The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  “I got chills.”

  That was true.

  Under the table, his knee bobbed up and down like a sewing machine.

  Should he just tell her? Tell her that he had—what, exactly? Stolen? Grave-robbed? Borrowed?—her dead husband’s body? But was he even right? The edges of the room seemed to warp, his vision blurring. Not now. Please, please, please, not now. If he blacked out, there was no telling what would happen, what disaster he would have to wake up to.

  What was he capable of?

  He had no idea.

  Hope asked, “You from around here?”

  “Just passing through.”

  “Oh, yeah, from where?” Still the cordial professional smile.

  He hesitated. “New York. On my way out to Montauk.”

  “Not the greatest beach weather.”

  “No. No, it isn’t.”

  He thanked her for the coffee.

  She lingered an extra moment, as if she wanted to say something else, but then turned and left. A quick glance at Roy again before she went into the kitchen.

  He had followed her yesterday morning to Tom’s, a greasy spoon at the edge of the bluffs over the Peconic River on Highway 25, halfway between the Tanger Outlets and Riverhead. It was an old-style diner with chromed-metal-and-Formica counters, checked linoleum floors, and booths lining windows with views over the river and the scrub brush of Barrens Park.

  Bacon hissed and popped on the griddle, overlaying the warm-comfort smell of freshly brewed coffee. At eight in the morning, just three cars were in the parking lot, including Roy’s beat-up Chevy. Two more cars pulled in, and Hope brought coffee to the new patrons.

  She slipped past Roy on her way back behind the counter, holding up the carafe—more?

  He shook his head.

  He left ten dollars for the coffee without waiting for the check.

  * * *

  “Damn it.”

  Roy was soaked to the waist from wading through the wet grass, his hair sopping wet from the rain that streamed into his eyes.

  Even through the pins-and-needles numbness, his hands and feet ached from the cold. He balanced on a mound of red bricks at the back of the house, straining to shove open the kitchen window. He had checked from a distance—no lights on. Nobody home. The girl would be at school till at least three, and Hope had picked her up from after school at five yesterday.

  Groaning, he strained again.

  Everything was locked.

  What did he want?

  He wasn’t sure.

  A hint of an explanation of why Jake had killed himself, for one. Something more than what Angel was able to scour from the internet. He couldn’t send the man here. He didn’t even want Angel to know he was here. He didn’t want anyone else to know. This was his private mission. He needed to know more.

  Break a window?

  Not yet.

  The house was locked down tight. Who locked houses like that out here? Wasn’t this the countryside? Wasn’t that the reason people moved out of the city? To leave doors open, keys in the car, trust your neighbor, and all that?

  Roy circled the house again, shivering for real now.

  He crouched in the grass when a car hissed by in the rain. He looked through the window of the double garage. A wall of tools gathering dust. A vehicle inside—could be an old Mustang. In the gloom he saw something else: stairs against the back wall.

  He glanced up, blinking in the rain.

  There was an upstairs to the garage. It would be warmer in there, at least. He tried the door to the side. Locked. Grabbing the handle, he put his shoulder into it.

  The old wood frame cracked.

  That can be fixed, a voice said in Roy’s head. Nobody would know. Nobody ever comes in here, anyway. The place is a wreck.

  He closed the door and paused for a few seconds to blow on his hands and stamp his feet. He circled the Mustang, ran his hand over it—smooth, the curves like echoes of a dream in the dim light. The smell of the engine grease, sawdust, dark patches of oil on the concrete slab—it all felt achingly familiar.

  Roy took the stairs up to the attic and clicked on the light.

  Two rows of fluorescent tubes popped and then clicked on. A heavy bag hung from the rafters at the end. A few pictures of Jake with Hope. One of him holding his little girl, Elsa. More pictures of other MMA fighters on the walls, many of them signed. A few pictures of Jake holding a tactical knife, dressed in camouflage in the woods. A weight bench and a heavy set of irons. Everything coated in a layer of fine dust.

  A desk by the window looked out the back.

  Roy opened the top drawer.

  Two old plane tickets, some keys, stacks of receipts and business cards. He rifled through the side drawers. File folders stacked with bank records, what looked like contracts, old tax returns. He slung his backpack around, opened it, and pulled out the stacks of papers, emptied the contents of the top drawer into it.

  “Put your hands up,” said a voice. “Or I’ll blow a hole clean through you.”

  Roy dropped the last handful of the contents of the drawer into his bag but kept his back to the voice.

  “I’m not stupid. I saw your car across the road, two days in a row. Then when you pulled into Tom’s today?” It was Hope, her voice quivering but angry. Solid. “You following my little girl? You goddamn sicko. Are you Lenny’s people? I told them we got no money.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  How was he supposed to explain this? Hey, I’m kinda your dead husband, so this stuff is sort of mine, in a way. Can we talk about this?

  He turned slowly, holding his left hand out, urging her to keep calm.

  Hope still had her name tag on, the same clothes that she was wearing in the diner an hour ago. Her hands shook as she held a rifle, its barrel trained on Roy’s chest at point-blank range.

  Before Roy could say anything else, a strange keening noise, an animal wail, rose until it filled the attic room. It came from Hope. Her face creased up as the thin shriek rose into a scream.

  30

  Detective Devlin pulled up the collar of her wool peacoat against the wind howling up the cliff face. Ragged clouds dragged low and fast over the dull pewter surface of the Atlantic. It had snowed the night before, and patches of white remained in the northern lee of the gnarled pines leaning back from the prevailing wind.

  She had to make this quick.

  There were no cars in front of the house, and the lights were off, but the sprawling complex must have dozens of rooms, any of which might be occupied.

  She had a prearranged excuse. Coleman had called in a fake report of a missing-person sighting, and that was enough to justify her encroaching on private property to do a check of the beach access. The excuse wouldn’t do her much good if Harris got wind of it, though, and the Chegwiddens had to be some of the executive officer’s favorite customers.

  The puddles on the driveway had a thin plate of ice covering them, and she stepped carefully.

  She had asked around about Captain Seamus Harris and learned that he took paid gigs to do private security for parties in the Hamptons. That explained why the East Hampton Police Department’s second in command was at the Chegwiddens’ that night, and why he was there to pull Roy from the car. But what wasn’t he telling? What really happened that night?

  “Security” was something of an overstatement for Harris’s real function.

  The Hampton crowd didn’t want to be disturbed if a noise complaint came in, and they didn’t want their guests getting searched for drugs. What better solution than to have the top cop from the local department sitting at the door? It wasn’t exactly illegal, but she had a feeling Internal Affairs would look dimly on it.

  Or maybe not.

  She had been warned to leave Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe alone—friends
and family, too. But then, why did the private investigator Roy had hired try to get back in touch with her? The car from the accident was never brought into the pound.

  No forensic exam.

  Even though Roy was as good as dead, the Chegwiddens’ own contractor had dragged the wreck off first thing the next morning. Maybe the Chegwiddens were just obsessive about cleaning up their property. Maybe they were worried about a lawsuit. They were billionaires. Different rules applied, or people like that assumed they did.

  Del wanted to get a look for herself.

  She had parked her unmarked Crown Vic, a rust bucket ten years past its prime, two hundred yards up the gravel driveway, then walked in tentatively, pretending to check the bushes.

  She checked the house again. No lights.

  She had waited until the middle of the afternoon, but not for the temperature to warm up. She needed the sun’s rays as direct as possible on the cliffs at the front of the house.

  The new brickwork was obvious, the mortar clean and white, the stones pristine and lichen-free. She leaned over the edge. Thirty, maybe forty feet to the beach, but the new wall was built ten feet back from the drop-off. The rock had been scraped clean of auto paint, but she clearly saw the scratch marks where the car must have skidded past.

  Straight off. No brakes, no turn skid marks.

  “Hey, hey, hello?” called out a voice, the accent unmistakably British.

  “Damn,” Del muttered under her breath.

  “Are you the police?” asked a man in a thick gray sweater and striped tie. He hung half in and half out the side door of the house.

  “I should have rung the bell,” she said. “I didn’t think anyone was home.”

  “Well, well, so yes, you are the police?” the man asked again. He didn’t look angry. If anything, he looked lost.

  “I’m Suffolk County PD,” Del said. “And you are …?”

  “Charles Chegwidden. This is our property.”

  “As I said, I’m sorry for intruding, but—”

  “I’ve already called you twice. Thank God you’re here.”

  “Called me twice?”

  “Three times—yes, three times, in fact, if I include last week.”

  “I think you’ve made a mistake.”

  “Mistake?” Charles asked. “But then, why are you here?”

  “What’s this about, sir?”

  The man fidgeted with the door frame. “My wife, Primrose.”

  “Yes? What about her?”

  “She’s been missing for a week. Ever since a rejuvenation party thrown by Eden Corporation. In Hell.”

  31

  Roy circled around Tompkins Park. Again.

  The sun was still just below the horizon. Friday night had not quite given over to Saturday, but the eastern sky had faded from oil-slick black to gunmetal gray in anticipation.

  In ones and twos, late-night stragglers appeared and disappeared between the cones of light cast under the streetlamps. Shapes materialized from the darkness. A huddled mass under a mound of blankets on a park bench. The jagged leafless branches of an oak tree overhead—the earth’s nervous system reaching up from the cold dirt to feel its way into the shaded sky. Scrims of ice glazed the puddles in the tarmac path, trapping leaves beneath. The frigid air stung his nostrils on each deep breath.

  He really had thought Hope was going to shoot him yesterday. He had almost wished she would, but as he held up one hand to her, she had crumpled, legs giving way, wailing like a trapped animal.

  Had she been scared? Of course, but there was more to it than fear.

  He had reached for her, but she shrank away, shaking, terrified of him.

  So he ran, out the door and into his car.

  And, as always, with the feeling that someone was watching.

  He had driven for miles without thinking, just aware of the distance between himself and Hope. And Elsa.

  The little house in Calverton had become the sun at the center of his universe, its gravity tugging at him. Even now, in Tompkins Park, he could feel its pull.

  Before he realized it yesterday, he had driven clear out to Montauk, whereupon he turned around and circled back through East Hampton, resisting the urge to drive north. He drove past his house. Past his mother’s house.

  He had almost stopped in at Sam’s house in Southampton. He had wanted to empty the contents of his backpack with his friend and sift through it, but his gut told him it wasn’t safe.

  He couldn’t involve Sam. Couldn’t put the people he cared about at risk.

  He stuffed his hands deep into his jean pockets and took a side street away from the park, then another. He crossed back and forth, huffing clouds of white vapor with each breath. At the corner of Second Street and Avenue B, a red-orange neon star colored the gray morning. The Never Inn. Still no vacancy.

  Was someone following him?

  Maybe, but one thing was for sure: someone knew where he was.

  The implants in his temples, against his skull, measuring his brainwaves. The implants in his legs and arms. Dr. Danesti knew where he was at all times. They were tracking him. Worse, were the implants affecting him in some way? Were they doing things to him?

  * * *

  “Come on, Jake,” Roy said aloud. “What have we got?”

  He had finally returned to his tiny basement apartment on Eleventh and Avenue C. He waited in the cold to make sure the landlady was still asleep upstairs before his stiff fingers fumbled with the keys. He pulled the drapes, then dragged a coffee table in front of the door and barricaded himself in before turning on the lights.

  Then he emptied the backpack onto the bed. The stuff he’d stolen from Jake Hawkins’s desk. Much of it was envelopes stuffed with crumpled paper. On closer inspection, they were just receipts. Phoenix, Arizona. Austin, Texas. Burgers. Taxis. A record of trips and travels.

  “What else?”

  A chain with a dozen keys, all different sizes—probably for the house and garage. Then a few separate keys. One looked as if it was for a safe-deposit box. Another had an orange plastic sleeve.

  Three more keys, on another chain, looked similar to some of those on the first. He inspected each, tried to dredge up some feeling. What did his gut say? He smelled them, held them one by one against his cheek. Nothing registered.

  A stack of bank records going back six years.

  “Did you need money, Jake? Was that what made you do it?”

  It’s always about the money, a voice in Roy’s head answered.

  Was there some insurance claim? Did life insurance even cover suicide? He doubted it could. That wouldn’t make sense.

  And then another thought. Did Jake sell his body?

  He had heard of people in India selling a kidney.

  Angel had told him about it. One of the small towns where Eden had an office—“Kidneyville,” they called it in one depressing documentary. Had Jake sold his body to Danesti? Was that possible? The doctor was on the board of the OPTN. Danesti had said how critical this operation was, to demonstrate further success on the heels of the Shelby Sheffield operation.

  Roy leafed through the bank records. Jake Hawkins hadn’t been rich by any stretch, but he had managed to save some money as well as pay down most of the mortgage on the small house.

  I wasn’t desperate, said a voice in Roy’s head.

  “Is that you talking to me, Jake? Show me. What else?”

  He had read the stories of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Had Jake suffered one too many left hooks to the head? But the regular stream of income, the carefully stored receipts right up until he died. He didn’t look nuts.

  In the pictures Roy saw, Jake still had a full head of hair. He didn’t have the massive bulging muscles of a steroid junkie. He seemed organized, squared away. What could have made him want to blow a hole in h
is head?

  There was a key for a safe-deposit box. But for which bank? Maybe he could get into that. He had Jake’s passport, and it was still valid—at least, unless Hope had canceled it. He had looked it up. Dying didn’t automatically terminate a passport. A relative had to cancel it. But had she? Would the bank teller even bother to check? He’d read about old voter rolls, how the government kept dead people on them for years. He leafed through the receipts. Boxing gloves, payments to Self Store. A computer from Best Buy.

  Self Store. That wasn’t a retail shop; it was a self-storage company. They had signs all over New York.

  He glanced at the pile of keys. The orange one.

  The receipt had an address.

  * * *

  “I just don’t remember the number,” Roy said to the kid behind the counter. “I have the key, though.”

  “Gimme the receipt again? Name’s Jake Hawkins, right?”

  The kid held out his hand.

  He had blond hair combed straight back, and the eyes of a stoner in dire need of Visine. The kid seemed annoyed or impatient, or just high. Roy had interrupted whatever game he’d been intently playing on his phone.

  The Self Store front office was twenty feet square, with a huge orange logo taking up one wall, stacks of packing boxes and tape for sale on another, and two plastic chairs in front of the counter. The entrance door was set in a wall of safety glass crisscrossed with embedded wire. The place was ringed by a twenty-foot chain link fence topped with razor wire—not exactly Fort Knox, but you’d need a good reason to want in.

  The location was right on Middle Country Road, just past Brookhaven and not far from Calverton. On one of his first blackouts, Roy had woken up in his Range Rover not a hundred yards from this place. It couldn’t be coincidence.

  The kid studied the receipt, tapped a few strokes on the keyboard. “Yeah, I got you here.” He sucked air in through his teeth. “I’ll need some ID, too.”

  “Passport okay?”

  “Sure,” he replied, eyes still on the screen in front of him.

  Roy bet he was from the rural end of Long Island. He might not even have seen a passport before.