White Birch Graffiti (White Birch Village Book 2)

by Jeff Van Valer

  “Yes. Still here. I’m listening.”

  “Okay. Say your friend Hoss needs to know who the other campers are in the cabin from that year. But he doesn’t, right? It’s late at night. It’d do no good to call the camp, and he’s not going to call them anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t want anyone to alert the authorities.”

  “Why?”

  “Jesus, Paul. Are you still asleep? Because Cartwright knows us. He knows who we are.”

  “Then why did he return the e-mail? If everything you said is true, why would he… take the risk alerting us?”

  No answer.

  “Hugh? Why the e-mail?”

  “Good question. I don’t know. Maybe the guy’s half-crazy.”

  Weatherby remembered camp. Hoss wasn’t half-crazy. He was all-the-way. “Where is he?”

  “His e-mail response came from some place in Paducah. He has it routed so it doesn’t look like it comes from his house. But if he was in Carbondale and sent the e-mail at ten-eighteen central time? About three hours ago? My guess is he sent his little message and hit the road.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “I have a pretty good idea. And by the way, Paul, to answer your question? I am recording this conversation, just like I did with the one in the office. Analog, okay? One copy. These recordings can be destroyed, and I aim to do just that when this is all over. But for now? I want to keep a close eye on my partner.”

  Weatherby slumped onto a kitchen chair.

  “But rest assured, Paul. I think things are going to be okay.”

  “But what if…”

  “What if what?”

  “I don’t know. What if we don’t succeed? I mean… what if—”

  “What if, if, if, Paul? Go back upstairs and get dressed.”

  “Get dressed?”

  “Look out at the street. I’m watching you through your kitchen window.”

  Weatherby peered between the vertical blinds. At the end of his front yard sat a big, dark SUV producing exhaust. Weatherby’s heart leapt.

  “But…”

  “Get out here in five minutes.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Hurry up. I have a few calls to make, and we’re going to go pretty fast.”

  “Hugh?”

  “Hurry up. You can ask as many questions as you want when you get out here. I’m giving you five minutes, and I mean five. You make another phone call right now, and I’ll know. Tip off Barbara, and I’ll know. Does she know anything?”

  “No,” Weatherby whispered.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

  Still whispering. “No, Hugh. I never have.”

  “Good. Then all you have to do is make it so I never hear of her knowing anything. That wouldn’t be good for you. Or her. All right? It’s that simple.”

  Wet warmth poured into Weatherby’s crotch.

  “Look, Paul. We’re still on the same team here. Okay? It’s all going to be fine. But I need you here with me, just in case. Tell you what. Make it three minutes.”

  Hugh hung up, and Weatherby dashed up the stairs to change his pants. He had no time to sit down on the warm bed with his wife and feel the baby kicking.

  CHAPTER 41

  Ted faced the door and stood by the phone.

  If you wanted to break all links to Senator McDaniel and what he did in 1970, you’d need to get rid of anything ever written, connecting them. Ted was sure Hoss would know how to do that.

  The records would be in the main office. Ted remembered the cabin-like structure, nestled in the trees by the highway. Inside, some old filing cabinet would store simple lists, camper reports, cabin pictures. It could be stored on a computer or even the internet by now, Ted thought. But then again, in such a yesteryear kind of place, those records could still be purely paper, untouched for decades. And in the case of Cabin 7 in 1970, it might be no one ever knew any of the others’ names. Destroy the records, and those connections are gone. The McDaniel campaign would know that, too.

  Those records, Ted figured, are long gone. And with a little research and a couple of well-placed phone calls, the campaign could eliminate the men, too. And that’d be that.

  But…

  The records weren’t all in the office. The plaque. It’d be in the cabin, hanging in the rafters, listing every name from that summer.

  No. No, it wouldn’t. Maybe Buck would forget about the plaque, but Hoss wouldn’t.

  Ted had to say something about the murders before someone else got killed. He could tell his story from anywhere, whether in the back of a squad car or behind bars. His only job was to stay alive and save who could be saved.

  He could even use the trucker’s CB radio. Right? He thought for a second or two. No. Not right. He pictured the conversation. Ted would feel like his twelve-year-old self, talking to the grown-ups.

  “Denton McDaniel’s campaign is killing people,” he’d say.

  “Oh, yeah? Who?”

  “All the kids from White Birch Camp, nineteen seventy, Cabin 7.”

  “Oh, dear. Could you give me their names?”

  “Well, besides Neil Shepherd and Zeke Yasko, there’s, um… lemme see…” Ted’s eyes would roll up, and he’d chew on the inside of his cheek. “Hoss. But I can’t remember his name. And there’s Buck. That’s Denny, I mean Denton McDaniel. The senator? The one running for president now? And um… oh yeah. There was a kid we called Bud. He’s a real weirdo. His hair is white, and his eyes should be pink, but they’re not. And then there’s the guy who sleeps in the bottom bunk, under Hoss. But I can’t remember what we called him.”

  “Or his name?”

  Ted would shake his head. “Um… huh-uh.”

  “Do you know where these guys live?”

  “Uh… well… no.”

  Ted did know enough, probably, to get some authorities checking out the camp, though. And they’d find exactly nothing. McDaniel and Hoss would have taken care of everything. The records would already be gone. Of that, Ted was certain. All McDaniel had to do was erase the people.

  His mind drifted over the plaques, each uniquely etched with wood burner or labeled with a tiny paintbrush. How much time had he spent at White Birch as a kid, reading them? In his distorted memory, he read them for hours upon collective hours.

  He had a certain way of thinking about them. The plaques were the records and… something.

  An old man appeared in his mind, a man he’d never met. A guy named Cal Owen. Mr. Owen lived in Cabin 7 in 1938.

  The plaque is the record, and the…

  Above Ted’s bunk, scrawled on Cabin 7’s wooden ceiling, was

  cal owen ’38

  Back in the day, Ted imagined Cal, the man, what he looked like, who his brothers and sisters might have been, what he might wear way back in 1938. Ted had formed almost an entire, fantasy friendship with the twelve-year-old from a different generation. He’d found the ’38 plaque and the name, Calvin P. Owen. Calvin, not Cal. The crisp mental image of Mr. Owen came, not from the 1938 plaque, but from the…

  More free-form thought. Harrison Ford in the hot rod. In the movie. American…

  Graffiti. The graffiti was the…what had Ted told himself back then?…the proof. That was it. The plaque is the record, and the graffiti’s the proof.

  Ted remembered that fateful day, when Lloyd found Buck’s knife. It was curtains for Buck. He’d have been sent home if it weren’t for what happened next. Ted and Zeke were in the cabin loft that day, secretly watching. They weren’t just up there for kicks, either. They were up there leaving graffiti. Prohibited graffiti they meant to hide. They felt like criminals. Stole a marker from Headquarters, climbed into the loft, hid the names, nicknames, and hometowns of the cabin members. Little rebels, they were that day.

  Never mind that down below, Buck had a hunting knife and Hoss taunted the alcoholic counselor with that counselor’s own whiskey bottle. Ted and Zeke never told a soul what th
ey’d done or seen. Not even Neil. But up there, in the back of the loft, they’d left, not the record, but the proof. It’d still be there, hidden as hidden could be. As long as Cabin 7 stood, there was a record neither Hoss nor the senator’s people knew about.

  Ted stared at the pay phone’s keypad. Those elegant little keys held the power to flood the warehouse with authorities. Local, state, federal. If that last 1 key sank three millimeters into its machined, chrome nest, it’d alert McDaniel. It’d serve up plausible deniability to the campaign. And time to fix the problem.

  Ted would come off as nothing more than a crazy man (a wife-killer, no less, and God knew what else the police thought they had on him). He wasn’t calling anyone. Not Dad. Not Frank Bruska, not some Michigan sheriff department with an anonymous tip.

  The depot door opened, and the trucker walked in. A patient smile crossed his face as he strolled up to Ted.

  “You’re a little jumpy, my friend.”

  “May I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you pay in cash downstate? Down at that truck stop?”

  The trucker hesitated.

  “Did you?” Ted asked.

  “I think it’s time you answered a question for me.”

  With that, Ted couldn’t argue.

  “Tell me why you want to know.”

  It was do-or-die for Ted. Time to trust a stranger. He took a slow, meditative breath.

  “My wife was murdered at my home in Indiana, and a couple of guys… you remember those guys in the speeding van? The chickens-home-to-roost guys?”

  “I do.”

  “Those guys,” Ted said, “the ones in that van, tried to kill me in Broadbent, Ohio. I’m pretty sure those men killed my wife.”

  The trucker turned his head to one side as he listened. It was, to Ted’s knowledge, the quintessential body language for, I’m-not-so-sure-I-trust-you. “What are you doing in Ohio?”

  “My wife’s funeral is down there.”

  “All right,” the trucker whispered, his wise eyes narrowing further. “Is it time to call the police?”

  Ted didn’t know how to answer. NO was the clear choice, but it wouldn’t wash with this man. It wouldn’t wash with any reasonable person. But YES would be wrong from every angle he could think of.

  “Almost,” is what he decided to say. It was the truth.

  “Almost.”

  “Yeah. I need to do something before I can call them. Need to get a hold of something and keep it safe first. And I’m afraid that’s all I should say.”

  “Son,” the trucker said, his expression changing to one more consistent with the sympathy magnet grouping. “I’m afraid I’m going to need a little more than that.”

  “You remember telling me why you left your church?”

  “Of course.”

  “That you were helping too many people who didn’t need it?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “You were right about me. I need your help. Some others do, too.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Did you pay cash at that truck stop?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “If you paid with a credit card, if you left any proof you were at that truckstop, you need to leave here now and pretend you never met me.”

  The trucker pursed his lips in an expression that said, You better keep talking, buster.

  “They’ll know I’ve been here. I just charged a phone call to my home line.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “I can tell you, but it might be better if you don’t know who I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’ll soon know I’ve been here and that about three hours ago, I was at that truck stop. If you used a card down there, they’ll know quickly that you brought me here. And if they know all that, they’ll swarm your next destination before you get there. If you paid in cash down there, they might not be able to link us at all.”

  “Look,” the trucker said. “I did pay in cash.”

  “Didn’t buy gas?”

  “No. I don’t like leaving paper trails that lead to me, not when I don’t have to. Now tell me your name, son. Let’s start with that. It’s your last chance.”

  Everything the trucker said during the Bob and Hayley show lined up with the thoughts of a man who might try not to leave a paper trail. The trucker, as a matter of fact, might be a man who’d withdraw several hundred in cash to elude and therefore screw with a detective spying on him. Against thirty years of accrued judgment, Ted decided to believe this stranger. He produced his wallet and showed his driver’s license. “My name is Ted Gables.”

  “Alvin Williams. Ted. Look. I’m not sure I follow you or what I can do for you if…”

  Ted took another deep breath and shuddered. What he was about to do felt like jumping off a cliff. He took a nervous glance around the depot and whispered, “I think the men who killed my wife were after me and shot her by mistake. And my two best friends… one of them was murdered last Thursday, and just now on the phone, I found out they killed Zeke, too.”

  Recognition flashed on the trucker’s face. Ted had yelled Zeke’s name as he awakened from a dream.

  “Why would all that be going on?”

  “Stick with me, okay? This’ll sound crazy.”

  Mr. Williams let out a nervous laugh. “It kind of already does.”

  “When I was a kid, my friends and I knew the senator. Senator McDaniel.”

  The trucker leaned in a few inches. “How?”

  “Went to camp together. Something happened there that summer. Something bad.”

  The trucker’s eyes widened. He suddenly seemed to know everything. Or enough, anyway. Ted thought the man might exclaim something church-related, like Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! or O Lord Almighty! But all he ended up saying was, “Holy shit.”

  Ted nodded vigorously, nervously.

  The trucker stammered. “He’s running for presi—McDaniel Sec—” Then he whispered, “That’s why you can’t tell the police!”

  “If I don’t get there before they do, the truth is just going to go away. And this unbelievable story will be all that’s left.”

  Ted wondered, after divulging this much of the story, if he’d just committed suicide. He let Mr. Williams process the information.

  “Ted. What, if anything, can I do for you? Tell me.”

  “You said you were heading to Grand Rapids?”

  “Just north of there. Little place called Sparta.”

  “Need a little more help staying awake?”

  “How would it help for you to get up there?”

  “That’s just the thing. The camp I mentioned. It’s in Michigan, and I need to find something there before they do. It’s a lot farther north, somewhere between the Sleeping Bear Dunes and Traverse City, but Grand Rapids would be a little closer than Toledo. If you could take me there, I’d have less to do to get the rest of the way.”

  Distrust, fear, and contempt were all potential responses to Ted’s claims. He expected any or all of them. But instead, what he got from the man who’d saved his life—the second man who’d saved him since he’d set foot in Broadbent—was a wan smile.

  Sympathy magn—

  “I thought this’d be sayonara,” the trucker said. “But okay. Behave yourself like you did all the way here, and my passenger seat’s yours.”

  Ted couldn’t really believe what he was hearing. The world had certain strangers, and this one put Ted to shame. The trucker pulled off his hat and matted down his hair again. When he did, the butt of the .45 served as a little reminder.

  “I can behave myself,” Ted said.

  CHAPTER 42

  The ring was deafening in the quiet pick-up truck. This wasn’t going to be good. Of that, Lewis was sure. The sat phone arrangement was supposed to be different. They were supposed to make calls, not receive them. But then again, he and Mr. Gray were supposed to kill these men, not make media spectacles of how they kept
letting one of them get away.

  Mr. Gray pressed the green button and held the phone up to his face. “Yeah.”

  Lewis ran his fingers up and down the textured vanadium of the flat-head screwdriver. He knew Mr. Green was onto them already. Somehow, he just knew. Question was, how. Why would the guy call, otherwise? He leaned close to the phone, listening.

  Mr. Green said, “I got a little something I need you to do.”

  Mr. Gray rotated the phone away from his face, making it easier for Lewis to hear.

  “Need you to get back up to the camp.”

  Mr. Gray’s hard blink and a half-second’s hesitation wrote a little story for Lewis.

  Camp? What camp?

  “All righty,” Mr. Gray said. “What do you need us to do?”

  “Remember we gave you six jobs to do? Not forgetting we took care of Montana for you, which I’ve decided not to charge you for.”

  “For that we thank you,” Mr. Gray said.

  “Listen. Don’t talk. We told you about six, but in truth, there are actually seven of them.” Seven. Lewis wasn’t expecting that. “I need you up at that cabin. Cabin Seven.”

  Dominion over the sat phone meant Mr. Gray had some kind of relationship with Mr. Green Lewis didn’t—and probably wasn’t supposed to—know about. He relaxed, for the moment, into his black-box status. To be unknown at a time like this was good. It was very good, because he might just have to disappear, money or no money.

  “Where are you now?” Mr. Green asked.

  Mr. Gray studied a road atlas for a moment and said, “Somewhere, maybe a half-hour south of Richmond, Indiana.”

  “Well, then, I want you to head north.”

  Lewis whispered, “What’s it pay?” Mr. Gray turned away from Lewis and held a palm up to him.

  “Richmond’s what? Six or seven hours from the camp?”

  “About that.”

  “Get up there. Soon as you can. Make sure nobody’s nosing around. You see a lot of police or something, get out of there. You see a couple of them, you know what to do. Then burn the cabin down. You hear me? Down to the ground. I want every square inch of that thing in flames. And work quick.”