“Right-o. Alright, I’m going to bring her in. Thanks, Jim.”
“Thank you, Michelle,” he said, smiling. She left the bottom of the stairs, not glancing up at him again, but only walking out of sight.
Jim returned to the bedroom and stood there. Something occurred to him, something he’d seen on the way in, walking down the road to the place. He set his gun on the bed. First, he had to take a piss. It might not be much of one — his prostate was no great shakes anymore, pardon the pun — but the pressure was there. He walked into the bathroom, put up the seat and unzipped.
First he’d let Michelle get going then he’d check the shed outside. See if there was any trash in it and what the trash might have to tell.
As he did his business, Jim thought he heard something. A voice. Of all things, it sounded like it had come from the drain. He listened, and heard it again. Only this time, it seemed to form inside his head.
“Verrega,” he heard. “Don’t let her go.”
Jim waited for more, feeling his blood run cold. When he heard nothing else, he fastened his pants back together. He walked slowly out of the bathroom, and stared at the wet spot on the carpet.
* * *
Officer Michelle Branch walked back out of the Kingston place and over to her vehicle, which she had driven up almost to the back porch. The Goldfine girl was sitting in the back, cuffed, hands behind her, looking straight ahead.
Michelle got in and did a three-point-turn and had started out the dirt driveway when someone pulled off Viscome Road on the other end and started in.
Michelle’s heart leapt; it’d taken her by surprise. The vehicle was a green Chevy Blazer. She thought she recognized it. She put her Explorer in park and got out.
Investigator Milliner emerged, a light smile on his tired-looking face. “Sheriff called me. How are you, Ms. Branch?”
“Tom, good afternoon.”
Milliner started over to her, leaving his driver’s side door open. He was wearing jeans, boots, and a hunting jacket, the red-and-black-checked kind. His hair was sort of pushed against his head on one side and the balding part on top had a few wiry, errant hairs standing up like drunks at a line-up. Milliner looked like he needed a good rest. Hell, he looked like he needed three weeks in Bermuda.
Milliner’s ghost of a smile faded as he walked toward the vehicle, no longer looking at Michelle, but fixed intently on the girl in the back seat. He approached on the other side of the Explorer, looking in the rear passenger-side window at the girl.
“This her?”
“That’s her.”
The ambulance was approaching, but the siren had clipped off in mid-wail. Michelle wondered why. Before she even had a chance to raise this with Milliner, though, the ambulance was there, lights twirling, turning off from Viscome Road and only getting as far down the driveway as the back of Milliner’s vehicle.
“Shit.” She hopped back into the driver’s seat and threw the gearshift into reverse. Then she thought of Jim saying there’s no one here. Well, Jim may have made that call, but you never knew. There could still be someone. Tom Milliner was still standing on the other side of her vehicle, staring in at the girl who was looking straight ahead, seeing nothing, it seemed.
“Tom,” Michelle called loudly.
He snapped out of it and turned and looked at the ambulance and trotted over to his car.
A few seconds later Michelle was reversing back towards the house and Tom was following, the ambulance on his heels. Michelle and Tom parked as far out of the way as they could in the constrained area, and the two EMTs got out and started up toward the porch.
Milliner came back over to Michelle, who sat in the vehicle. Michelle gestured with her hand for Tom to lean close.
“She says she’s the perpetrator.”
Tom looked at the girl in the backseat.
“But Jim hasn’t found anything yet,” said Michelle.
Tom glanced at Michelle then turned his head to look at the house. “Let me take her in.”
“What? Why?”
“Sheriff called me, like I said. I been out here already. Twice. I sort of got a case going with her.”
“Oh. Okay.” It meant less paperwork for her. She got the suspect out and took the cuffs off and Milliner put his own on her. The girl was warm, loose as a rag doll, and Tom had no trouble getting her into his own backseat. She looked like she was in shock.
Tom walked around the front of his Blazer and got in it. He started up the engine. Michelle thought to stop him, to ask a few more questions, but the two EMTs were walking back towards the ambulance, empty handed.
There was no body after all, Michelle thought. Jim had been right. What a strange afternoon. She patted the hood of Tom’s Blazer and he pulled out and started away.
After some deliberation she signed off on the EMTs and sent them on their way. They followed Milliner’s path out of the dirt driveway, headed to Donna’s Road, and Route 33 beyond.
* * *
Jim Cruickshand burst out of the front door of the house, his face flushed.
Michelle called over to him. “What’s the matter?”
Jim looked past her, down the driveway. He came down the porch steps. “Where is she?”
“Milliner was here. Picked her up.”
“Follow them.” he said. “Keep your eye on that girl.”
“What is it?” She was used to state troopers giving commands rather than making requests, it was their way, but there was something else in Cruickshand’s voice.
“I’m not sure yet. Just keep on her. Let me know what Milliner does with her.”
She nodded and got in her Explorer and took off through the woods, as instructed.
Trooper Jim Cruickshand listened to the sound of her engine fade, watching the driveway which led away from the Kingston place. Then his head swiveled on his neck as he turned to look at the shed which sat pressed into the trees.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Milliner looked at her in the rearview mirror.
“Who do you think you shot? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
Elizabeth’s head was swaying back and forth over the bumps. She seemed to be looking at the console between the two bucket seats or, at nothing at all. Her eyes rolled up to meet his in the mirror.
“Chris,” she said.
Something fluttered in Tom’s chest. It felt like someone had stuck a hose into his solar plexus for a second and turned on the air.
She looked at him, and he thought he saw a little bit of life come back into her eyes. “My ex.”
Tom looked ahead and had to step suddenly on the brakes; the stop sign for Route 33 was coming up fast. He saw the girl’s head lurch forward as the vehicle abruptly came to a stop. He glanced at her in the mirror.
“The officers didn’t find anyone there at the house. Did you move him?”
She shook her head, and blonde hair spilled across her brow. She blew at it, her hands still shackled.
“Do you think . . .” he began, carefully mapping out the next few words, as Steph would have recommended, “Do you think that maybe he survived? Walked away himself?”
“He looked pretty dead,” she said in a low voice, and he saw in the reflection a tear rolling down her cheek, out from beneath the mass of hair.
“Looks can be deceiving. I met Christopher, you know. That’s what you call him too, right? He doesn’t like to be called Chris?”
“No,” she said, “he doesn’t. He had this thing, you know, that people are given their names and then they always get shortened. And the shorter ones always suck,” she said.
Tom smiled. He’d been a Tom, sometimes a Tommy, but never a Thomas, not for years, not since his mother had passed.
Tom liked that the girl was talking about something like this. She was barely over twenty. Kids that age needed to be able to talk and to swear and to think. Otherwise they pulled their hoods up over their heads and started getting into the weird shit. Not that shooti
ng your ex-boyfriend was exactly normal.
“So, you met him?”
“Yeah. Hung out with him last night,” Tom said. He wasn’t consciously trying to use the vernacular, Tom thought, but I had him in custody wasn’t accurate, either.
“Oh yeah? How’d you meet?”
Tom thought she was coming back around nicely, coming back to the land of the living. He figured that the kid gloves were working, and now he could be a little blunt.
“Can I ask you something strange? You ever heard of a defective? Or a wagerer?”
She shook her head. “What are they? Oh, well, I’ve heard of a wagerer.”
“You have?”
“Yeah, um, I mean, it’s someone who places a bet. That’s the usual meaning, right?”
“Yeah, that’s the usual meaning.”
He watched as a truck bearing hay bales made the left turn at the blinking yellow where 33 intersected with 4, and he started to slow. There was Isaac Palyswate’s dairy farm on the right, and the air was redolent with manure. Tom came to a full stop at the yellow and lit up a cigarette. “You mind?”
She shook her head no, and he saw her look at him with some bewilderment. Then Tom checked all his mirrors, and, seeing no one, asked her, “What other meaning might there be?”
She shrugged. She looked out the window, at the farm. “I guess there’s an old-fashioned meaning.”
“Old-fashioned?”
“You know, archaic. A wager in older times wasn’t just a bet. It was a promise.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went to a private school. They taught us Latin and ancient civilizations and all of that. Plus, Jared, my boyfriend, he leaves me home a lot and I read.”
“Where is Jared?”
Elizabeth looked from the window to the mirror. Then she looked down, back to the space between the two seats. “I don’t know.”
Tom let it go for now. “So, it means a promise?”
She seemed grateful to avoid the subject of Jared, to have something else to talk about. She wasn’t from around here, Tom knew that. She was a gene-pool chick, well-heeled from somewhere downstate, or maybe Jersey or Connecticut.
“I think it means a pledge,” she said. “When you pledge service.”
Tom felt a little jolt. He thought of his father, telling him: You still need to serve.
“Maybe combat service,” the girl went on. “Like, a wager meant that you gave yourself to something, you promised yourself in order to resolve an issue. Like, a major issue. And you can make payments on it.”
“Payments?”
“That was what it was, I’m pretty sure.”
Tom smiled into the rearview mirror at her. “Thanks,” he said, “that’s helpful.”
“No sweat.”
An awkward silence ensued. Sometimes politeness betrayed its purpose, Tom thought, and only drew attention to the darker things at hand. He thought about Jared saying how they’d lost a child, Elizabeth and Christopher. His smile faded as he watched the road. He was reluctant to bring up the issue, sensing that while it was at the heart of things, it would be too much for the girl right now.
They entered into a long dip, and back up the other side. They would be nearing Red Rock Falls, and the Sheriff’s Department, in less than ten minutes.
They rode in silence.
The name “Red Rock” was a translation from a Native American word, Tom couldn’t remember which. The red rock that was found in the Adirondack Park was almandine garnets, circular shapes found within larger basalt rocks. They’d been discovered, and the town named, back when the mines to the northwest were still in operation, but the Native Americans had known about them long before that. Red Rock County encompassed a number of small villages, but the two most prominent were the Falls and Lake Meer.
Coming out of the dip, Tom watched the mountains to the south that rose up jagged against the sky, rocky and pined. He wondered about that boy, so long ago, who had left the phone booth after his emergency call, wandering off alone. Tom thought about the kids who’d been hanging around, their mouths pursed and eyes darting.
He looked at Liz in the backseat.
“Everything is going to be okay. We’ll sort this whole mess out.”
This time, she didn’t look at him, but stayed fixed on the space somewhere in front of her — or far beyond her. She’d apparently reverted back to the kind of numb shock she’d first been in. He regretted anything he might’ve said to provoke the relapse. But, he reconciled, she was going to go through what she was going to go through without any help from him. Whether she only thought she’d shot somebody or actually had, either way you cut it there were some things to sort out.
By the time they got to the outskirts of Red Rock, however, she was worse. She seemed completely gone, not responding when he called her name, stuck somewhere inside of herself like a garnet in the dark grey basalt.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Tom didn’t take her to the police station. He took her to the hospital.
“She was lucid for a while in the car,” he said to the PA, “and then she just went . . . I don’t know what you call that.”
The small hospital was buzzing with activity. Tom left the Goldfine girl with the PA and wandered about for a moment, lost in the din. He found himself standing outside the nurses’ station, and found Maddy at one of the desks.
He smiled at her. “Don’t you ever go home?”
She smiled back. “I could ask you the same thing.” She scribbled on the top sheet of a stack of papers and then stood, taking the sheaf of documents with her. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Not really,” said Tom.
Truth was he had slept; he’d gone down for about three hours before his beeper went off. Sheriff Johnston had called Roger Hadley for a detective to head to the Kingston house, but Hadley reported that Tom had been out there already, that he was investigating something, and so deferred. Truth was, Hadley had a new girlfriend, a real piper from Comlinks, and hadn’t wanted to get out of bed.
Tom’s sleep had been typically thin and discomfiting. In his dreams he’d been running down kids on fire, one after the other, as they stood burning in the streets. Maddy read it in his face.
“I can get you Valium.”
“I’m alright.”
“What’ve you brought me?”
“A young girl who thinks she killed somebody. Now she’s . . . I don’t know. Minimally conscious, I guess you’d say.”
Maddy scrutinized his face. Tom saw flecks of yellow in her blue irises. He felt like hugging her, but the feeling passed.
“You brought me a murder suspect?”
“There’s no body. Between you, me, and the sea, I don’t think she killed anyone. Just check her out, for me. Please.”
Her eyes continued to search him. “I’ll see to her,” she said at last, and then smiled and moved past him.
He turned and said to her back, “Seriously, why are you still here?”
“I love my job,” she said over her shoulder, and walked out of the cramped little nurses’ station.
She stopped in the doorway and turned. “A little boy needs a transfusion, and we may end up having to ship him to RRMC.”
Tom felt himself stiffen up. He thought of the baby boy, the nurse singing a lullaby.
“For a blood transfusion? You can do that here, can’t you?”
“Well, over in the Falls, yes. But, there’s other things.”
“The thing with his eyes?”
“Yes and no. We’re not entirely sure about the eyes. Anyway, if we go over there, I’m going along.”
Tom stood there, not quite knowing what to say. He knew Maddy didn’t have a car, so she must’ve meant she’d ride over to Red Rock Falls in the ambulance. She lived only a few houses down from the little hospital here in Lake Meer, and she walked everywhere, that bright orange scarf around her neck. She was singular, that woman, and she kept it that way.
“Where’s his
mother? His parents?”
“His mother was a sixteen-year-old on methadone when she had him. And at seventeen, her boyfriend tried to convince her to get rid of him. It’s not a nice story, Tommy.”
“Get rid of him?”
“Makes other things pale in comparison, doesn’t it?”
Tom nodded grimly. “How urgent is the need for his transfusion?”
“They’re prepping him for the transfusion now. He needs it right away.”
“He’s had blood loss?”
“No.” Her eyes searched him. “I have to be careful what I say, Tommy, even to you.” She lowered her voice to the point he had to lean in, barely able to hear her. “If he doesn’t get the blood, he could die.”
“What about anyone here? You’re stocked like the Ritz on New Year’s Eve. Got any potential donors here? You must have a similar type. Is he a rare type?”
“We’re checking,” she said, “but it’s a long shot. He is. And he may need surgery. It’s going to be tough . . . there is no local anesthetic which can touch it, and general anesthesia is . . .”
She stopped, and Tom saw something pass over her. The sight of her, that steeliness coming over her in the face of emotion, it reminded him of something Maddy used to say years ago, that summer when they had spent some time together. Better fish or cut bait, Milliner. She was smiling again, now. Her steeliness was never able to eclipse her warmth.
“I have to go, doll.”
“Okay,” he said, for some reason reluctant to let her leave. “Let me know if I can, I don’t know, let me know if I can do anything for you. Anything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jared stalked through the woods.
He moved out of the trees and into a clearing of tall, dead, goldenrod. The snow here was thin, and allowed the reeds to stand on end. Where they were still bent, he followed, moving along through the labyrinth of deer runs.
The air was fresh. It was a cool, wet, fresh thing; a living thing. The muted colors, the drab ecru of the goldenrod stalks, the dark green of the tree line hemming the clearing, the battleship grey clouds — they all seemed brighter, as though Jared’s eyes were a siphon, drawing out every last drop of color and contrast. He felt sharp, so sharp. So crisp, like the air. His hangover was nonexistent. He’d had no breakfast but didn’t require it. His breathing was low and slow, whistling through his nostrils. He felt fit, lithe, and powerful.
HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Page 13