Waiting for the Night Song

by Julie Carrick Dalton

  Cadie took a table by the window. Within seconds a waitress greeted her with a pot of coffee and a stoneware mug. The men in the corner burst out laughing as the waitress poured. Their laughter drowned out her greeting.

  The waitress scowled. “I don’t even know why they’re still here, since Crittenden went under. It’s not like we have a bunch of extra jobs around here for them.” The waitress leaned in and lowered her voice as if taking Cadie into her confidence. “I’m pretty sure one day they’ll walk out without paying.”

  Cadie clenched her jaw, not wanting to get into another argument. This town wasn’t worth it.

  “You know they found a body in the woods? Folks think it might be this kid who disappeared like thirty years ago. They’re looking at the guy who owns the hardware store across the street.” She leaned in to whisper again. “The day that kid went missing, people saw the hardware guy fighting with him, then, boom. No one ever saw him again.”

  “Can I order?”

  The waitress stiffened with offense. “I’ll be back with a menu.”

  A rusty cowbell over the door clattered as Garrett, back in street clothes, walked in. He slouched as he stood next to the table, rocking back on his heels.

  “You can sit.” Cadie motioned to the empty side of the booth.

  “Right.”

  “How was basketball?”

  “Great. Sorry if they were a little, well, embarrassing?”

  “They’re middle schoolers. They’re supposed to be embarrassing.” Cadie picked up a menu and pretended to read it. “So what’s the mentor program about?”

  “I shoot baskets with them once or twice a week during free blocks and meet them after school to work on homework sometimes. But mostly, we shoot the shit. They talk about girls, baseball. We have lots of volunteers.”

  Garrett looked like he spent a lot of time outdoors. A pale raccoon mask framed his eyes in the shape of the sunglasses sticking out of his shirt pocket.

  “Ryan Stevens told me the pines on Crier Hill are turning brown. Have you noticed it?” Cadie said.

  “Why would they turn brown?”

  “I think it’s a beetle infestation tied to the drought. If I’m right, it’s a huge fire hazard.”

  “I haven’t noticed anything.” Garrett picked up the water and took a sip. With the glass still at his lips, he looked around the table and put the glass down. “This is your water, isn’t it? Sorry. I’ll get you another one.” He wiped his hands on his pants and squirmed in his seat.

  A tall man with short-cropped hair walked over and slapped Garrett on the shoulder. “What time tomorrow morning?”

  “My place at six forty-five.”

  “Ouch. That’s early.”

  “Tino and I run a wakeboarding business together,” Garrett said. “You know the smart aleck you met at the basketball court, Fernando? That’s Tino’s brother.”

  “Watch out for this clown.” Tino nodded his head in Garrett’s direction.

  “I’ll be careful,” Cadie said.

  Silverware rattled on the table as Tino’s friends passed Cadie and Garrett on their way to the door. Cadie looked back at the table where they had been sitting. A tip stuck out from under a plate, at least five dollars in ones. The waitress walked by the table, carrying Garrett’s and Cadie’s lunch. She noticed Cadie looking at the cash and scowled, as if to say, But I bet they’ll stiff me next time.

  “There’s something I should tell you,” Garrett said after Tino left. “Your boat, the flat-bottom, you remember?”

  “What about it?”

  “It was mine,” he said.

  Cadie felt her toes curl around the warped boards as the boat tore through the curtain of mist. Cold fingers of morning water reaching up for her legs as she splashed through the surface. Cadie traced everything back to that moment, that boat.

  “Why didn’t you tell us? We would’ve given it back.” She could feel the grit of sand grinding into her skin as she knelt on the bottom of the boat to paddle, the grainy wood of the oar in her hand, the paint flakes embedded in the treads of her sneakers. “It appeared at the end of my dock one morning. I never knew where it came from.”

  “I didn’t want it back. Clyde and his buddies used to take that boat out fishing and drinking. Mostly drinking. They’d go out on the boat, eat all our food, and we didn’t have much.”

  “You’re not making a strong case for protecting him.”

  “Clyde seemed like my best chance at a normal life. That foster placement, right after my parents died, scared the shit out of me.”

  Garrett’s hair hung below his collar, covering the cigarette burns. Faded pink scars marked the screws that had held his broken forearm together.

  “One night after Clyde and his friends came up from the dock, all hammered as usual, I snuck down to the beach and untied the boat. I pushed it off and prayed it would never come back.” Garrett mimed pushing the boat away, reminding Cadie of the way he used to swoop his arms when they got too close to his dock. “Then a couple days later, you came by in the boat and I panicked. I didn’t want Clyde to see you guys and recognize the boat. That’s why I warned you guys not to come near my pier. I was afraid Clyde would recognize the boat and take it back. And I did not want that boat and all of Clyde’s friends back at our house.”

  “That’s why you acted so crazy when we came close? I used to feel guilty for not saving you from your kidnappers.”

  “You didn’t really think that, did you?”

  “I guess not. But we did make up all sorts of stories about you.”

  “Like what?” He leaned across the table.

  “That you were being held for ransom, or you were a foreign prince in exile. That was before I met you.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “So, are you married or living with anyone?” Cadie blushed. “I mean, do you live here alone?”

  “I thought Fernando made my situation pretty clear.” He grinned. “I knew my love letters would win you over eventually.”

  “You were a real poet.”

  “I live in the same cottage. It was held in trust for me until I turned eighteen. Clyde rented it out while I went to boarding school in Minnesota. He lived over on Crittenden Farm for a while, then bounced around from friends’ couches to cheap rentals. He’s always stayed in the area, but never in the same place too long.”

  “Minnesota. Figures.” Cadie refused to react to Garrett’s attempt to humanize Clyde.

  “Why?”

  “I tried to find you by tracking down yearbooks from all the New England boarding schools I could find online. I almost called Daniela’s mother once to ask her how to find you, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her.”

  “I used to leave notes in library books thinking that one day you would check out the books and find them.” Garrett leaned back in the booth.

  Cadie felt a lump rise in her throat. Scores of unanswered love letters. Letters for her. So many what-ifs lingered in the cracks and crevices of Maple Crest.

  “I need to get back to work,” Garrett said after they finished their lunch. “But if you aren’t in a rush, we can take a quick look for those browning pines on Crier Hill, if you want.”

  He shuffled his feet as they walked down Main Street, his untied laces skittering across the pavement. She tried to push back the memory of his mud-streaked face, his ghost-white lips, but seeing him again made the memory feel present. And dangerous.

  Footsteps behind them hurried closer. Cadie instinctively picked up her pace.

  “Cadie, is that you?” a voice called.

  She didn’t need to turn around to recognize Raúl’s voice. She didn’t need to look to know he wore a Garcia’s Hardware polo and wrinkled khakis. The faint scent of turpentine found her before he caught up.

  “I’d recognize those fireball curls anywhere,” Raúl said. His chest looked a bit broader, his hair more salt than pepper, but his huge smile looked exactly the same, the creases around his
eyes a little deeper as a result of his ever-present smile.

  Garrett clasped Raúl’s hand like an old friend and gave Cadie an uncomfortable sideways glance.

  “You know Garrett?” Raúl said as Cadie sank into his hug the way she had as a girl. He rocked sideways from foot to foot as he lifted her off the ground. “Does Daniela know you’re in town?”

  “Yeah, I just saw her.”

  “Come for dinner tonight. Dolores would love to see you. You too, Garrett. We’ll make a party of it.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t want to spring that on her.” Cadie imagined Dolores’s face if Cadie walked into her house with Garrett. “Next time I’m in town, I’ll give you some advance warning.”

  “I won’t take no for an answer.” Raúl turned to Garrett.

  “I appreciate the invitation,” Garrett said. “But I don’t think Dolores would be too happy to see me, you know, considering—”

  “She understands the chief has to interview me. It’s part of his job. We’ve got nothing to hide.” Raúl tilted his head and raised his eyebrows as if daring them to refuse his invitation.

  “I guess I could stop by,” Garrett said. “Cadie?”

  “Great. I’ll see you both at six thirty. I need to get back to the store,” Raúl said before Cadie could answer.

  “Wait, I can’t—” Cadie started.

  “I’ll see you at six thirty.” Raúl waved as he headed back toward the store.

  “Why’d you say yes? We can’t go over there.” Cadie paused at a stone wall in front of the post office. A rock the size of a tangerine had tumbled from the face of the wall, leaving a hole. She tried to replace it in the cavity, but it no longer fit. She put it in the pocket of the shirt she had borrowed from her father’s closet. She would add it to her cairn when she returned to her apartment.

  “He didn’t give me a choice.” Garrett walked backward down the sidewalk in front of Cadie.

  “I don’t know who’s going to be angrier, Daniela or her mom,” Cadie said.

  “So we’re going?” Garrett walked across the parking lot of the police station toward the edge of the woods about a hundred yards behind the building. Main Street was mostly flat, but behind the library, post office, and police station, the ground swelled upward, gently at first, then burst forth with granite peaks in the near and far distance. A mix of old pine and hardwoods covered all but the fiercest eruptions of stone.

  Every photo advertising leaf-peeping season in Maple Crest featured an image of orange and red leaves framing the old-fashioned library and post office. The town’s identity was tied to these trees. She hadn’t appreciated the iconic beauty until long after she moved away. The library, which had seemed enormous in her memory, looked small against the backdrop of the mountains surrounding the town.

  Cadie followed Garrett into the woods leading up Crier Hill. Stepping off pavement into the forest usually calmed Cadie, but as she tromped behind Garrett, soggy memories of their last walk in the woods together prodded at her. Wet shoes, mud in her hair, under her fingernails, in her mouth. The chush of the shovel cracking the ground open.

  The ground now crunched underfoot; twigs snapped instead of bending. The town felt dangerously brittle.

  “Do you really think you can protect Raúl?” Cadie caught up to Garrett.

  “Definitely. Everyone respects him. No one wants to see him in trouble.”

  “Daniela’s going to want more than assurances.”

  “She doesn’t know you and Dolores were there, does she?”

  “No.”

  “I get it that she’s upset and worried about her dad. But we can not come forward with the truth. It’s not Raúl we need to worry about. It’s Dolores,” Garrett said. “You and I were minors. We’d have to deal with the public fallout of admitting we covered up Juan’s death. I’d probably lose my job. We wouldn’t face any actual legal problems. But Dolores could get charged with being an accessory after the fact to a murder, which can carry the same sentence as murder itself. There’s no statute of limitations.”

  Cadie stopped walking. A soft breeze moved through the mixed-wood forest. The air tasted like the crush of leaves on a fall night, although an August sun blazed above the canopy.

  “If Raúl gets charged, which he won’t, the charges would never stick. There’s no evidence tying him to Juan’s death,” Garrett said. “We could step in and clear his name if it came down to it. But if we come forward now and tell the truth to clear Raúl, Dolores is the one who could get in real trouble.”

  “We just ride it out and hope Raúl doesn’t get charged?”

  Garrett nodded and continued up the incline.

  “This feels wrong.”

  “I know. Look, Dolores saved me. I don’t know what would have happened if she hadn’t come over that day. Clyde probably would have gone to jail and I would have gone back into the system. He was—he is—the only family I’ve got.”

  “Was state care really such a bad option? Not that it matters now.”

  “Looking back, I don’t know why anyone would have let Clyde have custody in the first place. He was twenty-three and could barely take care of himself. But I didn’t see it that way then. I just wanted to make sure I never had to smell my own skin burning again while my foster dad used me as an ashtray.” Garrett shuddered as if trying to release the memory.

  Cadie remembered the desperation in his eyes the day he showed her his burns. The filter of time and perspective couldn’t mute the aching solidarity they had shared. She had so desperately wanted to believe she was saving him.

  “I’m so sorry that happened. I am,” Cadie said. “But it makes me sick letting Clyde get away with it, while people point fingers at Raúl.”

  “I know this doesn’t make it any better, but it was an accident. The gun was just supposed to scare Juan so he wouldn’t turn Clyde in for robbing that store. But it, it just went off.”

  “Sorry, but it’s pretty cut and dry to me. If you knowingly pick up a loaded gun, point it at someone, and the gun goes off, you should be held accountable.”

  Garrett picked up his pace and walked ahead of Cadie.

  “We should at least tell Daniela the truth so she’ll stop pushing for us to go public,” Cadie said.

  “That should be Dolores’s decision. I owe her that much.”

  “Three days. That’s it.”

  “They haven’t officially identified him, but there’s already plenty of speculation about who it is,” he said. “There’ve been a few fights between locals and some of the farm workers over the past few weeks since the layoffs started. Now there’s a bunch of locals throwing around accusations that if it’s Juan, another farm worker must have killed him. And, yeah, some folks are dragging Raúl’s name into it.”

  “So Clyde walks away? No rumors, no harassment,” Cadie said. “He made you and Dolores bury a body for him. And me too. I will never outrun those woods. No matter what I do, I will never not be in those woods. How can we not hold him accountable?”

  “There’s nothing tying him to any evidence. I mean, the gun was registered to him, but it’s at the bottom of the lake.”

  “What if someone found it?” Cadie couldn’t look at him as she spoke. Her voice felt shaky. Why hadn’t she thrown the gun in the lake like she promised? How could she have been so stupid?

  “Impossible. It’s been in the water so long, it’s under a foot of sediment and rocks by now.”

  Cadie met his eyes. Was he testing her to see if she would admit she hadn’t thrown the gun in the lake? He didn’t flinch under her stare.

  “What are we looking for out here, anyway?” he said.

  “Evidence of a beetle that’s causing a die-off among pines.” Cadie continued up the slope. She stopped in front of an old-growth pine mottled with resin tubes. “There. That’s their calling card.”

  Cadie squatted in front of the tree, steadying herself with one hand against the broad trunk. The doomed pine tree offered Cadie a way forward.
She could prove her theory about the beetles without relying on illegally obtained samples. But the tree also suggested her worst-case scenario might be playing out in her own hometown.

  She snapped a picture on her phone and tried to text it to Thea, but she couldn’t get a cell signal.

  “What can we do about it?” Garrett touched a bubbled glob on the trunk.

  “It’s still early. We can get ahead of it if we thin the affected trees before someone throws a cigarette out the window and the whole forest lights up.”

  “This patch of woods backs up to Ryan’s father’s place. There’s no way he’ll cut down old growth. These trees are over a hundred years old.”

  “Then he’d better get ready for a fire.”

  Cadie pulled a small handsaw out of her day pack and sliced a thin wedge out of the tree. She held it out to Garrett. “See the blue stain? It’s a fungus the beetles inject into the tree to cut off the resin flow and starve the tree to death. They move in when there’s a drought and attack the already-stressed trees.”

  Garrett put his hand under Cadie’s and brought the wood sample close to his face. His breath grazed her palm as a humid breeze shushed the leaves overhead, lifting Cadie’s hair off her neck.

  “It’s incredible that a tiny creature could bring down such a huge tree,” Garrett said with a reverence that sent a shiver up Cadie’s spine. “It’s terrible. But it’s also kind of amazing.”

  “They’re incredible creatures,” Cadie said in a near whisper.

  Garrett examined the blue stain on the wood for several seconds, his head so close to Cadie’s that she could feel the unsteadiness of his heartbeat.

  “Where are they?” He looked up at her, his hand still cupped under her hand.

  The crisp blue of his eyes unnerved her. She looked away as she placed the piece of wood in his hand. She pulled a pocket knife from her bag, eased the blade open with her teeth, and peeled a stretch of bark off the dead tree to reveal a tangle of crisscrossing burrows the insects had carved into the wood.