The Will

by Reed Arvin

  “He’s safe,” Henry said, glad to have one good thing to report. “I saw the reporters on TV before I came over. He’s in my motel room.”

  She sighed, and he felt her relax a little. “All right. Shouldn’t we go get him?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know what to do with him when we do. The town’s not safe for him now.”

  Henry drove to the motel parking lot and looked toward the street, scanning for news trucks. No one had followed them. He and Amanda got out of the car and walked quickly to the room. Henry knocked and called out softly, wanting to let Boyd know it was him. He opened the door and knew instantly that Boyd was gone.

  “If the reporters find him before we do they’ll eat him for lunch,” Amanda breathed.

  “If they haven’t got to him already. Come on, we’ve got to find him.”

  They sprinted back to the car. “If he’s not at the park or his house, I don’t even know where to begin,” Henry said.

  “Let’s go.”

  They drove the ten minutes back through town and turned onto Owen-dale toward the park. To their horror, they saw two white vans parked near the bench Boyd used. He could see the young reporter walking around, looking disappointed. “Not there,” he said. He slammed the car into reverse and drove out the way he had come in.

  It was only a few blocks to Raymond’s house, but even as they rolled to a stop Henry could feel that Boyd wasn’t there. He leapt onto the porch and looked inside. He called out and knocked, but the place was empty. He turned and got back in the car. “Any ideas?” he asked.

  “None. But it’s not that big a place. We’ll just have to search it, street by street.”

  “All right. I’m taking you back to your car and we can split up. It won’t take long to cover the town that way. Meet me here in an hour. Call me if you see anything, and stay away from the television crews.”

  Carl Durand was drunk. He stared at Frank Hesston’s blurred face, trying to decide whether or not to go home, pack a suitcase, pick up his passport, and head for the airport. After several seconds of staring, he found himself speaking. He listened to himself as though he were a bystander in the room. “You said you had it covered,” he muttered through the booze. “You said, ‘Leave it to me.’”

  Hesston’s face shaped itself into the mask of habitual irritation he had more and more often felt about Durand. But mixed with that irritation was, for the first time, a trace of real fear. He tried to concentrate, maintain his focus. They should be celebrating; Ellen had held together, taken the shot, and left them clean. But a fog of uncertainty had descended on him, and he found that all he could think of was the sound of Sheriff Collier’s voice when he had called two hours earlier. Somebody’s been diggin’ over by the Crandall wells, he had said. “They covered up the hole but I could see the fresh dirt all right. Went down a good ways by the size of it.” And then, worse news: “There’s been a stranger in town, meetin’ with that lawyer and the girl. I didn’t see him, but I asked around. He’s some kinda scientist.” Through the fog Hesston heard Durand’s voice.

  “They brought a geologist with them, Frank,” Durand said, glaring drunkenly at Hesston. “A geologist.”

  “I know, Carl. I’m trying to think, if you’ll shut up.”

  Durand took a huge swallow of whiskey from a glass. “You didn’t let me take out the little freak, and we’re screwed.”

  “Ellen stayed together. That’s what’s important. No matter what that weasel Mathews threw at her, she stayed together.”

  “People in this town aren’t stupid, Frank. Even you admitted you’d have to be blind not to see she was lying.”

  “People in this town will do what they’re told,” Hesston retorted. “And on the top of that list is Brackman.”

  “He didn’t act too goddam obedient today.”

  “He put on a good show for the reporters. He’s a snake, and he’d bite us in the ass if he thought it was good for him. So we have to make sure he never thinks it would be good. Do that, and Brackman’s no problem.”

  “So what’s your bright idea now?” Durand wiped his mouth. “If you’d let me do what I wanted we wouldn’t be in this thing.”

  “That’s right, Carl. We’d be in Leavenworth, in prison.”

  “We’re going to be in Leavenworth anyway, goddam it!” Durand replied. His voice was getting shrill. “For God’s sake, Frank, doing Boyd now is getting more dangerous, not less. There were TV cameras at the courthouse today.”

  “We didn’t kill Boyd because for the past twenty-five years he hasn’t been a problem. Who knew Crandall was going to leave the land to Boyd? Did you?”

  “No,” Durand said sullenly. “If I had known what he was going to do to us I would have killed him myself.”

  “Of course you would, Carl. If it were up to you everybody in the county would be dead. Now listen to me. We have to keep it together for a couple of more days. Ellen’s going to hang together and she’s going to deliver Boyd to us tomorrow. After what happened this morning in court she has no choice. She’s finished in Council Grove. She needs that money like the wounded need blood.” He looked at the bottle in Durand’s hand. “Give me that,” he said, reaching for the booze.

  Durand answered him with a scowl, but he slowly handed over the bottle. Hesston started to put it in his drawer, hesitated, then took a swig. He screwed on the lid and set it down. “This will all be over soon,” he said, feeling the liquid hit his stomach. “In twenty-four hours Raymond Boyd will be out of our lives forever. Ellen’s going to deliver him to Roger, and Roger is going to deliver him to hell.”

  “We’re under a spotlight now, Frank. Waiting was a big mistake.”

  “On the contrary. Boyd’s unbalanced, and this is the most stressful event of his life. Suicide is a completely credible end to his miserable life. And no one will be more publicly distressed about it than me.”

  “And what about Mathews? Him and his geologist?”

  “Mathews doesn’t know anything, not for sure. If he did, he would have brought it up in court.”

  “And what about what he suspects?”

  “What about it? If the lid stays on for another day it’s over. With no Boyd the case is moot and Brackman dismisses.”

  “You got the Boyd thing covered, right?”

  “Yes, Carl. It’s under control. He’ll be dead within twenty-four hours.”

  She saw him, leaning inexplicably like a drunken man against an electric power pole a block from her house. His back was to her, and she wondered if he was ill. Even from behind he looked fragile, as if a good wind would blow him off the pole and into the sky. He had a duffel bag on his shoulder. She let her car roll silently to a stop about fifty feet away from him, and he didn’t turn around.

  Her mouth went dry with the sight of him. She opened her door and stepped out of the car; he remained perfectly still, his arm wrapped around the pole, head resting calmly against it. She walked toward him quickly, looking around to see if anyone was nearby.

  She couldn’t understand why he didn’t turn around. Perhaps he was lost in his own world, a thousand miles away from the street. Maybe the light pole was a ladder up to heaven, and he was resting for the climb. But for whatever reason, he didn’t move, even when the sun cast her shadow over her shoulder and into his line of sight. She stood quietly less than three feet behind him, the scent of him in her nostrils, the memory of him gathering in her brain. Finally, she spoke his name.

  “Raymond.”

  There was a pause, and then a tremble.

  “I’m here, Raymond. Turn around and look at me.”

  Slowly, with laborious effort, Boyd pushed off from the pole and circled his body toward the voice. He stood blinking in the sun, squinting at Ellen through the glare.

  For a moment, she didn’t see the haggard, dried-up man before her. She closed her eyes in the silence between them, and in that instant he was twenty-six again, smiling at her in an inexpensive suit and looking embarrassed. He had s
tuck out his hand like a shy employee, not like the manager of the branch. Yes, she could have the job. He had only been there a few weeks himself. He needed someone right away, if she could start the next day. She took a desk within view of his office, and soon she had felt the staring on the back of her neck, an uneasy sensation prompting quick glances over her shoulder that found him rapt, adoring her silently, clumsily. She had been moved by him, in those first few weeks, to her own surprise. After a year and a half of drunk soldiers and sex that ran between the merely numbing to the truly painful, Raymond’s adoration had seemed like flowers, like candy, like a high school prom. It had seemed like a life she had never had and maybe, she thought, he was normal, that his love was what love was really about and maybe she would let him do that to her and unlock whatever shred of innocence was left inside that hadn’t been crushed by spit-shined Army boots. Maybe love was supposed to be sweet and it didn’t matter that it was clumsy and blind.

  But all she had to do was think about Tyler and Raymond disappeared. Tyler’s pure, dangerous power called out to her like heroin to an addict, and she answered it in the same place that had led her to the nights at Lucky’s in the first place. Tyler knew what he wanted. He was prepared to take it. If there was a man worth obeying, it was him. What she felt for him made her evil, she knew that. But there was a dark appeal in that, and given the choice between Tyler and Boyd, she had never wavered. Tyler was hard strength and badness and he touched her in her dark witch, in the warm, sickly sweet spot in her soul that demanded to be indulged. She had given in to Tyler completely, and she would play Raymond however he directed.

  When at last she opened her eyes, the man Raymond Boyd had become was staring at her, the same silent adoration buried under madness but still discernible. His eyes were glimmering from underneath his hat, and he wavered there before her, listing and leaning.

  “Hello, Raymond,” she said quietly. “I’ve come to talk.” Boyd shook slightly, his head bobbing. His fascination was complete and horrible to her, a vivid reminder of her own treacherous heart. He was helpless, in his way, locked in his obsession. And she had destroyed him. She was going to destroy him again.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” she whispered, her voice failing her. Suddenly, her throat was full of bile, and she was nearly gagging. She forced out words. “I’ve missed you terribly. We have a lot to talk about. So much time has passed. Too much.”

  Boyd’s breathing accelerated, the tension in his face alarming and vehement. “I have to get my blood cleaned,” he said in a rasp. “It’s full of gold.”

  “I know, sweetheart. Just come with me. I know how to help you. Everything will be fine.”

  Boyd smiled, and he seemed to relax. His murmuring slowed, and he held his hand out to her. She stared at his fingers a long moment, fascinated and repulsed. At last, she reached out and touched him, taking his filthy hand in hers. “Come, darling,” she whispered. “Come and let me take care of you. Let me take all your pain away.”

  Boyd’s eyes were wide, and he looked at her as though she were an angel of God. He made the sign of the cross before her. “Absolution,” he said. “Fools and whores, I absolve thee.”

  She winced, but didn’t break away from his eyes. Instead, she held him captive there, and led him to her car.

  * * *

  Amanda pulled her car up to Henry’s exactly on time. Her report was like his: Boyd had vanished, disappeared from the earth. “At least the reporters didn’t find him,” Amanda said. “They’ve gone, too. Back to their viper’s nests.”

  “So no Ellen, and no Raymond,” Henry said. “I don’t like them both going missing.”

  “I wonder if Collier’s got them? Did you go by the sheriff’s office?”

  “Yeah. They weren’t there, and neither was Collier. I’ve got to assume he’s looking like we are. He’s probably already covered the town, and that’s why we didn’t see him.” Henry looked outside his car. “We can’t just start looking randomly. We need some kind of plan.”

  “You want to split up again? Although I don’t know where I’d go.”

  He turned and looked at her. “If Raymond’s gone he’s not where he is voluntarily. He doesn’t go anywhere, for God’s sake. The newspeople are gone, at least for the day. So when I think about the people who might want to take Raymond somewhere he doesn’t want to be, it’s a pretty short list. Collier’s on it, and I want you to stay here and call me if the sheriff shows up. Right now the person I really want to find is Roger.”

  Roger Crandall stared at the label of the prescription in front of him in the moonlight. Risperdol, 5 mg. There were about forty capsules in the bottle. Enough, Hesston had told him, to take care of Boyd forever. His eyes moved up and across the gravestones at the Everlasting Rest Cemetery in Pretty Prairie. It made sense, he supposed, to have a cemetery way out in the middle of nowhere, a mile from the nearest house. But it didn’t make the waiting any easier. He shifted his feet uneasily, avoiding the gravestone before him with his eyes. But he knew his father’s body was several feet directly beneath him, beginning, he assumed, its long disintegration into a mass of desiccated flesh.

  Hesston had insisted on the cemetery. It’s a suicide. Boyd’s insane. He goes to Crandall’s grave site and takes the bottle of pills. It’s crazy enough to be real. Roger shook the bottle lightly, feeling the pills rattle. There had been only one way to find out what Boyd was taking, and it meant breaking into the man’s ramshackle house. That had been a risk he hadn’t wanted to take. It was public, and he could have been seen. But he had managed to slip in, feeling something he hadn’t expected: humiliation. His father had walked the streets of the town with his head up, fearing nobody. Now, Roger had found himself crawling on his hands and knees in the dark through the brush around Boyd’s place, slithering up the porch and hoping the door would be unlocked.

  The place hadn’t been the mess he had expected; evidently, the lawyer and his girlfriend were keeping it up. Things were sparse, but orderly. The house had only three rooms: a living room with scratched hardwood floors and a plain table and chairs, a bedroom, with a chest and single bed, and a kitchen that contained a collection of indiscriminate junk. Roger had found Boyd’s pills in the bathroom, but not touched any of the prescriptions. Instead, he wrote the names of the drugs down and slipped back out, badly needing a drink.

  Roger glanced at his watch: seven-fifteen. It was starting to rain, to his irritation. Ellen should be there in a few minutes. Hesston had told him not to get impatient; it might take some time to persuade Boyd to get moving. But he would come. If Ellen asked, he would come.

  Roger didn’t know how Hesston got the drugs for the phony suicide, and he didn’t want to know. Forty times five milligrams. He calculated in his head: two hundred milligrams. Head drugs. But in that kind of dosage it didn’t work on your head. It just stopped your breathing. Arrested it, Hesston had said. Same difference. You were dead.

  Roger stuck the bottle in his pocket and pulled a black pistol from a cloth bag. The gun wasn’t for Raymond; simple chloroform would handle that problem, and he could feed him the pills afterward. The gun was for Ellen.

  Roger fingered the pistol, felt the cold metal of the short barrel. As much as he hated the pills, he preferred handling them to the gun. They didn’t look so hazardous, so lethal. But the gun was obviously for killing. He was sweating, and his fingers left wet little marks on the barrel. He wiped down the gun again, and put on a pair of thin leather gloves.

  Hesston didn’t know about the gun, and that made Roger’s nerves vibrate. But Durand had called, leaning heavily. I’ll handle Frank. We need insurance in case things don’t happen. The gun will be in your mailbox after eleven. Get it tonight. Roger went over the backup plan that Durand had worked out with him: If Ellen comes apart and tries to stop you, use the chloroform on her. Then put the gun in Boyd’s hand and pull the trigger. Make sure the powder burns get on his arm. Then put the gun in Boyd’s mouth and pull the trigger
again.

  Ellen took the back roads toward the Everlasting Rest Cemetery. There were only two houses to pass before she could get on the road out of town, and it was nothing but deserted cornfields across the fifteen miles of country road to the graves.

  Five miles out of town Raymond began to disintegrate. By the time she turned onto Highway 27 to the cemetery, his hands were clenching the armrest so tightly he was nearly puncturing the cloth. His murmuring was agitated, an eerie vocalese that crept up her spine. She looked over at him; he was staring out the window, eyes wide. She looked quickly back at the highway, then heard Boyd give a very sad, very human moan. When she looked back, he had changed.

  Boyd was suddenly, startlingly lucid as he looked back at her full in the face. In that instant he wasn’t a child, and he wasn’t covered over with insanity. Even through his madness he knew that something terrible was about to happen, and he was willing himself to go with her to that sacrifice. In his eyes was real terror, not a psychotic and imagined fear but a real, almost tactile awareness of danger. She saw him hold on to sanity, the madness trying to cover him again. She let the car roll to a stop, pulling off onto the gravel. “What is it, Raymond?” she asked. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Boyd stared into her eyes. His lips moved slightly, and he breathed, “I love you.”

  She began to weep. She slumped over, her eyes welling with tears. She put her head on the steering wheel, her face turned away from him. “What did you say?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. They sat in silence for a long moment, the only sound the softly humming engine. She sat breathing unevenly, a pain thrusting through her heart until she was afraid she would die. At last she turned her head to look at him, and she saw that he had vanished again, pulled down under the waves of madness. “Get out,” she said. Raymond was mumbling, not looking at her. She reached across him and opened the door. “Get out,” she spat again, more forcefully. She pushed on him, and he listed over. She pushed harder, and screamed at him over and over. “Get out, get out!”