The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Esprit D’Escalier

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stroud, Carsten, 1946–

  The homecoming / by Carsten Stroud. —First edition.

  pages cm

  “A Borzoi book”—T.p. verso

  eISBN: 978-0-385-34963-5

  1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Shapeshifting—Fiction.

  3. Southern States —Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.S833H66 2013

  813′.54—dc23

  2012050902

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Front-of-jacket photograph by Carlos E. Serrano / Flickr / Getty Images

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1

  For Linda

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  After the Fall

  What the Military Term: “Vertically Deployed into the Terrain” Actually Means

  Love May Be Blind, but a Few Years of Marriage Will Fix That

  If a Bear Falls in the Forest

  The Book of Edgar

  The Term “a Criminal Lawyer” Is the Opposite of an Oxymoron

  What Dreams May Come

  Hy Brasail Plantation Southern Louisiana, 1840

  Six Months Later

  Three Men in a Federal Prison Come Up with a Simple Plan

  A House by the Side of the Road

  Zero to Sixty in Four Point Three Is Good but Sixty to Zero in One Is Not

  Thursday

  Mr. Harvill Endicott Comes to Niceville

  Deitz Was in the Wind

  The Shocking Price of Arugula

  Coker and Charlie Danziger Have Another Frank Exchange of Views

  Dead Man Talking

  A Hard Kid to Like

  Deitz Guns Up

  The Outside Wants In

  Well, No Matter What Happens, There’s Always Death

  Trail of Tears

  When It Absolutely Positively Has to Be Dead by Midnight

  Willow Weep for Me

  If God Made the Universe Out of Nothing, Did the Universe Make Nothing Out of God?

  Deitz Sees the Light

  Stairway to Hell

  A Trick of the Dark

  Friday

  The Roots of Evil

  Harvill Endicott Confers with Lyle Preston Crowder

  A Beryl Is a Jewel

  The Remains of the Day

  Mr. Teague Is Not Receiving

  Candleford House

  Endicott Calls Upon the Black Widow

  Good News Never Arrives Wrapped in a Baby Blue Folder with a Gold Seal

  Saturday

  Say It Isn’t So

  What Is Written in Stone

  Behold a Pale Horse

  Monday

  Res Ipsa Loquitur

  Tidy as You Go

  Mr. Teague Is Now Receiving

  The Way Is Shut

  No, Really, Harvill, You Shouldn’t Have!

  Wednesday

  I Sing the Body Electric

  Three Weeks Later

  A Dappled Day

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Among the dead there are those

  who still have to be killed.

  —FERNAND DESNOYERS, 1858

  Perhaps the universe is suspended on

  the tooth of some monster.

  —CHEKHOV, 1892

  After the Fall

  What the Military Term

  “Vertically Deployed into the Terrain” Actually Means

  There was this Chinese Lear, first in line at Mauldar Field, locked and loaded, an arrow in a full-drawn bow, jets spooled up, brakes smoking, flaps flapping—the tower phone starts to shrill—a loud metallic howl—John Parkhurst, the tower boss, snatches it up, and what he gets—he told the cops later—is this shrieking raging rant from this loudmouthed—

  Okay, to help this make sense, Parkhurst is a part-time Pentecostal minister, so when he’s talking to the cops he uses the word individual instead of something stronger—anyway, the guy on the horn is claiming to be an FBI agent, and what he wants—at the top of his lungs—is for that curse word curse word Chinese Lear to be stopped right where it is, held on the runway, locked down, and when Parkhurst—who’s kind of a fussy older guy who should probably have been a dentist instead of an air traffic controller—asks for a badge number, well, the guy completely loses it—starts to curse again—uses the F word—and is halfway through a phrase that starts with you dumb c-word and ends you-know-where—so Parkhurst slams the phone down.

  Two minutes later the Lear, a 60 XR Luxury Edition—ten mil easy—powers up into the sky, climbing steep, riding the thunderbolt—the twin jets so loud they rattle windows for a mile around, and Parkhurst sits back, stares at the phone, his ears still on fire, and he says dear me and oh my and lets out a sigh and starts shaking his head, thinking, and on the Lord’s Day too.

  But … other than that nasty bit of business … he got himself calmed down and looked around at the other guys—most of them staring back at him wondering what that was all about—and then he looked out the windows and by God’s Good Grace it was still a lovely Sunday morning in the spring and when he glanced up at the shining blue sky there wasn’t a cloud to be seen … okay, maybe, except for something kind of odd away there in the southeast. It looked like a smudge of black smoke. Or perhaps blowing leaves.

  Parkhurst, having taken spiritual refuge in the Old Testament, pondered the smudge for a time, idly speculating on its nature.

  Meanwhile, a thousand feet up and a half mile downrange, the Chinese Learjet dipped a wing and banked gracefully to the south.

  As Parkhurst drifted through Psalms, a flicker of unease twitched at the back of his mind. He turned to check the Doppler radar. The smudge came back as a diffuse return, essentially undecipherable. So he used his binoculars to get a closer look.

  It took him a second or two to get the target in focus, and another second to make sense of what he was seeing, but once he figured it out, his throat clamped up and his chest went cold.

  It wasn’t a cloud of smoke, or leaves. It was a flock of crows. A very big flock of crows.

  Parkhurst jumped onto the radio—Flight zero six five emergency China Lear alter your course immediately to bearing—but by then, given the speed of the jet, it was just too damn little too damn late. Parkhurst got a brief return transmission from the copilot—tower we are—followed by a shrill Chinese curse.

  The scarlet and gold jet, glittering in the morning sunlight, punched straight into that flock of crows and burst out the other side, its fuselage streaked with blood and matted black feathers, the starboard engine trailing a thin plume of blue smoke. The jet was already losing altitude.

  The pilot was on the radio again—tower this is Flight zero six five we have multiple bird strikes repeat multiple bird strikes—visibility zero—then there was only crackle and static.

  In the tower they all stood in stunned shock as the Learjet skewed to port—its nose dipped—the leftward bank quickly turned int
o a roll and then a rapidly narrowing spiral—the nose dipped—dipped farther—the plane went into a nosedive—the radio came back to life—the pilot had reverted to Hakka and was screaming into his mike—in the background they could hear voices and shouts and metallic racket of the airframe juddering—the pilot came back in English—tower we are going in we are going in.

  They all heard one last transmission—tell my son—then a hoarse cry—the Lear slammed into the ground two miles away, right in the middle of the fourteenth green of the Anora Mercer Golf and Country Club.

  It exploded into a yellow and red and black fireball that flared outwards and rose up into the sky. A few moments later the guys in the tower felt the shock wave hit the windows, a dull percussive thud, followed by a rolling boom.

  There goes my career, Parkhurst was thinking. And then, as an afterthought, poor souls.

  A thousand feet above the crash site the flock of crows re-formed, drew into a tight cloud that took on the shape of a scythe as it flew low across the town, wheeling and soaring, filling the cool clear air with their brassy cries, and then it rose up in one coherent mass and disappeared into the east in the direction of Tallulah’s Wall.

  There was a graveyard silence in the tower except for somebody at the back of the room, who said, in a small voice full of awe, “Holy shit.”

  Parkhurst swallowed with pain and got onto Fire and Ambulance. While he was calling it in, one of the other controllers, a new kid named Matt Lamarr, studied the flight roster for a moment.

  He looked up at the other guys, all of whom were still staring out at the mushroom-shaped cloud rising up from the golf course, except now they were barking and yapping and snapping at each other like a pack of deranged Labradoodles.

  “Hey, dudes,” he said over the din, and then he said it again, louder. “Dudes!”

  Everybody but John Parkhurst turned around to stare at him.

  “What?”

  “Morgan Littlebasket took his Cessna up at 10:22 hours? Right?”

  “Yeah,” said one of the guys. “So what?”

  “So, like, where is he?”

  The Niceville black-and-whites got to the scene of the Learjet crash in four minutes, followed closely by the fire crews. The fireball was raging and pools of jet fuel were burning off all around the splash zone. It was just too hot to work the blaze. There wasn’t much for anybody to do other than to wait for it to die down and check for collateral injuries around the perimeter.

  All they found was one lone vic wandering around in a daze, a crumpled little man with a heavily damaged nose and a badly singed face who identified himself as Thad Llewellyn.

  From what they could decipher of his hysterical ramblings it sounded as if his wife had been in the center of the impact zone when the Lear came screaming down into the fourteenth green.

  Her name was Inge and apparently she’d been holding the pin for him while he was trying to chip his way out of a sand trap.

  The patrol guys refrained from making the obvious hole-in-one jokes—at least in the guy’s hearing—and gently helped him into a cruiser and sent him off to Lady Grace Hospital, lights and siren if you please.

  Then they set up a ribbon barrier to keep the bystanders at a safe distance—mostly groundskeepers and a few folks who’d been having Sunday brunch in the Hy Brasail Room—and settled in to wait for the flames to subside to a workable level and the duty supervisors to show up.

  In the meantime they watched the wreck of the Lear burn down into a debris field of shattered metal and glass and body bits out of which rose a billowing black cloud with bright orange fire at the center. The wind was carrying the smoke eastward, away from the caravan of cop cars, but they could feel the heat coming off it even from a hundred feet away. The fairway grass was blackened all around the site.

  Basically the entire fourteenth green was a smoldering crater fifty feet deep and a hundred feet across. Which is what happens when an aircraft vertically deploys into the terrain.

  Nick Kavanaugh and his partner, Beau Norlett, got to the scene a few minutes later. The fire trucks were stacked up along the cart lane and people in HazMat suits were out there spraying foam all over the place. The EMT vans were parked out of the way, the paramedic crews leaning against the front bumpers or standing around talking in clusters. Nothing for them to do. There were no survivors. Whatever was left of the passengers and of Thad Llewellyn’s wife, Inge, would eventually get tagged and bagged by the Forensics guys or the Transportation Safety Accident Investigation crew.

  Nick rolled their navy blue Crown Vic up behind a big black Suburban with SUPERVISOR printed across the tailgate in bright gold letters. It was Mavis Crossfire’s ride. Nick looked across at Beau as he opened the driver’s door.

  “Let the LT know we’re here. Tell Tig that Staff Sergeant Crossfire is on the scene too. Then go see what the First Responders have to say.”

  Beau Norlett was a young black guy shaped like an artillery round. Raw, but eager and tough, and getting more useful every day. He and Nick had only been partners for a week now, but it had been one hell of a tour. A bank robbery with six killed, including four cops. A wealthy older woman named Delia Cotton gone without a trace, and her elderly gardener, a man named Gray Haggard, gone with her. A hostage-taking at a church which required the services of a police sniper. And just yesterday, his wife’s father, Dillon, vanished from his office up at Virginia Military Institute, not seen since.

  And now this.

  A hell of a week.

  “Will do, boss,” said Beau, who was still running on the adrenaline high of the last few days. Since the Belfair and Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division unit had high sartorial standards—at least Nick did—he’d bought two new suits, a Kors and a Zegna, and three pairs of Allen Edmonds shoes. At his salary, with a wife and two kids, this was a major investment.

  “They got a coffee truck over there, Nick. Want a coffee? Honey bun?”

  “Coffee would be great, but don’t call me honey bun in front of the harness guys.”

  Beau laughed, picked up the handset, flicked the SEND tab. Nick closed the door and took a moment to wring out the kinks before he put on his suit jacket. He was in charcoal gray today, with a black shirt. No tie. It was too damn hot. He slipped his gold detective shield onto his belt, tugged at the Colt Python he carried in a holster on his right side, and surveyed the scene, getting his head into the game again.

  At thirty-two, Nick was young to be a CID detective, but he had served eight years with the Fifth Special Forces, so his thirty-two wasn’t like the thirty-two-year-old hairball who is still living in your basement trying to finish his doctoral dissertation on Gender and Race Bias in Neo-Kantian Hermeneutics.

  Nick was just over six feet, gray-blue eyes, blue-black hair graying at the temples, still taut and fit, married to Kate Walker, a family practice lawyer, whom he adored and who, he hoped, adored him back, which, most of the time, she did.

  He walked up to the driver’s side of the Niceville PD Suburban and tapped on the window. Mavis Crossfire grinned back at him as she powered the glass down. A big-boned pink-faced woman with short-cropped red hair and smile lines around her pale blue eyes, she was in harness this morning—a crisp dark blue uniform with a big gold badge on her Kevlar vest and staff sergeant stripes on her sleeves.

  “Nick. Top of the morning.”

  Nick shook his head. “Top of the morning?”

  “You’re Irish, aren’t you?”

  “I was born in California.”

  Mavis smiled, took a sip of coffee from a thermos with an Ole Miss logo on the side, nodded her head in the direction of the crash site.

  “There’s a hell of a thing.”

  “Yeah. Any survivors?”

  “Not a chance. And another vic killed when it came down on top of her.”

  “Do we know who she was?”

  “Inge Llewellyn.”

  “Jeez. Thad Llewellyn’s wife? Plus-sized Nordic lady with a voice
that could cut glass?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Tough week for Thad Llewellyn. First his bank gets robbed, and now his wife gets hers on the fourteenth green. Does he know yet?”

  “He was over there in a sand trap when the jet came down. First Responders found him wandering around the fairway with no eyebrows. Saw it all.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Black-and-white took him to Lady Grace. They’ve sedated him.”

  “I sure hope so. Poor bastard. I heard it was a crow strike?”

  Mavis nodded.

  “Tower saw it happen. Lear smacked straight into the flock. Thousands of birds. Never had a chance. Now get this. There’s another fire crew over at the base of Tallulah’s Wall, picking through a wrecked Cessna. Tail numbers come back as Cherokee Nation Trust. Inside is a crispy critter named Morgan Littlebasket.”

  “I know that name.”

  Mavis nodded, looking at her notepad.

  “Yes, you would. That would be the Morgan Littlebasket, head of the Cherokee Trust and all-around Very Inflated Person up in Gracie. Tower guys say he showed up for a joyride at oh-nine-hundred this morning. Seemed a bit distracted. Fooled around with a pre-flight check and then took off around ten twenty. Went south. Witnesses say he buzzed those old trees along the crest of Tallulah’s Wall. Then he came down, skimmed along the Tulip River for a half mile, powered up again and banked left, rose up to maybe five, six hundred feet, altered course to the northwest, leveled out, and flew himself right smack into the middle of Tallulah’s Wall.”

  “Straight and steady flight?”

  “Not a weeble or a wobble. In like a bullet.”

  “Man,” Nick said, smiling at her. “What do you figure was going through his mind?”

  “The windshield, and thanks for the setup.”

  “Maybe a suicide? Any note? Any last words?”

  “Nothing so far. We’ve got people going through his house right now. Could have been a stroke or a heart attack. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “He’s got daughters, doesn’t he?”