentration slid at the wrong time, he might as well write off the next hour for putting himself back on course. And let him make a wrong turn, even once, and it was branded for the foreseeable future in the panic center of his brain. On approach to the offending fork in the road, Jason’s attention would flail in a squirrel-in-the-intersection zigzag, trying to recall whether he remembered it because it was the right way to go, or if he remembered it because that was where he’d gone wrong the last time.
That’s how he’d found his haven, more than two years before he’d ever imagined he could kill a person, by twice taking an accidental turn onto a road that led nowhere.
The Realtor had been overzealous when Jason had asked what was available in small properties with a fair bit of green space and a whole lot of quiet on the outskirts of Stillwater. She had sent him off with a stack of listings to preview, each with the dreaded miniature map that might as well have been a squirming knot of worms for all the dismay it caused Jason. On both trips to the house that eventually became his own, he’d overshot the red x that he’d drawn and, without knowing it, substituted the next one for his turn. He trundled along a narrowing, winding trail that he came to realize didn’t look to be dancing to the same song that the road shown on the map was playing.
The first time, after several minutes of brow furrowing and mental rummaging for his bearings, Jason had to concede that, once again, he’d missed his mark. Of course, there was nowhere to turn around. Just as the maddening tingle in his bladder had worked around to an honest debate on the merits of using the ditch for a quick pit stop, a confident swath of fresh asphalt branched off to the right and back, more or less, in the direction he had come.
He’d cranked the steering wheel over with hope, only to dead-end in befuddlement. Farther into the woods, the blacktop blunted off as cleanly as a diving board. Jason was at a loss and staring down an eleven-point turn. But nature prevailed, both as a twiggy, green roadblock outside, and also as an urgent, relentless distraction on the inside. He jerked the gearshift into park and paced off much farther than modesty required to relieve himself behind the largest screening oak he could find. A glimpse deeper into the trees explained the road’s abrupt surrender. A sinkhole, sixty feet across, and probably more than twice as deep, had yawned a halt to the pavement’s progress.
The next bout of disorientation in the same part of town stranded Jason once again at the lip of the sinkhole in the woods. Although this time, it wasn’t as worrisome to him. Lost in the same place twice is a little less lost the second time around. The memory of the breezy green and gold dappling the forest floor was more than
enough incentive to kill the engine and wander once again into the trees. This time, he sat against a broken stump and considered the rim of the chasm. How had it happened? All around, the land was a firm platform holding up a grove and a road and then, all of a sudden, whump!
He finished his diet cola, ears-deep in the twitter-quiet of the thick woods, and concluded that Chicken Little had feared the wrong thing. The sky falling on your head was Providence and you were blameless. But the ground falling out from under your feet was something you should have felt coming.
• • •
The word twist would not begin to cover the contortions ol’ fate had performed to arrange that Jason found himself a face-saved widower. Heartbroken twice by his wife in a quick succession of painful words and then her sudden death, he’d been stranded, almost out-of-body, as an observer over the chaos that spilled a new life at his feet.
Patty had by all accounts been healthy when she told him, dry-eyed and as kindly as she could, that she no longer loved him, wasn’t sure she’d ever really loved him at all, and hoped he understood it was habit that had kept her at his side for seven years, but that it couldn’t make the distance until death do us part. Except that it had. Less than seventy-two hours after the bombshell, and before she could pack up her things and their friends and sign him off her bank books, death intervened the first time to make Jason’s problems go away.
Pleasant, lovely, and more than a little spoiled, Patty had possessed a unique dedication to getting her own way. But her vision of how things ought to be was undermined by a lazy lack of bark and bite. A rhythm was spawned the first time Jason had brought his class notes to her, without her having asked, when she’d missed an early-morning lecture in Intro to Income Taxation. She sparkled and he held up the candle to her automatically. He’d always known that her attachment to him was founded, in part, on the recognition that they were very much alike, in all the feeblest ways. But to him, that was as good a defense against being alone as any he could think of.
His father-in-law had detested him on sight, and his mother-in-law had never really looked at him at all until they were forced into a stiff, obligatory embrace in front of the casket. He was almost sure he’d seen a sneer behind the tears. The two inches of powder, though, and the softening juniper fog of gin fumes, made it hard to tell for certain.
It’s often said that dead people look as if they were sleeping. Jason didn’t find this to be true. Patty’s expression, backlit with the glow from the white satin coffin pillow, held none of the slack-faced stupor of sleep. The morticians had done a masterful job in setting her features and rouging her cheeks. In fact, he’d had to rein in the fear that she was faking it and was, at any moment, ready to spring from the box and proclaim him the fraud that he was, standing there being lauded as her beloved husband. The cat had been more beloved, and it was going home with her parents.
The softer side of Jason knew she didn’t belong there. The dentist’s chair, although often unpleasant, wasn’t expected to be the executioner’s recliner. No one died that way. But her heart had spilled more than one secret that week. A dearth of real affection for him was one; an intolerance for Versed and Fentanyl was another.
Somewhere along the line, perhaps in infantile trauma or schoolyard bullying, Jason had suffered a courage-ectomy. He’d withstood his father-in-law’s bristling analysis during the finalizing of Patty’s not insubstantial estate. It passed clear, but unspoken, between the two men that her father knew very well of his daughter’s intent to start anew. Tact and decorum were encoded into Jason’s father-in-law, so there was no ugly scene. Jason matched the silence with a passivity that was indivisibly a part of his skin, even more restricting than his father-in-law’s armor of pride. It prevented Jason from rising to the challenge of that sober glare, to argue that he would have fought for his marriage if he’d had the chance. He even thought, in the hours he didn’t sleep, of ways that he might have done just that. He hosted dialogues in the dark with his dead wife and convinced her on the stage of his imagination that they were good together, that she should stay. But in the end, a shame-pink face in the mirror was all his one-man shows earned him, and he took the money and ran—out of the frying pan and into the fire, as would be his hapless habit.
• • •
He’d adopted the trek to the sinkhole as a good omen and also a cleansing ritual. He came back often, especially once the trouble with Harris started, taking great pains to ensure that the smug, prying bastard hadn’t followed him there and didn’t know all of his secrets. Occasionally he was disappointed to find his seat taken by kids playing hooky or lighting séance bonfires in the glade, but not often enough for him to give up trying.
He had boosted himself off the usual tenterhooks one afternoon, shortly after he’d moved to Stillwater, relaxing against a tree and watching the light and shadows make kaleidoscope patterns on his closed eyelids. The blank bliss had been deep, so the commanding and not entirely friendly “Howdy” simply scared the shit out of him.
A county sheriff, decked out in starch and polished leather, stood over him, conjured out of God knew where. Jason hadn’t heard a thing.
“Oh. Hello.” Jason jumped to his feet and immediately wished he’d been more casual about it.
“Can I see some ID, sir?”
Jason scrabbled at his back pocket for his wallet. “Of course, Officer. Is there a problem? I mean, it’s okay for me to be out here, right? I just like looking at it.” Jason glanced over his shoulder at the hole, brimming with the golden light that fell through the gap it left in the trees. “It’s quiet here.”
“Oh, it’s something, isn’t it? The Public Works Department don’t care for it too much, but no problem, really, for you to sit here, if you like. It’s not private property, but it is dangerous. I know you’ll keep mind of the risks. We’ve just had kids hanging out here when they’re s’posed to be in school, or lighting fires at night and general hubbub. That sort of thing.”
“Well”—Jason pushed a chuckle to an awkward spot in his mouth—“I’m no kid.”
The cop nodded over Jason’s driver’s license. “I can see that, Mr.—ah—Getty. You haven’t been drinking, have you?”
“Oh, no, sir. Not a big drinker,” Jason stammered, then flinched at the obvious omission. “I mean, I did bring a drink out with me, but it’s just diet soda, sir.” He swept a hand at the can on a nearby stump. “Oh, and I always take my trash with me.”
“That’s fine.” The policeman jabbed his tongue into the side of his smirk and craned a look through the immediate trees and slid himself another quick once-over of Jason, head to toe. “Well, you have a nice day.”
“Thank you,” Jason said, knowing that it wasn’t likely. The shiny finish to his nice day was all fingerprinty now. “Uh, you, too.” But he said it to the cop’s back and didn’t really mean it anyway.
Beyond that one encounter, it had always been a peaceful place for him. Sanctuary. There, in the rustling jade cocoon, he allowed himself to dismiss the constant company of guilt and cringing. When he was alone there, no mirrors nervously ogled him, measuring him against the next guy. It was the one place to find a rare peace with his naked thoughts.
The forest grows ferns and trees; it cultivates mushrooms and spores; it fosters its creatures from nothingness to more of the mulchy same. And for Jason, the seeds of backbone, of entitlement, were nurtured in the fertile hollow that had dropped the bottom out of civilized advancement. The forest insisted. It pushed back. At some sudden swell of that’s-enough, it emphatically refused to be overrun by bullying machinery and someone else’s idea of what it should be. Jason had taken the lesson to heart without necessarily meaning to, and in some ways, the forest, with its reassuring murmuring and nodding boughs, was as much to blame for Jason’s ultimate predicament as anything else.
• • •
Pulling into the driveway almost two hours after he’d first spotted the detectives in their truck, Jason was not entir
ely surprised, nor pleased, to see Bayard still there, pacing at the front door, cell phone pressed to his ear.
“Mr. Getty.” The detective snapped closed his phone and took the front stoop in a loose-jointed, limber spring that made Jason’s skin crawl with annoyance and envy. “I’m glad I didn’t miss you.”
Jason heard it as I would have sat here until next week for the chance to give you the hairy eyeball, but he forced an agreeable smile. “How are things going, Detective? Any developments?”
“And how.”
A day spent trying not to die of anxiety had left Jason raw, and he could feel the prickling on his skin of the policeman’s predatory interest.
Bayard continued, “And the good news is, Lyle and his team are the neatest forensic crew I’ve ever seen, so if it looks bad, please know it could have been a lot worse.” He stepped aside to allow Jason to and through his own front door.
Had he been able to imagine their thoroughness, Jason would never have made it through his pantomimed work act. Dark paper covered the windows where the shades and curtains had been inadequate, and a flat, alien darkness stole any sense of home from the rooms. In the gloom, Jason could see traces of black powder smeared into the grooves on the doorframes and pick out a faint chemical smell still lingering in the air, but all in all, the place was reasonably in order.
“I need to show you something,” Bayard said. “If you think you’re up for it.”
In answer, Jason swallowed hard.
Bayard nodded acknowledgment to the unspoken misgiving. “I wouldn’t normally. I thought we were all done.” He let it hang for an important second. “But now I’m not sure that we are.”
Jason felt the air turn to molasses, and Bayard, close enough to touch, was hogging it effortlessly. The darkness helped, though. For the first time in his life, Jason found breathing a distant secondary concern to something else. In this case, to retaining his composure. “Of course.” He barely even stammered.
