HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down

by T. J. Brearton

  In his mind Milliner replayed the Jeep passing him, going a bit too fast, high beams on, the dark shape of Jared Kingston tucked behind the wheel. He could’ve been on a mission. Some sort of love triangle at work.

  “No,” said Christopher. “He didn’t know I was there.”

  “I see.”

  Milliner lowered his gun and holstered it, watching the kid for a long moment, considering his options.

  “Alright,” he said at last. “I think I should drive you to where you need to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Look,” Milliner said, the gruffness rising in his voice again, “I could arrest you for trespassing right now.”

  “Wouldn’t the Kingstons have to press charges for that?”

  Milliner took two steps forward and once more grabbed the kid by the shoulder of his jacket.

  “They’re friends of mine. All I’ve got to do is give them a quick call. Get in.”

  There was another shrug, but the boy complied.

  Christopher sat, appearing resigned to his fate, as the passenger door shut and the dome light winked off. He dropped his head as if studying his hands, maybe, or the space between his feet.

  Milliner rounded the front of the vehicle as the first drops of rain, cold as ice, began to chatter against the Blazer, chill his balding head, and sending a shiver through him before he reached the driver’s side door.

  * * *

  They had come to the end of the dirt road, and Tom signaled right onto Route 15, in the direction of Red Rock Falls.

  “You look cold,” said Christopher.

  Tom said nothing.

  “Maybe you should take a drink,” said the kid. “That would warm you up.”

  Tom glanced over then, expecting, at last, to see the kid looking at him, perhaps with a shit-eating, smartass grin on his face, but Christopher was still looking down. Tom was struck by the resemblance he bore to a young Jim Cruickshand, Tom’s best friend during high school. Christopher’s expression was somber — he certainly wasn’t smiling — and he had slumped a bit in his seat.

  “I’m sorry,” said Christopher. “Sometimes I can still be wicked. I’m trying to stop that. It’s not a perfect state, you know.”

  “What state is that?” Tom asked, confused, his tone mellowed somewhat from before.

  He hadn’t intended on engaging the boy, although playing shrink to the people he investigated was often part of the job; sometimes a little psychobabble went a long way. He wanted to hold onto his irritability with the kid — it stemmed from the take a drink comment. Even though he hadn’t touched a drink in over two years, with recovery you were in for life and didn’t need any more temptation than life itself offered every moment of every day.

  “It’s hard to say,” Christopher said. “I wasn’t always this way.”

  “Neither was I.”

  Much as he may have been innately prone to reticence and stubbornness, Tom found that the part of him talking at that moment was a new Tom, perhaps the real Tom, the person he’d been as a little boy, in his innocence, before the corruption which had so dismantled that child.

  The Blazer moved on through the rainy night, the wiper blades keeping to their rhythmic cadence.

  He repeated the question. “What state is it that you’re in?”

  “It’s like Purgatory. May I ask you something?”

  “I suppose so. Sure.”

  “Why have you been following me? Did I do something wrong?”

  Tom wasn’t ready for that, though something tugged at the back of his mind. He settled for the cliché. “It’s my job.” He then surprised himself by saying, “When I’m not catching new cases, I keep an eye on things. It’s what they pay me to do.”

  The kid offered a barely perceptible nod.

  “There’s nothing free in this world,” Christopher said. “Nothing except the grace God gives you.”

  Tom managed a quick glance at the kid, then back at the road. Despite better intentions, despite the new Tom Milliner who had supposedly become more open, more sympathetic to people, he said to himself, Okay, here we go. Kid’s a religious nut. A ministry youth, or something.

  “What do you do?” he asked, acting on this suspicion. “Talk with people? A door-to-door type thing?”

  “No. I don’t . . . I’m not sure what I do. I’m finding out.”

  Again, Tom nodded, more to buy time while formulating his next question than in acknowledgement of the kid’s response.

  “Why were you at the Kingston place then? Trying to win her back?”

  In his mind’s eye Tom saw the door slam — Stephanie on the other side of it — and remembered himself turning and walking down the steps, and out into the lonely night.

  Christopher ignored the question as if hoping to institute a distraction.

  He asked, “You want to turn on the radio, or something?”

  “Nah,” Tom said, allowing the deflection, “I don’t like the radio.”

  Tom felt around the console between them and grabbed the Styrofoam coffee cup. He drank from it. It was cold.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I’m not staying anywhere.”

  “You got any ID on you? Any money?”

  “No.”

  Tom took another sip of the cold coffee. The storm was worsening. He slowed his speed a little, lifting his foot from the gas pedal. It was then that he caught a scent coming from the kid — something not exactly like sweat, but some other odor he couldn’t quite place — maybe the smell of aftershave, or shampoo, something with Mountain Breeze on the label, a detergent maybe. Or maybe it was an air freshener lying somewhere in the Chevy, he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t remember.

  “The cops in the Falls can pick you up for vagrancy,” Tom said.

  “They’d do that?”

  “They’ve done worse.”

  Tom began to see that for all the kid’s initial mysteriousness he actually seemed pretty ordinary. He clearly wasn’t expecting to be hassled by the police — another mark in his favor. He was referring to some “state of being” or something, yes, so maybe he was some sort of intellectual or philosopher like a lot of the Goth kids fancied themselves, but nevertheless he seemed bright, different from the Goths, almost naïve.

  “I don’t think they’ll pick me up.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I just don’t think they will.”

  Tom grew silent for a moment. He set down the cold coffee, fumbling a little before managing to slip it into the cup holder.

  “Well you can’t stay outside; it’s pouring. You’ll need to hole up somewhere.”

  “I thought maybe you were taking me to the police station.”

  “Is that where you want to go?”

  “No, not particularly, but it would be dry and that seems to be your concern.”

  “Not particularly?” Tom repeated it as a question.

  Again, the boy changed the subject.

  “Have you been watching the Kingston house?”

  “No. Should I be?”

  “You said they were your friends. I thought you were checking up on the place for them.”

  The kid had caught Tom in a lie, but didn’t dwell on it or use it in any incriminating fashion. Christopher’s mind seemed set on other things.

  “That guy, Jared, is no good. He’s on his way out, if he’s not careful. He’s tempted. He’s carrying something.” Christopher said all this with his head still bent forward, as if in prayer, or tired.

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean — tempted, carrying something?”

  “I just mean he’s not very good. Not for Elizabeth.” His tone was plaintive, indicating that he had feelings for her.

  “Ah,” said Tom, believing they were getting close to the truth of the relationship.

  Up ahead, a blinking yellow materialized in the silvery downpour. The water on the windshield distorted it so that it looked like a kind of flower, or the glimmering eye of some huge beast
, squatting there in the intersection.

  Tom thought of the hotels, and of the inkblot shapes, the protean residue in the walls.

  He cleared his throat. He reached into his inside pocket of the hunting coat — the other pocket, pulled out some cigarettes and shook two out. He offered one to Christopher. The kid took it. Tom indicated the cigarette lighter on the dash, and the kid pushed it in — lifting his head for the first time since getting into the Chevy. They were silent and waited. The lighter popped out. Tom had put his own cigarette between his lips, and the kid took the glowing cylinder and offered it to him. Tom lit his smoke and passed the lighter back. The kid lit his. They exhaled in unison and began filling the air with smoke.

  The smell of the tar and tobacco smothered the strange odor that had gathered in the Blazer, the scent of a garment exhumed from storage.

  Tom cracked his window. He felt he’d waited long enough to put the kid at ease for his next question.

  “So you think Jared is carrying something. Muling for someone?”

  The kid savored several puffs and seemed to be thinking — perhaps honing his answer, either for truth or effect. His gaze was directed ahead out the windshield. Tom slowed and made another right heading directly east to intersect with downtown Red Rock Falls, perhaps five minutes away. They passed a farm — Isaac Palyswate’s stretch. Tom could see, but briefly, the mud forming where the rain impacted the cow pen, and then they were picking up speed again.

  Christopher had formed his answer.

  “Something like that. But not how you think.”

  Tom lived on the other side of Red Rock, beyond the village of Lake Meer. The thoughts that he found flitting through his head had become uncomfortable. He found himself questioning a plan that seemed to have gained a life of its own. To feed this kid and give him a couch to crash on for the night was insane — at least absurd. He returned to the questions.

  “Okay. Let’s try another route. You think you can save Elizabeth from a bad relationship?”

  “Maybe.”

  It had been delivered with feeling, though diminished by the meager indication of a shrug.

  “It’s been my experience that you can’t make anyone do anything,” Tom said. “People have to be ready to change, and then they change. All you can do is be there to support them.”

  He had no idea why he had been moved to say that. Maybe he felt he was giving the kid some good advice, maybe he was still using what paltry psychological skills he had at his disposal. Maybe he was just talking.

  “Yeah,” said the kid. “You’re right.”

  Tom took a chance with his next question.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Everywhere,” said Christopher.

  Tom might have expected as much. The kid probably came from a bad home — so many of them did. He had been broken somewhere along in there, just like Tom had. Maybe he got into it with the old man one final time — the confrontation that had catapulted him out in the world. Now, estranged from his family, no father figure to look to, he wandered about, more often than not trying to piece back together lost relationships in an unconscious effort to rebuild what he’d lost with his family.

  Maybe I’m a hack, thought Tom, and dragged on his cigarette.

  He peered into the sheets of sweeping rain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Elizabeth lay there, listening for Jared, thinking about Christopher, and what she’d heard in his voice.

  Her body was tired. It had been a long day — Jared had awakened her at 7 AM. No matter how much he might drink, Jared was never one to wallow in bed the next morning. Elizabeth liked the bed. She often felt she could spend the whole day snuggled in — and sometimes she did. She would read, she would talk on the phone, but mostly she would just lie there, thinking of nothing. Jared didn’t encourage it, to say the least, and had already started to get on her case, like her mother had, like her father had, like a procession of boyfriends had. She could see it in their eyes, even when they didn’t say anything. Only Christopher had really seemed to understand. He had never said anything, never given her any front, or unsubtle vibe (like Jared).

  Her body was tired indeed, trying to pull her down; invisible hands groping at her shoulders and lower back and legs, gathering her into the bed. Her mind, though, was active. Her mind always seemed to be the most active at night. Christopher had understood that too.

  What was it? What was it in his voice that was so unsettling?

  Earlier that evening Jared had asked her if she’d wanted to come out with him, which she often did. Most nights she couldn’t bear the thought of rattling around in this camp-like house by herself. Occasionally though, she preferred it, and looked forward to a bath, a book, a phone call to her sister. Tonight, the only thing she had wanted to do was sit by the pond and watch the loon.

  She had discovered the loon about two weeks before, and though Jared had likely heard its call in the evening and early morning just before dawn, they never mentioned it to one another. It was her loon, her guy-loon. She’d instantly associated the solitary creature with the male gender; without question it had just been “guy-loon.” She realized that the sobriquet had to do with two stuffed bears she’d had as a little girl, “guy-bear” and “gal-bear.” She had always preferred guy-bear, and often punished gal-bear for no reason, placing her in the corner with her pink ribbon around her neck, facing the wall.

  Liz had opted to stay in tonight, if only to wait for the call of the loon, for a sighting of him out there on the grey and green pond waters. Ice-out had come early this spring, Jared had informed her, almost a full month ahead of last year.

  It wasn’t surprising, she thought, given the inexplicable events of the evening, that the pond had invaded her dreaming mind, when it suddenly returned to her, the core of the dream she’d awakened from moments ago: a small figure in the center of the turmoil, looking up, bathed in the rain.

  The storm drummed the roof over her head now. The ceiling in the bedroom was slanted. Jared called it a “loft” bedroom. She thought of it more as an attic, and the pitched ceiling could make her feel claustrophobic. Sometimes she awakened in the middle of the night with a heavy feeling on her chest, whooping for breath, eyes wide in the dark and stillness. It never woke Jared up, of course. He slept the sleep of the dead.

  Elizabeth didn’t tell Jared everything, and she wondered if she would tell him about seeing Christopher. Even if she did, what would she say? That a man she thought to be long gone had shown up at the house, drenched to the bone, half an hour before the skies actually had opened up?

  She got an image of a hospital then, of a white room, a towering machine of telltale lights and knobs and toggles, and then the image was gone, as there was a crashing sound from downstairs and she heard a “fuck!” come from Jared.

  She sat up in the bed.

  “Babe?” she called. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah!” came the call back from Jared, and she heard his gravelly chuckle, which broke up into a series of coughs.

  She started to lie back down but then stopped.

  “What’re you doing?”

  There was another ruckus as something toppled over and then something else was slammed shut. She suddenly thought she knew what he might be doing. But why? Was he just so piss drunk? It could be dangerous. What if—

  “It’s in the car,” he said, and she could hear, even from downstairs, that his words were a bit gauzy, a bit drawn. “It’s in my Jeep,” he said, and she heard a chuckle again, only this time less boisterous, almost ponderous. One sharp bark of a cough followed. She thought she could smell cigarette smoke. She was pretty sure she did. Jared insisted on not smoking in the house — he always had her go outside. Unless, of course, he was properly pickled.

  “What’s in the Jeep?” She was still sitting up, holding the covers in front of her. A camisole and pajama pants were all she had on, and the house was on the cold side. Jared needed to stoke the woodstove, but he was obvi
ously preoccupied.

  “In the trunk,” he called, misinterpreting her. “In the back.” He said something else, something that might have been little fucker, and then she heard the door from the kitchen to the porch bang open and shut, followed by the muffled clumping of his shoes down the two porch steps, a sound swallowed up by the flushing rain.

  What in the hell was he doing? She was pretty sure she knew now what the commotion had been — Jared had gotten into the gun cabinet. He’d probably knocked over a couple of the other weapons in his whiskeyed clumsiness before getting the Mossberg shotgun, his favorite. If he thought there was — what, some animal maybe — in the Jeep, then he would be taking the shotgun. He’d told her all about his guns, more than she’d ever wanted or needed to know. There were three he kept in the house — the Mossberg shotgun, a Browning A-bolt rifle, and a .22. Jared had tried to give her the combination to the lock on the gun cabinet a couple of times, telling her it was for her safety, if she was here alone, but she’d refused.

  She was from a suburb of a large, polluted, and crime-ridden city. Danger, drugs, and dereliction filtered into her neighborhood like blood oozing from an infested wound. Heroin had found her without any difficulty — the DEA had Turkey and China to thank for throwing such copious amounts on the world’s black market, but the suburbs were the hub of the drug economy. Here, though, what was there to be afraid of? Here in this little rural town in the middle of nowhere, along a dirt road in the forest, miles from anything. She’d told Jared this, and of course he’d responded that she was naïve, that bad things happened here all the time.

  Elizabeth dropped back onto the bed, folding her arms across her chest. The wine, the emotions of the night, and her general state of fatigue pulled at her again. She forced her eyes shut, but then felt her eyelids quivering. She saw flashes behind the lids, as though someone was turning a light on and off in the loft.

  And she saw him again, the child, the boy (guy-loon) standing in the middle of the pond, and then she heard the cry, the cry of the loon, and saw that the boy — he might have been two, maybe three — saw that his eyes were shut, that something was keeping them shut.