Three Graves Full

by Jamie Mason

  Moments later, Tim Bayard stood at Jason Getty’s front door, finger poised above the doorbell. He had never underestimated the value of the simplest, most obvious etiquette. With all that he’d found in the backyard, he could have crashed through with a battle cry and been excused the dramatics, but over and over in his career, he’d followed the civilest path to often surprising results. A startled bad guy was an off-balance bad guy, and nothing is more startling to a red-handed outlaw than a polite knock at the door or a courteous please and thank you. They never saw it coming.

  His phone had been connected to a patrolman named Mike whom Bayard only knew as an overstuffed uniform that he’d passed in the hall on occasion. Now Mike kept Tim company on an open channel.

  Tim, in just above a whisper, brought the details into order for Mike. “This guy, Getty, he’s a real regular. It shouldn’t be a big deal.” Saying it out loud, however quietly, to another person, snapped the circle closed in Tim’s mind.

  He’d talked to Jason Getty for a handful of hours and never once left feeling as if he’d asked the right questions. The Montgomery/Reynolds case seemed simple enough. Getty had given them all the right access and accommodations. Yet, here they were. When “all right” was completely wrong, everything was off—every smile a beat too late, every cadence just the slightest bit wobbly. A pretender’s back was always so straight that his shirt sat funny on his shoulders. When they’d spoken, Jason’s eyes had strained to drift, but he’d forced them to stay, irises trembling like a weakling pinned under a two-hundred-pound bench press. Jason Getty was afraid of cops and in the way that didn’t seem entirely general. For the benefit of his new partner, Bayard kept the conclusion simpler.

  “He’s been really meek. Pretty helpful, to be fair. But somehow . . . I dunno. It’s never really fit. I knew this was going to get upended. Something’s been wrong the whole time. Just stay with me, Mike.”

  “I’m right here till I’m right there, Detective.”

  “Thanks.”

  Bayard rang the bell and immediately followed it with a mild volley from the side of his fist to the door. He craned back to look through the dining-room window for a better view of the main hall, scanning the shadows for movement. He repeated the sequence. Nothing.

  Tessa’s ears were flat against her head and tension swept back through her in waves that pulled her rigid as a stringed arrow.

  “Let’s try around back,” Bayard suggested.

  Tessa led the way.

  At the back door of Jason Getty’s house, Tim got more of the same from the door—a whole lot of nothing. But Tessa had gone frantic on the landing, prancing and woofing, shoving her nose into Tim’s hand.

  He ran his other hand across his mouth, then readied his pistol. He sniffed, wished he hadn’t, and huffed out the offending breath hard. “Ready?” he said to the dog.

  Tessa obligingly skittered left and right and gargled a hushed bark.

  “Still with me, Mike?”

  “Yep. Sure you don’t want to wait? I mean, you know Ford’s not there, right? And you said yourself it’s dead quiet.”

  “His truck isn’t here, but you should see the dog.”

  “So?”

  “She’s Ford’s dog.”

  “Okay, well, do what you gotta.”

  Bayard clipped the phone to his belt, speaker on, and hammered once again on the wood, then on the glass of the back-door window. He looked to Tessa and she panted her enthusiasm. She tossed her head and rocked back on her spring-loaded legs, a dog nod if ever he’d seen one. Which he hadn’t. Bayard shrugged, then drove his foot into the door, just below the handle, with the full force of his leg behind it.

  The whole works took surprisingly little effort; the door bowed under only a flimsy safety catch at the top. It gave way with the sharp snap, banging open and sending Detective Bayard spilling over the threshold. He pedaled his legs to stay ahead of a face-plant and barely won out over his momentum, keeping everything upright.

  But Tessa nearly toppled him anyway in her dash for the main hallway. She didn’t wander. She didn’t snuffle along the linoleum or linger to twitch her ears. The weak light from the front windows lit everything to a scale of gray shadows, showing a clear and empty path from the kitchen through to the front entryway. To Bayard, the house smelled faintly of the decay in the yard. He couldn’t know what Tessa sensed, but the chills that bent every hair on his body to full attention were knowledge aplenty.

  Tessa had fallen to her haunches against the wall in the corridor, her forelegs out stiff to allow her to crane as tall as her neck would go. Her throat rippled the sound forward, up to the ceiling, ricocheting off the walls, raking raw all who heard her: a howl of pure misery.

  • • •

  The ringing cry scrubbed every thought from Bayard’s head. Never mind that it was terrifying on some primal level to be blind and deaf to whatever horror Tessa sensed; just the sheer sound of it made white static spike and hiss in the place where his logic should have been. Her warning wail set fire to his fight-or-flight instinct, but it burned at cross-purposes with his own weak senses. Nothing was there. Even sand through his fist at least let him know what he couldn’t grasp. What only she could know sparked a tremble that sped through him.

  “What the hell?” Bayard dropped to a crouch. “Tessa, what?” Her eyes were squinched tight, the sound rising from deep within her to blast the air with her anguish. The noise careened off the walls and through his head.

  “Tessa, stop.” Bayard wrapped his arms around the dog. He felt the shudders climbing through her, so he hugged her to him, his face buried in her fur. “Tessa, please.” Her baying rang on until Tim’s eyelashes were wet with tears that he hadn’t felt crest.

  Then she stopped suddenly enough to leave a hole in the hallway, so stark it tipped Bayard right off-balance. He caught himself with his hand against the floor and raised his face to Tessa’s.

  Bayard had easily believed that man’s best friend could be taught to understand basic commands. He’d seen for himself how clever dogs could be at communicating their wants and needs, and at anticipating what their masters might require of them. But whenever it had been suggested that a dog could read a man’s mind, or even bypass the internal chatter and scan a soul, he’d always indulged the idea with the same nod he reserved for UFO sightings and ghosts on the stairs.

  But he forgot to remember that he didn’t believe in that sort of thing once Tessa’s gaze crawled through his own eyes and into the solitary confinement of his mind. For the briefest of moments she was there, their two wills separated only by a thin glass of silence. In the warm amber quiet of her eyes, understanding glowed between the crashing surges of his heartbeat. His scalp tingled as it crawled in awe at the realization that to the very edge of actual dialog he was, for a moment, not alone with his thoughts.

  She opened her mouth and took Bayard’s wrist in her teeth and curled around on herself, drawing Tim’s arm over her. He hugged her and wiped at his eyes, but she butted him off. She repeated the process, wrist in mouth, curling herself into a comma.

  “What the hell’s going on?” asked the other officer from the phone on Tim’s belt. Tim could finally hear him again.

  “I don’t know, Mike.” Bayard stood, and immediately Tessa pulled him back through the motions again, curled nose to tail with Bayard’s wrist gently, but firmly, in her teeth. He watched her insistence and precision, but kept talking. “Getty’s not here, or he’s really good at playing possum. I’m going to have a look around, but I’m not touching anything.”

  “Got it. I’m nearly there.”

  Tim took a step to leave the foyer, but Tessa wouldn’t allow it. She blocked his way, pressing her side against his shins. She had his wrist again wound around herself.

  Bayard tried to step away, but Tessa bounded in front of him, mouthed his wrist, harder this time, and ducked to the side. Then she bounced away from him and barked. She pounced on him to repeat it once more, complete wit
h the punctuating woof.

  “What are you doing, girl?” He tried on an authoritative tone. “Tessa, come.”

  She barked back, unimpressed.

  Clearly she wasn’t going stop her interference, so Bayard disconnected from Mike and called Maggie.

  “Did you find him?” She hadn’t even said hello.

  “Not yet. I don’t even know if Ford was here or not. But Tessa’s acting really weird and I can’t get her moving or get past her.”

  “What is she doing?”

  Bayard explained, and fifteen miles away, Maggie sank to the floor. “Oh, God. He’s not there? Are you sure?”

  “Maggie, what? What is she trying to tell me?”

  “She does that when something’s wrong with Ford, like when he suffers one of his angina attacks. Whenever he has one, or is about to have one, this is what she does. She knows it’s coming. She does it to him or she does it to me to make me follow her to him. She did it—oh Tim—she did it when Ford fell off the stepladder last year. Remember when he chipped his elbow?”

  “Hang on, Maggie. Don’t go all the way to the finish. He’s not here. No one is. His truck’s not here either, so that could be good. Call the hospital to check if he’s come in. We’re going to find him.”

  “Don’t wait so long between calls, Tim.”

  “I’m not going to call you and send your heart into your throat if I haven’t got anything to say. No news is just no news, okay? I promise. I’m out here. Know that. I’m not going home until I find him. Just check the hospital and let me know once you have.”

  Bayard knelt in front of Tessa. They stared at each other. “Tess, I don’t know how to talk to you.” He offered his wrist. “Take me to Ford. If you can.”

  She rocked back against locked forelegs and barked again, then sprinted for the front door, then pulled toward the left until she zagged right and whined, pawing a small, dark box before doubling back to puff over a spot in the rug.

  Tim tried the hall switch, but it clicked dead in the wall. Stuck with only the garish pointer of his halogen flashlight, he traced Tessa’s pacing. His beam showed blood on the floor to the left, and then to the right, he knelt to look more closely at a mobile phone, battery side up in the carpet. This evidence needed to be left where it was.

  Tim flicked open his phone and first selected Jason Getty’s number from his call list, then watched the phone on the floor. The tone in his ear rang through to the default electronic mailbox, no recorded greeting. Grim to the back teeth, Tim dialed Ford from his speed-dial roster. He held his breath for a hopeful interval, but the phone on the floor lit up, twisted half a turn, and Beethoven’s Fifth sang out into the too quiet house.

  Tessa bayed to break the walls just ahead of her heart.

  26

  I forgot!” Jason blurted.

  It was cold-water bracing and strangely anchoring for Leah that anything in this hellish night could feel familiar. She’d been primed a dozen times for this brand of flimsy con in every one of Reid’s absurd reaches for distance from his sins.

  “You forgot that you had a cell phone.” While she fit the puzzle edges of the last few hours together, a reasonable fear fought for ground against the distinct and disorienting impression that she had nothing at all to fear from Jason. So instead, Leah was furious. “Police and ambulances, ours for the asking, in your pocket the whole time and you forgot?”

  She ground her teeth over his silence and set loose the simple test through them. “So call 911, then.”

  He made no move toward his pocket.

  “You won’t,” she said.

  “I can’t. Please.”

  Leah scrambled out of the car and Jason mirrored her to face off over the hood. No set of headlights was anywhere in sight, nothing to offer the hope of any help, but for the first time all evening, since the moment her trip to Reid’s temporary grave had gone haywire, Leah felt like herself. She wanted answers even more than she wanted a white knight or an aspirin.

  “Oh my God,” she said, her realizations now steadily thudding into place in time with the pulse in the side of her head. “I am so stupid.”

  Leah’s eyes ran back and forth, snatching to the foreground bits of the scene that had brought the two of them out into the night together. “You were filthy before you fought with him, and then he said he didn’t do it—oh, yeah, I know! I heard everything.” She lobbed Jason’s startled look back at him. “You were quiet and I was falling all over myself, but sound carries real well when the whole goddamned world is holding its breath. I didn’t know what the hell he was playing at, but he wasn’t playing, was he?”

  Jason gaped like a fish horrified at drinking air.

  “Did you hit me?”

  “I—Leah, if you’ll just let me—”

  “It’s a pretty simple question: Did you hit me?”

  “It was an accident.”

  The thrill of wringing him with questions registered on a scale from unkind to unwise, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. The Q&A burned away the pain and the terror, and it kept the rest of the night at bay. She was fairly certain that whatever came next for the foreseeable future was going to be chock-full of things she didn’t want to see and didn’t want to do, so she kept tossing questions onto the bonfire instead.

  “Were you going to kill me?”

  “I would never hurt anyone!”

  And there it was. The rarest specimen of falsehood—the elusive, nocturnal, true lie. Leah considered herself the reluctant curator of a world-class collection of honest untruths; most of them she’d stockpiled were just different variations on Reid’s I-love-yous.

  “Well, there’s a fucking relief.”

  “It was self-defense!”

  “Hitting me was self-defense?”

  “No, no, the other—the—” His hands fell to his sides. “Harris. In the tarp.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “I’m not a bad person. I didn’t tell the police because I was afraid, but I’m not like that.”

  Not like that. Leah wondered what like that would look like and thought of Boyd Montgomery. He would likely also have a good story justifying why he’d shot Reid and his own wife. But would he ever wear a look like Jason’s? Would it fit his face? Would she believe it if he even tried? It was difficult to imagine. Jason could have left her to Boyd half a dozen times already and he hadn’t. She wanted to make less of that fact, but she couldn’t.

  In spite of herself, a faint pity welled up, vying with anger as the source of the weight in her chest. She sighed, disgusted, and with herself for starters. Out of practice, she didn’t have her usual stamina for confrontation. A breeze rolled through her empty fingers where Reid’s hand hadn’t been for so long.

  “You know what? Prove it. Show us how much you’re ‘not like that.’ ” She scanned the tree line and pointed. “He went in about there. He can’t have gotten that far.” She thrust the flashlight into his hands. “Jason, hurry. You just go find him, and I’ll do the rest.”

  “The rest?”

  “I’ll get Detective Watts to the hospital. You can take the truck and go wherever you need to go. Just get in there after him, bring him out, and you can run or whatever you were going to do.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?”

  “Because if you help me and this doesn’t work out for you, it was never going to. You had a plan tonight and it was my stupid luck to fall into it. But whatever. You have to get in there now or it’ll be too late. Jason, just hurry. Run. I’ll stay with the car.”

  Jason recoiled as if she’d slapped him. “Go after him by myself? You won’t. You’ll leave. As soon as you get a few minutes to yourself, you’re going to freak out, Leah. You’re going to drive away and leave me.”

  “No, I won’t. Right now I want to help the detective more than I want to burn you. You can take the keys, if you want.”

  “Yes, you will. You’ll run. You’ll flag someone down.” He looked away, red to the ears.
“I would.” She heard him swallow. His nose went red and his eyes watered. “And anyway, what if Montgomery comes back? You’d be here all alone. You can’t be out here by yourself. It’s not safe.”

  “Not safe? Not safe here? You can’t be serious.”

  His eyebrows leaned plaintively up his forehead. Again, Leah sifted her thoughts for fear of him and came up empty. Something, or a domino row of somethings, must have tipped the world on its head for him. She couldn’t disbelieve him or pry what she did know of him away from a nagging inclination to sympathy.

  “Look, I don’t know what I’ll believe tomorrow, Jason, but I swear to God, I won’t be stopping anywhere until I get to the hospital. It’ll give you time. This has nothing to do with what you’ve told me, anyway. I promise. I was never going to be able to go into the woods. I just can’t—I can’t go in there.”

  “You have to. You have to come with me.”

  “You’re not hearing me. I cannot go into the woods, Jason. I can’t go into the woods because I will freak out if I do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  When Leah was ten years old, she had been on a camping trip, a rare family outing. While her mother and stepfather made a booze run, her oldest stepbrother, lazy and stoned, had bribed Leah from her splashing at the lake’s edge to go back to the campsite for his radio. He’d offered $4, and then sweetened the deal, since she wasn’t a baby anymore, with the grown-up dare of the swill-half of the last beer from his secret stash.

  It had been wickedly hot, the flies buzzing overloud in her ears and the forest floor tilting and wobbling under her feet. Leah had kept to the shade, just off the path, as the alcohol zipped through her virgin veins. Within half an hour, she was hopelessly lost. They didn’t find her until the next morning, and then only with the help of a handful of park rangers.

  Since that day Leah had never been able to stomach beer and had not gone deeper than three strides into a stand of trees.

  A quick version of the tale told, and her palms were already slick with sweat. Jason stared at her for more, eyes expectant for a bigger and better reason, but she didn’t have one. In the face of Jason’s titanic fear of whatever he’d done and how close he was to being collared for it, her phobia had been skimmed and shown shallow. At the brass base of it, even without Jason’s demands, it wasn’t a very good excuse to sit in the open, alone and concussed. Not with Boyd Montgomery on the loose.