Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  He saw her standing by Mile Marker 27, standing idly, just as Overton had described her, in her dark green dress, her eyes turning suddenly to where Overton’s battered old truck wheezed and rattled as it hauled itself up the mountain, the overheated engine gasping loudly, just before the truck drifted to the side of the road and came to rest on the littered shoulder.

  As Kinley imagined it, she must have looked at the dusty truck, pausing for just a moment before she moved toward it, walking determinedly until she reached Overton’s racked body as it slumped beneath the open hood.

  After that, it was talking heads, Overton’s slumped over the devastated engine, Ellie’s beside him, her mouth at his ears, firing her questions one after the other, and then later, Overton under the truck, his eyes catching only brief glimpses of the small feet in the black shoes as they pranced about, pacing up and down, the young, girlish voice coming to him in short, nervous bursts: What’s the matter? can you fix it? how long? how long? how long?

  It was easy for Kinley to hear Ellie Dinker’s voice now, as it had always become easy when he had released his mind like a dog in the woods, let it take him wherever the dreadful scent led, and in those weird and tragic moments, he felt the wildest region of his mind bloom with a sudden, relentless ardor, and he entered imagined landscapes, dark and smoldering and haunting, heard imagined voices, dim, shrill, full of rage, emptiness, longing, everything fully visualized in that powerful way his grandmother had taught him to imagine: with your mind’s fingertips, Kinley, with nothing between you and what you’re after.

  For a time, he let his mind hold, trancelike, over the little scene on the mountain road, absorbing every nuance of sound and sight, before returning it to the brutal questions which still shone from the screen of his computer.

  He read them over again, slowly, one by one, concentrating on each word, as the possible answers emerged, tossed about in his head, then settled to the ground with the fierce gravity of logic, and to all four questions, he typed in a single, unifying answer:

  Ellie Dinker walked precisely from her house to Mile Marker 27 on the mountain road because it was a clearly visible landmark that could be easily designated as a place of rendezvous. She had not expected Overton’s truck to break down in sight of the meeting place and had quickly rushed down to his truck in order to ascertain how long he would be broken down. Once she knew that Overton would not be leaving quickly, she had walked far enough up the road to make sure that when the missing person arrived, he would be far enough away to prevent his being seen by Overton. Within a few minutes, the missing person had, in fact, arrived, and Ellie Dinker had gone away with him …never to be seen again.

  Never to be seen again, Kinley thought, as he read the paragraph again. Then he typed the eighth question:

  8)Where is Ellie Dinker?

  He’d barely removed his fingers from the keys when Riley Hendricks’s motionless eyes swam into his mind, and he imagined himself not at some place that remained distant both in space and time, but another place entirely, one that was here and now.

  TWENTY-THREE

  It took a few minutes to assemble the tools he needed, but he’d finally managed to find everything in Ray’s small, dusty garage. The rope had hung in a tangle beside the garage door, the rubber boots in the small closet adjoining the office. A pair of gray work gloves were in an old tool chest, and the flashlight in a kitchen drawer, nestled among a disorder of tape, pliers, matches, whatever else had been tossed haphazardly inside. Only the shovel had remained in its hiding place, so that in the end, he’d had to settle for the long garden hoe and small, sharp-edged spade he’d found near the disordered rope.

  Night had already fallen by the time Kinley pulled himself into the car and headed up toward the Overton house. At the brow of the mountain, he turned onto the narrow road, edging the car through the near total darkness, his eyes occasionally glancing down the mountain slope to where the lights of Sequoyah still burned with their old radiance, the one he remembered from his youth.

  Dora’s house was dark, and the little gray car she’d been driving when they met at the old Dinker place was gone. He looked at his watch, noted the lateness of the hour and wondered where she was, with what he recognized immediately as that little ache of fear and longing Ray had sometimes described in the early days when he’d found himself in love with Lois.

  But it was not something Kinley had ever felt, and its curious, muted appearance now struck him as being oddly out of place among the graying hair at his temples, and the ever-darkening crescents that sometimes hung beneath his eyes. Because of that, he refused to give it more than the soft, passing nod its subtle emergence seemed to deserve.

  Instead, he busied himself with his equipment. Methodically, he tugged on the large, ill-fitting boots, hoisted the rope over his shoulder, grasped the hoe, spade and flashlight and headed for the well.

  It rested not far from the rim of the mountain, a circular wall of gray stone curving jaggedly around its black mouth. The central shaft had been covered by a sheet of now-rusted tin nailed to the posts that supported the arched roof of the well.

  The nails which held the tin in place were badly weathered, and Kinley had no trouble dislodging them from the wood. Once free, he drew the tin sheet from the opening and let it slip quietly to the ground.

  Now the dark shaft was fully exposed, and for a moment, Kinley leaned over into it, shining his flashlight toward the bottom. It was deeper than he’d expected, the yellow light diffusing as it swept down the narrow shaft until it disappeared altogether.

  For a few seconds, he shifted the beam from wall to wall, as he looked for footholds along the shaft. There were very few, and because of that, Kinley understood that he would have to cling to the rope for long periods of time as he eased himself down toward the bottom of the pit. Carefully, he tied the end of the rope to one of the pines that stood nearby, then harnessed himself to the other end, crawled into the yawning shaft, released the hoe, and listened for a moment until he heard it splash into the water at the bottom of the shaft. From the time it took to fall, he calculated the distance to the floor of the well and began his descent.

  The air seemed to thicken, congealing around him like a heavy, black liquid, and he could feel a sudden, irrepressible tension crawl slowly over him, tightening his skin around him, pressing in upon his bones. It was an odd sensation, and he found himself glancing upward from time to time, as if to remind himself that the earth above was still bright and clear. But the moon was no more than a smoky mass behind the nocturnal clouds, and so he let his eyes descend again, staring down toward the ever-darkening regions over which he hung.

  As he continued downward, the circle of light that seemed to stare down from above narrowed steadily, until it appeared as little more than a distant tunnel.

  He forced his eyes away again and concentrated on pressing his feet firmly against the side of the shaft as he lowered himself downward one step at a time. He could see his hands grasping fiercely at the rope, seize and release, seize and release.

  As he continued his descent, the uneasiness within him, a predictable tension accompanied by an odd, unexplainable nostalgia, continued to build insistently, voices growing louder and louder as he neared their source.

  It was as if something at the bottom of the pit were simultaneously calling him to it and warning him away, begging him to reveal it and crying out that he must not. For a moment, he stopped, his feet digging into the shaft’s moist wall, while he dangled eerily in the blackness, his fingers pulsing along the long, gray rope. The darkness solidified around him so that he almost felt he could release the rope and drift back restfully onto its ebony bed, as if to hang there forever, in a lost suspension, his arms flung out, secure in the impenetrable darkness.

  It’s better to know, isn’t it?

  It was Ray’s voice, and they were together again, moving through the woods, over the lip of the canyon and down onto its dense, green floor, moving faster and fast
er, until Kinley felt that it was only him moving, and he was a little boy again, and Ray was no longer leading him, but someone else, a hand dragging him through the undergrowth, his eyes following that hand, up the arm and shoulder to the tall, imposing blur that pulled him ferociously.

  It’s better to know, isn’t it?

  Now it was Dora’s voice, and he was with her on the porch, and then in the tiny living room, his fingers dancing over the white keys of the piano, freed suddenly from the iron grip of repetitive motions, the lock of nerves that made them twitch and tingle, pull and grasp, as if the flight of music, its momentary exhilaration, was the only route to another sanctuary.

  He heard himself gasp, and a burst of air shook the small tendrils of the roots that reached out from the circular wall, and he sucked in a long, deep breath, filling his lungs, expanding his chest, rushing air into his blood and along the complex system which led to his brain, clearing it with a sudden infusion of oxygen.

  His fingers released their grip on the rope slightly, and he sank down again. He could feel a cool wave of air engulf him, sweeping upward, as if to drive back the yellow beam of the flashlight, while at his feet, the firm wall of the shaft grew moist and pliant, his boots now leaving faint tracks along the side of the well.

  He stopped again and glanced down. He could see the bottom of the well at a distance of perhaps twenty feet, the handle of the hoe nosing up out of the water as it leaned against the dripping wall.

  A sudden urgency overtook him, driving him down with an uncompromising command, and he gripped and released the rope, gripped and released it again as his feet plowed backwards down the wall.

  He reached the bottom a few seconds later, and paused to get his breath, his eyes focusing upward into the darkness, while he continued to hang from the rope, his feet barely breaking the surface of the water. Above, the shaft looked closed, the moon swept from the sky, leaving nothing above but what remained below, a thick, watery blackness.

  The urgency swept over him again, but this time more clear and definite, so that he was able to recognize its source.

  “Kinley, are you …”

  He heard Ray’s voice again, saw his face wet with rain as the walls of the shaft were wet and dripping.

  “Kinley, are you …”

  “Afraid?” Kinley whispered softly, wondering if this had been the question Ray had never finished as he ran breathlessly beside the train.

  His hands twitched, and he wrapped his fingers around the chrome handle of the flashlight to stop them. The light illuminated the fetid pool of green water beneath him. He released the rope again and took another backward step, the heels of his boots now breaking the surface of the water, then sinking beneath, deeper and deeper, as the water crept further and further up his ankles, knees, legs.

  He gripped the rope more firmly, then drew his legs from the wall and let them dangle beneath him, flailing slightly in the water, the toes angled down, reaching for the first firm ground.

  He brought them up again, took another backward step, then removed them, and began to dangle again, his feet still searching for the ground. Nothing. He tried again. Nothing.

  He was almost waist deep in his crawl along the wall before the ground suddenly rose to press against his feet, and he slowly let go of the rope and stood upright in the well, the green water now only a few inches below his belt, cold and slimy as the other places he had been, ditches and ravines, swamps and ponds and estuaries, damp cellars and flooded basements, streams, rivers, waterfalls, the last resting places of the unjustly dead.

  He took the hoe, turned it upside down and began to tap its rounded end against the ground at his feet, nudging, prying, nosing into the muddy bottom. Years had passed since Ellie Dinker’s death, but a body in decay still possessed a terrible stubbornness, an unwillingness entirely to disappear. It fought with stains sunk deep in cloth, flaps of black, desiccated skin, the brittle intransigence of bone. And Kinley knew that if Ellie Dinker’s body had been thrown into the well, it would be there still, a lumpy, wormy mass, but a mass nonetheless, its gooey pile of amorphous flesh held in place by the webs and hinges of her bones.

  Slowly, inch by inch, in tight circles radiating out from his feet, he prodded meticulously at the ground beneath him, the end of the hoe nosing through what he recognized as bits of wood, glass, metal, weedy islands of underwater plants. In the silence, he could hear the soft lap of the water as it licked at his waist or swirled around the gray shaft of the handle.

  The process was grindingly slow, and by the time Kinley had moved the hoe several times along the outer wall of the well, he could feel his soggy clothes clinging to him sickeningly, the thick, stagnant water like a kind of glue binding cloth to flesh. He shook his head. Nothing. There was nothing.

  He sank the end of the hoe into the strap at his back, grabbed the rope and began tugging himself upward, his feet slogging up the moist wall of the shaft.

  As he rose, he could see his tracks before him, wet and dripping, the earth crumbling around them, the soft plup, plub of its reddish clay dropping from the shaft into the stagnant pool below.

  The old urgency reared again, menacing and frightening, and he felt his grip tighten on the rope and his feet press deeply for a hold, then slip away as the dripping earth gave way.

  He looked up, but saw nothing but the shrouded darkness. He drew the flashlight from his belt and aimed it upward, its beam shooting a steady stream of light up the narrow shaft. The ground above him seemed to tremble unexplainably, as if the beam itself had begun to gnaw into the earthen walls, dislodging steadily larger bits of dirt.

  Kinley turned off the light and let it slip idly from his twitching fingers, as he grasped more desperately at the rope, tugging brutally upward, dragging himself forward toward the utter blackness overhead.

  He could feel the ground rain down upon him, as if someone were shovelling earth into the shaft. He pulled himself upward against the falling earth, driving on through the torrent, head down, muscles bulged, the grip of his hands like vises on the slender rope.

  His feet slid against the wet wall of the shaft, then slipped off entirely, dangling in the black air until he could reach the wall again. A steady throb of pain ran up his thighs and back, and each time he swung free, his grip on the rope tightened, his fingers like knots of flesh around the cord.

  Still, he tugged and dragged at the rope as he fought to find footholds in the wall. He could feel his breath coming in quick, short gasps, see it in bursts of white mist in the chill night air, and for an instant, he thought of his life as something infinitely frail, something clinging to the limb while waves of fear rolled down its naked sides in small, icy streams of sweat.

  Suddenly, he heard movement overhead, glanced upward and realized that he was near the top of the shaft. In the faint gray light he could see a figure staring down, the dark head poised at the entrance to the well. He felt a slight tremble in the rope, as if it were being sawed in two from above, the cuts coming rhythmically, the rope trembling with each pass of the blade as a body shudders with each pistol shot.

  He pressed his feet to the side of the wall and dragged himself upward frantically. Above, he could still see the lone figure staring down at him, motionless and demonic, as his grandmother had sometimes stared from her place above his head, eyes gleaming in the darkness.

  “Help me,” he breathed.

  He saw the figure draw away, and he dragged at the rope, his feet whipping wildly in the empty air, as he dragged again and again, his feet no longer of any use, but simply great, soggy weights which hung in the blackness somewhere down below.

  “Help me.”

  His hands twitching at the rope, grasping, grasping as he dragged upon it again and again, the eye of the shaft growing larger, as if he were tugging it mightily toward him.

  “Help me,” he repeated, then gave a few last furious pulls on the rope, his legs drawing up beneath him as his hands released the rope and he grasped wildly for the
stone rim of the well, the tips biting into the hard rock, the nails scraping silvery patterns into its dry stone, the grip loosening even as he pressed it down again, his body edging back helplessly toward the dark pit.

  “Help me,” he said as he felt himself drift backward, sinking into the darkness, his hands suddenly breaking free of the stone, but still grasping, grasping.

  Suddenly she was over him, leaning into the dark eye of the well, her long white arms reaching for him, holding him, drawing him up with a long, mighty pull that swept him over to the rope again, his hands wrapping around it with a sudden, unfathomable calm.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  She wrapped him in a blanket, made a cup of black coffee, then watched him drink it as he sat beside a small electric heater in the living room.

  “It was just a lead I was following,” Kinley explained, “something Riley Hendricks said.”

  Dora said nothing, but only waited.

  “He wondered why the police had never checked the well behind your father’s house,” Kinley added.

  “So you decided to check it?”

  “You have to eliminate certain possibilities as you go along,” Kinley told her, the voice of the schooled professional now reasserting itself determinedly.

  “So you thought my father might have dumped Ellie Dinker’s body in the well?” Dora asked softly.

  “I wanted to eliminate that possibility,” Kinley answered weakly. “I mean …”

  Dora raised her hand to silence him. “You don’t have to explain.” She stood up, walked to the window, glanced out quickly, then turned back to him. “Besides, I’d already checked it,” she said, “six years ago.”

  “You? Why?”

  She leaned against the window, the dissolving glow from the lights in the valley rising in a faint aura from her shoulders. “Because of Mrs. Dinker,” Dora said. “I came home one afternoon, and she was in the backyard. She was standing by the well, still wearing that black dress.”