Silence on Cold River

by Casey Dunn

  “And you will perform oil changes on my client’s car every three months until the day you graduate,” the other attorney had interjected, “and you will wash and vacuum it once a month.”

  “Is he going to let me touch his car again?” Eddie had asked Mr. Flemmons. He heard the man turn away.

  “Any slipups and this offer expires immediately and the original sentence will apply,” the man’s attorney answered for him.

  Eddie remembered how he couldn’t speak, couldn’t make a single sound come out. So he nodded. The attorney and his client leaped from their chairs like the table had caught fire. The judge, his lawyer, and Mr. Flemmons stared back at him—two dark faces sandwiching an old white man with whiter hair. They had reminded Eddie of an Oreo cookie.

  “This is your shot, Eddie,” the judge had said. “Don’t blow it.”

  At first, the owner of the car would stay inside his brick house when Mr. Flemmons brought Eddie to service or wash the car. Then one day, about six months after the hearing, he was standing in the driveway in plain clothes and asked Mr. Flemmons to teach him, too. Mr. Flemmons stepped aside and asked Eddie to walk him through the steps. Then Eddie, his face and pants streaked in oil, had whispered, “Do you want me to show you how I started your car?”

  Eddie smiled to himself as he sat on the old couch, remembering the curiosity like fishhooks that pulled up the man’s eyebrows. “Hell yeah,” he’d said.

  The flicker of joy within him sunk, tethered, always tethered, to Hazel. His relationship with Stan Flemmons was one of the reasons Eddie had been supportive of Jonathon Walks taking her under his wing. Not that she was a troubled kid in need of a shot—Hazel was a saint. But she was also alone. Eddie might sing along to a favorite song on the radio in the car, but music was background noise to him, something to regard, like the temperature or the season. It could set a tone, sure. That’s why they used it in movies. Even tone-deaf folks like Eddie could take the hint.

  Still, he was grateful for Jonathon. Even if Hazel was dead, and maybe she was… maybe she was… that man had brought the life back to her eyes for just a little while.

  MICHAEL Chapter 39 | October 2004 | Tarson, Georgia

  I PASS THE TARSON CITY limit population sign. It hasn’t changed, save the longer streaks of moss and the deeper pocks of corrosion. I wander aimlessly down Main Street. Perhaps my time in Atlanta has colored my perspective, but I swear the buildings look shorter, the road narrower, the lights slower.

  An old Toyota Tacoma in front of me slows, approaching a green light at an empty intersection. Wiry gray hair crowns the driver’s peach-colored scalp in a crescent, and I nearly prompt him with my horn. I sit back and rest the heel of my hand against the six-o’clock position on the steering wheel of my Jeep.

  One honk and everyone would think I’m not from around here.

  I press my palm flat against the center of the wheel. The horn blares for a second and a half. The truck jumps ahead, then the brake lights flash. An older man hangs out the window far enough to look back at me. I roll my window down and stick my hand out, gesturing the opposite of an apology, emulating what I’ve seen a hundred drivers do on Atlanta’s streets.

  The driver waves me off, his frown visible in the side-view mirror, and drives ahead. I turn at the intersection. I wasn’t planning to, but I don’t have any plan, really. Fate told me to come back, that she’s ready, that I’m ready. So here I am.

  I am relieved to find that the antiques shop is still here, an open sign in the door. With any luck, Rick is still here, too, and I’ll be able to gauge the community’s reaction to my potential return without inciting a riot. I try to peer inside as I drive past, but the windows are dusty, and although I’m sure the store is stuffed from wall to wall with trinkets and junk, from the outside I see only brown. Even the plants in the window planters are curled and dying. I imagine they would snap between my fingers.

  Bones don’t snap, by the way. They’re not brittle, not unless someone is really old and calcium depleted, or if the bones have been cooked. Raw bones are quite hard and remain so long after exposure.

  I pull into a spot, one of three marked for the store, but the whole row in front of the sleepy strip of stores is completely empty. I leave my stick and my pack on the floor behind my seat and step out of the car. My shoes are the shiniest thing in this town, and I nearly consider changing them before walking farther onto the sidewalk. The sound of another car approaching spurs me along, and I push through the door to the antiques shop, a little bell above my head jingling to announce my arrival.

  The inside of the antiques shop is exactly as I left it. Boxes piled in a corner, shelves laden with musty, forgotten castoffs. But the little engraved instruments are not sitting on the shelf behind the counter. In their place stand a row of old Beatles records and a poster of Marilyn Monroe.

  A man steps out of the employee office, and he is not the same, either. He steps into the light, and I see that if he is a man, he is just barely—probably eighteen or nineteen at the oldest. His hair is oil black and pulled up in a Mohawk.

  “Can I help you?” he asks.

  “I’m just passing through. Something in the window caught my eye.”

  “What was it?”

  “A little wooden piano,” I lie.

  His face knits with doubt, but he rounds the counter all the same and hustles to the window display. “I can’t remember seeing one of those recently, but to be honest, some of this stuff has been here since before I started working here.”

  “How long have you worked here?” I let my gaze roam, remembering how tall the shelves once felt, how strong the walls. This place was like a fortress for me. Now the ceiling, its exposed pipes and beams peeking from squares where tiles have been removed, feels like it might cave in with a hard rain.

  “About a year. A little over. Yeah, sorry. I don’t see anything like that up here. Are you sure you saw it?”

  “I heard this store used to carry miniature instrument carvings. Must have been the power of suggestion,” I say.

  “Rick carved them back when he managed the store. He was my neighbor. That’s how I got the job. I’m not exactly marketable, as my mom says.” He grins. “They might still sell them at the Music Box, though. It’s right across the street.”

  “Is Rick still in town? I do a little carving myself. I’d love to pick his brain.”

  “He doesn’t live in Tarson anymore. A friend of his killed himself in Cold River a long time ago. My mom said he never could get over it.”

  My finger pauses on the spine of the book. Could Timmy, that pudgy, redheaded shit, have been a friend of Rick’s? I recall the hours Rick spent with me, teaching me how to guide the blade of a knife for precision, depth, line versus slope. And patience, always patience.

  You can only make one stroke at a time, Michael.

  I am filled with the desire to hold the walking stick, to trace each key under my thumb. I move for the door, calling out a polite farewell.

  “Hey, wait,” the boy says, and I turn on my heel. “He left a number so I can call him if I have any trouble. I don’t know if it’s still his number, but it might be worth a try. Maybe you can buy something over the phone.” He hands me a scrap of paper. “Don’t tell him I mentioned the suicide. He gets pretty locked up about it. He was the only friend in town the kid had. I think he feels like he failed him.”

  I take the paper and stow it in a pocket. Timmy had plenty of friends. Even now I can see their faces circled around me, mouths open with shouts, spit flying.

  “It wasn’t a popular thing, the friendship,” the boy said.

  “Age difference?” I speculate.

  “No. I mean, maybe, if the kid was normal. But this kid. Monster.” He smiles and shudders at the same time, and the hair on my arm raises, sensing a coming lightning strike, an approaching storm. “His name was Michael Walton. You should look him up. Closest thing this town has to an urban legend.”

  AMA Chapter 40
| 11:00 PM, December 2, 2006 | Dalton, Georgia

  AMA WOKE GASPING FOR BREATH, every inch of her beaded in chilly perspiration. The bullet wound ached with fresh pain as if she’d just been shot, and she realized she was pressing the undersides of both wrists together, bound once again in her dream. She slapped at the button for the bedside light. If getting out of bed wasn’t such a production, she’d turn on the overhead light, too, but the switch was by the door. Between her sprained ankle and the sedative they’d given her to help her sleep, she wasn’t sure she could make it without falling.

  She was panting and furious, scared enough to sweat and shake in a hospital room where more security and more doors would separate her from Michael than at any point in the future, unless by some miracle he was caught. She wondered if Michael would own space in her brain, a sliver of every shadow, every bump in the night, for the rest of her life. By letting him go, she gave him that. And she gave him Hazel. If only that man hadn’t had a gun, hadn’t tried to shoot Michael. Maybe he would’ve run off and left Ama standing there in the rain.

  But Michael would’ve come back.

  She recalled the crime scenes in the case she defended for him. The cat that had been dissected piece by piece, layer by layer. A small dog with its ribs broken open with a hammer, its lungs cut open with a pair of gardening sheers. Michael Jeffery Walton finished what he started.

  She pulled her legs into her body and rested her forehead on her knees. Would he see this as a negotiation on her part—a plea deal? She would leave him alone if he would leave her out of it. But could she do that? Really? He’d already had Hazel for an entire year. She’d been with him for a matter of hours and hadn’t thought she’d survive.

  She opened the laptop Lindsey had brought up for her earlier in the day, along with a change of clothes and a bottle of Zinfandel. The only thing stopping her from opening the wine was that Lindsey had forgotten to bring a corkscrew. Reading comments about herself on the V.A.A.C. site was like some kind of purgatory, or whatever it was called when Catholics punished themselves. One of the comments mentioned Eddie by name and said they would be paying him conjugal visits in prison as a way to say thank-you.

  “Christ Almighty,” Ama muttered.

  Someone tapped on the door before pushing it open. A nurse walked in, petite and lithe, a cable-knit sweater draped from her shoulders like it was sliding off a hanger, and Ama wondered if she had to buy her clothes in the kids’ sections at department stores.

  “Hi, Ama,” she said. “Trouble sleeping?”

  “I’m just ready to be in my own bed,” Ama replied, closing her laptop and casting it aside.

  “Nothing is better than your own bed,” the woman agreed. “Your own pillows.”

  “No offense, but it’s criminal to call these flimsy things pillows,” Ama said. “And don’t get me started on the sheets.”

  The woman laughed, an easy sound, like they might be trading stories at a bar about crap dates or ridiculous pickup lines, and Ama wondered at the sense of relief bleeding from her heart.

  “If you drink enough of that wine, the bed will be more comfortable,” the woman offered, eyeing the bottle, and Ama smiled in spite of herself.

  “If I could get it open, I would.”

  “I can help you with that. Just don’t tell the supervisor.” The woman arched a brow and reached in the oversize pocket of her sweater, producing a set of keys held together with the loop end of a Leatherman keychain.

  “You are my hero,” Ama said, feeling as light as she had since waking.

  “My name is Kim,” the woman said as she removed the cork and passed Ama the open bottle. Ama realized this relief, this coolness flowing through her, was a response to the sheer normalcy of this moment—of these ninety seconds not discussing vitals or reliving flashbacks.

  Ama poured wine into a plastic cup and offered it to Kim.

  “No, thank you. I’m working,” she said. “But I can hang out here for a minute if you want company. It’s no fun to drink alone.”

  Ama swallowed a sip of wine and a smartass remark about drinking alone, and nodded a response.

  “So how are you doing, Ama?” Kim asked, and slid her hands in her giant pockets. “How are you really doing?”

  “I don’t even know.” Ama brought up the head of her bed and sank back against it.

  “I’m sure it’s hard to answer that when there’s still so much unknown.” Kim frowned. “I think random evil is so much scarier than if there’s a reason. It’s like something truly terrible—like what happened to you—can happen to anyone at any point, and there’s nothing you can do to see it coming. Nothing you can do to stop it.”

  “I’d never met that man before in my life,” Ama said.

  “I thought you didn’t remember what happened. Have you had a breakthrough?” Kim leaned forward, her expression too eager.

  “No.” Ama swallowed hard. “A detective came to question me. He brought his picture by. I’m sure I’ve never met him before.”

  “You said ‘Hazel’ when you first woke up, didn’t you? A nurse is telling everyone about it.”

  “Who knows what I said. I was waking up from surgery.” Ama’s hands began to shake. She put her cup down to keep from spilling.

  “Did you mean Hazel Stevens, the girl who disappeared in Tarson Woods last year, the same woods where you were found? That was the shooter’s daughter. Did they tell you that? Do they suspect Eddie Stevens for her disappearance now? Why did you say her name? Did he tell you something?” Kim asked the questions in such rapid succession that Ama could barely keep up.

  “What is this, an interrogation? This is highly inappropriate. I’m going to report you to your supervisor.” Ama glanced at the whiteboard where every nurse had written their name the first time they came in the room. Kim, Ama realized, hadn’t done that.

  “Who are you?” Ama growled.

  The woman stood and withdrew her hands from her pockets. She was holding a press badge and her cell phone, blinking with an ongoing recording. Ama thumbed the call button on the side of her bed. “I need security! Someone’s in here!”

  The woman bolted through the door in one fluid movement. Ama sank back against the raised head of her bed. She’d just been had by a reporter and she’d nearly sung like a damn bird, because why? Because they had laughed about shitty pillows together and she’d opened a bottle of wine? She blinked back a sting of tears, feeling utterly betrayed by herself.

  Two nurses rushed in, looking over the room from corner to corner.

  “Are you okay?” one of them asked.

  “No.” Ama glowered, needing a place to aim her disgust other than herself. “A reporter was just in my room. I want to know who to speak with about nurses disclosing patient information to the media.” The nurses looked from Ama to each other. “Now!” she barked, and they scurried from her room. Her heart thudded in her chest—something the reporter had said still bleated in her mind.

  Ama grabbed her laptop again and typed “Hazel Stevens” into a search engine. She clicked on the first link, an article from a year ago about Hazel Rae Stevens, vanished in Tarson Woods on December 1, 2005, and a picture of her distraught father: Edmond “Eddie” Stevens.

  And who, one year later, would come into Tarson Woods looking for Ama.

  Ama slid from the hospital bed, hobbled to the bathroom, and vomited into the toilet. She rested her cheek on the cool seat, heaving and spitting. It made sense now. It all made sudden, undeniable sense. Eddie Stevens was the man crying in the van. He’d realized Ama hadn’t come back out of the woods, and he’d gone in after her.

  Ama stood up, rinsed her mouth, and, gripping the edge of the sink with both hands, stared at herself in the mirror. If she stayed silent, people wouldn’t think Eddie had just tried to kill Ama; they’d think he did away with his own daughter, too, especially once the media began promoting the connection. At the very least, she needed to say she remembered something—something that would clear Ed
die’s name. Maybe the gun accidently went off. Maybe she remembered being grabbed by someone other than Eddie but didn’t remember who or what he looked like, and Eddie really was a hero.

  Michael would know, though. He would know she couldn’t remember what happened without remembering who… without remembering why. She had to figure out how to let Eddie off the hook without spooking Michael. If the media broke a story that turned up the heat on Hazel or Tarson Woods, he would see it as Fate telling him to leave, to find safer, calmer water, that the time wasn’t right. He’d left Tarson before. He’d leave again, and he’d take Hazel with him, or he’d leave her wherever he’d locked her up and she would die.

  If she didn’t say a word, kept to her story of amnesia, Eddie Stevens would be labeled the killer of his own daughter for the rest of his life.

  If she told the truth, Eddie Stevens would very likely never see his daughter alive again.

  Ama couldn’t be sure if or when Kim planned to break the story tying Hazel to Ama’s shooting, but she doubted Kim would sit on it for long. She needed a way to keep Michael in Tarson long enough to draw him out and snare him. To do that, she would need bait, and the only thing he valued at this point was her voice. She wanted to be back in Atlanta so bad she was tempted to walk there, but if she wanted Michael to stay in Tarson, she couldn’t leave, either.

  How could she tempt him to her, and where, with any hope of escaping the meeting? And, maybe the larger hurdle, how would she get the message to him alone? She had to figure out how to write an invitation in the proverbial sky that only he would see, only he would truly understand.

  MICHAEL Chapter 41 | October 2004 | Tarson, Georgia

  I’M DEAD.

  I sit back in my chair at the library and reread the archived article about my suicide in Cold River. I stare at the photograph they used, one of those school pictures with the blue backgrounds that makes it look like you’re underwater or in the sky. Either way, it’s a touch morbid.