Echoes of the Fall

by Hank Early

  “Deloach is dead. I don’t know Blevins, nor do I care to.”

  “So, Harden then?”

  She shook her head. “This is hard for me for a variety of reasons.”

  I leaned back in the chair, stretching my legs. I felt as if she was telling the truth. There was something guileless about her, as if she was both sad and surprised to be asked these questions, to be here now talking with me about something she’d obviously tried hard to put behind her.

  “Can I give you a piece of advice, Mr. Marcus?”

  “Of course.”

  “Next time you want to interview a woman about the past, make an appointment. Better yet, do a little research of your own. The Harden School is an institution that has survived tragedy after tragedy, not to mention many controversial situations that would have taken other schools down. You and I aren’t going to be able to affect change there. If I thought we could, I’d throw caution to the wind and do whatever you asked me to, personal consequences be damned, but I don’t believe we can change it. It’s like trying to move a stone that weighs so much more than you do. The harder you work, the more likely it is you throw out your back. Why do that when you know you can’t move the stone?”

  “I’m here to help you,” I said. “We can move it together.”

  “You’re not as strong as you think,” she said. “None of us is. Especially compared to her.”

  “To who?”

  She gave me a look that suggested I was an idiot for not keeping up. “Savanna, of course.”

  “What does she have to do with Harriet’s death?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  She shrugged. “The world doesn’t make sense.”

  “Right,” I said, “but it’s our job to make sense of it.”

  She just looked at me as if I were a child, uninitiated into the ways of adulthood and the hidden forces at work in this world.

  Maybe if I hadn’t just come off the breakup with Mary and the binge-drinking episode that had nearly killed me, I would have pressed her, maybe I would have demanded she explain to me about Savanna, but instead I let it go, afraid that in doing so I would have to face the inevitability that she was right, that the world wasn’t something that was ours to understand.

  * * *

  In the end, I felt like Rufus would be able to put my conversation with Lyda Duncan into context, and if he couldn’t, he would at least be able to finish his story, and I’d be able to go from there. I thanked her and left her my card, pleading with her to call me if she came up with anything else more concrete. I wasn’t very optimistic. You can always tell if someone is eager to work with you by how they react to your card. If they reach for it, that means they’re interested. The ones who plan on throwing it away as soon as you leave usually let you just lay it on the table. It’s as if they think touching it obligates them to use it in the future. She didn’t touch it. Hell, she hardly even looked at it.

  I figured Rufus would be in the truck and was more than a little surprised when he wasn’t. I glanced around, thinking maybe he’d wandered past it, confused. That didn’t sound like Rufus, but he was blind, for God’s sake. Surely he had to make mistakes sometimes?

  Maybe he was still in the barn? I didn’t want to risk going back. If Lyda saw me snooping around there again, she’d certainly peg me for some kind of criminal or, at the very least, a nut job. I chuckled. Too late. I was pretty sure she already thought I was a nut job.

  I headed for the barn again, moving quickly. Once inside, I called out his name.

  No reply.

  I looked up into the loft. He wasn’t there.

  I called his number, pretty sure he hadn’t brought his phone. He never did. It rang several times before going to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message.

  I jogged to my truck and scanned the road. Nothing, just a shimmering haze in both directions.

  Shit.

  I drove slowly on my way home, keeping an eye out for him walking along the road, but I didn’t see him. Could he already be home, back at the old church? Not likely. Feeling a little anxious, I reminded myself that Rufus was capable despite being blind. Hell, he might have decided to take a shortcut home instead of walking along the road. That actually made more sense. In some ways it was safer for Rufus to stay off the road, considering he couldn’t see traffic.

  By the time I reached Riley, I’d just about talked myself out of being too worried. What did I think had happened, after all? Rufus had gotten lost? That was laughable. Even blind, Rufus knew this area better than anyone. So, what then? Was I really going to consider the possibility he’d been picked up, taken away by someone? Nah. The truth was somewhere in between, I convinced myself. Rufus had thumbed a ride back to the old church on Ghost Mountain.

  But when I pulled up to his place, I began to doubt my own logic. I checked inside the church and found it empty. I checked around the graveyard and the creek again but found no sign of him.

  How was it possible for him to just vanish?

  I wasn’t sure, but I needed to talk it over with somebody. I glanced across the creek and saw Ronnie and his friends working on the studio. They’d framed the whole thing out now and were busy hanging sheetrock. It wasn’t very large, but I figured it would be plenty big enough for them to practice and record. I couldn’t help but feel my spirits lift a little looking at Ronnie’s progress. Somehow, Ronnie seemed to be doing better than anyone these days, and it was just another one of life’s inexplicable blind curves that you could never see coming no matter how careful you were, how hard you tried to be ready.

  I took a deep breath and walked across the creek toward just about the steadiest influence I had left in the world.

  30

  It took a lot for Rufus to get disoriented. He liked to tell people he just knew where things were. He explained it this way: he’d tell people to think of the place they knew better than any other. He’d tell them to imagine being there with their eyes closed.

  “Would you still know where you were?” he’d ask.

  “Sure,” they’d answer.

  “Could you find the door?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of course you could, because you know the place. That’s what it’s like for me in these mountains. I just know them.”

  He wished he could see people’s expressions when he told them this. He imagined they were either amazed or just disgusted because they thought him a liar. The comparison was patently ridiculous. A room was nothing like the mountains that made up the Fingers. A room was a few hundred square feet, while the Fingers were miles and miles of rough terrain, riddled with rocks and snakes and deadfall, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. He found his way. The sun helped. He could get his bearings by feeling it on the side of his face or the back of his neck. The slope of the ground helped too. Generally, that would tell him which way the mountains were.

  Still, there were times he’d get turned around, have to backtrack, retrace his steps to the last place he’d had his bearings. But completely disoriented like he was now?

  Not often.

  The only thing he knew for sure right at this moment was he was inside a vehicle, moving down the road, the sun on his right shoulder, which meant he was heading south. But beyond that, he was utterly confused.

  He’d heard the vehicle coming toward him as he made his way out of the barn toward Earl’s truck, but he’d assumed it was just a random vehicle on the highway and it would soon fly past. But it slowed—he heard the brakes grabbing the tires and the engine downshifting—and turned into the driveway. He stepped off into the grass hoping to give it room to pass by, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t stop and ask him what he was doing there. But he also couldn’t help but wonder who it might be. Lyda? Mr. Duncan? Savanna, God forbid?

  He’d never in a million years thought anyone would still be living here. Jesus, if he’d only known. He would have stayed home. Opened some beers, told Earl everything f
rom the safety of the Fingers.

  The car coming down the drive stopped, idling nearby. He kept walking. A car door opened. He waited to hear it shut. The sound didn’t come.

  He tensed, listening closely. He heard the wind, the sound of an airplane passing overheard in what he believed to be the northeast quadrant of the sky, an insect—maybe a dragonfly—buzzing in high grass off the road. But nothing else. Whoever had opened the car door had yet to move from inside the vehicle.

  He continued to walk, listening closely.

  Still nothing. The airplane droned away, trembling and fading. The dragonfly buzzed closer. He felt it clip the seat of his overalls. The wind stopped. He smelled something like aftershave, except sweeter, nearly rotten.

  “Who’s there?” Rufus said. An alarm had begun to rattle inside him. This was the sixth sense, if he had one, the sure knowledge that the person—represented only by the sound of the car door opening and the smell of the menthol from the aftershave—meant to harm him.

  But there was more than that, wasn’t there? The person’s silence, their absolute stillness, spoke to him as much as any sound or smell. This was a person who understood that Rufus wasn’t to be taken lightly. Which meant he’d had an encounter with them before. Either that, or they’d been made aware through someone else that he wasn’t any ordinary blind fool.

  “Have a good day then,” he said, and started on toward the road. He walked alert, every muscle as tense as his senses that waited for the first indication—be it sound or smell—that the person was coming for him.

  He made it to the road and turned left, walking toward the setting sun. He felt it on his face. Three steps, four steps, five. Was he going to make it? Had the person just given up that easily?

  Just when he almost believed it had all been a false alarm, he heard the seat squeak inside the car and then a boot heel came down on the gravel. Rufus picked up his pace, walking faster. The boot heels began to crunch loudly now. Repetitively. He ran.

  The boot heels stopped. A whistle came from his pursuer, sharp and long, like one of those wolf whistles men used to do when a pretty woman walked by. The kind that showed appreciation but also something darker, suggesting the woman wasn’t just relationship material but also a kind of potential prey. In that way, it was the perfect sound.

  Rufus ran faster, staying on the side of the road, where he felt like an oncoming vehicle would have plenty of room to avoid him. It was only when he left the ground, flying into the dark horizon, briefly, like an airplane with no windows, that he understood the whistle had not been for him.

  It had been for whoever tripped him.

  He hit the asphalt hard, his right elbow taking most of the force. Better than his face, he thought, as he felt hands on his back. They raised him up powerfully. No sooner had he begun to struggle than he felt the gun muzzle jammed into the middle of his back.

  Still no words spoken. The gun said everything he needed to know.

  Part of him considered fighting. He doubted whoever it was would shoot him out here in the middle of the road in broad daylight, but he decided against it. He didn’t even know who he was dealing with, which meant making a bet like that was foolish for sure. Instead, he let his body go limp to indicate he had given up.

  “Who are you?” he said again as the man (it had to be a man, didn’t it?) physically wrenched him around by the shoulders and began to walk him toward the car, the gun still pressed into the middle of his back. It was right against his spine, and Rufus felt like that was another sign. Whoever it was knew what he was doing.

  And they also knew enough not to speak. Silently, the man guided Rufus to the car, where he was pushed into what he quickly realized was the back seat.

  Leather. Clean. New-car smell. Power locks from the sound of them all clicking down at once.

  “Can you at least tell me where you’re taking me?” he said.

  No answer. The car pulled out of the driveway and turned to the right. East.

  He was sure of that much.

  * * *

  But now, after what he guessed had been nearly two hours of continuous driving, which included several endless doughnuts in a field to disorient him, he wasn’t sure of anything. His mental radar was off-line. He was truly, truly in the dark.

  The men in front were so steadfast in their silence, he gave up trying to engage them and instead focused on other details that might help him make some determination about where he was and whom he was with.

  Initially, he’d suspected it might be a sheriff’s county vehicle, but after touching the man’s hair in front of him, he knew there was no glass separating him from the front seat like there would have been if it was a sheriff’s vehicle. As soon as he touched the man’s hair, his head moved. Rufus reached out again, trying to feel the head again, but instead all he felt were two large hands around his wrist. They flicked his hand back on itself, bending his wrist at an extremely awkward—and painful—angle. He gasped and settled back in his seat.

  The message was clear. Hands to yourself.

  “Asshole,” he said.

  No reply, just the thumping of irregular pavement under the rolling wheels.

  Wait. That was something. Irregular pavement. He focused on the pattern of thumping. Maybe if he could memorize it, he’d be able to recognize the pattern again. Of course, that assumed he ever escaped his captors. He had a sinking feeling they might be taking him somewhere to kill him.

  He wasn’t ready to die. Hell, he hadn’t even fixed himself yet. He still needed more time to figure out how to live with what he’d done, how to simultaneously move forward and never let himself forget the guilt, because forgetting was its own kind of guilt, happiness its own accusation.

  But why? Maybe that was the most important thread he needed to follow. Had Harden connected him to Earl? Was it possible he was one of the two men in the front seat? Possible, he supposed, but unlikely. Harden would be in his seventies now, too old to be chasing people around the county.

  But if not Harden, who? Who else would have reason to do this? Who else might feel threatened by Rufus?

  There was Jeb Walsh, or course. He’d held a grudge against Rufus and Earl since the day they had greeted him outside the library in downtown Riley nearly a year ago. Of course, greeted wasn’t really the word for what had happened that day. A better term might be accosted. Rufus had seen Walsh’s descent on Riley and the Fingers coming and had had no intention of sitting by idly and just allowing him free rein. Walsh wasn’t the kind of man who was used to being challenged directly and had been trying to exact some revenge against Rufus and Earl ever since. Kidnapping Mary had been his first failed attempt. Why wouldn’t he try for Rufus next?

  The answer wasn’t clear. But one thing was. All of those possibilities were preferable to who Rufus believed was behind his abduction: Savanna.

  He wasn’t ready to deal with her again. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be ready for that if he lived a million years.

  31

  I waited until midnight to call 911. I couldn’t fool myself any longer. I was deeply worried about Rufus. I’d spent the afternoon and early evening with Ronnie, driving around the county looking for him, but we soon realized we were going to need some help. He wasn’t at any of his old haunts, nor was he walking along any of the roads he would have taken to get home. I needed help. But I didn’t call 911 because I expected any help. No, I called because I knew it was the first step, something to cross off the list before deciding what to do next. I knew I’d be patched through to the sheriff’s dispatch, and at the moment my list of suspects who might have done something to Rufus was headed up by the actual sheriff. There was always a chance I’d get a friendly deputy instead, though I wasn’t sure how much faith I had in any deputy that hadn’t quit on general principles when Argent took over.

  The dispatch operator took down my information and said a deputy or the sheriff would be in touch.

  I put down the phone and walked over to the refri
gerator for some whiskey, only to remember I didn’t have any. This realization hit me hard and fast, and all wrong.

  The goddamn nerve of Ronnie and Rufus to take my whiskey.

  What followed could best be described as a tantrum. I lost my shit. Not just because I was out of whiskey. That was part of it, but the main part was the realization of how much I actually needed it.

  That realization caused me to pick up a plate in the sink and fling it across the kitchen. It crashed into the wall beside the door and shattered. That felt good, so I found another plate and did the same with it, grinning savagely as it exploded against the wall.

  I went for the table next, knocking it sideways, but that wasn’t good enough. I got down low, palms against the flat underside, and flipped it. It slid across the linoleum, crashing into the side door of the kitchen.

  The chairs came next. Then the microwave, the coffeemaker, more dishes, and the knives in the drawer. Soon I was in such a state of blind fury I couldn’t see straight. Even so, I didn’t stop. The outburst felt too good. It was the first time in weeks I felt the pressure in my head being released.

  At some point, I made my way into the den. I was basically destroying the house on autopilot now. My mind had drifted away to some place of bliss where thoughts of Mary’s absence or Rufus’s disappearance couldn’t reach.

  “Are you okay?”

  Later, I’d wonder just how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me. Long enough, I was pretty sure, for her to think I’d lost my mind.

  I stopped, aware suddenly of the candlestick holder in my hand. I’d been using it to bludgeon a mirror Mary had set up for me when I’d first moved in. It was splintered all to shit now, but I saw my reflection clearly enough. A man I barely recognized stared at me. He clutched the candlestick holder with a bloody hand. His face was crooked in the splintered glass, his eyes red and filled with a shimmering madness.

  Standing behind him was the woman who’d started all of this. Daphne. I seethed, staring at her. I wanted to throw the candlestick holder at her. I wanted to curse her for what she’d done.