White Birch Graffiti (White Birch Village Book 2)

by Jeff Van Valer

  Somewhere in him persisted a ridiculous optimism. His worthy cause would come along and push him one way or another.

  Of his immediate family, Max was the only one left. The rest pretty much exited the earth at the same time, in a burst of dubious excitement. Multiple murder-suicide, leaving a teenager behind. After that, Max found his notoriety. Or notoriety found him. Reporters for newspapers and TV over the next weeks and months harassed him without end. Local Missouri news, Chicago, even some national news pieces exposed him as the survivor of a family tragedy. Well after he turned eighteen, he was more center-of-attention than a naked prom queen. It made him a little famous. Hence the identity change.

  Max’s day was over. It was time for bed.

  Almost.

  One last thing to check. A certain e-mail account needed its weekly glance. He squared himself at the desk, his knees scraping the bottom of the middle drawer. He’d always meant to get a desk for a six foot six guy, but he hadn’t gotten around to it. He tipped a bottle of root beer, sucked down a swallow, and put aside Sunday’s USA Today. It was an edition he wanted to keep, the one with the front-page picture of an old friend from Ann Arbor. Neil’s death had created riots in a college town. It saddened Max, made him wish he’d gotten to know Neil a little better.

  Max clicked a couple of icons and opened his America Online account. The anonymity was good for a lot of things. Keeping people from knowing Max Blocker, of Carbondale, Illinois, used America Online was one of them. The service seemed passé for the internet-savvy. Max wouldn’t use it, but Willard Cartwright, of suburban St. Louis, might.

  The address deliberately contained the names WILLARD and CARTWRIGHT, the account was paid by a phantom name through a credit card linked to a post office box in Paducah. The e-mail account did nothing more than alert him to anyone trying to find him. What he’d do if he ever found someone, he didn’t know. But finding out, once a week, that nobody even seemed to be looking, was nice. He typed in his silly sign-on and password. The TV droned in the background.

  After the modem’s array of buzzes, ratcheting sounds, and static, the machine finally hushed, then spoke with canned cheerfulness.

  “You’ve got mail!”

  Max raised his eyebrows and mocked the machine. “You’ve got mail,” he said, yawning. “You have mail, doofus. Not ‘You’ve got mail.’”

  He opened the virtual mailbox, slumping in his chair. Inside sat a message from an address he didn’t recognize. Double-click. Resting his left elbow on the table, he dangled and swirled the root beer bottle from his long fingers. The message said

  Hey, Willard! Or should I say Hoss?? :)

  Max bristled and sat up straight. Something cold washed his skin from the inside.

  Just trying to catch up! How you been? Just looking to catch up, gimme a shout back sometime, tell me where your at! Sometime soon!!

  —Buck.

  Max stared at the screen, his heart racing. “Who the hell is this?” He hoped it was stupid junk e-mail, but two ugly weeds of truth sprouted from it. First, Buckie doesn’t write like this. He never did, not even when they were thirteen. Second, somebody who knew Willard Cartwright had once briefly been known as Hoss did. Only at one time and one place did he ever go by that name. He shuddered, and his bladder seemed horribly full.

  The phony e-mail account did its job. It finally hooked one. Only this one seemed immediately worse than any reporter.

  “Funny thing is,” he said into his lonely darkness, “whatever goofball sent this thing probably thinks he’s the one who’s fishing.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Lewis noticed the three sluts. They took turns glancing at him while yammering to each other. A three-on-one would be nice, he thought, but he was busy. Maybe some other time. He passed a certain look to them, just in case one or all came up to flirt. This store’s closed, ladies, was the message he meant to convey. All his attention was for the doctor. Stealing a peek between a tall, yellow Galliano bottle and a stumpy crown of Chambourd, he spied the doctor watching the television.

  The rest of the job was as good as done, Lewis thought. Pop the doc, and it’d be sunny beaches for the rest of winter. After a visit to his grandmother in Louisiana. Mr. Gray had the kids to deal with. Not Lewis. Nanny was the one he had. She was the one who had it figured out. She was the one who knew how to love, how to care. No one else knew a damned thing. They could all go to hell, and Lewis was more than happy to send them there, one by one. Especially for money.

  The barmaid served up a glass of straw-colored fluid with cherries in it. What’s the good doctor drinking now? Scotch and soda? Whiskey sour? The hot barmaid patted him on the hand—Damn! She flirting with him?—and bopped on down the bar. Too bad the doctor’d never get a chance to lay a tongue on that cocktail-serving machine.

  Drink up, Doc. I’ll pop you when you stumble down the sidewalk. And just because it’s you, I’ll make it a stabbing. There’d be no blowing the head off anybody’s wife tonight.

  Twenty thousand had been paid up front, and another eighty were on the way. In Lewis’s mind, the good doctor, this Ted Gables, was just another line item, a pencil scratch with a nice check box at the left. It’d be good to be done with it. He should’ve taken a chance on the doctor and that curvy little thing he’d been hugging in the parking garage.

  The birthday cake professor would have been a good one to keep accidental-looking, what with all the national attention and race riots he’d caused. But who cared? All these targets had been far enough apart, geographically, hadn’t they? This last one, the wily doctor, didn’t have to look so accidental. In fact, a violent kill might be just the thing. Husband and wife, rubbed out mob-style, him at her funeral. That’d make the pair look like they’d been into some dirty business together.

  Lewis liked that. Grease the doctor. Leave him bloody. Collect the cash, and get down to the beach. No one would ever connect those men.

  Would they?

  The dangerous question bubbled up again. Just what is the connection? Lewis had had plenty of time to wonder. On the road while Mr. Gray wouldn’t shut the fuck up, waiting under that cold-damned spruce tree, or pretending to read the paper in a sleaze-bag pub, Lewis mulled it over. Those guys were spread all across the country. Butcher, schoolteacher and coach, preacher, professor. Doctor. They only had their ages in common. They wouldn’t be in on any business deal. Of that, Lewis was sure. They had some common knowledge, and someone wanted something to stay a secret.

  It can’t be anything else.

  Lewis shook his head thinking about it.

  And the deadline.

  Deadline of noon today, as a matter of fact.

  The questions rolled back around. Who was Mr. Green? What did he want with a deadline? There was a bigger truth in the scenario, and Lewis wondered if there might be a little more cash in the deal if he could find out what it was.

  He studied the widower. The TV screen sure had caught the guy’s attention, but why?

  It’s just worthless newsreel shit. What the hell’s so interesting? The words

  SENATOR MCDANIEL WOULD BE THE NATION’S

  YOUNGEST MAN ELECTED PRESIDENT

  rolled across the bottom of the screen.

  His focus danced back and forth between the television and the doctor, who seemed transfixed. Lewis shifted in his chair to frame the doctor’s face perfectly between the Galliano and Chambourd. The guy’s face was one part confusion and four parts intense interest.

  That was the face of recognition. Stone-cold recognition.

  Revelation is what that look is. What is it? What’s he see up there?

  A youngish looking guy standing behind a bunch of microphones. Running for president. Lewis watched for a moment. When he glanced back to the mirror, he quit breathing.

  The doctor stared right at him.

  Before Lewis could look away, the guy actually acknowledged him with a nod. Like a gentleman. A Midwestern, hay-seed, wave-at-everybody gentleman. Shit. Lewi
s picked up his prop newspaper and pretended to read. Mr. Gray would give him twelve kinds of hell for this.

  Over the top of the paper, keeping his eyes on the text, he tried to see what the doctor was doing. Lewis thought maybe he should have nodded back.

  ~~~

  Ted watched Ironman read his paper. Guy didn’t nod back, and he hadn’t touched the drink the waitress had left him. He figured Ironman might just be averse to looking a stranger in the eye, like he was from New York City or something. But Ted’s first thought, the one he dismissed, was that maybe Ironman felt as though he’d been caught spying.

  Nah.

  Ships in the night. Ted shrugged off Ironman like the trapdoor spider. A laxative ad pandered to the cable news demographic. Ted poked at his ginger ale’s floating cherries with a little green straw.

  The mirror pulled his curious gaze. Diverting only his eyes, he flew his attention low, between the colorful bottles of the liquor cityscape. Ironman held his newspaper up so far that Ted could only see the upper half of the man’s irises.

  He can still see you, Ted.

  Is he hiding?

  Ted caught the paper’s back side. Sprinkled onto the page, next to the unmistakable logo of the diesel engine plant in Blue River, four or five small portrait pictures floated in an ocean of newsprint. Each photo had a caption and headed its own, separate article. Five such articles filled the page, the last of which consisted of two full columns. The paper was too far away to read, of course, but its gestalt was a dead ringer. The arrangement of the pictures, the diesel plant logo, and the disproportionate length of the last article sealed it. In Ironman’s hands was Sunday’s Blue River Bugle. The two-column entry was Kathryn’s obituary.

  CHAPTER 25

  Ironman put down his paper and sipped his ginger ale. Ted immediately faced the television.

  What’s that guy doing with The Bugle?

  Before Ted knew it, his breathing became heavy. A quick glance showed Ironman leering at the three young women. One of them rolled her eyes and turned away from him.

  Ted tried to concentrate on the senator running for president.

  It was your truck, Ted, Frank’s voice echoed. There’s no way around lookin’ at that.

  On the television screen, the quasi-familiar guy behind the senator grinned in a way that gave Ted gooseflesh.

  Is Ironman stalking me?

  Ironman swirled his ginger ale glass. He appeared to concentrate deeply on the drink he’d just ignored for fifteen minutes. The women who’d essentially propositioned him now ignored him as he seemed, all of a sudden, to pine for their attention.

  Ted wanted to lock himself in his hotel room.

  But no way would he leave now. Not if Ironman might follow him. He faced the television. Senator what’s-his-name was back. Denton McDaniel from Missouri. Missouri. Something about Missouri gave Ted the willies. It always had. Or at least since… since he was—

  When he was about fourteen, his dad took him to St. Louis to see the Gateway Arch and go to a Cardinals game. Ted could still remember the anxiety he felt, crossing the river. It was his first trip into Missouri. It bothered him for no reason he could remember immediately, but it bothered him something fierce.

  Senator Denton McDaniel from Missouri.

  Anxiety. As they crossed the river. Was it the water? Did it look like the Lake up at White Birch? No. It wasn’t the water. It was Missouri that bothered him. The only reason the river bothered him was that when they finished crossing, they’d be in Missouri. Ted liked rivers. He fished at home as a kid in the Flat Rock. He wondered, as they crossed, what they might catch if they fished in the Mississippi.

  Ted poked at the cherries with the little straw, wondering absently how even to begin fishing in a river that big. It’d be by boat. A boat…

  “Floatin’ down the Mississippi

  With m’ Poly ANNNNN…”

  Hoss. Hoss was from Missouri. Hoss and Buck both. That was what bothered Ted about crossing the Mississippi.

  He stopped poking at the cherries and drew in a deep breath. The image of Senator Denton McDaniel from Missouri slowly consumed him. He forgot about all else for an entire minute. During that minute, the trapdoor spider got him.

  On a starry August night, the trees clattering in the wind far above, a hula-torch of flame twirled away from the campfire. It landed and set a dead cedar alight. Zeke occupied his mind trying to do something about the burning tree, but Neil finally got him back to the canoes. A thick stand of drought-anguished trees and a crunchy, ochre floor of dead pine needles threatened to trap the boys in flames. It was no place to be, especially in a breeze quickly graduating to gale force.

  Buck stood next to Lloyd, who lay face down in the prodigious fire, and dropped his bloody knife. Ted picked it up, sheathed it, and put it in his pocket: the nidus of his big lie. And as it turned out, Ted forgot to toss the knife in the depths on the way back. He’d been too busy paddling on the lake’s agitated surface, figuring out how to put the canoes back on the noisy rack, keeping the other boys quiet, and watching the place of his dreams go up in flames.

  The imagery was almost a hallucination. Ted had seen it countless times before. Only this time, the kids were older… Zeke crying by the flaming tree and Neil, pulling him back toward the canoes… were older. They were grown men. Hoss was tall and thin. The knife was the same, but Buck was grown and wore a suit.

  It was the first time Ted thought the stupid trapdoor spider was trying to tell him something. His unbelieving gaze rolled slowly back toward the screen.

  “I’m Denton McDaniel, and I’m running for president.”

  ~~~

  Max burst into a stand, sending his swivel chair backward, partway through the drywall. His root beer dropped and spilled as he sidestepped the desk. He fumbled with the remote, turned up the volume and gaped in disbelief.

  “Denny’s running for president!”

  Max grinned, then smiled fully. He felt proud, like the proverbial uncle who takes credit for things he never did. But his smile faded into a frown of concentration. A man on the screen patted McDaniel on the shoulder. The face was familiar. It was the kid from San Diego. Top bunk. Northwest corner of Cabin 7.

  A trove of ages-old, liberated information spilled into his mind. At that moment, it was Hoss’s mind the memories spewed into. What was that kid’s name? Slept above… who was in the bottom bunk? Coach. Kid from Wisconsin. Coach was in the bottom bunk, and… above him?…

  Sunny. “THAT’S SUNNY!” Max/Hoss realized his outburst could probably have been heard from his quiet street.

  Sunny, a trouble-maker. A cry-baby. A kiss-ass. Always wanted to hang out with Buck and me.

  Sunny wasn’t smart enough to become a serious pain in the ass, but with the slow-moving brains God gave him, he did a pretty good job.

  And boy-oh-BOY did Sunny hate Ted. Ted, the kid who just kept his mouth shut and minded his own business. The kid who spoke only when something important had to be said. The kid who so pissed off Sunny just by not taking any of his crap. Ted was the kid Hoss learned to listen to.

  Max/Hoss thought about the phony e-mail, and he remembered he had to pee.

  He thought about the letters he wrote to the now-senator. Back in the day, when kids needed pencils, stamps, and a few days’ patience for a response, he and Denny wrote hundreds of letters. Before their correspondence fizzled out, not once had Denny ever written anything and signed it Buck. He wouldn’t do it then, and he wouldn’t do it now. He learned to hate his nickname as much as Max hated Hoss.

  The senator would never write anything a good teacher would want to attack with a red ink pen. He didn’t finish sentences with at, and he knew the difference between your and you’re. Using a colon and close-parenthesis to make a stupid little smiley face just wasn’t his style. A sentence like How you been? The redundancy about catching up? The run-on sentence with the word gimme? Huh-uh.

  “And don’t even start,” Hoss said aloud, “on e
nding every sentence with a damned exclamation point.”

  McDaniel was proper. He was a lot less Gilligan and a lot more Thurston Howell III. Proper guys like that don’t send shitty e-mails. Period.

  Maybe some recent, bored-out-of-his-skull, White Birch camper ran internet searches based on the 1970 Cabin 7 plaque. Doubtful, Hoss thought. Nothing ever written, as far as he knew, had the nicknames on it.

  Thirty-year-old memories rushed into him. Bad memories. Hoss snatched the cordless phone and yanked out the telescoping antenna. He punched seven numbers onto the keypad.

  “Randolph!” he said into the device. “It’s Hoss Cart—MAX. Max here. Do me a favor. This guy on the TV. You watching this? The guy running for presi—… Yeah… Find out who the guy is with the senator, the new candidate, in that interview they keep playing?… The guy who pats McDaniel on the shoulder?… Who is that? I mean, what’s his name, and what’s he doing with the senator?… Call me on my cell, and tout suite when you find out. I gotta go.”

  Before any answer came, Max hung up on the best assistant a guy ever had. He paced and muttered to himself. “What’s Sunny? Chief of Staff maybe? Denny’s press guy? Work with McDaniel Security?”

  Something didn’t work in his mind. Or something worked too well. Too many things were going on. Things that reminded him of camp. He counted them on his fingers. Denny running for president and somebody impersonating him with that ridiculous e-mail.