The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  She had a handle: Ghosty. But she sometimes strayed and went, as they told Markus Paul, “Bodecia on us, which was the British warrior against the Romans!”

  “She went Bodecia on you—is that right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Why would she?”

  “She was smart, and liked to say she lived in the woods, and had all the things collected on Bodecia.”

  “Is that right?”

  “She was seriously smart—I mean space-station smart.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” one boy said, as if reprimanding Markus for his lack of understanding. “That’s right!”

  “Space station,” another said, who had his head shaved except for two strands of green hair that hung down over his eyes.

  They talked on, crowding about him at the small lace-curtained store, on the steps, as the traffic to and from Tracadie went randomly by. Messaging was a new language and a new way to write, and it took a few days for Markus to decipher it.

  They told him she had started to go from random to spiritual. Took a course on Saint Mark. This came about because they, her friends, had abandoned her, though they did not admit this outright.

  “Sometime in July.”

  “You lost touch with her?”

  “Yes sir!”

  Markus knew when she had written to Rory that summer. The messages were very ordinary until about August 9.

  On August 9 things started to change.

  “Bodecia has signed on, C U 2MORO 10, 2 put pollys in the pond?”

  And Rory wrote back, saying, “K, c u at 10.”

  Markus discovered the child had waited that afternoon in the listless, boring heat. One thing she wanted to show was her sparkling jeans. So she signed on and wrote again: “Wh r U—waiting near pathway? I won’t go to pool alone—U know so, U come 2?”

  He didn’t answer. She messaged Robin: “U C him?”

  Robin wrote back: “NO—U put wogs in pond?”

  “Not so much yet—where is he?”

  “Dunno—he’s random, gotta go.”

  That day Amy left the house an hour later to go to Fanny’s. The snaps she put on her jeans reflected the sunlight and water and her hair fell softly. She came to the path to Glidden’s pool, which she didn’t want to take alone. So she placed the frogs near the brook that led to the pond, and let them go there. For some reason she did not turn and go back to Fanny’s, which she was supposed to do. She continued walking, thinking she would go check to see if Burton was being teased. But when she came to the very bottom of the lane she saw Rory’s bicycle laying in the field of tall cow corn. She ran toward it, but stopped dead when she saw him and Robin tending to her bicycle. Fixing the chain, and Robin laughing. And so she knew. Later that week she heard Robin had her license.

  So every day since then, she would go online to see Rory’s last message, hoping for a new one. Rory, signing on as The Roaring Boy, had written: “K, c u at 10.”

  Yet time passed and the days got further and further away from his last message. As summer wore on she wrote: “Bodecia is on, U come 2 Me, Must C U—have something most important to say—secret I have to tell someone! K?”

  She wrote August 12, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25 about this secret she could tell no one else. And then August 31: “Bodecia is on, Plez Roaring boy U come over, Redbreast is no longer my friend! You could stay with me at F G—just when Mrs. Hanson goes away to get dad and mom, on Sept 2nd. She is leaving at supper. I would be grateful for just that one day! I could make you Pizza? K??? Please??? I need to tell someone—I think I know something! You tell me if I do?? It is its own World.”

  Markus flipped a page with an energy that came from anger.

  “The trouble with all of this is it was right before our noses,” Sergeant Bauer said. “So, who knew?”

  Markus knew Amy had phoned, but he said nothing now. Bauer had confiscated all of her messages.

  Amy wrote Robin on August 31, saying, “Redbreast have U C’n R—I wn R to come to Fanny’s with me—just that day when Mrs. Hanson goes to pick up mom and dad? That is the one and only time, and make U pizza?”

  But Redbreast no longer answered.

  Amy sent some emails to her father: “I am sure you are happy to be able to come home for a while, wait until you get my hug. My hug will last for an hour and two minutes. But I don’t want to leave the Miramichi—do you think we have to?”

  Markus read all of Amy’s messages on a soft September afternoon when kids were now back to school. Little Bodecia, Markus wrote on one of the pages, was abandoned by most of us, most of it accidentally.

  He paused. It was all there. That is, reading these things, as strange and as arbitrary as it seemed, everything was in place to make her drowning what Leo hoped it would be: a tragic suicide that all could live with after a certain length of time. Especially if they put a statue to her on Chapman’s Island. Especially if Minnie came back to Alex, and Doreen to Leo.

  The message to her dad was the last. September 1. The real trouble was, she knew something was wrong—a certain dread she felt.

  By September 2 she knew exactly what it was. Why didn’t she tell her mom?

  This would all have to come out in the report now being handled in Moncton.

  “Who would have ever known?” Bauer said now, insinuating Markus into his own lack of understanding.

  “Random,” Markus said, glancing at him, “totally random, my man.” And he closed the notebook for good.

  —

  “MRS. HANSON COOKED THEM A CHICKEN AND A POTATO salad and a cheesecake,” Bourque said at two on that afternoon of September 2. “It’s really nice of her—” Then he said this: “The thing about Minnie, which in effect is a balm to us, and allows a certain healthy healing to take place, is she is a good woman—not a dazzling woman like some of the trappers’ wives I know, those insinuating little backstabbers who would wear a coyote and say it was a fox—but all in all a kindly woman, who as you know—what a body on her when she got her growth at about eighteen, do you remember? I am talking body, sweet, how do you say it, it melted when you hugged her, which I was lucky to do once at her wedding.”

  “Unfortunately I have never hugged her,” Alex said. “I was too, too shy.”

  “Then you have missed a certain—charm.” Bourque smiled. “For, you see, she gave in to a hug—a hug allowed her a certain predisposed submitting she had no control over.”

  “Shut up about her.”

  “Oh well. You should have been at the wedding. You should have been at my wedding.”

  “I missed it because of ecclesiastical duty.”

  “I know that,” Bourque said, almost in timidity.

  “Shut up about her or I will talk about your wife in the arms of you know who.” And he looked up at Bourque with a calm and almost Jesuitical hatred.

  “Anyway—Mrs. Hanson is already on her way—so we could go over now and do it—what do you think? This is when she is left alone up there—no one around at all—and Rory, that Rory—why he never visits her anymore!”

  Alex shrugged.

  They sat in the sullen cabin until almost quarter past four, not looking at each other perhaps like those about to witness an execution. For one whole hour or more they did not speak. Then Bourque, who was wearing commando pants, went out for a little while. Then he came back.

  The day had gone on. Bourque had come in to tell Alex that Amy was already there, at the house.

  “But she is very smart,” Bourque said. “She took the old woman for her walk when Mrs. Hanson was still there. You see, all summer on the lane she was only one call away from help. But today it is different.” Here he broke out grinning in spite of himself. “I was so close beside her as she walked by me, I could have put the clothesline about her there and then.” He was a little too energized, as if he wanted to instill a kind of excitement in the prospect.

  “The clothesline—what clothesline?” Alex asked.

 
; “Oh, don’t you worry—I have a piece of clothesline if we have to tie her up.” And Bourque reached into his pocket and brought out about three feet of line.

  “But if we have to tie her up it will look like she didn’t really commit suicide—for how in the world would she tie herself up?”

  “It could be done—it is quite possible—and in fact it might show her ingenuity, coupled with her fierce determination to go through with it. If she ties her hands, she will have less ability to stop what she herself puts in process?”

  “I will not go for tying her up. I don’t want to scare her. I realize she has to go for whatever chance we have—still and all!”

  “I am only saying that if there are certain other measures that have to be taken, just till we get her to the pond—but I couldn’t put the clothesline around her because Mrs. Hanson was still there. She is looking at the puddle too.”

  “What do you mean, she is looking at the puddle?”

  “Simply this: she is looking at the puddle, in the yard, for I have snuck back and forth and disturbed it. And though she has not seen me, she knows this—that is, that the puddle is disturbed. She is no one’s fool, Minnie’s little girl.” He said this as a reprimand to Alex and in appreciation for people like him and Minnie. “And there is something sweet about her, she smells of wash and clean air—I like that about her!”

  Alex was suddenly appalled at Bourque even suggesting Amy’s body as appealing. But perhaps that is not what Bourque had meant. Perhaps he had only meant that her body was more sacred than he had thought.

  “But I am trying to ask, what has that got to do with anything?” Alex said, trying to sound severe.

  Bourque did not answer this. He stroked his mustache and nodded, deep in his own thoughts.

  “Killing her will solve nothing,” Alex said now. “If they impound the truck, which is what Markus is about, if they do so, we will be incarcerated no matter if we kill her or not. This is the fundamental flaw in our design and will work against us in the end.”

  “She is the key witness, and I believe that over the last two weeks she has figured it out. I am sure she saw Poppy and finally she knows she has, so we have no more time. As Elvis says, its now or never!”

  Bourque did not know how right he was as far as the timeline went, and that over the last two weeks Amy had done just that, realized fully what she must have seen, and had been on the verge of telling her mother before her mother left to go out west. Was on the verge of telling her father in an email but realized once the email was sent how final it would all be.

  Alex was silent. He, Alex, however, was no fool—he realized this. All of the crime so far had been committed by Bourque, really—the knifing and the tricking John Proud. He could go tonight and turn them both in, and perhaps, just perhaps be free of it all. But could he do this?

  “Bourque is terribly right wing,” he could say. “Not like me!”

  Again Alex asked what it would benefit to harm Amy.

  Bourque, drinking from a bottle of hermit wine, stared at him. “No man, no problem,” he said.

  This splashed on Alex like scalding water and he sat forward, suddenly, angrily. “Why did you say that?” he asked.

  “Say what?”

  “What you just said, why did you say it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Then don’t say it again!”

  “What did I say?”

  “No man, no problem!”

  “Seems like the thing to say.”

  “You stole it from Stalin!”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “And that’s not the first thing you stole—his mustache, his eyes—I’ve been watching you!”

  “Are you nuts? Who is Stalin?”

  —

  MARKUS MISSED AMY’S CALL BY A HALF AN HOUR THAT DAY. In fact, his procrastinating made his departure for Richabucto late enough that he did not get back to the office and therefore was not told of the call until the following day. He reprimanded himself for this, but he was still sure they wouldn’t have told him about this call, coming from the child. Because Bauer had had so many calls about the criminality of Johnny Proud.

  The little girl had asked for Markus Paul, and only managed: “I know what is wrong with me. I saw a truck that night, about ten o’clock—”

  The call came after one o’clock in the afternoon. She phoned from her house, because Fanny had no phone. When she hung up she realized that Mrs. Hanson had already gone, and she was alone on the sad old lane with the elderly woman.

  —

  MARKUS NOW WALKED TO THE TRUCK, WHICH HAD BEEN taken apart, piece by piece. It was the afternoon of September 23.

  Blood under the seat belonged to Poppy. The smell of kerosene was prevalent, everywhere. Luminol showed passive blood drops on the carpet that had come from Bourque’s cut hand. There was fiber from Alex, and most likely his DNA. There was nothing in the truck belonging even remotely to John Proud.

  The tires, though scorched, matched what little marks they had, and the sandal prints matched Alex Chapman’s. It was so easy, wasn’t it, now that it was all over? A red-winged blackbird flew.

  “Random.” Markus smiled.

  —

  THAT HAD BEEN BOURQUE’S IDEA, TO GET RID OF THE TRUCK by burning it, down in Chapman’s lot, before dark. They could say, since the truck was old, that it was electrical, he maintained, a fire sparked by some short in the electrical harness under the dash. And he, Bourque, knew how to do it. He had done it for Cid Fouy before for insurance with the Corvette.

  That would nullify the truck as a witness against them, he said.

  He said, “It is our only chance, my big cheese.”

  “Well, when should we do it?”

  “Now,” Bourque said, looking out the window, “because it is starting to spit rain again—and that will stop the fire from spreading. We do it in the lower junkyard, behind all the rebar, so no one will see it from the highway.”

  “But couldn’t they say that this is indication of some conniving guilt, as much as me going to buy new tires?”

  “Oh sure, but then again the truck itself will be gone, the tires—we will burn them as well—”

  “So we are in it this deep now—we burn the tires and we go kill Amy—is this what has become of my journey?”

  “What journey?”

  “The journey I started on the day my mother died, the journey that was set in stone, to defend my mother, as I must, from all who had harmed her. That is who I thought I was right up until last month!”

  Bourque simply shrugged.

  “So what happened to that fellow, the fellow I thought I knew?” Alex asked.

  “What has to be must be,” Bourque said kindly. And he added, not plaintively but philosophically, that when he was a child, crying out in the dooryard because his dad had hit his mom, little did he know that the knee of the man he was sitting on, Poppy Bourque, who made him toffee in a little bowl on winter days, he would later stab, and that would set off a chain of events that would make him prone to drowning children.

  “But,” he said, “it must be done now! Or give it all up. That is what we discussed throughout the late summer, when I could have been out fishing salmon. I was in that hole of a room with you, deciding what to do about her. I did not intend it and neither have you. But there is something else you must, must know.”

  “What?”

  “Something that will burn your socks!”

  “What—tell me, what!”

  “He knows about it.”

  “Who knows about what?” Alex said, starting to tremble.

  “Markus Paul has figured out it is about a lotto ticket.”

  “How in God’s name could he ever figure that out?”

  “It puzzles me as well,” Bourque said, “but he came to my house and spoke of what he would buy if he won the lotto—and that he would buy a Porsche, just like I said I would. That scares me just a little bitty bit!”

  Alex looked at him
as if he had just suffered the deepest of betrayals.

  “I knew it—I knew that would come back to haunt you!” he roared.

  “Nothing will ever come back to haunt us if we stick together,” Bourque said. “Keep your little chin up!”

  But Alex now knew that was a lie, and that he must extricate himself if he had any chance to live.

  —

  THEY STARTED OUT IN THE PULPY AFTERNOON, THE WEEDS gone yellow and the grasses trampled down, the trees themselves all tinted by the cold and the bay water seemingly empty of summer life, and now again the rain spitting down on them, as they moved solitarily across the trampled garden. What was even worse, I suppose, is that both sighted Markus Paul’s squad car at Burton’s. But they kept silent about this, even to each other.

  They both of them smelled the wind, and smoke from chimney fires, and both realized the noble feelings associated with this smell, the men who worked in the woods to keep their families going, and all the thousands of winter storms fought, the children protected, the mothers’ sacrifice unto death.

  Alex was quiet. They took the keys again and started the truck, and drove it down the back hunting path to the old kiln where Alex had tried at one time to forge out of his entrails his essence as an artist and human being. He looked at it, as if wondering what had become of this wunderkind, this boy who had been so amazed at life, so willing to debate it, and before that so willing, so terribly willing, to love it.

  “Gone,” he whispered.

  “What?” Bourque asked.

  Alex lifted his hand, and said nothing more. He looked at Bourque as the rain hit the windshield.

  “She’ll be having that chicken now, and all the things Minnie made for them too,” Bourque advised. “You see how nice Minnie is—she was up so early making sure of everything before she left for just a few days, making pies and chicken, and a blueberry cheesecake—that’s who nice Minnie Mouse is, and you, the big cheese, didn’t know it. You did not love her for who she was.”

  “Did so.”

  “Did not—you wanted to love her behind glass, so you missed her completely, and will never get to fuck her.”