“Hey, honey, getting a little loud over here.” It was Kendra, his wife. She gave me a reluctant nod of acknowledgment as she rubbed her husband’s back to calm him down.
“Bobby wasn’t even what, Smitty?” I said, ignoring Kendra.
Smitty sucked in a big gulp of air to answer, but physically stopped himself with a wobble of his head. He glared at me, the steam from his nostrils melting the ice in my drink. “Don’t come in here trying to trip me up.”
“Trip you up about what, Smitty? The truth? Why don’t you just come out with it?”
“What are you two talking about?” Kendra said, one hand on her hip and the other now resting on her pregnant belly. She’d turned to face me directly so I guess Smitty had two generations of Mama Bears to protect his sorry ass.
“We were talking about Jasper and Bobby,” I said to dismiss her. “Smitty got a little upset.”
“It didn’t sound like—” Kendra started.
“Weird how Jasper’s place burned down, too,” I said, directing my evil owl eyes at Smitty to catch his reaction.
Smitty frowned, but Kendra picked up where an innocent person was supposed to. “What do you mean—too? What else burned down?”
“A barn,” I said. “When we were teenagers. Smitty remembers it.”
“What does that have to do with the fire at Jasper’s trailer?” Kendra said.
Smitty put his arm around his wife’s missing waist. “Ignore her, Kendra. She’s trying to start trouble.” He dragged her away in caveman fashion.
The lights shut off suddenly and a slide show sprang to life, accompanied by a poorly projected, better-forgotten sound track of nineties songs. A drunken woman I didn’t know narrated the slides with her mouth too close to the microphone. She eventually gave up as she realized she didn’t recognize half the people in the photos and couldn’t keep saying, “How ‘bout that guy, huh?”
Photos flashed by. Boys making goofy faces in the hallway, girls playing basketball in gym class, clusters of kids celebrating after football games or sitting bored in classrooms. Pictures of couples with their arms linked in the hallways, geeks working on computers, jocks high-fiving, and girls striking slutty poses. The bursts of laughter and shouts of, “I remember that!” came as if written into a script. Then the music took on a more somber tone and close-up pictures of four deceased classmates haunted the screen for ten seconds each. Seemed abbreviated for a lifetime tribute, but an eternity to the daughter of the girl whose father had killed the one yet to come up.
And there he was. Bobby Kettrick. Looming larger than life, in full color. It was an excellent likeness and I didn’t realize until that moment how immeasurably handsome and photogenic Bobby was. Separated from his personality and presented as nothing but two-dimensional eye candy, he offered a delectable blank slate. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to pile on myth and romance, layer it with hyperbole and lore, and then watch as the image rose upon a grander pedestal each year.
To my side, I saw Smitty turn and burn a hole through my soul with his eyes.
From the corner of the room, a wasted, former football player raised his glass and shouted, “To Bobby!” His mostly inebriated classmates followed suit and echoed the deep sentiment, but I noticed the men did it with far more enthusiasm than the women, Bobby’s reputation reverberating differently with each gender. Surely, more than a few of the women in the room had experienced three-dimensional Bobby and hadn’t appreciated his real-life charms.
A few minutes later, it was my turn to watch Smitty. The slide show had morphed into a retrospective on Lavitte, showing it over the years from 1940 to today. I would have given credit to the intoxicated woman for her research efforts, but having recently seen Jasper’s yearbooks, I knew she’d simply scanned the photos from the annual section called Our Town.
When a photo of the Hesters’ three-story barn popped up on the screen, several students shouted, “Whoo-hoo!”—no doubt remembering the parties, bonfires and sex they’d had there for the short duration of the barn’s existence. I wasn’t expecting this opportunity, but since Charlie had mentioned the rumors about the barn, and since the barn had met its demise in the same fashion as Jasper’s place, I glanced at Smitty while the picture was still up.
A picture truly was worth a thousand words. In fact, Smitty’s reaction to that barn offered up far more than a paltry thousand. He lowered his eyes and pulled away from Kendra who was trying to laugh along with pictures she knew nothing about. He swigged the remainder of his newest drink, then turned and lurked close to the bar, his back to the screen. He didn’t turn around again, not even to see the picture of Jasper they’d tossed in at the last minute as a tribute to his recent passing. The picture couldn’t have been more perfect, and I’d swear Jasper was talking to me from the grave. It showed him putting his hands in the air and smirking, as if to say, what are you gonna do, while Smitty and Bobby sprayed each other with fire extinguishers in the background.
Soon after the slide show, Smitty tried to leave but got assaulted with a shoulder slap from Stuart, the bald guy who’d gotten a hard-on over Charlie’s arrival.
“How ‘bout this guy, huh?” Stuart said to Kendra and another woman. “Bigwig at the Pentagon, whipping up secret formulas to take out the Russkies and the Chinamen.”
Smitty made a feeble attempt to brush him off but the guy was plastered and clearly in need of an updated history book. “I bet you deal with a lot of scumbags, am I right?” Stuart slurred. “Lots of crazy informants and drug dealers who go undercover for you and whatnot?”
“Sometimes,” Smitty said, his ego no doubt inflating. “You’d be surprised at the range of people I deal with. But it’s mostly chemists and scientist types.”
Chemists and scientist types? Who better to poison an old friend?
Smitty caught sight of me sitting on a muted speaker, within earshot of their conversation. I glared at him like Little Red Riding Hood cornering the wolf when she’s figured out how to turn the tables on him. He jerked away from Stuart, shook his hand, and told him to look him up if he was ever in D.C. Within moments, he got the hell out of there, a wide-eyed Kendra in tow.
I spent most of the rest of the evening being ignored and fending off dirty looks as people’s inhibitions and common courtesies gave way to the alcohol. For the final fifteen minutes, I hung around with my own kind—the help—until Charlie appeared and deemed the reunion lame.
“Let’s get out of here, Sunshine. I got contact numbers from the only two people who amounted to more than a hill of beans from this class. I mean, seriously, do they think the heads I hunt have red necks? Because they most decidedly do not. Sorry I ignored you.”
“No problem, Charlie,” I said, and meant it. “I got everything I needed. And then some.”
Chapter 35
Artie… sixteen years ago
The sun sliced into Artie’s eyes like a long, slow stab. He’d meant to fix that hole in the shutters for six months now. Question was, why the hell was he experiencing the sunrise in his office? He tried to swallow but the idea of saliva had long skipped town. His lips pulled apart slowly as he attempted to work the muscles of his face. The rough sound of his tongue unsticking from the roof of his mouth made him woozy.
His head felt like a rocky trail with horses stampeding over it. As he tried to sit up, a lightning bolt of agony shot from his skull to his toes, both extremes flaring with a sharpness that grew worse when he tried to resist it. He fell back down on the small couch where his body had remained in a crumpled heap most of the night. Sweating profusely, he cast aside the worn-out blanket that clung to him like a wet washcloth against a shower wall.
“Goddammit,” he said through clenched teeth.
With his fingers pressed against his eyes like hot stones, he let himself remain motionless for a good five minutes, willing death to take him. What the hell could possibly have happened? Had he been mugged? It hurt to think, but his mind drifted to the night before. Busy night
at the garage. Drinking from a tin can. Gunshots. He remembered it like a dream wrapped in gauze. Had it been just last night that Enzo served up that shit from his uncle? Or was that the night before? This was only the second time in his life he’d completely blacked out an evening’s entertainment, the first being the night he lost his virginity in high school. At least Louise-Anne Verner claimed they’d done it, but heck if he knew. She was psycho from day one, and Artie would have been shocked if he’d been able to get it up at all that night. To this day, he didn’t know what had happened and didn’t trust a thing his friends told him, especially that Reed Carlisle who’d likely spiked the grain alcohol with ground-up pills. Artie had sworn never to get like that again but now he’d gone and spent an entire godforsaken night in dirty clothes, passed out on this foul couch, probably half infected with whatever was crawlin’ around inside it.
He rose up, fighting every step of the way to stay upright and keep his anger in check. He failed on the latter when he kicked the bejeezus out of the empty water-cooler container on the floor. It rolled twenty feet into the waiting area and stopped when it butted up against the pump action shotgun leaning barrel-up against the wall.
“Real safe, Artie,” he mumbled to himself. “Real safe.”
With an exhausted sigh, he stumbled out, taking at least three minutes to do so, and grabbed the shotgun to put it away. As he started the trek back to the office, he caught sight of a huge-ass gopher through the back window. Much as he hated losing twelve hours of his life to an alcohol-induced mental void, he hated gophers more and killing one might relieve some of the vexation he was feeling. With his head throbbing to beat the band, he grabbed the silencer from his office. It wouldn’t do much, but it would spare his ears a few decibels. He staggered back through the waiting area and stopped at the open door leading to the garage bays. He pressed the button just inside to raise the first bay door. It pained him to face the burgeoning daylight, but that gopher looked so plump and lazy, Artie had to give it a shot. He caught sight of the fat bastard running up the hill, where it suddenly stopped, turned and stared right at the garage. Maybe the sound of the door had drawn its attention. Maybe the scent of a grown man sweating liberal amounts of moonshine had caught its interest. Hell, the damn things could smell a drop of rain a mile high in the sky. Why not some distant perspiration?
Leaning against the jamb between the waiting area and the garage, he pumped the gun and shot.
Goddammit if he didn’t miss by a day and a half. He was about to give up and return the gun to its locker when a rat scurried right in front of him and started chewing on something behind the rear bumper of the old Mercedes in the first bay.
“Whatever you’re eating, Mister,” Artie mumbled, “must taste awful damn good for you to be coming out in front of a loaded gun.” He considered taking a shot at the rat, but thought better of it when he remembered all the flammable substances inside the garage. “Lucky you,” he said.
As if understanding he’d just been spared, the rat—an eight-pounder at most—tried to drag his meal to a more private spot so he could eat in peace, but it was too heavy. He only succeeded in sinking his teeth into a shoelace. He hauled that, plus a bit of a sneaker, into Artie’s hazy view.
“What in the hell?” Artie said.
A moment later, Artie went a shade of pale that a mortician would have found disturbing.
“Holy fuckin’ shit.”
He dropped to his knees.
Chapter 36
Allison… present
On the way home from the reunion, I got an idea. Not a new idea. The same one I’d had earlier. But it hadn’t occurred to me to do it with Charlie.
“Charlie, you up for an adventure?”
“Why not? The night’s just getting started.”
“Drive to The Willows.”
“No thanks,” he said, as if I’d offered him a cocktail weenie.
“I’m serious. I need to get something and the situation’s getting fairly desperate.”
“In the putrid Willows?”
“Yes, behind Jasper’s trailer.”
After humorous negotiations with Charlie involving the words meth-heads, tweakers, degenerates, and gangbangers, he agreed to go, but only because he thought it might make a good party story.
I didn’t see headlights in any direction so the dogs must have been called off for the night. A few minutes later, we arrived at Jasper’s. The scent of charred wood and scorched rubber from the earlier fire burned our nostrils when we exited the car. Scarred remnants of the trailer looked like a sad and lonely skeleton, a sickly geriatric patient abandoned by all caretakers.
I asked Charlie if he had any tools since I had no idea how Jasper had concealed his message in the roof of the well.
“A good gay is always prepared,” he said. He popped his trunk and told me to help myself. I pulled out a heavy-duty flashlight, a jack, and an entire Save-Yourself Toolbox Kit, labeled as such in bold pink letters. I gave him a look that said, Really?
“Hey,” he said, “when I came out, I barreled through the fucking door.”
“Good for you, Penelope Pitstop. Let’s go.”
He held the flashlight and jack while I took the toolbox. Walking behind me, he did a less than stellar job of lighting my path. My shoes would never recover.
“How can they stand the constant dampness back here?” I said.
“It’s the septic,” Charlie explained. “They did a horrible job installing it. The ladies at the salon used to say The Willows would forever smell like the shit of lepers and beggars.”
“They did not,” I said.
“Well maybe they said fertilizer, but you get the idea.”
“I thought the odor was from the protected wetlands back here.”
“That, too, I suppose,” Charlie said. “So what exactly are we getting from this mysterious well of yours?”
“Jasper left me a message of some sort but I don’t want to say more than that.”
“So you did see him! I knew it!”
“I didn’t,” I said. “But the information about the message got through. Just in time, apparently.”
We reached the well. The arsonist who’d destroyed Jasper’s place must have thought I was searching the trailer for evidence. Officer Ervin Johnston must have informed them that I was peeking in the windows. Thank goodness they didn’t extend their hot little fingers to the well. It looked intact—at least as intact as a crumbling, poorly built well could look. I wondered who was allowed to raise a structure back here on federal land, but then I wondered why more people didn’t do it. No federal agent would ever drag his ass into the dregs of The Willows to ensure everything was up to snuff and code-compliant.
A tacked-down, black tarp draped the roof of the well. With any luck, something more substantial lay underneath that had kept Jasper’s message from getting wet. I had no idea what material people used to build the roof of a well, but I hoped the creator of this one took into account the damp, leper-shit-infused air surrounding it.
I placed the toolbox on the ground and opened it while Charlie illuminated the contents.
“Okay,” I said, “which tool for banging through a roof?”
“Well that depends if you’re going from the top or the bottom,” Charlie said.
“Thanks, Charlie, but I’m talking about the roof, not your sex life.”
“Bummer,” he said. “’Cuz if you had been, I’d have been partial to the Ball Peen hammer.”
I laughed, a little too loudly.
“I really don’t know tools,” he said. “Just slam it with the first thing you grab.”
I chose a hammer with a sharp, weighted end. My dad would have been undoubtedly disappointed in a daughter who didn’t know her way around a toolbox but it wasn’t my fault he hadn’t taught me.
“Hey,” I said, “before I start waking up the neighbors, shine that light on the underside here.”
Charlie obeyed. The underside of the roof—the
part that faced the water far below—looked like a layer of corrugated metal. It appeared newer and shinier than the rest of the structure. I ran my hand along it and felt an unexpected seam in the center that was visually undetectable. I followed it with my fingers and realized it wasn’t just a horizontal seam where two pieces of metal had been welded together. It actually formed a six-inch square. I pressed up against its center. Nothing. Then I jiggled it and felt the slightest give. I tried sliding it sideways to the right, left, front and back. Nothing. Charlie watched me in silence.
“Maybe it’s like a key,” he said. “Try twisting it.”
As I fought to get some sort of grip, my middle finger and thumb fell perfectly into two slight indentations that didn’t fit with the rest of the pattern. I pressed upward on them, then twisted the whole square. It slid smoothly, somehow meshing with the metal frame around it to allow about one inch of movement. When it stopped, I tried sliding it in all four directions again, and then pushed straight up one more time. It popped right off, leaving me with enough space to reach in and explore. I didn’t relish the idea of my hand blindly groping the hidden area. The dimensions seemed perfect for a dead snake or rodent, and Jasper hadn’t exactly been sane all his life.
I set the square portion aside and felt like a kid in a haunted house told to reach behind a curtain and stick her hand into a container of spaghetti while some costumed teenager claimed it was a bowl of brains. I dared my fingers to venture forth and then... I felt it! Definitely not spaghetti. It was a metal box, about four inches wide.
“I got something,” I whispered.
I grasped it with my thumb and fingers and eased it towards the opening.
“Don’t drop it!” Charlie said, louder than necessary.
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