by Beth Lewis
The car slid level with me, the shadow inside, I felt its gaze, not its eyes because I couldn’t see them. It was a shape. Dark and formless against the sunlight. I wanted to call out but my throat was dry.
The engine roared and the car sped away. Gone, and like that, the ill feeling went with it.
All the air blasted out of me and I wanted to laugh. It was just a stupid car. Probably Darney Wills on his way home from Barks trying to scare me.
I shook off that cold strangeness and let the summer sun heat me back up, let it prickle my skin as I walked. The light feeling returned and I found myself smiling.
Just a stupid car.
Before I went to school, I took the Coke bottle to Westin’s grocery and Al Westin gave me a nickel. I bought an apple for Jenny and polished it on my sleeve all the way to school until it was glossy red and gleaming. I met her outside with Rudy and Gloria and she squealed at my gift. Hugged me and we shared it, bite for bite.
‘How was your talk with the pastor?’ Jenny said, chewing. A bubble of juice burst at the corner of her mouth.
‘Boring,’ I said. ‘He quoted Bible at me the whole time.’
‘Told you!’ Rudy laughed.
‘Can we go now?’ Gloria said.
I tried to argue, say we should get home, I had chores, Jenny had chores, but in truth I wanted to spend as much time with the loving, concerned version of my mother as I could. I wanted Jenny to. I wanted her to feel the love I felt every day and realise how wrong she’d been. But the three of them had their minds and hearts set on solving Mora’s murder and I was silenced. So I was almost gleeful with relief when we reached the Roost and found one of Samuels’ deputies standing guard on the path. A van parked at the edge of Briggs’ field said there were more cops around.
‘Tomorrow?’ Gloria whispered from where we hid in the bushes and we all agreed, then parted ways to head home.
But the deputies stood watch for the rest of the week, all through the weekend, and we couldn’t get close. For Rudy, Gloria and Jenny it was a week of frustration, for me, it was joy. I’d worn a smile all those days. Every day was full of hugs and cooked meals, kisses and stupid, wonderful games. Momma taught us Blackjack and Euchre, she put Jenny’s hair into long pigtails, and even got us a quart of mint-choc-chip ice cream. We ate it right out of the tub. Three spoons and no leftovers.
But no good thing can last.
On that Friday, the last day of school, Momma went to Gum’s and didn’t come home until Sunday. When she did, she was a tornado, shouting all sorts about Jenny and her hair and her dresses and how she’d have men after her and how it was all her fault Momma didn’t have a man and had lines on her face and nobody wanted her. Jenny gave back as good as she got and the pair of them screamed so loud the glasses in the cupboard shook.
I held Jenny while she cried all Sunday night. She kept saying over and over, I wish she was dead, I wish I was dead. Every word between them both was a knife to me. I balled my tears up and forced them down into that dark pit inside me. I was rot in a tooth, all fine on the outside until one day it’s not and the tooth shatters and the black, foul guts of it spill out. You can have moments of joy, John Royal, but you can’t have years, you can’t have months, or weeks. You get moments, so savour them.
The first no-school Monday, ten days after we found the body, the four of us finally met at Three Points and began our search for Mora’s killer.
9
It’s the yellow I remember clearest. The tatters of police tape, like army banners left behind after the battle. Torn, stamped into the earth, but glaring up at me. There were a thousand footprints leading to the Roost. None of them mine or Jenny’s or Rudy’s or Gloria’s. They were all from the sheriff, deputies, men in white coveralls and hoods, photographers, journalists, the coroner. Our Roost was invaded. Our private piece of Larson ripped up.
We stood at the edge of the trees at the top of our valley. The sky was sombre and overcast but still sweltering, the feeling of storm-static in the air. Our well-worn, narrow path was now a wide scar of dried mud. The invaders had trodden water from Big Lake and the stream up the slope on boots and trouser legs, left it to bake hard in the sun. They’d brought her up this way, Mora, probably in one of those black bags. I could see it, the boot prints of the men carrying her, the weight of her pressing them deep into the mud. They would have hauled her to the gate a few hundred yards east, toward town, the closest you could park a van or ambulance. The slice of flattened grass showed their path.
‘This is messed up,’ Rudy said.
Nobody would take the step, break the barrier.
The sun beat hard on our foreheads, noses, backs of our necks. It was still early, just past ten, but the heat didn’t care about the time. All four of us lived half our lives outdoors. Our skin was tanned calves’ leather that didn’t burn any more, just darkened in the summer, lightened in the winter, like the waxing and waning of the moon. But in this summer, this heatwave, this swelter, with every searing lungful of dust-thick air, our bodies suffered. I felt the sun’s damage on the back of my neck, the tell-tale prickle of a burn, but still I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to see what they’d done to our Roost, our Fort, our lake. I didn’t want to see what they’d taken and what they’d left behind.
‘Didn’t think you boys would be so chicken,’ Gloria said. She took the first step. Disappeared into the trees, down the bank.
Then Jenny.
Then Rudy.
Down the slope, into the shade of the valley.
‘Johnny.’ Jenny’s voice, rising up from the river. ‘Get down here. Now.’
I stomped down the incline, kept my eyes on my feet, not to stop myself falling or tripping but to not see what the invaders had done. I felt the change before I looked up. The sound of the valley was wrong, like it was wider, bigger, almost an echo chamber, where it had been enclosed and soft. The rumble of a tractor two fields over, tinny chirp of birds, a breeze bringing the smell of a clearing fire – all aliens landed in our seclusion.
‘Jesus.’ Rudy raked back his hair like he wanted to rip it out. ‘Jesus!’
With one look up, every happy memory shredded and blew apart in the wind. Our valley was the threshing floor after harvest, the yard when a fox got in the garbage, strewn with debris and things that didn’t belong. Latex gloves and balled-up evidence bags. Styrofoam coffee cups and napkins from the Backhoe diner. More police tape. The ground, leafless, grassless, beaten by the invaders so thoroughly the weeds had fled or been killed. The banks of the narrow stream were indistinct and the floor had become a solid mass of uneven, dry-mud ridges and kicked-up clods.
The four of us trailed deeper into the Roost, to our Fort and Big Lake. Fear filled me up with cold despite the heat. Would the Fort even be there? Would that bastard Samuels have knocked it down, kicked the walls out of spite or a joke? A laugh with his deputies. Stupid kids, what kind of structure is this?
But there it was, intact, mud sprayed up one wall and the door flung wide, but standing. The ground around it and up to the shore of Big Lake was ruined but our dam was there, our Fort was there, and it was as if the trees knew it. They crowded in, hugged the air close, the sounds and smells from the outside world lessened and eventually I stopped noticing them. The cold inside me evaporated and all the tension in the four of us went with it. Smiles. Patting shoulders. Bright eyes.
‘Thank God for that,’ Gloria said and wrapped her arms around Rudy.
He gave a cheer, Jenny grabbed my hand and squeezed. We were us again and we remembered why we came.
The area around Big Lake where Gloria found the body and where the four of us dragged her was almost unrecognisable. The log we’d laid her next to was rolled over and out of place, the sycamore roots were pulled up, chopped up, and lying in rows on the bank, a tangle of yellow tape discarded beside.
The lake itself was transformed into an expanse of brown water.
‘They must have had divers in, kicked up all the m
ud,’ Rudy said, tapping me on the shoulder, flapping his finger toward the water. ‘Read about this lake down in Colorado. Hiker found an arm washed up on the shore so they got boats and guys in breather masks. They found, like, five dead people down there.’
‘Sounds extreme for a lake like ours,’ Jenny said.
‘It’s deep though, isn’t it?’ Rudy carried on. ‘Maybe there are more under there. Who knows what they found? Maybe they found my flick knife you douchebags threw in.’
‘Yeah and maybe they’ll see your initials on the handle and come and arrest you.’ Gloria stuck out her tongue.
She hated knives and had been the one to snatch it off him. She’d hurled it right into the middle of Big Lake. Jenny clapped and I smiled but it was a shame to lose it. At least, it was a shame for Rudy to lose it. He thought he was James Dean with that knife in his hand. He tried to get it back, went swimming for it every day for the next week but never found it.
I did.
The same day Gloria threw it. Rudy had stormed off and Jenny and Gloria went picking wildflowers to make the Fort more homely. I groped around in the mud until my fingers closed around the handle. I never told anyone, not even Jenny. Jenny wouldn’t understand why I’d want a knife. Why I’d kept it hidden behind a brick in the crawlspace wall. Why I’d spent a whole night down there after I found it, cleaned it, dried it so it wouldn’t rust. I was marvelling, staring at the shine on the blade, admiring the mechanism, click, flick and ready for action. It was mine and my own secret and no amount of sulking and sniping from Rudy would make me give that up. I’d tried to scratch his initials out. But he’d carved them deep and I could still see them. RB right there in the black handle.
‘Here, look,’ Gloria called from the far side of Big Lake.
Jenny skipped over the dammed stream to join her. Rudy, beating a stick in the bushes near the Fort, did the same.
I stared into the muddy water. It must have been days since they dredged the lake but the silt hadn’t settled. My chest seized at the thought that it never would. How could it? Now that it had seen what it had seen, been violated by divers and police, rakes and sticks drawn across its soft bed like fingernails down a back. That glass-clear lake of a few weeks ago, one with a carpet of leaves and twigs, was ruined. I picked up a stone, dropped it in the water. A brown ripple and gone. Swallowed up.
‘Johnny!’ Rudy shouted. Snapped his fingers at me like he would a mutt. ‘We ain’t getting any younger over here.’
He put on a cowboy voice from that William Holden movie I hated. We’d snuck in the back of the picture house in Clarkesville to see it. Come on, Johnny, Rudy had said, tugging on my shirt, Hell-on-Healey – Bill Healey, the owner of the picture house – won’t catch us this time, you’ll see, and Rudy was right. Scared me bright white all the shooting in that movie. Rudy called me sissy for days, along with God knows how many variations; royal sissy, queen sissy, Johnny King of the Sissyboys. That voice he put on brought those stings back, like coming face to face with a nettle patch after you’d fallen in once. You feel pain twice, Momma says, once with the cut, then again with the memory.
‘What?’ I said.
That selfish, black part of me was glad then that I’d taken Rudy’s knife.
‘Tracks.’ He waved me over. ‘Leading along the river. Come on.’
Jenny and Gloria looked at me, half-smiling, twitching almost, raring to go. Those cop shows called it a lead. We had one. We had to follow it. The stings faded, made Rudy my friend again and not a bully I wanted to clock in the mouth but never would.
Gloria pointed down a path that hadn’t been there before, called me to hurry up.
‘Sorry,’ I said and leapt over the stream, ran to them. ‘It’s just, you know, they wrecked our lake. Makes me mad is all.’
‘And a woman is dead,’ Gloria snapped, like a snake strike. ‘I think that’s more important than some stupid muddy water. For Christ’s sake, John.’
Rudy whistled. ‘Mellow out, Gloria. We know why we’re here.’
Gloria huffed and barked something about the path and where it might lead. Now I had caught up, Jenny threaded her arm through Gloria’s to calm her down. The girls walked ahead, Rudy and me a few steps behind, giving them space. Gloria was all red in my eyes. Red hair. Red cheeks. Red dress. A warning. STOP. DANGER. Those snakebite words of hers throbbed through me. The weight of the poison made me drag my feet.
Rudy put his hand on my back, gave me a pat. His mouth puckered up in one of those sad smiles. You got burned, Johnny boy, he said without saying it.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I muttered and Rudy’s pucker widened to his movie-star grin.
Gloria looked at me over her shoulder. A little nod, a little smile, and the tension was gone.
The girls walked on, arm in arm, pointing here and there, at a footprint, a discarded glove, a crushed soda can. We emerged from the valley, beneath clouded sky. The path became a rope strung through the four of us, tugging, dragging, and soon we were running. We crossed a strip of fallow land turned to dust in the heat. Then a cornfield, the stalks looming an easy three foot over our heads. The policemen’s path spread between the rows, like they’d taken a giant rake to it to till up clues.
‘Check it out,’ Rudy called from two rows over, ‘they dug something up.’
We converged around a hole. An arm’s length round and the same deep.
Then I noticed the dog tracks. Dozens of them. Darting off in every direction.
‘What do you think was in there?’ Jenny said, hushed, but that electricity was still there, sparking behind her eyes.
Rudy reached down and felt around in the dirt. His fingers dug furrows, searching for anything the idiots might have missed.
‘What would make them even dig here? In this spot?’ Gloria said, glancing side to side like a rabbit on the road.
‘The dogs must have smelt something,’ I said.
I kept my eyes on the hole, each new claw unearthed just another line of brown. Dust fell through Rudy’s fingers as he threw out handfuls. But it was just a hole. A dog could have dug it weeks before we even found Mora. It could have nothing to do with her or the search.
‘This is useless,’ Gloria said, standing up, brushing her dress. ‘We should keep going.’
‘There are dog tracks leading further into the field.’ I pointed. Gloria nodded. We were partners again.
Rudy threw away a handful of dirt and smacked his palms together. ‘Sir yes sir,’ he said and jumped up. He jerked his hand in a mock salute and left a smear of brown across his forehead. Nobody told him.
‘What was in there?’ Jenny said, as if to herself. She squinted at the hole, trying to pick out something, anything, that might give us an answer.
I helped her up as Rudy and Gloria followed the dog tracks.
Jenny grasped my hand. ‘There’s something in there, Johnny, I can feel it. Something buried.’
A quiet electricity raced through her and into my arm. Her grip tightened. There was compulsion behind her expression, a yearning pull I could feel through her and it scared me.
She looked back at the hole. ‘They found something horrible in there. I know it. That’s why they won’t look for Mora’s truth.’
Jenny’s eyes were wild, blood-red spiderwebs pulsed at the edges. ‘They found something worse.’
The strange horror slammed into me, the feeling that made me almost afraid of my sister. I didn’t know this version of her, the version that went back to Big Lake and slept beside a dead body. This frantic version kneeling over a hole, seeing evil in the dirt. You’re losing her.
‘Okay,’ I said, soft and calm like how I’d talk to Momma on a bad day. ‘It’s okay, Jenny. It’ll be okay. Rudy said once that gangsters bury drugs and cash in fields like this. Maybe that’s what happened here, the dogs smelled a haul of pot and started digging. Nothing to do with her. Right?’
Jenny frowned, like my words were a puzzle she couldn’t solve.
‘Come o
n, let’s go find the truth, together,’ I said.
The sparks in her dulled and my sister came back, inch by inch. She nodded and lessened her grip but didn’t let me go. I didn’t want her to. Rudy and Gloria waited for us to catch up then the four of us set off again together.
We were quiet for a while. Rudy found a stick and swiped at dried corn leaves hanging low off the stalk. They made a noise like ripping paper with every hit. That sound, mixed with the last of the chirping cicadas, set the rhythm for our steps. The corn stalks towered above us, and the sky was a thick, heavy grey. It was as if we’d stepped through the wardrobe but Narnia was dead and dry and covered in ants. They latched onto our shoes, crawled up our legs and nipped our shins. Clouds of midges invaded our nostrils and ears, stuck to our sweat like it was amber on tree bark. I stopped thinking about the path, the tracks we were following, I didn’t even notice if they were still there. Nothing else existed in the world, just this cornfield, just us. Jenny’s hand in mine, radiating heat all through me, but I wouldn’t let her go.
Then the light changed. Ahead the air felt clearer and in a few more steps we came out on a dirt road. Blinking, emerging from the relative darkness of the field, we stood in a row along the edge of the road.
‘No more tracks,’ Rudy said, too quiet, too distracted, and for good reason.
Across the road a series of fields, dirt ploughed to deep furrows, stretched for another mile or two, until they met a group of low buildings. The fields swerved to avoid the property, curved around it and resumed straight lines on the other side. Even the land didn’t want to touch or see or know what was in there and I couldn’t blame it.
We knew those buildings. We knew the dried-up dirt they sat on, the farmland turned salvage yard, ringed with a chain-link fence and a vicious yellow dog only one man could control. Everyone in Larson knew that property and everyone knew to keep their distance.
Buchanan land. Buchanan rules.
‘I didn’t realise we’d come so far,’ Gloria said, glancing at Rudy.
I let go of Jenny’s hand and crossed the road. A stone in my chest dropped to my stomach. The tracks reappeared. Big, deep footprints in rich earth kept damp by irrigation channels. Two sets, two deputies, led in one distinct line to those buildings. Rudy saw them too.