Catfish Lullaby

by A. C. Wise

  Caleb had nearly choked on suppressed laughter, watching Nathan and Sheila turn the color of sour milk, looking twice as curdled. It wasn’t until they were both back in the car that Rose allowed her hands a faint tremor, and Caleb had reassured her Nathan’s bark was worse than his bite.

  “So I won’t be waking up to any burning crosses on my lawn?” Rose had quirked an eyebrow, even though her expression had remained shaky.

  “Nah. That’d require him to be able to operate lighter fluid and a match without setting himself ablaze, and he’s a little gun-shy since he blew his eyebrows off at a cookout last Fourth of July.”

  Rose snorted, and Caleb had been relieved to see her relax, realizing just how sorry he’d be to lose her. He had, however, proceeded to give her a rundown of who she did need to keep an eye out for, including Robert Lord’s sorry excuse for a father, who continued to cling to Lewis even though Robert and the rest of the family had long since moved on.

  Despite the scene they were driving to now, Rose seemed as steady as ever, and Caleb found himself grateful all over again. She’d grown up somewhere near Tallahassee, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what she wanted with a small nowhere town like Lewis. Her claim was that she’d thrown a dart at a map and ended up with Lewis, but he didn’t believe her. For one thing, who even kept paper maps anymore?

  Yellow safety tape fluttered around the shallow ditch beside Emmett Hawkins’s drive as Caleb pulled off to the side of the road.

  “Brief me?” Caleb took a sip of his coffee, making a face at the bitter-burnt flavor, and abandoned the mug in the cup holder.

  “Not much.” Rose nodded toward two other officers. “They’re just getting started. The report is pretty fresh.”

  Caleb approached, thumbs tucked into his belt. It was an affectation he’d picked up from television, and it annoyed him every time he caught himself doing it. He put his hands behind his back instead.

  “Anything yet?”

  Terry Rowe, a man who’d joined the department under Caleb’s father, looked up.

  “Blunt force trauma to the head. Not much blood. Looks like she was killed elsewhere and dumped here.” Terry paused, a frown working the corners of his mouth.

  “And?” Caleb braced himself; there was something Terry wasn’t saying.

  “Maybe you’d better see for yourself.”

  Terry’s frown further soured the coffee in Caleb’s stomach. Terry peeled back the covering over the body, and the world jolted out of time. Markings covered the dead woman’s arms, wounds packed with black mud to make them stand out. For a moment, Caleb was twelve, looking at a grainy newspaper photograph.

  He’s trying to bring my father back. Cere’s voice in his head and again in his dream, It’s time.

  Caleb shook himself, forcing his attention back to the present. It had to be a copycat killer. But two victims wasn’t exactly the kind of murder spree that inspired imitators. Besides, most people in Lewis didn’t even remember the murders—or anything else connected to the Royce family—unless Caleb outright reminded them. Or unless evidence was staring them in the face.

  “Just like last time.” Terry echoed Caleb’s thoughts, but there was an edge of uncertainty as if he wasn’t quite sure what he meant.

  “Aw, shit!”

  “Deputy?” Rose’s exclamation drew Caleb’s attention.

  “I know her.” Rose crouched by the body. “That’s Holly DuBois. We went to college together. We were paired up as roommates for a semester before she dropped out.”

  “You’re sure?” Caleb was annoyed with himself the moment he said it, but the look Rose gave him was troubled rather than angry.

  “Yeah.”

  Only then did Caleb think to touch her shoulder, a comforting hand. Rose took a deep breath and straightened.

  How would his father have handled the situation? Better certainly.

  “If you’d rather sit this one out . . .” Caleb started, but this time, the look Rose turned on him was unmistakably a glare. He held up his hands. “Okay sorry.”

  “What did Rowe mean by ‘just like last time’? Sounds like something out of a damned horror movie.” Rose had regained her composure although her gaze kept sliding back to Holly.

  Caleb glanced at Terry who stood a few paces off, talking to the coroner who had just arrived.

  “Come over for a drink after work. I’ll catch you up, and you can tell me about Holly DuBois.”

  Rose shot him a questioning look, but Caleb only shrugged. Maybe he was paranoid, but he wasn’t convinced one of the other officers wouldn’t use anything they might overhear to discredit him. Besides, he needed the time to get his thoughts in order.

  “Fresh from the icebox and fresh from the yard.” Kyle handed Caleb and Rose each a beer, followed by a dish of sliced peaches topped with vanilla ice cream.

  “Beer and dessert.” Rose grinned. “This one’s a keeper.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Caleb said as Kyle took the third porch chair, splaying out his long legs.

  “My grandmother’s not-so-secret cure-all. Though she preferred bourbon to beer.” Kyle raised his bottle, and Rose clinked hers against it.

  Caleb couldn’t help flashing back to when he’d first introduced them. Even though his sexuality wasn’t exactly a secret around the office, Rose was the first and only person he’d felt comfortable “flaunting” it around as it were. Kyle and Rose had taken an instant liking to each other, and Caleb had only regretted the introduction in so far as they had spent most of the night trying to outdo each other with embarrassing stories about him.

  “Do you know I had to teach him how to line dance?” Kyle had said, grinning from ear to ear. “What kind of self-respecting Southern boy doesn’t at least know how to boot scoot?”

  Caleb had tried to protest he wasn’t that kind of cowboy, and Rose had launched into a story about how scandalized Caleb had been the time they’d been called in on a report of trespassing to find Cole Richards with his pants around his ankles and his bare ass stuck in a feed bucket in Pete Lawton’s barn. He’d been high as a kite and claimed he’d just been looking for a place to piss, but with Pete’s heifers lowing and rolling their eyes, the inevitable jokes had started, and Rose had barely been able to keep it together while Caleb looked like he’d wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

  Caleb caught himself grinning like an idiot at the memory and wiped the smile away, turning his attention to the dessert. The peaches had been warming all day in the sun, and they still held a hint of that warmth. The sudden image of a persimmon from his grandmother’s tree, oozing black rot, stole his fleeting good mood. He inspected the peaches, swallowing hard, and forced himself to take a bite to prove he could before pushing the bowl away.

  “Catch me up, boss.” Rose nudged the toe of Caleb’s boot.

  Caleb passed a hand over his hair. Rose deserved the truth inasmuch as he could give it.

  “When I was a kid . . .”

  “This is about Cere.” Kyle sat up, tension lifting his shoulders.

  Caleb spread his hands, shrugging. Even if he had wanted to let it go, he couldn’t anymore. A woman had died. Someone Rose knew. Kyle sat back, but the expression of worry didn’t leave his face.

  Since the third month of their relationship, when they’d stopped simply meeting up and started staying over, Kyle had been privy to the worst of Caleb’s nightmares. Those times Caleb woke shouting Cere’s name, flailing and knocking over lamps. He had every right to worry.

  Caleb knotted his fingers, looking down but feeling Rose’s attention as he related the story.

  “I know how it sounds,” he said when he’d run out of words. “There are times when even I think I imagined the whole thing.”

  It was only the second time he’d told the story in full, and it left him as wrung-out as the first.

 
“I’ve heard of Catfish John.” Rose tapped at her beer bottle thoughtfully.

  “My uncle had stories about him, called him the River Man, but they sound pretty much the same.” She shrugged, killing the rest of her beer. She set her bottle down. “Del Royce did murder two people. That’s a fact. It’s in your father’s files. So wouldn’t all the rest be in there too?”

  “Some. Not all.”

  With everything his father had done for Lewis, had done for Cere before she disappeared, Caleb didn’t want this one failure to be the thing that defined him. Rose had never met his father, Kyle either. It wasn’t the image he wanted to give them, but how else could he explain things?

  “It’s . . . the case is still open, unsolved. My father didn’t stop looking, but . . . every time I tried to ask him, he would get this far-away look, like he couldn’t remember. Like something kept him from remembering.” Caleb spread his hands again, a helpless gesture.

  Following Rose’s example, Caleb took the last swallow of his beer and gave Rose a half smile.

  “Thinking about a career change yet?”

  “I’ve heard wilder things. Seen ’em too. You never met my granny.” Rose flashed a wicked grin.

  “Oh?” Caleb raised an eyebrow, the knot in his chest loosening. “You’ll have to tell me your war stories someday, but for now, tell me about Holly?”

  “Hmm.” Rose pulled out her phone, scrolling as she talked. “Like I said, she dropped out our first semester. Had this older guy she was involved with. I think she thought he was going to pay her way or something.”

  She held her phone out to Caleb.

  “Just a week ago, Holly posted something for Throwback Thursday on Facebook and tagged me. We weren’t friends, but you know how it is.”

  “Woah. You had a full-on Pam Grier, didn’t you?” Caleb ran a hand over his own close-cropped hair again.

  Rose was the one black face in a group of white kids. He thought back to Mark, their little band of two. At least college had been better for him, but it didn’t look like it for Rose.

  He knew it hadn’t been easy for Mark either. Even though they’d gone to separate colleges, they’d kept in touch. About a month or two after 9/11, the sandwich shop Mark’s parents ran in Lewis was vandalized, the windows smashed in, slurs spray-painted on the walls. It didn’t matter that they weren’t Muslim; they were brown, and that was enough for some of the good old boys. Caleb’s father’s health had already been failing then, and he’d turned over the lead in the investigation to other members of the department. Shortly after their shop was vandalized, the Nayar’s house was broken into. They’d decided that was enough and moved away.

  Caleb hadn’t seen Mark since the first summer back from college. They exchanged emails on their respective birthdays, but that was it. He’d never asked Mark if he remembered Cere or the day they’d seen Del Royce torturing an animal on the train tracks. He was afraid of what the answer might be.

  “Retro was cool back then.” Rose gave him a sour look, bringing Caleb back to the present. Her hair now was practically as short as his. “Anyway, that’s Holly.”

  She pointed, and Caleb enlarged the image, trying to match the girl in the picture to the dead woman in the ditch. Even without the marks cut into her skin, Holly had looked like someone used hard by life. The girl in the picture at least looked like she had some hope.

  Rose leaned over, scrolling the image a bit to the left.

  “That’s the guy she was seeing. The one she dropped out of college for.”

  Caleb nearly dropped the phone. He’d been so focused on Holly he hadn’t looked closely.

  “That’s Del.”

  The rotten-sour stench of him, his hot breath against Caleb’s cheek as he’d snarled a word into the air and taken down one of his father’s men. Tim Vickers had been in and out of hospitals and doctors’ offices with health problems the rest of his life, ones he’d never had before. Toward the end, lesions in his throat and on the lining of his stomach had made it so he could barely eat. He’d starved to death.

  Poison. Tim Vickers. Caleb’s grandmother, his grandfather, even his father. As much as he hated it, Caleb religiously went to the doctor every year for a full checkup. So far, he had a clean bill of health, but what if the rot that had taken the rest of his family was just waiting for him? Maybe he’d gotten lucky, maybe he hadn’t lived in his grandparents’ old house long enough. But what if he was a carrier somehow? What about Kyle?

  He pushed the thought away, enlarging the picture again. Sunken cheeks, shaggy hair, eyes that had once turned red like blood in water. Had Del spent all this time hidden in plain sight, looking for Cere? How had Caleb missed him? Caleb imagined Del separating Holly from her peers, encouraging her to drop out, turning her into someone who would never be missed. Keeping her around until he needed her.

  “You think this is the guy who killed her? The same one who killed those two people when your father was sheriff?” Rose took the phone back.

  “At least two.” Caleb shook his head. “I never saw what happened to Del the night Cere vanished. Catfish John did something to him and then . . .” Caleb shrugged.

  “Or there’s a copycat killer on the loose.” Kyle echoed Caleb’s earlier thoughts.

  They lapsed into silence, and Kyle stood.

  “I think we need another round.”

  “So what do we do?” Rose asked as Kyle returned with fresh beer. “How do we track this guy down?”

  Caleb almost said, We need Cere.

  “Let’s take a ride.” Sitting still was making Caleb itchy, restless. He needed to do something, anything, so he wouldn’t feel so useless.

  What had changed? If Del had been in hiding all these years, why now?

  “Is that a good idea, boss?” Rose nodded at Caleb’s beer.

  “You’re welcome to report me to your local sheriff’s department.” Caleb took another pull before climbing into the truck. Rose hadn’t relinquished her beer either. She slid into the middle seat, and Kyle climbed in beside her.

  The sky had darkened, and now the stars were out full force. Caleb switched on the high beams and pulled out of the drive. He’d been running Lewis’s roads since before he could legally drive. He could probably make the drive with his eyes closed, but tonight he didn’t want to miss a thing.

  “Where are we going?” Kyle leaned around Rose.

  “Back in time.” Caleb flicked a glance to the side, seeing Kyle and Rose’s concerned expressions. He swallowed the rest of his beer, leaving the bottle to rattle around in the cup holder.

  A feeling like lightning crawled under his skin, intensifying as he turned toward his grandparents’ old house. His old house, even though he and his father had only lived there for another few months after Cere disappeared. It seemed like another lifetime when he’d belonged to that place. At the same time, remarkably little had changed, like this particular part of Lewis was frozen in time. Caleb knew small, rural towns. In any place other than Lewis, someone would have moved in on an isolated patch of land like Archie Royce’s and set up a cook house. Or the government would be after it for timber. It certainly wouldn’t be sitting empty.

  But this land was tainted and not just with the black rot that had once marked the yard. It was sick down to the roots. Archie Royce had been a monster bad enough to keep all the others away, even now.

  Caleb caught himself gripping the wheel and forced himself to relax, slowing to make sure he didn’t miss the turn. Trees had grown up, but the old driveway was still visible. Barely. He parked just off the road, retrieving a flashlight from the glove compartment. Kyle pulled his phone out of his pocket, using its flashlight. Neither beam penetrated very far into the darkness.

  As Caleb panned his light over the trees, he half-expected eyes to shine back at him. The chirr of insects and the low thump of frogs filled the night. At lea
st those had come back. Maybe that meant whatever hold Archie had over this place was lessening? Caleb held onto that hope as Rose and Kyle followed him down the drive.

  Not even the outline of Archie Royce’s house remained, but Caleb could still feel it. The last burned timber and cracked stone had been hauled away years ago, the land itself scraped flat, but the sense of a space that had once unfolded to become something much larger continued to haunt the ground. The world was warped here; the trees that had managed to grow in the intervening years kept their distance, preserving the memory of the house like a ghost.

  “What are we looking for?” Kyle asked.

  “I don’t know.” The delicate hope in Caleb’s chest faltered.

  A tiny, foolish part of him had expected to find Cere here waiting for him.

  “You have that look,” Kyle moved closer, the fingers of his free hand brushed Caleb’s arm, a simple touch to reassure them both.

  “What look?”

  “Like you’re about to tell me to wait in the truck or, better yet, go home where I’ll be safe.” Kyle’s lips shaped a half-smile, but Caleb couldn’t help wonder if there was an edge of hurt under his words.

  Kyle was the very picture of a mid-Western farm boy—blonde hair, blue eyes, shining like the sun over a field of wheat. There was nothing fragile about him, but Caleb couldn’t help a complicated impulse to protect him. If they’d been any other place, he wasn’t certain he’d feel the same. It was Lewis, its history, the things Caleb had seen here. Archie Royce’s legacy was his fight, and he felt a duty to keep Kyle safe from that.

  “I would never.” Caleb tried to flash a reassuring grin, but it stretched the skin of his face too tight, like a mask. A tiny, nagging voice in the back of his head told him he was being selfish. Despite everything he’d already told him, he was trying to preserve Kyle as the one clean, bright thing in his life, a safe haven to retreat to.

  Kyle reached for Caleb’s free hand now, squeezing his fingers briefly before letting go. Caleb pushed the ugly thought away.