by Jamie Mason
The park was deserted, just as it should have been at that hour. Maggie pulled into the space where the little blue car had served as a makeshift cot for the tiny, time-killing girl she’d spoken to earlier. She stared out through the windshield at all the nothing going on in the park. The engine ticked and the dog shuffled her anticipation in the passenger seat. And it was all the news to be had.
Maggie clipped the leash to Tessa’s collar and stood aside to let her out of the car and into the park. Tessa ran the length of her lead, snuffling and darting between invisible troves of interest, leaving Maggie too aware of the weight of her unease and fidgeting for a reason not to feel foolish. She didn’t know why Ford had wanted to check on the girl in the park, and she didn’t know where that curiosity would have led him beyond this spot. She didn’t know anything more than that it was well past their bedtime. Her intuition fretted away in the back of her mind like an itch that squirmed just past the longest contortion of her reach. The buzzing of the lamppost only highlighted the quiet, and it irritated her. “You could have just asked, you know. It would have been a simple enough question as he walked out the door. But, no. And so here you are, in the park, in the middle of the night with your dog, but not a clue. You’re really slipping, Margaret.”
Tessa paused, alerted by the tone, and checked Maggie’s face to be sure the scolding was not intended for her. Satisfied, the dog bowed back to her sleuthing, as Maggie muttered on in her tirade against her own lack of foresight. In the near distance, brakes squealed and the gritty pattering of tire-stirred gravel echoed down the bricked facades of downtown.
Maggie’s monologue faltered at the sound and she listened for more. There wasn’t any more. She sighed and reeled in the slack of Tessa’s leash. “This is silly. Let’s go home.” But Tessa stared ahead, lock-legged and rooted in place, pulling against the shortened tether.
“Come on, Tessa.”
The dog looked to her mistress and back across the open lawn.
Maggie gave the leash a grumpy tug. “Not now, Tess. No strays or trash-digging for you tonight. I’m not in the mood.”
Tessa dropped her head, the equivalent of a dog shrug, and fell agreeably in step, back to the car.
• • •
Experienced bird-watchers can identify a hidden warbler just on the pitch and variations in its call. Sometimes they’ll pinpoint the seasonal plumage and the mood of the creature, too, just by the sound it makes. Savant music students may be able to name the arrangement and performer of a well-loved piece by listening to merely a few bars. They can hear a Stradivarius or a Steinway, where most would hear only a violin or a piano. And the simple secret of mothers-with-eyes-in-the-backs-of-their-heads is the ability to discern that only one combination of items in the house could make a sound like that: the new stainless-steel toilet brush clattering along the spindles of the open staircase railing.
But what even the most canny and attentive human being discerns by straining at the eardrums would disappoint the average mutt.
Tessa was always game for a late walk. Night smells and night sounds were so different and, without the sun toasting her dark fur to distraction, much more pleasant for her. Her ears twitched constantly and her nose cataloged trace scents by the hundreds. Rabbits had been in the park earlier, and sometime recently, a kid sick from too many sweets. She could already feel the leading edge of a storm that wouldn’t roll overhead until tomorrow afternoon, and she could hear squirrels turning against dry bark in their fretful sleep deep in the hollowed knothole of a dead branch. The second hand on the clock tower in the square whirred in its loop to underscore the night music for her. All of these tidbits flowed over Tessa with as little notice taken as Maggie had paid to the tiny shifts in the wind against her face. Tessa didn’t react because it wasn’t important.
Obviously, Maggie was agitated. Late-night drives and strolls on their own in the deserted park would have clued Tessa to that. But anxiety has a taste that doesn’t tingle on the human tongue. It sours the edges of a person’s aura. The tang was only vague around Maggie just now and was nothing Tessa could remedy anyway.
Apparently, it was nothing for Ford to attend to either. Otherwise, Tessa couldn’t account for why Maggie hadn’t perked up at the sound of his truck. The slight arrhythmia of the engine’s firing made easy work of picking out Ford’s ride from other sounds. Gun the throttles on a dozen identical pickup trucks and Tessa would find her own (because, of course, everything that was Ford’s was hers as well) in seconds flat.
He had headed out of town, out onto the forest road, and not in the smooth way they usually rode together—the truck lurched into the distance, erratic on the go, jerky on the stops. But now Tessa and Maggie were humming along due opposite, back toward home. Tessa chuffed a sigh and twisted her head with the passing guardrail posts. She could hear the interruptions they made in the airflow past the car. It was all so interesting.
21
Boyd drove in silence, flicking his eyes rhythmically from the street to the rearview to the speedometer to a quick check at both sides, all the while holding a precise line through the bends of the road. He’d spurned the speed limit, sometimes by nearly double, to put plenty of asphalt between himself and those two loonies from the house.
But Boyd hadn’t driven all that much in recent years. The bank, the liquor store, and the market were all in the same strip mall. Fifteen minutes to get there and another fifteen to get back, twice a month, was about the size of it, and although his twenty-year-old Nissan rattled a bit in the trim, its mild engine ticked like a clock. This mammoth rumbled like a logroll in a thunderstorm, and it flat-out unnerved him. He had never wrangled a vehicle as modern, complicated, and howlingly loud as the pickup. And he’d never been worried about being chased before, either.
It had never occurred to him how much concentration it would all demand, but it was surely enough to bring on a headache bad enough to compete with the soreness in his balls. He hunched over the wheel and squinted a hard focus on driving inconspicuously while trying, with limited success, to shake off the teasing prize of all puzzles—how to ride a fast rail out of Stillwater in a dead cop’s stolen truck. Then all he had to worry about was what to do with the rest of his life.
There were boondocks and backwoods in the near distance, some of them even peopled with Montgomery kin, but Boyd’s standoffish ways had hardly endeared him to most of them. Any of them, if he was honest. A cold flutter dropped right through him. What if he made one of those cop shows for killing that detective? There’d be no sure safe haven in all the world, even under a Montgomery roof. Everyone knows that juicy gossip runs thicker than the sap in a family tree.
It wasn’t fair.
Boyd had always thought of time, his time, in the same way he regarded a vast forest full of sunlit hollows and shadowed thickets. He’d conceded to the natural way of things, but he wouldn’t apologize for clearing some space of his own. Every man had a right to that. Now that he was alone, he only wanted to stay that way—bothering no one and earning a little peace and quiet in return. He had tried it the regular way. He’d bought up a pile of debt and called it a home and married up and let her set out her plan for their lives while he took out the garbage. Katielynn ought not to have done him like that. And that long-haired, little peckerhead? Boyd wished he were still alive so that he could shoot him again. He was still that pissed off.
The strobing pools of yellow light from the streetlamps worried him. His route out of the county was a winding series of dark side roads with only one short run across a corner of town. This was the span that concerned him most. Crossing the well-lit, open stretch left him feeling as bare as an egg.
The storefronts were unlit, their shadowy window displays hidden in the gloom, then opaqued in the sliding glare of his headlights. Boyd’s eyes darted back and again over the scene to mark the difference between mannequin and security guard, his paranoia inventing stealthy movement where there was none. Preoccupied as he was w
ith his imagination, he was sluggish in responding to the very real tomcat that darted into his path from the alley between a closed tavern and a still-bustling all-night diner. The cat flinched to a petrified arch, its yellow eyes wide and fixed on the truck’s grille.
Boyd swerved and braked hard, freeing the cat from the spell of the headlamps, but kicking up a racket in the strewn gravel at the far edge of the lane. The truck skated over the grit, then hurled him against his seat belt as it jerked to a standstill. The cat loped to the opposite sidewalk and glared back in contempt. He watched it slink away in the rearview mirror, scanning the street and the diner window for clues that he’d drawn any unwanted notice. He curled his lip over the newly familiar urge to curse. With shaking hands, he steered the truck back to center, a heavy dose of asphalt pebbles clattering in the wheel wells.
The fright had jolted all of his senses high. He sniffed the air and immediately wished he hadn’t. He’d been sucking in the reek of his clothes, off and on, since he’d shut himself up in the cab, and it brought back to mind his wrestling around in the dead glop that could not have been, would not have been, absolutely was not, Katielynn. A deep, nagging tingle marked an alarm that had suddenly switched on in his guts.
And then a sound. Boyd had felt the wheels pick up some rocks off the shoulder. They clacked off the rims as the tires spit them out of the way. His brows came together in concentration to look, listen, smell, and think over the painful thumping of his heart.
Boyd hated to admit it, especially coming as it was just on the heels of having conjured Katielynn to mind, but as the rattle of dispersing gravel grew fainter, the other noise gained ground—a muted drag, scraping against metal and a soft thump, coming from behind him, but nowhere near the tires.
His foot forgot its job on the accelerator and the truck slowed to a crawl. He looked again into the rearview mirror, at a red and grimy smudge raked across the back window. He knew full well that it hadn’t been there a few moments ago. He also knew a more complete analysis was due, and right soon at that, but somehow his mind was still stuck on the notion that Katielynn shouldn’t have any red left in her.
Boyd let the truck drift to a stop on the shoulder, eyes glued to the mirrored view behind him. The last of the streetlights were a block in the distance, but still close enough to throw wet glints off the smear on the glass. Boyd had never fainted in his life, but as a blackness rose up to blot out the view of the street behind him, his heart squeezed down small and hot in his chest. He found that, somehow, unmanly or not, a forced nap might not be the worst thing he could think of at the moment.
The trail of muck on the window disappeared into the rising shadow. The harder he stared, the more he wasn’t at all sure he was still awake. The black void moved and, in doing so, betrayed its edges. Boyd’s attention shifted closer to home. He found his own eyes in the mirror, strange and double exposed, his own face eclipsed by a human-shaped shadow that didn’t quite match up in size or contour to his own. Two men materialized, overlaid in the same dim reflection.
As hard as he’d started to wish for it, unconsciousness didn’t rescue him, and only because he had to, Boyd sucked in a dose of sour air. To his horror, he was left stranded in his seat, very much awake with his heart banging to drown out every other sound, staring through bloody glass into the furious glare, reflected back into his own eyes from someone behind him in the truckbed.
• • •
Spirit totems are usually grand things: eagles, bears, rushing rivers; any number of elemental or noble symbols. Jason’s soul, though, was probably best represented by a bit of rope: a bundle twisted in on itself, a stringy thing, terribly easily knotted. And as such, he now understood the tension at the center of an evenly matched tug-of-war.
The undead Ford Watts hadn’t been successful in his crafty break for the truck, not all the way to behind the wheel, anyway. By her gasp alone, Jason knew he wasn’t the only one seeing the camel work boot as it dropped stealthily under the sight line of the side wall. And he found that he was dragged exactly neither way by the pull of doing the right thing, striving as it was against the hundred ways he could still slither away from his problems. So, in lieu of a decision, he choked the life out of the steering wheel and let Leah’s concern for the policeman drag them forward.
“Oh, no! Go! Go! Help him!” she cried.
The truck was almost out of sight faster than seemed the least bit safe, and when counting up horse legs, you wouldn’t bet on Leah’s car in a race. But the gate had opened and race they did. Their route rode a plain stretch of thoroughfare, straight through to an eventual corner of town, then out into a series of mild hills, each rise blocking the long view. Jason’s dread ran ahead, cresting each intersection and knoll before them. The thought of what it would mean to catch up to the truck kept nudging Jason’s foot off the accelerator, and Leah countered every lag with a howled prompt to go faster.
“Oh, God. This is all my fault,” she wailed.
“Your fault? How could this be your fault?”
“Detective Watts wouldn’t have even come except for me.”
“Huh? Who knows? Maybe someone saw Boyd Montgomery and called the police, or saw me—” He stopped just before the maybe someone saw me digging slipped out. Regardless, why had Ford Watts come? Why had any of them come?
In getting the body out of the ground, the night was always going to have been traumatically unpleasant. Jason had signed on for that and had already made the down payment in nightmares for the privilege of even trying to move Harris out of the way. But the intersection of everyone’s purposes had gone all the way to end-of-the-line disastrous, and he couldn’t help but wonder beyond his normal agnosticism. What the hell was happening here? Was there a higher power drawing a line under his life as he’d lived it? Was there ever any intervention? Or better (or worse) yet, was it all preordained?
“Saw you . . . what?” Leah asked.
Panic brushed against the top of Jason’s throat again, closing it up like a tickled flytrap.
“Nothing.”
His little slipup spiked down through his middle, and he felt her staring, her eyes heating up the side of his face. He hunkered deeper into the seat. He wasn’t cut out for this in any extended play, no matter that he’d proved quite good at faking it for short bursts.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe someone saw me run out after you. I mean you did drive up and park an unfamiliar car on the street in the middle of the night, right? Maybe it worried the neighbors.” He tried on a Detective Bayard—style pause and felt the power of it, but none of the rightness. Low blow, Mr. Getty. He belatedly tried to soften it. “But still, that doesn’t make it your fault.”
“We’re losing him,” she said.
Way up ahead, a curve and a hill swallowed the truck again. The options rolled over Jason’s perfect tightrope, a unicycle high-wire act—with no net and a storm gale blowing through the big top. He was sorely worried about anything that pulled them closer to the moment of having to do something, anything. And he was well aware that his worry was some sort of metaphysical catalyst for fiasco.
He’d said so himself, everything he did was the wrong thing. So how long could he get away with doing nothing? He didn’t know. How much gas was there left in the tank? How bad would the next wrong words out of his mouth make him look? And there was always the odd telephone pole to plow into. He cut his eyes to check that Leah had her seat belt on.
“Jason, look!”
The final hilltop gave way to a mile of road, plumb-straight, the yellow dividing line spearing through the night under the headlights. Far ahead, a set of taillights flared under braking, tilted around a right turn, and vanished.
22
The evolution of a species takes millennia, but dread can leap from a single-celled organism to an agile, nagging parasite in minutes. By the time Maggie had hung her sweater back on its hook in the closet, she was already launching into an argument with the strong urge to raise t
he alarm.
“Maggie Watts, if you stir up the night shift for nothing, Ford’ll have your head.”
Tessa lifted her nose from the kitchen floor at the outburst.
If he’s still in the head-having business. The voice ringing in her mind’s ear feigned cool detachment; hinting at the bleakest possible outcome with the light, maddening touch of spider’s feet.
“That’s ridiculous. He hasn’t been gone that long.”
Tessa looked from Maggie to the door, clearly perplexed by the one-sided conversation.
But it’s the middle of the night. Wouldn’t he have called?
“Yes, it is the middle of the night, which might be exactly why he hasn’t called. He no doubt thinks I’m sleeping like any sensible person would be at this hour.”
You’re probably right. Maggie held her breath to see if she’d scored the point and made peace with herself. But he knows you; knows you’d worry.
She didn’t respond right away. Maggie was not fond of arguing, especially with the part of herself that sounded more than a bit like Sister Patricia Ignatius, the only haughty, habited hater of children who had taught at St. Joseph’s Primary Academy. And Maggie was polite, always. She didn’t speak out of turn, even when debating her own dark side, nor did she forge ahead before she’d thought her comebacks through.
Instead, she made tea and tried to ignore the ticking mantel clock. She retrieved the telephone from its cradle and fetched a stash of chocolate/cashew snack mix from a covered saucepan at the back of the pots-and-pans shelf. Glancing again and again at the receiver didn’t make it ring. She stirred milk into her tea and wiggled her finger through the nuts to root out the chocolate pieces. No message icon appeared from the voice mail, but Maggie dialed into the system all the same, just to be sure. She stared deep into the pattern of the stone countertop and tapped scattered salt from the shiny surface to her tongue.
