Black Valley

by Jim Brown

  The morgue was unguarded.

  Why was there a guard in the first place, she wondered again? Chain of evidence, perhaps. Hadn’t there been a controversy about that in the O. J. Simpson trial? The presence of a guard added unexpected weight to Mrs. Humelory’s assertions.

  It also meant the body of Meredith Gamble was inside.

  Piper hesitated, stalling for the tug of sensibleness, her rational mind, to reassert itself and stop her from going through those doors. But the static. Was that what it was? The static was greater here. The lightning storm that raged beneath her skin had intensified.

  Something on her face. She put her hand to her nose. Her fingers came away red. Bleeding. She took a tissue from her pocket and wiped away the blood.

  She crossed the room quickly. Maybe it was locked? The knob turned easily. Piper Blackmoore entered the county morgue.

  Dean Truman arrived at Westcroft College early Saturday morning, just as the maintenance men were about to haul the ruined blackboard out of the room. “Could you cut out this section for me?” he asked.

  Raphael, the older of the two, pushed his NO FEAR cap back with his thumb and considered the request. “The graffiti? You want to save the graffiti?”

  “Examine it, actually. Under a microscope.”

  “If you say so, Doc.” Producing a thin-blade saw from a bottomless tool kit, Raphael began cutting.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch . . .

  A malignant fear clawed up Dean’s spine. He took a step back and wiped his face. The fear extended its reach, embracing his chest, raking his heart with dirty, jagged nails.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch . . .

  The sound wasn’t the same. But close. The fear continued to climb, reaching the base of his neck, gripping his shoulders, and hoisting itself up, striding his head, muffling his ears, scratching at the corners of his eyes.

  “. . . idea who did this?” The words were faint and seemed to come from someplace faraway.

  “Doc?”

  Dean blinked. An idea darted across his mind, then was gone.

  “You okay?” Raphael stopped sawing.

  Dean grasped for the idea but found nothing. He shook his shoulders and straightened his back, as if to shake off the childish, irrational fear. “Fine – distracted, that’s all.”

  This appeased the handyman. He returned to his task. “I said, any idea who did this?”

  At the front of the room the younger man triggered an electric drill. The frantic whine was a welcome reprieve from the incessant sawing.

  Raphael kicked the ruined board and pulled a three-foot square section free. “There you go, Doc. Knock yourself out.”

  Outside, the gaunt limbs of a naked oak tree rapped on the window. The rain had started shortly after midnight and was still falling, propelled by a cold, driving wind, cutting across the gray sky in harsh, diagonal slashes.

  Raphael stood up, rolled his shoulders, and gave the weather an appraising look. “Getting ugly out there. Weatherman didn’t say nothing about no rain. Least not like this. The skies look mean. Damn mean.”

  Mean.

  Something in the distance caught Dean’s eye. Up on the side of Hawkins Hill. A flicker. A dot of color. The lashing remains of the crime scene tape pulled free on one end and flapping like a yellow flag, marking the spot where Meredith Gamble had been slaughtered.

  The fear reclaimed its shoulder perch, leaned over, looked Dean in the eyes, then licked his face with a cold, rough tongue. Dean shuddered with revulsion. He looked down at the message slashed into the blackboard, then back at the roiling black-gray clouds.

  Mean.

  Mama?

  The chamber reeked of formaldehyde and alcohol. Three rows of five-foot fluorescent lights illuminated the stark gray room. The last row of lights was malfunctioning, one pole completely dark, its companion dying. The bad bulb whined and flickered, flared and dimmed. Shadows splashed across the cold concrete floor.

  Mama? Why would she think of her mother? In here of all places, why her mother?

  Piper Blackmoore’s head had been spinning ever since she entered the room. The spurting, dying light didn’t help. A buzz? No, a gray zone, like a deep, circling fog, surrounded the memories she held of her mother. Meager memories, swathed in cotton, unseeable, unknowable. She had been only four when her mother bled to death on the living room floor. They said Piper was with her, holding her head - crying - covered in her mother’s blood.

  Something bad is coming. The memory was insistent. She heard the words in her mother’s voice.

  Not words, warning.

  Something bad is coming.

  It was what her mother had said the night she died. And now that memory reasserted itself with such clarity and intensity that Piper felt as if her mother were in the room with her, standing just beyond the row of gurneys, tucked away in a shadowed corner, appearing and disappearing in opposite accord with the flickering light.

  Something was going on beneath the Douglas firs of Black Valley, Oregon. Something bad was coming.

  Coming home!

  The thought came to her with shocking clarity. Whatever it was it was, returning.

  Something bad.

  A tingling numbness in her extremities, like experiencing a mild electrical shock, brought her to full alert.

  The hand. She found it in a tray in a small refrigeration unit – bagged, tagged, and waiting for the crime lab to pick it up. Slowly she took it out of the wrappings.

  Pain . . .great pain . . . cold and hot. The hand had been removed from a conscious person; the owner had watched it happen. The pain was unbearable, but the terror was worse.

  Fear.

  Of what? Of losing a hand, of dying?

  No.

  Fear of not dying. Of living in a world where . . .

  Sweat spilled from Piper’s pores, her brow was knitted.

  What was the hand afraid of?

  A blinding flash of light, but not white, not any color. . . dark . . . a flash of dark light . . . and pain.

  . . . of living in a world where such things could exist.

  Then the hospital alarm screamed.

  12

  The closer he got to Black Valley, the worse the weather was. Fitting. As he crossed the Willamette Bridge into the city limits, the rain was falling like millions of air-driven nails shot from heaven. Even the roar of the big Delta 88 engine was muffled by the pounding rain. He was driving more on instinct than vision.

  The same instinct that had caused him to steal three sticks of dynamite from one of his construction sites and lock it in the trunk.

  How am I going to find her?

  Black Valley wasn’t a large community, but it was big enough to make it impractical, if not impossible, to knock on every door. Besides, even if he could, what would he say? “Excuse me, my name is Mason Evans; I’m a contractor from Portland and I’m looking for my daughter, Tina. Perhaps you’ve seen her? She’s five three . . . one hundred and ten pounds with long, dark hair. Always smiling, always happy, and traveling with . . . an abomination to God, truth, and life itself - traveling with the devil or the devil’s stepchild.”

  They would think him crazy. And maybe . . . maybe they were right. It made no sense. Emotionally, physically, and mentally drained to the limit, he knew that he couldn’t handle this alone. His only chance of finding Tina was his cousin John. As for making sense of all this? They hadn’t spoken in years. Never got along that well to begin with. No reason to think that he would be the least inclined to do Mason a favor. Still, the only one, the only conceivable person who could understand the impossible, was Dean.

  He needed Dean Truman.

  The fire alarm screamed, wiping out the bleating of countless machines demanding attention, demanding action.

  Fire.

  The hospi
tal staff moved in jerks like old, stop-action animation, not sure where to go. All practice, all mandatory instruction, was gone, worthless, forgotten in the blaring panic, fanned by the shrieking alarm.

  On the second floor both nurses ran from the intensive care unit, hurrying down the hall to the main station, looking for guidance. After all, the patients in ICU could not easily be moved. At least one was alive at the discretion of the machines; to disconnect him, to move him, would be to kill him.

  Alone, the man who had pulled the alarm slipped into ICU room number one.

  Click.

  Flip.

  Fear lashed her body like a wet leather strap. Piper Blackmoore wasn’t sure what was happening. She left the morgue at a full run. She slid to a stop. Her face just inches from Deputy Cheevers’s. She paused. For a brief second she thought he was the cause of the alarm. That he had seen her enter the morgue, and even now his backup was screaming its way toward the Black Valley Hospital. She half expected him to cuff her.

  You have the right to remain silent . . .

  But his eyes were too wide, too white. He was scared or confused or both. If he had seen her exiting the morgue, it hadn’t registered. They exchanged a look of mutual panic and disbelief, then he zigged and she zagged and they were both moving again.

  Stupid, superstitious woman, Piper chastised herself. I get the willies, and what do I do? I break into the county morgue. Oh, good thinking, Piper. Nothing calms a girl down like communing with the dead and playing with severed body parts.

  Her Nike track shoes squealed, but held, as she rounded a corner and headed for the exit. She reached the door to freedom, to the outside word, at the exact moment that the alarm stopped.

  She stopped, hand on the door.

  Something.

  She let go of the door.

  The sound of running feet reverberated off the sterile walls.

  Something.

  She crossed her arms, fingernails digging into her flesh. The sensation she had felt outside the hotel was back, stronger than ever.

  Something.

  Her fear was inextinguishable. Yet . . .

  Without knowing why, or consciously deciding to do so, Piper Blackmoore turned and went up the stairs. She was headed for the second floor.

  Damn rain, damn Weather Channel, damn bunions. The ground was loose and malleable, sucking on his feet like a newborn pup on its mother’s teat. He marched through puddles four, five, six inches deep. Water found its way over the top of his boots and up his pant leg, making him wet and miserable despite the expensive, water-repellent rain gear.

  Damn rain gear.

  Just a little hunting, that was all he asked. Just a little time alone in the woods. His gun in his hands, his sights on his prey, the sound of the shot, the smell of gunpowder. Hell, even the danger of hunting out of season hadn’t stopped him, but now a little rain was threatening to do what the law could not – and that made Kirby Boray mad.

  Damn mad.

  He had given up after three hours – three hours of pure hell. Forget the Bible. Hades wasn’t a lake of fire – it was just a lake, miles and miles of water. Water up your nose and down your boots, water on your head and under your shirt. He had wasted a Saturday for this?

  Damn bad luck.

  He was nearing the truck, or at least where he thought the truck, was when the ground gave way. Kirby hit the mud and leaves and shot down the incline like a puck on ice. Sliding, twisting, rolling, turning.

  Cursing. Or at least trying to curse. Leaves and mud and twigs got in his mouth and his beard, his eyes. His hood came off and rain played a drum solo on his balding scalp, then found entrance to the few dry, warm places that still remained on his body.

  He held on to his gun. There was that, at least. And he hadn’t blown his hands off, which was a distinct possibility, since the weapon was loaded and ready. When he came to rest at the foot of the hill, Kirby Boray looked like the very ground he had walked on. Mud, leaves, briars, and branches – they all clung to his legs and back and face and arms.

  There was mud in the gun barrel.

  “Not my rifle! Shit fire and fart snowballs!”

  Damn mud. Damn leaves. Damn briars.

  Kirby raised himself up on his elbows, brushing mud out of his eyes. He saw something he didn’t believe, so he shut his eyes and opened them again. But it was still there.

  A body. A human body.

  “Damn,” he said. And the body said nothing.

  Dean made notes in the three-by-five inch spiral notebook he always carried with him. The figures looked like rat scratches in Sheetrock. All the information he had gathered from the dissected sheet of spoiled blackboard, dutifully logged and represented on the scored paper.

  As he told his students, science was 45 percent collecting information, 40 percent interpreting that information, 10 percent inspiration, and 5 percent sheer, dumb, blind luck. Although sometimes, he confessed, the percentages were exactly reversed.

  Dean closed the notebook and put it in his breast pocket. The collection of data had shooed away the illogical fear that had been crouched on his shoulders since the night before. Facts and figures. The sincerity of science. His bastion. His salvation.

  Dean stood and straightened his coat. He ran a hand through his dark hair, pushing it more or less in place. The air was filled with the scent of sawdust. He looked out the window, at Hawkins Hill, where Meredith Gamble had been sliced to death.

  The crime lab would determine where the glass was from. As for velocity? An aircraft remained the most logical possibility. He wondered if John had heard back from the FAA. Although there had been no plane crash, that didn’t mean an aircraft hadn’t been damaged.

  And the angle?

  Straight ahead. How could glass fall horizontally? It must have been caught in a powerful gust of wind. Looking out his window, watching the rain lashing the earth, he could believe it. Except the wind had not been that strong last night.

  The phone rang, snapping him from his thoughts.

  “Dean?” The phone line crackled and popped.

  “John? Is that you?”

  “Dean? Can you hear me?”

  “Barely. The phones are acting up.”

  “Yeah . . . ” His next words were garbled. “ . . . way all day . . . phone company . . . ”

  “John?”

  “Dean?” The line was suddenly clear.

  “Yeah, I can hear you now, but talk fast before we lose the connection.”

  “Cheevers is on his way to pick you up. I need you at the hospital.” His voice sounded heavy, as if his words had actual weight. “It’s Clyde. He’s dead.”

  13

  Rain turned to sleet, hard pellets of ice that shattered into thousands of shards as they slammed against the wet, black asphalt. The north wind had intensified. Leafless trees shook and shuddered. Power lines swayed in frighteningly wild arcs. On Hawkins Hill tree limbs, suddenly heavy with ice, moaned and creaked.

  Then the snow came. Gauzy and brisk, it filled the natural gashes and depressions of the landscape, evening out the roughness of nature, covering the city in a shroud of deathly white.

  And still the forecast called for clear skies and moderate temperatures.

  Nathan Perkins found Ava waiting in a black teddy – an index finger in her mouth, one leg arched and rocking back and forth, giggling at the expression of raw lust that consumed her husband.

  Ava took the lead in their lovemaking – always the insightful, inventive lover.

  Nathan was still breathing hard and sweating when he answered the phone. A trucker who had barely made it over the pass had contacted the Oregon State Police, who had then contacted the sheriff’s department, who in turn called the mayor. The storm was worsening. The pass was closed. And the only connection between Black Valley and the rest of the
world was the thin concrete bridge spanning the wind-frenzied Willamette River. He had to get the snowplows out and the sand trucks moving, had to make sure that bridge stayed clear. He thumbed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and told his wife, “I have to go.”

  Ava flapped her artificially extended eyelashes, brushed her chemically goldened hair behind her ears, and thrust out her scientifically enhanced breasts. “No. Stay.”

  Lust and love were powerful forces. She embraced him for a full minute, the fate of his city balanced against his desire for his wife. As if sensing his struggle and knowing she had won, Ava Perkins mercifully released him.

  “Go,” she said through pouty lips. “Go. Take care of your precious city, but make sure you don’t forget to come home.”

  Forget to come home? Nathan Perkins was more likely to forget to eat.

  “She’s so fake,” his mother had complained upon first meeting Ava. “All phony: chemicals, silicone, hair weaves, makeup – a completely artificial woman.”

  “If she’s artificial,” his father had said, “then give me the ingredients so I can make one for myself.”

  Nathan smiled at the memory and at his wife. His muscles burned warmly in the afterglow of their vigorous lovemaking, aching slightly as he dressed for the deteriorating weather conditions.

  “Don’t forget your scarf,” she reminded him, then wrapped the scarf she had made for him, a heinous thing of neon-yellow and red stripes, around his neck. She kissed him once, quickly on the lips, then covered the lower portion of his face with the cloth.

  At first Nathan felt silly, leaving his expensive home on Brentway Drive dressed like an arctic explorer, but thirty seconds of exposure to the freezing wind obliterated such thoughts. How had it gotten so cold so fast? Where had this storm come from? There had been nothing about it on the Weather Channel.

  He tried to reassure himself. So what if there was a little snow, a little rain? This was Oregon, and Oregonians were not easily scared off by the weather.