“Honk,” said Lemon, as they rolled slowly along the path, the huge willows pressing in around them. “If they’re around they’ll hear you.”
Kate blipped the horn a couple of times. There was no response. Patton’s Hard was deserted.
“They’re not here,” said Kate. “I can’t feel either of them.”
“Let’s go all the way through. If they’re not here, maybe it’s time to call the … Hold on a minute.”
Kate slowed the truck.
“See that?” said Lemon. “The car tracks turn off there.”
“How do you know it’s not the parks people on a golf cart thingie.”
“You don’t golf, do you, Kate?”
“No, I’m too young to die of boredom. So it’s not a golf cart?”
“No, it’s a car, a subcompact.”
Kate peered through the misty half-light. The narrow tracks they had been riding over came to a sharp turn beside a huge stand of willows. The tracks went under the cascade of hanging willow branches and disappeared into the greenish gloom under the trees.
“I am not,” said Kate, “following those.”
“Wait here,” said Lemon, popping the door. He stepped out, and then leaned back in.
“Have you got a flashlight?”
“In the glove box. Lemon, I’ve seen this movie.”
He flashed a bright, slightly crazed smile and Kate remembered that before he became an “escort” to the Ladies Who Lunch he was a Marine Corps combat vet with two Bronzes for valor.
“Nothing can happen to us. We’re the leads.”
“What if you’re just the faithful sidekick? They always get it first.”
“Depends on whose movie it is,” he said, reaching into the glove box. He pulled out a Streamlight and, with a flourish, Kate’s compact Glock pistol.
“Would it make you feel better if I took this along?”
Kate sighed, reached for the keys.
“Yes. But I’m coming too.”
“Why?”
“Because sometimes it’s the chickenhearted wimp who stays in the car who gets it first.”
Lemon laughed, closed his door, and Kate got out and hit the remote lock. He turned on the Streamlight—a powerful halogen beam—and they followed it down a few yards, reaching the point where the car tracks—if that’s what they were—disappeared under the willow branches.
Kate hesitated but Lemon reached out, caught a handful of branches, and pulled them aside, shining the beam in as he did so.
Inside the curtain wall the willows rose up in columns, tall, angular branches arching out like flying buttresses in a green cathedral.
The interior—it felt like an interior—retained traces of the glow from the setting sun. It soared over their heads, a hundred feet or more, and spread out around them in a radius of fifty or sixty feet. The soaring space was full of creaking and hissing sounds as the wind off the river stirred the upper branches.
Everybody said that the willows in Patton’s Hard would whisper to each other. Kate could understand how an imaginative person could hear voices in those trees.
The air in here smelled of earth and moss and rotting leaves. The ground under their feet was soft and damp. The tracks seemed to fade into the gloom. Something angular and spindly was up against the trunk of the main willow.
Lemon put his light on it.
It was a lawn chair, a battered old ruin that looked as if it had been scavenged from a thrift store or a junk pile. An umbrella was attached to the arm of the chair with a bungee cord. Beside the chair was an upturned wooden crate, and on the crate was a pile of dog-eared paperback books. The space in front of the chair was scuffed and worn. There were candy wrappers and Coke cans scattered about. Another lawn chair, this one folded flat, was propped up against the trunk of the willow. Kate went over and picked up one of the paperbacks.
It was a Harry Potter book—something about a goblet of gloom. Kate opened it and saw what she knew she would see. Rainey had written his name inside the front cover. He always did that.
Lemon was standing close, shining the light down on the page.
“I think we’ve found their hideout.”
“I guess we have. And they’re not here.”
Lemon turned the light away and shone it deeper into the gloom, following the tracks. Looking at them carefully, he came to the realization that there was only one set of tracks. That is, there was no sign that whoever had driven into this space had ever put the car into reverse and driven back out, smearing and overlaying a second set of tracks on top of the first.
When this thought had worked its way through the levels of his mind, his belly went tight and his breathing got shallow.
“Wait here,” he said, walking away towards the far side of the willow curtain. Beyond it he could hear the roaring rush of the Tulip as it raced around the big bend that it had carved into Patton’s Hard. As he got closer to the bank he could feel the force of the current through the ground. Kate came up behind him.
“Where do they go?” she asked. “I can’t see that anybody tried to turn a car around in this space. You’d see the tracks …”
Her voice trailed off as she got to where Lemon already was in one gestalt.
They were now at the edge of the Tulip. Six feet down the muddy banks the dark brown water swirled and hissed and muttered like a living thing. Farther out, twigs and leaves and river junk turned slowly inside the whirlpool generated by the currents as the Tulip powered through the bend.
Years ago Kate had seen a dog slip off the muddy banks and get caught up in that whirlpool. Some kind of hound, it fought desperately for its life. Kate had picked up a tree branch and tried to get the dog to bite it so she could pull him out, and he had tried to do that, but in the end he had just gone under, never taking his huge brown eyes, ringed in white, off her face. She hated Patton’s Hard as much as she hated Crater Sink.
On the far side of the river the lights of Long Reach Boulevard were coming on as twilight deepened. In the last of the light they could both clearly see the tracks they had been following.
They ran down the steep bank and disappeared into the Tulip River.
Lemon stepped closer to the bank, shining the light into the water. Through the murk he could see a pale white rectangle. When the light hit it, the reflective paint in the rectangle glowed much brighter. The white rectangle had large blue numbers on it. It was a license plate. He held the light closer to the surface of the water.
Behind him he heard Kate whisper.
“Lemon. You cannot fall in there.”
He peered down the cone of bright light. The license plate wasn’t caught in the willow roots, as he had been hoping. It was attached to something much larger, something round and metallic, and that larger thing was what had gotten tangled up in the willow roots, like a bull caught in a net.
He straightened, turned, and Kate tugged him back up the banks, his boots sliding on the slippery mud. They got back to solid ground.
“Is it there?”
“Yes,” said Lemon, “it’s there. Some sort of compact car. I think it’s light blue. It went down the bank but instead of going all the way to the bottom of the river, it got caught up in the roots of all these willows.”
“Did you see what make of car?”
“No. I got the license number. KT987Z. Do you know it?”
Kate went inside herself and came back.
“What you mean to say is, is it Alice Bayer’s license plate?”
“Yes, Kate. I think that’s what I mean.”
“I don’t know her license number. I know she drove a small blue car.”
She stopped, hoping for the right words to come.
“I guess we’ll have to call the police, won’t we?”
“Yes,” said Lemon, but gently. “I’m afraid we will.”
If God Made the Universe Out of Nothing, Did the Universe Make Nothing Out of God?
In many ways Rainey and Axel were just like
any other kids who knew they were in major trouble with the parents. Although it was getting dark and they were hungry, neither boy could bring himself to grab an uptown trolley and go back home. Not just yet anyway.
They were riding the Peachtree Line. They had been riding it for hours, ever since they left Rainey’s mother’s house on Cemetery Hill.
The Peachtree streetcar was one of the old-fashioned navy blue and gold monsters that Niceville was famous for. Heavy as a tank, it lurched and clattered through the crowded downtown streets, heading east again for the Armory Bridge that crossed the river a couple of blocks south of the Pavilion.
The overheated car was packed with office workers going home at the end of a long day and a few kids from Saint Innocent Orthodox School—Axel and Rainey could pick out their dorky outfits from a mile away.
Axel and Rainey had their Regiopolis blazers folded up and stuffed into their knapsacks. Rainey, in the window seat, was staring across the river at the face of Tallulah’s Wall. Axel was tapping away at his iPad, which Rainey thought he probably shouldn’t do because maybe there was a way to trace where they were when it was on. That was why he had taken the battery out of his cell phone. Axel had told him that taking the battery out was the only way to shut off a Motorola phone. Axel knew stuff like that because his father used to be an FBI guy. Axel was feeling pretty freaked out about his father being out on the loose. He didn’t want to run into him, but he didn’t want the police to shoot him either.
Life was complicated for both of them and there didn’t seem to be much they could do about it, so Axel was playing Grand Theft Auto and Rainey was staring out the window.
At this time of year the last of the setting sun always lit up the oaks and willows that lined the top of Tallulah’s Wall. They glowed now, a bright green, but the vine-covered face of the wall was in a deep purple shadow. There was still a big brown spot in the wall, where six months ago a guy had flown his plane right into it on purpose. Another suicide, just like Rainey’s dad.
Rainey looked over at Axel, who was sitting slumped down in his seat, looking sad and worried and tired. They had run out of talk a while back, their sense of a shared adventure had slowly died away, and now they were both just hungry and worried and sleepy.
Axel was a brave little guy and Rainey liked him—he had taken on Coleman Mauldar—but Axel really wanted to go home, and soon they’d both have to decide how to do that. Looking at his reflection in the window glass of the streetcar, Rainey wasn’t sure what kind of a state he was in.
He felt detached from the grown-ups around him, and from the bright lights of the shops and houses that were passing by on the other side of the glass, detached from the life of the city itself, as if it were a boring movie that he had to sit through because one of the Jesuits thought it would make better men out of them.
He mainly felt detached from Kate and Nick and from everybody else in the current version of his life. Axel was the only person he felt connected to, and even then he knew that Axel and he were very different.
For instance, Axel cared what other people thought and felt. Rainey knew that Axel was feeling guilty and sad and awful. Rainey understood in an intellectual way that this was partly because they had been caught out in a long string of lies and deceptions and getting caught at something sneaky usually made the person who got caught angry and sad and awful. Blowing off school would have to be paid for. Rainey and Axel both understood that.
But it had been fun while it lasted.
Gert the Lesbo had asked for notes and permissions and all that stuff. Axel had figured out how to work the computer—Axel was dead smart at that sort of thing—scary smart—and the notepaper was right there in his mom’s desk.
So he and Rainey had been free to do whatever they wanted during school hours. All that was over now. They spent a lot of time in their fort down on Patton’s Hard, but Axel said the place creeped him out.
After that, for the most part, they had just gone back to his real home almost every day—except when Lemon was there working on the gardens. They watched television and searched the Internet on his mom’s computer and googled for dirty pictures and posted stupid stuff on Facebook and Twitter and ate whatever canned stuff they could eat without having to cook it.
But they had stopped going on Google News after Axel found all that stuff about what was supposed to have happened to Rainey when he was kidnapped.
It had sort of freaked them both out, but Rainey most of all. Rainey had no clear memory of that time, other than there was a mirror with a gold frame in Moochie’s window and when you looked into it sometimes you could see a farm inside a pine forest and there was a big horse named Jupiter.
Axel found an article on Google that said Rainey’s mother had committed suicide by jumping into Crater Sink. But they had never found her body, and Rainey knew in his heart that his mother wasn’t dead and that if he could only listen harder to the voices in the willows then he’d understand what the willows were trying to explain to him. If he listened carefully enough maybe the willows could help him understand why his father had committed suicide after Rainey had been found inside that grave. Even Rainey thought that his father shouldn’t have killed himself right when Rainey needed him the most. So it was very important for him to figure out how all these things happened, and why, and then he’d know what to do about all these people in his life.
Including Axel.
The streetcar clattered across Armory Bridge and began to climb up the long, winding streets that ended up at the roundabout on Upper Chase Run, where the streetcar would turn around and head back down and do it all over again.
They had been on the car now for three hours—two dollars got you an all-day ride if you wanted it—and the driver, a young woman with hazel eyes and a big friendly hello for all the passengers—was beginning to pay too much attention to the two kids who never got off and who were always sitting in the last bench on the left at the back of the car.
Axel told Rainey that he could tell she was getting ready to do something adult about them.
They had about a half mile to go before they got to the roundabout again, which was set into the side of Tallulah’s Wall, right at the top of Upper Chase Run.
There was a flight of rickety wooden stairs that started at the end of Upper Chase, just past the roundabout. It zigzagged up the easy side of Tallulah’s Wall and ended up in a path that wandered around along the crest through all the old trees that lived up there.
The path ended at Crater Sink, but nobody ever took it that far, since Crater Sink had a reputation for being a place where bad things lived.
Although Axel, like every Niceville kid, knew all about Crater Sink, he had never actually gone there. For one thing, it was just plain creepy.
Rainey had visited Crater Sink only once, with his mother, on a kind of picnic. They had driven up there and laid out a brunch but his mother had gotten all twitchy about the way the trees were hanging down over Crater Sink and why there were so many crows all around and why even though it was a bright sunny day the water never showed any blue sky in it. The surface was always black.
So they hadn’t stayed, although Rainey often felt drawn to the place, especially now that he had found out that Crater Sink was where his mother was supposed to have jumped in.
They were rumbling slowly past the big mansions of The Chase, all of them sitting on top of their private hills behind their big stone fences. They went by 682 Upper Chase Road, a big wooden house with all sorts of turrets and stained glass and complicated woodwork hanging off it—Rainey thought it looked like it should be haunted. The house was dark and boarded up.
There was a black iron gate, chained shut, and a brass plate on the gate.
TEMPLE HILL
Rainey had looked it up after he’d heard a few of the guys at school talking about it. It turned out that Temple Hill was all about him. He nudged Axel out of his daze and pointed at the house.
“This house is all about w
hat happened to me,” he said. Axel sat up, suddenly involved.
“That house? Whoa, it’s like a castle! Like a haunted castle. Totally cool!”
Rainey explained how it was the home of this rich old hag named Delia Cotton. According to the story in the Niceville Register, she had disappeared like months ago, and her handyman too, a guy named Gray Haggard, who had served in World War Two with Dillon Walker, Axel’s papa, who was a Big Deal up at VMI and he had also disappeared around the same time and guess what, Alice Bayer had been her housekeeper, and it all fit together, and there was even more, because Nick was the guy who had the Cotton case, which never got solved, and Nick was also the guy who got Alice Bayer the job running Attendance and Records at Regiopolis Prep.
Axel had followed this narrative with only half his mind—he was trying to get to the part in Grand Theft Auto where you got to see a naked girl—but the mention of Alice Bayer got his attention, because he had a terrible thought going around inside his head that Rainey knew something bad about her. He was looking up at Rainey while he talked and his suspicions were right there in his face but Rainey missed it.
He rolled on, enjoying the way the story was giving them both the heebie-jeebies.
Rainey had also found out—by sneaking a look at Nick’s casebook, which Nick always left on the desk in his office when he was off duty—that the mirror in Uncle Moochie’s window had once belonged to Delia Cotton for like a thousand years and that Delia Cotton had decided she didn’t want the mirror and she had given it to Alice Bayer, who had sold it to Moochie, and that was why the mirror was in the window of Moochie’s store for Rainey to see and get all hypnotized by it and disappear.
He stopped there, because the idea came to him that what had happened to Alice Bayer was just payback, and thinking about it like that was helping to make his guilty feelings go away. But he wasn’t going to admit anything like that to Axel.
They clattered past Temple Hill and rumbled around a bend that led up to the roundabout. Axel went back to his Grand Theft Auto game, and Rainey wondered where the mirror was now.
The Homecoming Page 23
