After he was done with the water, Drake turned his eyes to the bright sun above.
It was coming on four in the afternoon, and the sun didn’t give any indication of easing its way into evening. The heat wave that had attacked New York all summer hadn’t as of yet given up its quest to melt the Earth.
Sweat trickled down Drake’s forehead and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.
“What do you want to do now?” Ray asked.
What Drake wanted to do was to go somewhere cool, somewhere inside. He must’ve glanced at the farmhouse then, because Ray shook his head, even though Drake hadn’t said anything.
“You know what dad said—he doesn’t want us going in there when he’s not around. You know, ‘cuz of my mom,” Ray said, lowering his eyes to the dirt.
Drake nodded.
He remembered the way that Mr. Reynolds had sat them both down when Drake had first arrived at the farm. He’d spoken briefly about Mrs. Reynolds, her sickness, and then had moved on to a set of rules for the next two weeks. Nothing too restrictive, just more of the same: if you go swimming, never go alone, no leaving the property, and stay out of the house as much as possible during the day. Two weeks was the longest Drake had stayed at the farm; if it had been up to him, he’d have stayed all summer. His first trip had just been a long weekend. The following year, it was a week. This year, it was two.
And every time he came, Mrs. Reynolds was sick. In fact, ever since Ray and Drake had become friends, naturally gravitating towards each other because they really didn’t fit in with the rest of the school, Mrs. Reynolds had been ill.
But this time was different. There was a smell in the air, something that reminded Drake of the time he’d snooped through his grandmother’s drawers looking for loose change.
This time, Mrs. Reynolds was really sick.
Ray pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one up. Then he offered the pack to Drake.
“You want one?”
Drake shook his head.
“Those your mom’s?” He asked, recognizing the blue packaging. Normally they smoked Marlboro's as this was the only brand that the corner store carried. And this was the only store that would serve them, considering their age.
Ray nodded and took a puff.
“It’s not like she needs them. You sure you don’t want one?”
Drake enjoyed the occasional smoke, or at least wanted to enjoy it, but he didn’t feel like one now. His stomach still wasn’t right.
“Maybe later.”
Ray continued to smoke his cigarette and as he did, Drake looked around. The Reynolds farm was very different from Drake’s accommodations in the city, which was most of the attraction. The rustic, wood farmhouse that Mrs. Reynolds spent most of her days in now was as unspectacular as they came. But it was the land… the acres and acres of unkempt wilderness that kept Drake coming back. That, and the lack of horns. It took Drake a day or two of being up here to finally get the sound of car horns out of his head.
Ray finished the cigarette and ground the butt beneath the heel of his shoe, before burying it with a pile of dirt.
“What do you want to do now?” Ray repeated.
Truth be told, Drake didn’t really want to do anything. In fact, the whole incident with the squirrel had left him feeling uneasy.
Never once during all of the time he had spent at the farm had Drake wanted to go home—quite the opposite, actually. But now, with the image of those beady—
“Come on,” Ray said with a smirk, drawing Drake out of his head. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Chapter 3
“Is it real?” Drake whispered, trying to keep his anxiety in check.
“What you think?” Ray turned the gun over in his hands as he spoke and then flipped it around and held the butt out to Drake.
Drake shook his head and took a step back.
“Jesus, Drake. It’s just a fucking BB gun.”
Drake swallowed hard, but eventually reached out and took the gun from his friend’s hands. The stock was wooden and it felt solid enough, but the barrel felt a little bit flimsy. It was metal, but it didn’t seem heavy enough to him. He turned it over in his hands, inspecting it, trying to look more interested than he actually was, before handing it back.
“Why do you have it?”
Ray put it back on the shelf in the garage.
“It’s not mine. It’s my dad’s. He took me out a couple times to shoot some rabbits. He tries to hide it, but I think he knows I can find it. Wasn’t one of his ‘rules’, after all.”
“Who knew you were such a regular Boy Scout,” Drake said, trying to bring some levity to the heaviness of the day.
It didn’t work. Truth be told, Drake’s jokes never went over well with Ray. Sometimes, Drake thought that his friend was just allergic to laughter.
And yet, Drake thought he detected a hint of a smirk on Ray’s face on this occasion. In fact, ever since the incident with the squirrels that afternoon, Ray’s mood seemed to have lifted.
While Drake’s had plummeted.
Wanting to distract himself, Drake purveyed the tools laid out on the workbench. His own father wasn’t much of a handyman, and his brother was the one who’d gotten all of the practical skills. Drake himself thought that he might lop off a finger cutting a steak. Who knew what part of his body he might lose if he tried to chop a cord of wood or saw a piece of timber.
“What does your dad do with all this stuff?” He asked, waving his hand over the bench. He recognized the hammers, a saw, a mallet of some sort, but the rest… he had no idea what more than half of the tools did, let alone how they worked.
Ray shrugged.
“Repairs the farm, I guess. I don’t know. To be honest I’ve never seen him use half of these things.”
His friend’s smile suddenly grew.
“But there’s one thing I see him use a lot.”
Drake’s brow furrowed. The afternoon started out by ending the suffering of a baby squirrel and then had degenerated into playing with a gun in the barn. If there were ever was a PSA episode hidden in Drake’s life, this was it, here, in this very spot.
And now his friend had something else to show him, something that his dad often used?
Drake was positive that this was a bad idea, but they had a good three hours to kill, give or take an hour, before dinner.
“Come on,” his friend urged, reaching over and pulling Drake toward the bench. Then Ray bent down and rummaged through a few of the buckets that were stashed beneath, before finally finding what he was looking for.
He was smiling again, revealing teeth that were just a little too small for his mouth, teeth that Drake had rarely seen.
There had been a time when Ray was just a regular kid, one who laughed and played with others, even though he never quite fit in. But that was before… before what, Drake couldn’t be certain. If he were a guessing man, he would have put his money on the change happening when his mother had first gotten sick.
“Grandpa’s cough medicine,” Ray said.
Clutched in his friend’s hands was a massive bottle of Scotch, the word Ballantine’s written across the purple label. Ray unscrewed the cap and took a swig. He tried to act cool about it, but he wasn’t able to completely mask a grimace. Then he held the bottle to Drake, who took it. It smelled like turpentine, and it tasted like kerosene, but it was something.
“So, let me get this straight; your dad comes out here, maybe tells your mom he’s going to fix the drainpipe, and then smokes cigarettes and drinks scotch all afternoon. I got that right? Is that what it’s like to be an adult?”
Ray suddenly stopped smiling.
“My dad doesn’t smoke.”
Drake shrugged.
“Anyways, you get the idea.”
Ray took another swig of the scotch, a larger gulp this time, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he screwed the cap back on, not bothering to offer it to Drake.
The boy’s hands were shaking, Drake realized.
As he watched, Ray clenched his hands. When he opened his palms, they were no longer trembling.
Maybe killing that squirrel is affecting him more than he’s letting on, Drake thought. I really hope it is.
Chapter 4
“You boys have a fun day exploring?” John Reynolds asked as he scooped vegetables onto his plate. His cheek was already full of steak and as he spoke, juice ran down his chin.
Drake normally loved John’s cooking—it was meat and potatoes all the way, way less refined than he was used to—but staring down at the piece of charred cow on his plate now… he couldn’t help but envision the dead squirrel in its place, its brown and red insides staining the ceramic.
Polite or not, there was no way that he was going to eat meat tonight.
Maybe never again.
Drake managed to drop a few stray peas into his mouth without curdling his stomach.
“Yeah… and tomorrow I think we’re going to go to the pond,” Drake said after swallowing.
John Reynolds looked to his son and pointed a fork with a hunk of meat skewered in the tines at him.
“Remember what I said, Ray. Buddy system at all times if you’re going in the water.”
Ray nodded and the three of them ate in silence for several minutes.
It didn’t take long for Mr. Reynolds to notice that Drake wasn’t touching his steak.
“You okay, Drake? Not hungry?”
Drake shook his head.
“Stomach’s not feeling great,” he said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m just not that hungry tonight.”
“More for me, then,” John said with a smile. He reached over and jabbed his fork into Drake’s steak. A second later, it had found a new home on the man’s plate.
A few minutes after that, it took up residence in Mr. Reynolds’s stomach.
Drake’s mother would have been appalled by this, but his mother wasn’t here. In fact, neither was Ray’s.
“How’s mom?” Ray asked, as if reading Drake’s thoughts.
John took his time answering, choosing first to wipe his mouth clean.
“Up and down,” he said. “Pretty much like every day. You boys didn’t come inside during the day and bother her, did you?”
Both Ray and Drake shook their heads.
“Good. The doctor says she just needs some rest. Lots of rest, and she’ll be up and at ‘em in no time.”
Drake and Ray exchanged looks, but neither of them said anything and for the next few minutes the trio ate in silence. John Reynolds was a working man, with calloused hands and dirty nails, and he ate like one, scarfing down Drake’s uneaten steak and shoveling peas into his mouth as if this was the last meal that they would have for some time. Hours, days, months, even. As if they were expecting a famine.
Ray ate like his father, but with less fervor. And Drake… Drake barely ate at all.
His mind was preoccupied with thoughts of Ray’s mother, of Angelina Reynolds, a slight, frail woman, who looked at least twice her 38 years.
If he could manage to block out the aggressive mastication of the two men across the table from him, Drake thought he could hear sounds from the machine that helped Angelina breathe wafting down to them from upstairs. It clicked and hissed like some sort of morbid soundtrack to their meal.
It hadn’t always been this way. When Drake had first come to visit the farm, Angelina had spent considerable time with them, and her effervescent personality had been a breath of fresh air. But then she had fallen sick. Drake still remembered the day when Ray had come up to him at school, tears in his eyes
“Mom’s sick,” Ray had said. “Some sort of lung disease. Doc says she might never get better.”
It was cancer, they found out later. At that time, Drake didn’t know what cancer was. He knew about sickness, of course, but his experience was limited to the flu that he often got in the winter and the chickenpox that he recalled getting five or six times even though his mother claimed you could only really get it once.
But as time bore on, and as he watched Angelina Reynolds’s body slowly start to waste away as if she was being eaten from the inside out, Drake began to think of cancer as something horrible, a disease that ate your soul and sucked the life from you like a parasite.
And despite John’s comments about his wife getting better, Drake was fairly certain that this was not the case. Maybe it was because he went long stretches of time between seeing Angelina, and when he did, her condition was always far much worse than it had been. It was like trying to tell if your hair was growing by looking in the mirror every single day. You become so accustomed to your own reflection that you don’t see the growth until one day you wake up, look in the mirror and say, holy Peanut Butter Solution, it’s down to my ankles.
And Drake was dreading the day when John and Ray came to the same conclusion.
When they looked into the mirror of Angelina Reynolds’s soul and realized that she was no longer there.
A sound drew Drake’s eyes.
John Reynolds was tapping his fork against the side of his ceramic plate, a grin on his face.
“What are you thinking about, boy? You look like you’re lost in your own world.”
Drake’s own fork, which he realized was full of diced carrots and peas, hovered in midair. He lowered it to the plate, and then gently pushed it away from him.
“Nothing,” he said so quietly that he didn’t know if the other two men at the table could hear. “I’m just not feeling all that well.”
Chapter 5
Drake awoke with a start. He sat bolt upright, kicking the damp sheets off his body.
He couldn’t remember his dream, only that it had to do with the squirrels. He felt like a pussy, just like Ray called him, but he couldn’t help it.
Drake looked over at his friend who had been sleeping in the bed beside him and was surprised to see that he wasn’t there. The bed was unmade, the sheet pulled back, but Ray wasn’t lying on it.
Catching his breath, Drake glanced around the room. The window was open slightly and the blinds were pulled up. Moonlight illuminated everything like bluish cigarette smoke. Blinking the sleep from his eyes and wiping the sweat from his forehead, Drake stood on wobbly legs and made his way over to the window.
He half expected to see his friend outside, to see Ray with his arms out in front of him like a zombie as he sleepwalked across the lawn. Ray had been known to sleepwalk in the past, but Drake or John usually found him curled up on the couch downstairs.
Ray hadn’t wandered outside, at least not yet.
And it appeared that he hadn’t this time, either; all Drake saw was empty fields. He listened to the coyote howls that filled the night air for a moment, before pulling away from the window and heading to the door next. Like the window, it too was slightly open. A quick glance at the clock on the bedside table showed that it was nearing four in the morning, which meant that John Reynolds would be up in about an hour, making his extra strong coffee in preparation for a day at the mill. Cognizant of this, Drake slowly and quietly left the room, curious, but not yet concerned, about Ray’s safety or whereabouts. If it had been the other way around, if Drake were the one who had gone missing in the middle the night, Ray might have activated one of those sirens they used during World War II to warn of imminent bombing.
And yet, as Drake made his way into the hallway and there was still no sign of his friend, and when he peered down the stairs and didn’t see Ray curled up on the couch, he started to feel a pitter-patter in his chest.
Drake’s and Ray’s room was located off the middle of the hallway, while John’s and Angelina’s was at one end, a guest room at the other. At least that was how it used to be. But after Angelina had gotten sick, John had relocated her to the guest room. Once, after one too many nightcaps, he claimed
that he had done it for her, so that she could be more comfortable and wasn’t disturbed by his “rusty chainsaw snoring”. But Drake thought differently. He thought it was because it was she who was keeping him up, that her ventilator and oxygen tank and mask and all the other stuff that Drake had no idea how it worked or even what it did, would keep John awake. It probably wasn’t even just the noise, either. The constant reminder of her imminent death was likely too much for John to handle.
And it was that door, the door to Angelina Reynolds’s room, that was also ajar.
It wasn’t as if her room was completely off limits—John didn’t keep her locked up or anything like that—but there was an unwritten rule that they would only go in, would only see her, if John was present or if Mrs. Reynolds specifically asked for them. This was fine by Drake, because he didn’t much like being reminded of his own mortality either. And yet, tonight, at four in the morning, he felt compelled to enter.
He was drawn to it, partly because of the smell of cigarette smoke emanating from within, and partly because he thought Ray might be in there.
And mostly because he was just curious.
Drake tiptoed across the floor, cringing with every step when his clammy feet made an annoying sticking sound on the wood. As he neared the door, he slowed even further. What he had first thought was his imagination, that there couldn’t possibly be smoke coming from her room, was confirmed: he was smelling smoke. And when he leaned into the room, he realized he could see it too.
Drake stood in the doorway, his jaw slack.
Angelina was lying on her bed, her eyes closed, her skin the color of melted wax. It had been a good three days since Drake had seen the woman, and back then it had been during the light of day when the sun was shining brightly on her. But now, in the pale moonlight, she didn’t look so much like she was dying, but more like she was already dead.
Her mask was off and she lay with her palms up, the backs of her hands resting on top of the sheets. The machines that kept her alive were all dark and for a brief moment, Drake’s heart stopped in his chest.
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 75