Blackwater Lights

by Michael M. Hughes

  But what was happening between him and Ellen was different. It felt hyper-accelerated and unavoidable, as if their meeting had been preordained. He couldn’t imagine just leaving and never seeing her again.

  No sense worrying about it now. He’d had the first sane, nightmare-free night in a long time. And he planned on having a few more nights lying next to her before he left.

  Chapter Fourteen

  He sat up, his neck aching. He’d fallen asleep on the couch. The little sleep he’d gotten at Ellen’s hadn’t been enough, and he’d passed out with the TV on.

  The phone rang. He staggered into the kitchen, bumping his knee on the kitchen table, and looked at the caller ID. Unknown caller again. He stared at the readout, watching it ring. Maybe it was Kevin. Please let it be Kevin.

  He clicked the talk button and held the receiver to his ear. He waited.

  “Hello, Ray,” Lily said.

  He hung up.

  The phone rang again. He took it into the bedroom and stuffed it under a pillow. It kept ringing, muffled. The bitch was nothing if not persistent. Maybe he should answer—just tell her to fuck off and go away, to stop calling him.

  He took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

  “What do you want?” His heart pounded.

  Her voice was flat and calm. “I’m willing to forgive you. I’m asking you—one last time—to consider what I’m offering.”

  Ray stayed silent. Let her get to the point.

  “There’s a lot in it for you if you work with us.”

  The us again. Lily and Crawford. “I don’t get it. Why won’t you just leave me alone?”

  After a moment’s silence, she answered. “You have something important—something we are very interested in. And we’re willing to reward you. Quite well. Monetarily … and otherwise.”

  “I’m not interested,” he said.

  “Oh, you are most definitely interested,” she said. “After all, that’s what brought you here, isn’t it? A need to know? About what happened to you all those years ago?”

  He sat on the bed to steady himself. They knew. They fucking knew. Of course they did.

  “It’s a win-win deal, darling. We all get what we want. All you need to do is come and see us again. We have a little chat, and you go home a very satisfied man, with enough compensation to kiss your little high school job goodbye.”

  “A little chat? You need to be more specific.”

  Another pause. “Come pay us a visit. That’s all. We ask you some questions, and you tell us what you know. And you leave. You decide whether or not you want to continue working with us.”

  “Then why can’t we just do it over the phone? Ask me your questions, I’ll ask you mine, and we’re both happy. Right?”

  “It’s not that simple. We need to speak in person. At Crawford’s. The discussion is delicate. And sensitive.” Her voice softened. “Plus I’d like to see you. I know the other night didn’t go very well, but I do like you, Ray. You interest me. I want to learn more about you. And there are lots of things I can show you, things that will open doors for you. Our connection is real—you know it. You felt it.”

  He closed his eyes. Maybe she was telling the truth. He could answer their questions and then he’d have the answers he wanted, too—why he’d been chosen, and what they’d done to him or what he’d seen when they took him down that dirt path on a star-filled night when the sky opened up. Answers to all of it. At last.

  No. She was doing it with her voice—bewitching him. The rhythm, the pitch, the way she hit certain syllables, were fogging his thinking. More of her hypnosis. He stood and shook his head. If he didn’t cut the mental circuit now, he’d start believing her. It was hard to get his reply out, but once he did it resonated with an odd but satisfying power.

  “No.”

  The abrupt silence made him dizzy. He’d done it.

  “I really don’t think you understand the decision you’re making,” she said. “You were part of something special. And it left its mark on you. Crawford can allow you to see it again. To remember it. To touch it.”

  “Fuck you,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with you or it. Just stay away from me.”

  “Look under the mattress, Ray.” Another voice—a familiar male voice. Crawford. He’d been listening on the line. “Go ahead. Put the phone down and look under the mattress, near your pillow.”

  “What?”

  “Just take a look, Ray. Go ahead, I’ll wait.”

  Ray put the phone down and lifted the mattress near the pillow. A plain manila envelope, large enough to hold a manuscript. His hands trembled. It was tied shut with a little red string. He picked up the phone. “I have it.”

  “Open it,” Crawford said.

  He unwrapped the string and lifted the flap. He reached in and pulled out a stack of photos—letter-sized, on heavy stock. It took him a moment to comprehend the top photo. It was upside down. He flipped it.

  It couldn’t be, but it was. Crystal—the girl who had awakened him that night that seemed so long ago—and she was naked, beneath a man, in a barely lit room. And the man on top of her was him.

  No. Not possible.

  He was holding her arms, pinning her to the floor. His eyes looked wild, ravenous, pupils wide and ghastly red in the reflection of a camera flash. A foam of saliva coated his lips. He could barely recognize himself in that face, almost as if it were some lunatic twin he’d never known. The bad Ray. Crystal’s mouth was open. Screaming.

  “Oh, there are more. Go ahead, look at the rest.”

  In the next photo she was tied up, her mouth sealed with duct tape, eyes wide and imploring the camera for help while he stood above her. In his hand was a black-handled hunting knife with a serrated blade.

  “There are more, but that should be enough to get your attention, yes?”

  Ray dropped the photos. He felt his sanity spilling like sand.

  “I think you’ll understand now that you have no choice in the matter. We have many more of them—a lot more, in fact, some extremely compromising. After what you did to that poor girl … Pity the dear thing. That was so terribly messy.”

  The room shifted. The lights flickered and the temperature dropped. Crawford, though miles away, might as well have been standing next to him.

  “No,” Ray said. It was all he could muster. They had him. They’d drugged him, set him up, and now he was theirs. Checkmate.

  “Come see us. Tomorrow. Join us in the Great Work, Ray. I promise you …” He laughed quietly. “The rewards are beyond anything you could imagine. Ciao, my friend.”

  The phone clicked.

  Ray slumped to the foot of the bed. He started to weep, but his tears wouldn’t come—just dry convulsions and, eventually, emptiness.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The flames tasted the photos, and consumed them.

  He knew it didn’t make any difference; Crawford would have plenty of copies. But it felt cathartic, watching the images as they were reduced to ash in the dirt behind Kevin’s house. The last bit to burn was a close-up of Crystal’s face. Her wide eyes vanished, accusing him as tendrils of fire erased them.

  What in God’s name had he done? Rather, what had they done to him? It seemed impossible that he could have been tricked into those horrific, staged scenes. His eyes were open in the photos, but there was no him in them. More like a man possessed by something alien. Somehow Lily had drugged him and hypnotized him after they had gone swimming. He’d been strung along, zombie-like, posed like a cheap prop, and then the whole thing had been expertly wiped from his mind.

  And anyone seeing those photos would convict him in an instant.

  After what you did to that poor girl, Crawford had said.

  No. Impossible. They might have posed him, but there was no way he could have hurt her. It was staged to make him look guilty, but she had to be okay. But who would believe him? The photos were damning. And Crawford claimed he had many more—and that what Ray had do
ne to her was messy.

  He kicked dirt over the smoldering ashes. There was one last option, though he dreaded it. Just thinking about it made him sick to his stomach. He showered, shaved, and drove into Blackwater.

  The police department was a squat brick rectangle with an American flag above a West Virginia flag and some unhealthy azaleas by the main door. Ray pulled into the lot and parked next to a black Mercedes. The receptionist had platinum-blond hair brushed high above her forehead and thin lips painted glistening pink. She told him he’d have to wait. The sheriff was eating lunch.

  Ray waited, his hands damp with nervous sweat. He paged through a year-old racing magazine, and it was like reading something from another planet—he didn’t know the first thing about auto racing. He tossed it aside and rubbed his eyes.

  Sheriff Morton was probably looking through the whole collection of Crawford’s photos now, fingering the safety on his gun, eating his ham and American cheese on white bread and giggling about the lethal injection Ray most certainly would be sentenced to. Maybe he was on the phone with Crystal’s parents: Yes, ma’am, we’ve got him. The man who murdered your precious little girl, as a matter of fact, he just walked into the station to confess—

  “Hello again.” Sheriff Morton’s door was open. He waved Ray inside and closed the door behind them. “Sorry for the heat. Damn air conditioner broke.”

  The office was small and plain, with a dirty window overlooking an alley. The sheriff’s desk was cluttered with papers, framed photos, and a Styrofoam food container overflowing with greasy napkins. A few plaques hung on the walls, too small to read. The sheriff’s chair creaked loudly as he sat. Ray declined the coffee he offered—it looked like black paint had congealed in the glass carafe. A dirty, rotating fan blew stale air across the room.

  “What brings you here, Mr. Simon?” Sheriff Morton asked. “More naked girls dropping by?”

  Ray sat down and tried to smile. “I wanted to ask you about someone. I think there’s something very bad going on.”

  “Bad? How so?”

  Ray breathed deeply. He had practiced what he was going to say a dozen times on the drive, but now it seemed absurd, unbelievable, and dangerous. But it was too late. And he was out of options anyway. Everything was dangerous now.

  “It involves a guy named Crawford. I don’t know if that’s his first or last name. You know him, I assume.”

  Morton’s smile faltered for a millisecond. “Lives in a big house outside town? Rich guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  Morton’s smile widened. “Sure, sure. Everyone knows him. Just like everyone knows your porno friend Kevin.” He accentuated the word porno—in his drawl, it sounded like paw-no. “Two biggest businessmen in our little town. ‘Course I know of him. Why?”

  Sweat dripped down Ray’s neck. He steadied his breathing. “I went to a party at his house. There were drugs. Lots of serious drugs, and that girl Crystal was there.” Just mentioning her name brought a wave of guilt. And fear. He hoped he wasn’t making an enormous mistake.

  Morton blinked. He wiped his forehead and the back of his neck with a napkin and shifted loudly in his seat.

  Ray cleared his throat. There was no stopping now. “I think Crawford is a big-time drug dealer. He makes the stuff. Ecstasy, and other things I’ve never even heard of. And I worry about what happened to Crystal. Or what might have happened.”

  Morton stared. He picked up a pencil and tapped the eraser on his desk. “How do you know Crawford? Through your friend, I suppose?”

  “No. I met him through a woman in town. A friend of his. She invited me to the party.” He swallowed, his mouth dry and pasty.

  Morton turned his chair. It squealed like a wounded cat. He chewed on the end of his pencil and stared out the window into the alley. “Let me tell you a little story, Mr. Simon.” Morton turned and smiled again, as if talking to a child. “When your friend Kevin moved here, it didn’t sit too well. People in Blackwater are mostly good churchgoing folks, and when they found out your friend made all his money selling pornography, they weren’t too happy to have him living here.” He wiped underneath his chin, glanced at the napkin, and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “So I did a little background check on him. Made a couple of calls, ran a few reports. One drug arrest, when he was in his twenties. Possession of marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Small amounts, so he got community service, never did any jail time. You were friends, so you know about that, right?”

  Ray sat forward in his chair. “I don’t understand. That was over twenty years ago. And this has nothing to do with Kevin. I came here to tell you what I saw at Crawford’s.”

  Morton chuckled. “Did you know your friend Kevin was arrested for the abduction and rape of a young woman, Mr. Simon?”

  Ray froze. “What?”

  Morton’s smile widened. “A nineteen-year-old girl named Beverly. Lived over in Parsons. He picked her up at a bar and took her to the Super 8. Got her all drugged up and videotaped all of it, she told us. And what he did to that girl wasn’t just perverted, it was unholy. It was sickening.”

  Ray inhaled deeply. It wasn’t possible. “I can’t believe that. He’s not like that—he’d never drug anyone. And he doesn’t do drugs. Not anymore, not since his twenties. Was he convicted?”

  Morton shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. He flew in a bunch of lawyers from New Jersey.”

  Ray grimaced. “There’s no way he’d do that. It must have been a mistake.”

  “That’s what he said. A mistake. A lying little girl. Your friend got off—no pun intended there—because the girl didn’t have the tape. We couldn’t find it, either, and we tore his place apart. And it was way too late to get DNA evidence. The hotel room had been scrubbed clean. It was her word against his. Money talked, he walked.”

  The heat was making Ray swoon. “So … I still don’t understand. What does this have to do with Crawford—with why I came to see you?”

  That condescending smile again. “Mr. Simon, I don’t know you from Adam. I only know you as someone who comes into my town and stays at the home of someone I don’t particularly like—someone who likes to make money off filthy movies and should be, in my opinion, burning in the hottest fires of hell. And damned if I don’t find some naked little sugarplum on your couch, screaming her fool head off, whacked out of her mind on who knows what.”

  Ray’s teeth squeaked. His jaw was so tight it felt like it would snap.

  “And now you wander in here with stories about that same girl at a party held by a citizen—Mr. Crawford—who has never once done anything but pay his taxes and behave like a moral, responsible, upstanding businessman.”

  Ray found himself staring at the photos on Morton’s desk. Children—all pudgy, red-faced, and smiling with little teeth like their father’s.

  “To me, Mr. Simon, it sounds like your friend harbors a grudge. He’s been nothing but trouble since he moved here. Mr. Crawford, on the other hand, has donated a lot of money to our department—and a lot to the state police. Anonymously, most of it. So you’ll have to pardon me for being a little skeptical about his involvement in this drug party.”

  The sweat on Ray’s skin had turned cold. His hands were numb and tingling.

  “My advice for you, Mr. Simon—and I’m sorry to be so blunt—is to keep your nose out of other people’s business. If people were taking drugs, I’m quite sure Mr. Crawford was not aware of it and did not approve. Your record is clean, and I’m sure you’d like to keep it that way, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.” His fingernails bit into his palms.

  “Well then, I guess that pretty much takes care of things.” He pushed himself away from the desk—squeeeak—and stood up. “You’ll be staying in town for a little while, I hope?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe another couple of days.”

  “Well, I’ll know where to reach you, then. And you’re still at the same address in Baltimore—Barclay Avenue? And still teaching in Baltimore Count
y public schools?”

  Morton had done his homework. “Yes.”

  “Well, take good care of yourself, Mr. Simon.” He didn’t offer his hand.

  Ray turned and left. The receptionist was whispering into the phone but stopped when he walked by.

  Someone was waiting next to his car.

  Micah the preacher. He stood next to the driver’s door, leaning on his cane, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. There was no way to avoid him.

  The preacher smiled. “Hello, Ray.” He held out his hand.

  Ray nodded but didn’t take his hand. “What do you want?”

  “Just to talk to you for a moment, please.”

  “I’m in a bit of a hurry.” He pressed the keychain control and the car doors unlocked with a click. How had the old man found him?

  “You don’t need to say anything, friend. Just listen.”

  Ray nodded. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  The sunlight reflected off Micah’s dark lenses. Ray wished he could see the eyes behind them. “I think I know why you came to me.”

  Ray felt the back of his neck turning to gooseflesh. “Really?”

  The old man smiled. “We need to talk. Privately.”

  “About what?”

  Micah seemed to stare across the parking lot, then looked to the sky. “You’ve been called back here.” He lowered his head. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Lily said that, too. “I’m not sure what you mean.”