Water's Edge

by Robert Whitlow

  “I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.”

  Tom nodded glumly and left the jail. Getting in his car, he leaned his head against the back of the seat. The encounter with Rose had drained every bit of fight from him. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine his life twenty-four hours earlier. It wasn’t possible. He was being pulled apart on a rack, and his future would be nothing except humiliation and ever-increasing pain. Then an idea he’d never thought would cross his mind appeared with a sudden and surprising appeal.

  Tom could leave this life for the next. It would be better for him. Better for everyone.

  There was an old deer rifle in a gun case beneath the bed in the bedroom where his father slept when he moved in with Elias. The rifle fired bullets that were powerful enough to kill a buck two hundred yards away. From close range, it would be an instantaneous and painless death. Tom saw himself kneeling in Elias’s study for a final prayer, then taking the gun outside to a spot behind the garage. He could sit down, lean against the wall, place the barrel of the rifle beneath his chin, and pull the trigger. The key to the gun case was in a small envelope in his father’s desk at the office.

  He started the car’s engine and drove to the office. On the way he passed two downtown churches that were now disgorging the morning’s worshippers. No one seemed to recognize his car. Adjacent to the church his parents attended was the cemetery where they were buried along with more than a score of Crane relatives. Elias owned a couple of plots in the cemetery. His uncle only needed one for himself and would certainly allow Tom’s body to be buried in the other.

  Tom didn’t bother trying to hide his car. He parked directly in front of the office, got out, ripped off the police tape, and fumbled for his key. It wasn’t there. He’d not replaced the key confiscated by Detective Keller.

  Tom calmly returned to his car, opened the trunk, and took out the lug wrench. Glancing around to make sure the side street was empty, he carefully aimed the wrench at a spot near the lock and smashed the glass. He reached inside and flipped the lock. He went straight to the desk. The key for the gun case was still in the envelope in the bottom left drawer of the desk. He slipped it into his pocket and left. Now the police couldn’t deny there had been a break-in.

  A strange peace descended on Tom as he drove to Elias’s house. He’d passed into the eye of the storm, a place of calm where he could act dispassionately before the swirling insanity of everything else that was going on around him returned on Monday morning. Elias’s car was gone. Tom parked beneath the large oak tree and went into the house. Rover was lying on his side in the front room. He raised his head when Tom passed, then rolled over. The dog would be happier with Elias than he had been with Tom.

  Tom headed down the hallway to his father’s old bedroom. He pulled the gun case out from beneath the bed and turned the key in the lock. The gun lay nestled in gray foam padding along with two boxes of ammunition. Tom took five bullets from an ammunition box and loaded one of them in the rifle. He slipped the other bullets in his pocket. The smooth wood of the rifle felt cool against his hands. He ignored Rover as he passed through the front room but then stopped at the front door. When he’d played out this scenario in his car outside the jail, he’d spent a few moments in Elias’s study.

  Tom checked his watch. There was plenty of time before Elias might return from church. He went into the study and leaned the rifle against the wall. Kneeling in front of the chair, he bowed his head and quickly asked God to forgive him for all the stupid mistakes he’d made in his life. Suicide was probably a sin too; however, the overwhelming problems he would experience if he continued to live, and the difficulties he would bring to others, made putting an end to life a reasonable option. Once gone, he could do no more wrong. Elias’s Bible was lying on the seat of the chair. Turning to the concordance in the back, Tom looked up the word death. A portion of a verse in 1 Corinthians 15 caught his eye: “O death, where is your sting?” He closed the Bible. That was it. Death no longer had the ability to hurt him. Its sting was gone. He had nothing to fear.

  Grabbing the gun, Tom resolutely left the house. It was a slightly overcast day. He glanced up at the sky and wondered what it would look like from heaven’s perspective. Behind the garage Elias had parked a rusty utility trailer. The tires on the trailer were flat and rotting off the rims. Tom sat on the ground next to the trailer. He raised the gun to his shoulder and pointed it across the open field. He flipped off the safety, aimed at a stump about fifty yards away, and pulled the trigger. A tiny cloud of dust sprouted beside the stump. The gun worked. And unlike the stump, Tom wouldn’t miss his next target. He inserted another bullet into the chamber and positioned the gun so the muzzle rested against the bottom of his chin. He had to fully extend his arms to press his thumb against the trigger yet keep the gun steady. He closed his eyes for a final prayer.

  “Tom!” a female voice called out. “Are you in there?”

  Tom opened his eyes, lowered the gun, and crawled a few feet so he could peek around the corner.

  It was Tiffany Pelham.

  She was standing on the front porch looking in the windows of the house. Tom leaned back against the garage and repositioned the gun. He hesitated. If he pulled the trigger now, Tiffany would be the one to find him. The high-powered rifle would be effective but messy. Leaning the rifle against the back of the garage, Tom walked around the corner of the building.

  “I’m over here!” he called out.

  Tiffany saw him and ran down the front steps and across the yard. She didn’t stop until she reached him, threw her arms around him, buried her head in his shoulder, and cried. Tom, his arms hanging limply at his sides, stared past her head toward the driveway.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked when her sobs stopped for a moment.

  Tiffany’s crying continued without an answer. There was nothing to do but wait. Finally she pulled back, sniffled, and rubbed her eyes.

  “Where can we talk?” she asked.

  “Uh, right here.”

  Tiffany glanced over her shoulder. “No, it has to be someplace private.”

  “There’s no place more private than this. Elias is at church.”

  “No, but I don’t want Elias walking in on us while I’m talking.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  Tiffany looked in Tom’s eyes. “Austin’s Pond.”

  “Austin’s Pond? Why there?”

  “Can we go there?” Tiffany ignored his question. “We’ll both need to drive. I can’t leave my car here.”

  “Okay,” Tom replied reluctantly.

  Leaving the gun behind the garage, Tom went into the house to get his car keys and wallet. As he walked, he quickly checked his commitment to carry through with his plan to kill himself. Freeing Tiffany from her attachment to him would be another reason to cut his ties with Earth. When he returned to the front yard, Tiffany was already in her car. She lowered the window.

  “You lead. I’ll follow.”

  On the way to the pond, Tom kept a close eye on Tiffany in the rearview mirror. That she still loved him despite the criminal charges showed the depth of her fantasy. He would have to be as harsh as possible with her at the pond. Her final memory of him, if not bloody, needed to end any chance that she could imagine them living happily ever after. He turned onto the dirt road that led directly to the pond. He reached the barn and let the car slowly roll to a stop. Tiffany pulled in beside him.

  “Let’s sit at the picnic table,” Tiffany said.

  They walked toward the concrete table.

  “It’ll be better if I say a few things first,” Tom began. “There’s no way—”

  “Wait. Not yet.”

  They reached the table. Tom sat on the bench in the spot where he’d wept over the loss of his parents. Tiffany stood in front of him, her lower lip quivering.

  “Tiffany, this is going to be hard enough without you saying things that are going to embarrass you after you hear from me. You’ve
got to realize—”

  “Stop!” Tiffany put her fist to her lips for a second, then pointed toward the far end of the pond.

  “What?” Tom asked, mystified.

  “Arthur had your father and Harold Addington killed!” Tiffany buried her face in her hands.

  A sick, sour feeling hit Tom in his stomach.

  “I heard him talking about it two nights ago at the barn. He didn’t know I was checking on a horse in one of the stalls, and he came in with two of his security guys. He told them he’d testified earlier in the day in front of the grand jury, and that you and Rose Addington were going to be arrested. However, if going to jail didn’t take care of the problem, it would be necessary to do to you what they did to your father and Harold Addington. One of the men argued with Arthur and told him two more deaths would bring down too much suspicion from the police. Arthur got mad and told him there might not be any other option. At that point they walked away from the stall. I didn’t hear anything else that was said.”

  Stunned, Tom didn’t respond.

  “Rick and I have suspected something wasn’t right with Arthur’s business for years,” Tiffany said, “but I had no idea it involved murder.”

  “Does Rick know about this conversation?” Tom managed.

  “No.”

  “And you’re sure about what you heard?”

  “Yes.” Tiffany covered her face with her hands again for a moment. “What are you going to do? I can’t stand the thought of you getting locked up in jail.”

  Tom eyed her suspiciously. He’d been deceived so many times the past few weeks he wasn’t sure who and what to believe. Tiffany might be exaggerating something she heard in an effort to drive him toward her. But why she would still want him made no sense at all.

  “If what you’re saying is true, you’ll have to tell it to the police,” he said.

  “If ?” Tiffany asked sharply. “Do you think I’m making this up?”

  Tom spoke slowly. “What Arthur is doing makes me believe anything is possible.”

  “And if Arthur finds out I overheard—” She stopped.

  Tom closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. He was completely confused. A moment later he felt Tiffany’s fingers gently touching the back of his neck and jerked his head up. Tiffany pulled away.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I feel so terrible for you.”

  “That won’t help. Do you know the names of the bodyguards?”

  “Jeff Scarboro and Mitt Crusan. Scarboro is over all the other security guys, but Crusan is the one who scares me the most.”

  Tom couldn’t shake the thought that something about Tiffany’s story didn’t add up.

  “Trying to prove something like this is very tough,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I heard the words with my own ears. What else is needed?”

  “There aren’t any details.”

  “I don’t have any doubts.” Tiffany wrung her hands. “How am I going to stand being in the same room with Arthur? He’s going to know something is wrong.”

  Tom didn’t answer. Tiffany stepped closer.

  “What if we got in the car and never came back?” she said. “I’ve got loads of money in an overseas bank account. All we have to do is get out of the country. There are still places that don’t send Americans back to the US. Isn’t Venezuela one of them?”

  “No,” Tom said, standing up. “We’d be caught and you’d end up in prison too.”

  “Being separated from you is going to be worse than prison.” Tiffany grabbed his arm.

  Tom jerked his arm free. “We need to get out of here before anyone knows you came to see me.”

  Tom started jogging toward his car. Tiffany struggled to keep up.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure, but you need to forget about me. Forever.”

  “I can’t help how I feel,” she called after him.

  Tom reached his car first and got in without saying anything else. Tiffany mouthed words outside his window and pleaded with her hands as he put the car in reverse. He spun the tires in the dirt as he turned around and drove away.

  Tom had no doubt that Arthur Pelham was a thief, and the financier might be a murderer, but Tom couldn’t rely on Tiffany to prove anything. Her story could easily be part of a plan to get him to run away with her. But more important, nothing Tiffany said convinced Tom that he should continue to live.

  When he reached Elias’s house, the old man’s car was in its usual spot beside the garage. Tom got out, quietly shut the car door, and returned to the spot where he’d left the deer rifle.

  It was gone.

  Looking up at the sky in despair, he slowly walked toward the house and up the front steps. Elias was sitting in the front room with the rifle across his lap.

  “How did you find that?” Tom pointed at the rifle.

  “I took Rover out for a walk when I got home from church, and he went directly to the last place you’d been. Tom, killing yourself is not an answer to your problems.”

  Tom flopped down on the sofa. “What is the answer?”

  “Cry out to God for help.”

  “Do you realize how hollow that sounds to me? My life went into the toilet after I came back to Bethel and started talking to God.”

  “I can’t disagree with you.”

  “Then give me that rifle.”

  Elias didn’t move. Tom could see that the old man was gripping the rifle so tightly that his knuckles were white.

  “I’ve had more failures than successes in life,” Elias said. “But I’m not going to quit because of a mountain of disappointments. What you’re facing is beyond me. All I know to do is call for help.”

  “What did you do with the bullets?”

  “Put them someplace where you won’t find them. And that includes the other two boxes in the gun case.”

  Before Tom said anything else there was a loud knock at the front door.

  “You stay here,” Tom said. “I’ll see who it is.”

  chapter

  THIRTY-THREE

  Tom opened the door. Standing on the front porch was an unshaven man in his late twenties wearing overalls and a faded baseball cap.

  “Barry Fortenberry,” the man said. “Did I just see your car leaving Austin’s Pond?”

  “Yes.”

  “I tried to flag you down, but you didn’t see me. I meant to come by the other day to give you something.”

  Fortenberry reached in the front pocket of his overalls and took out a brownish lump with a metal chain attached to it.

  “I was fishing at the far end of the pond a week ago and saw this in the shallow water. I thought you might want to have it.”

  He handed the misshapen lump to Tom. It was a long rectangular wallet. Tom opened it and saw his father’s fishing license.

  “Where was it again?” Tom asked.

  “Stuck in the mud about two feet from the edge of the water. Your daddy kept notes stuck inside where he wrote down information about how to fish different places. I saw him pull it out many times. He always put it in his back pocket, then chained it to the belt loop on his pants.”

  Tom pulled several sodden pieces of paper from the wallet. The writing on the pages was washed away. The steel chain hung down a foot from the edge of the wallet. Tom felt the chain.

  “Would the wallet float with this chain on it?”

  “Nah,” Fortenberry answered. “The wallet might do pretty good, but the chain has more heft to it than you’d think. It would take it straight to the bottom.”

  “I appreciate you bringing this by,” Tom said, looking up at the fisherman. “It means a lot that you’d go to the trouble.”

  “No problem. Like I told you the other day, your daddy was always good to me. It made me sad when I realized what I’d found.”

  Fortenberry stepped off the front porch and returned to his truck. Tom went inside the house. Elias was in the kitchen. There wa
s no sign of the rifle.

  “Where’s the gun?” Tom asked.

  “A safe place. And don’t ask any more questions about it. Who was at the door?”

  Tom put the wallet on the table. “Do you recognize that?”

  “It’s your daddy’s.”

  “Right. A fisherman found it at the edge of the pond.” Tom paused. “That’s odd since the boat turned over at least thirty yards from the shore.”

  Elias shook his head. Suddenly Tom sat up straighter.

  “Do you have the clothes my father was wearing when he died?”

  “Uh, they gave me his things in a plastic bag at the funeral home,” Elias responded. “I may have thrown the bag away, but if not, it would be in the closet in his bedroom.”

  Tom bolted out of his chair and down the hallway. The gun case was still on the floor beside the bed. He stepped over it and pushed back the sliding door for the closet. On the floor in the right-hand corner of the closet was a black plastic bag. Tom grabbed it and ripped it open. On top was a shirt he didn’t recognize. Beneath the shirt was another, smaller bag containing shoes. In the bottom was a pair of brown crumpled pants, the durable kind preferred by sportsmen. Tom held up the pants and ran his hand along the seam that held the thick belt loops. On the left-hand side of the pants, he felt something metal. It was the ring that attached the wallet to the pants. The chain had been ripped from its connection to the belt loop, leaving a single ring that was partially pried open. He carried the pants out to the kitchen.

  “Look,” he said to Elias. “The chain on the wallet was broken off at the link where it connected to his pants. It took some force to do that.”

  “What are you saying?” Elias asked.

  “There was some kind of fight.”

  “Fight?”

  “Yes, near the shore. My father didn’t drown because the boat tipped over.”

  Elias’s face went pale. He swayed unsteadily in his chair. Tom put his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

  “I feel light-headed,” Elias said.

  Elias tried to get up but immediately slumped toward the floor. Tom tried to catch him, but he hit the floor with a thud. Elias’s eyes rolled back in his head. Rover came over and nuzzled the older man’s face. Tom ran over to the sink, moistened a washcloth, and put it on Elias’s forehead. The old man groaned.