by Tracy Clark
I saw the candle first, its low light sheltered by a tiny alcove and overhang. Next to it, lying on the damp ground—Yancy Gantt. I recognized the parka, the skull cap, his boots. I breathed a sigh of relief, but it was short-lived. Near panic soon overtook it. It didn’t look like he was breathing. I looked around, but there was nothing here but Yancy, the lake, and the one solitary candle flickering. I drew closer, mindful of where I placed my feet. Nothing moved but the candle flame.
“Yancy?” I gently pulled back the collar of his coat, fingertips only, and placed two fingers to his carotid, feeling for signs of life. I felt nothing. I pressed harder, my own breath holding, then nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt a faint throbbing. He was alive. Barely. I wiggled out of my slicker and placed it over him for warmth, then dug my phone out of my jeans pocket to call 911. “Hang in there,” I said, shivering against the cold.
He looked up at me, puzzled, and I knelt down and leaned in, shielding him from the pelting rain. “Hey, remember me?” Yancy nodded, a glint of recognition in his eyes. I couldn’t tell how badly he was injured. I didn’t want to move him or exert him, but I needed to know about the wolf. What if this turned out to be the only chance I’d get? I placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Yancy? Can you talk?”
He moaned. “Hurts.”
I scanned the park in desperation, looking for flashing lights along the Drive. Nothing yet. It was too soon. “Can you try just a little?”
He squeezed his eyes closed, nodded once.
“The wolf, Yancy.”
For a time, he said nothing. I checked him again, afraid that he’d slipped away, but his eyes were open again. He was staring at the lake behind me. How much time did I have? How much pain was he fighting against? I felt like a heel pressing him, but he was the only witness, the only one who knew.
There was a slight shake of his head. “Two . . . wolves.”
Two? I agonized over what to ask next, searching for a way to phrase a meaningful question that could be answered by a simple flick of the head in hopes of minimizing his discomfort.
“Who are they, Yancy?”
“Black heart. No soul.” His voice wheezed out like air through a bellows, his tone and pitch frighteningly low. He began to chuckle lightly, shallow breaths only. The sound of it was alarming, air rushing in and out of his lungs, rattling and gurgling as it did. “Saints and sinners. Soft. Hard.”
He wasn’t making any sense. If he’d been on his meds at the beach house, he was certainly off them now, after wandering around aimlessly with a bullet in him. Was any of this real? I frantically searched the Drive again, but still there was nothing. What was taking so long?
“Ran. Hid,” Yancy muttered.
I rubbed his hands to work some of the cold out of them. “You’re done running now. You’re okay. Just lay quietly. They’re coming.”
He went quiet again. The silence felt like it would last forever. Then he broke it. “Deanna, Cesar, Buddy, Boss.... He hid her. He came looking.” Yancy drifted off. He’d gotten to the end of what he had. I sat stunned by his offering. The sound of sirens came first, then the lights. I watched as they grew closer. Help had arrived.
“Hold on, Yancy,” I whispered.
His lips moved. I leaned in. “The beads.” His voice was so low I could barely hear it. “Fell like rain.”
I watched as the ambulance a quarter-mile away, slowly turned off the Drive and gingerly moved up the narrow path that was just perfect for bikes and joggers and strolling baby carriages, but not so perfect for first responders in cop cars, fire trucks or ambulances. When the rig finally slid to a stop in front of the building, two paramedics jumped out, saw me signaling them, and quickly went to work on Yancy. Buddy and Boss? Beads? I had no idea what to make of any of it, and Yancy was likely dying. The paramedics checked Yancy’s vitals and started an IV. I followed it all, my eager eyes taking it all in, the sound of police sirens getting closer. I jumped when a hand came down on my shoulder, and turned to find Ben there. “What happened?” he asked.
“I found him. I don’t know how bad it is, but it looks bad.”
“You get anything?”
I retrieved my slicker from the ground. “I don’t know. He says there were two in the church. He heard names. The girl’s, Cesar’s and two new ones—Boss and Buddy.”
Ben sighed, a look of skepticism on his face, but he didn’t say anything.
“He got the first two names right,” I argued, in hopes of convincing him. “I have to believe he got the others right, too. Anyway, it’s all we’ve got.”
I watched as the paramedics loaded Yancy onto a gurney and slid him into the back of the ambulance; the back doors gaped open, revealing all manner of medical paraphernalia.
“Where are you taking him?” I asked them. “U of C. You family?”
Reluctantly, I shook my head no.
“Then you’ll have to meet us there.”
The back doors banged shut and the rig sped away, spinning tires spitting up the grass on the soggy lawn. The hospital was just blocks away. I hoped Yancy made it. I moved to leave, fumbling for my keys.
“I’m following them over,” I said.
Ben blocked me. “You think that’s a good idea?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“When’s the last time you slept?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? This could be the break I need.”
“If it’s a break, I’ll handle it. He’s alive, thanks to you. Now go home, get some rest, let them work on the guy. Did you call Barb?” I hadn’t. I’d forgotten. She wasn’t going to be happy. “See? You’re running on empty. I’m saying this as a pal, as one who gets you. Put it down for a night and walk away.”
A part of me knew he was right, but I still bristled at the idea of being sent home like a naughty child caught out past curfew. Yancy could be the difference between knowing what happened and not knowing. There was no way I could back off and let it go.
“Is that friendly advice or an order?”
Ben narrowed his eyes. “You need it to be an order?”
Even in the rain, a small crowd had gathered along the pedestrian trail, drawn by the emergency lights and the promise of a spectacle. The ambulance gone, they now tuned into our conversation. I could feel them watching. Maybe they were waiting to see if the wet woman facing off against the big cop would get Tased, carted off to jail, or both. I was dead on my feet, though I would cut off my own arms before admitting it. I should shut up and go home, I knew it, but I was too wired, too worried, too pig-headed to comply; the fact that Ben was perfectly calm and nonconfrontational only made me dig my heels in even more.
We faced off for a time, neither of us letting it go. He was just as stubborn as I was. That’s what had made us such a good team back in the day. Neither of us ever gave up on anything no matter how hard fought the battle. I kept telling myself to stand down, even as my blood boiled, even as I wanted to scream the building down. But I couldn’t win, and I finally accepted it.
I broke the stare down first, punching my arms into my slicker. “I’m going home.”
“Good idea.”
He didn’t dare smile. I was waiting for a smile. One smile, one indication that he thought he’d won, and I’d walk back my concession. “But I’ll be at that hospital first thing in the morning.”
“I know.”
I slid him a dangerous look. “We’re not done with this, you and me.”
“Know that, too.”
I walked off. He followed.
“Stop following me!”
“Where’s your car?” he asked calmly.
I stopped. My car was in the lot half a mile away. I squeezed my eyes shut, mouthed an expletive.
I turned to face him. “You think this is funny, don’t you?”
“Nope,” he said smiling. We stood in silence on the inky path, rain pelting down on us, Ben getting the worst of it. That was a good friend for you. Risking pneumonia to m
ake sure you were safe, even after you’d told him to shove it.”
“I’ll drive you back,” he said.
I melted instantly, and all the fight drained away. “Thanks.”
“On the condition that you admit that I was right back there,” he said.
I turned and walked off again.
“Say it. I’m right.” I could tell he was grinning. I could hear it in his voice. “I want to hear the words.”
I burrowed into my jacket, smiled. “Like hell.”
Chapter 30
Around ten the next morning, I planted myself in the hospital’s lobby. They wouldn’t let me up to see Yancy, and I couldn’t badge my way through, so I sat quietly in a blue chair that, despite the padding, had no give in the seat or back. After only a short time, I felt as though I’d ridden the open range on a crookback horse. It didn’t matter. I’d wait, though no one in charge would part with a single bit of information on Yancy’s condition. I wasn’t family, and they were serious about those HIPAA laws. Cesar and Dee Dee, I mused. Boss. Buddy. Baxter. Wolves? I pulled out my phone to scroll through Reverend Crowell’s holiday pictures. Dee Dee and Cesar happy, then Dee Dee and Cesar not happy. The initials in Pop’s Bible. One fifty? An amount of money? Part of an address? It could be a time, I thought, but Pop hadn’t added a colon. “Ugh, Pop. Help me out here.” I called Ben.
“You’re at the hospital, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I told you where I’d be.”
He grumbled on the other end of the line.
“They won’t tell me anything,” I said. “They won’t let me up. What do you know?”
“He made it through surgery, but he’s still out of it. They plucked a round out of his lung, and he lost a lot of blood.”
“Will he pull through?”
“They’re guarded, but optimistic. We put a cop on his door.”
I sighed, relieved that Yancy had better protection than I could obviously provide. “Thanks. That’s great. I believe him when he says someone’s out to get him. They might keep trying till they do. The cop helps. Anything on Deanna? An address maybe?”
Ben let a beat pass, cleared his throat. “Still working on it. But Gantt did do more talking in the ambulance.” I perked up. “What’d he say?”
“The paramedics said he kept muttering something about a roaring polar bear chasing him.” My spirits fell. “You know all of this is probably bullshit, right?” He was treading lightly. “Maybe he’s seeing things that aren’t there?”
“I believe him. He’s been running for his life, scared out of his mind. And those attacks on the homeless, the murder of the man in Yancy’s squat? They’re connected. Someone’s out there looking for Yancy Gantt and rousting anybody who looks like him. Why? Because he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see.”
“And you’re basing all that on the ravings of a mentally unstable man?”
I scrubbed my hand across my face, fatigue and exasperation battling for equal time. “How else would he know the names Cesar or Deanna?”
“Buddy and Boss? A roaring polar bear? C’mon, Cass.”
“It isn’t much, I’ll admit.”
“It’s less than that and you know it.”
“There’s a connection. I just need to make it.”
There was an uneasy silence on both ends of the line.
“One more link,” I said finally. “That’s all it’ll take. Yancy knows.”
I could hear Ben tapping nervously on his end, likely with a No. 2 pencil, which he favored both for writing and gnawing. “Don’t sit there all day. And eat something, for Christ’s sake, will ya?”
I smiled and ended the call. Eat something? I was too wound up to eat. Yancy’s life was hanging in the balance, and I hated hospitals. I didn’t like the smells, the sterility, the fact that I almost died in one. Still, I’d stay until they threw me out.
* * *
“Are you up already? You just got in two hours ago.” Barb said, shuffling into the kitchen wearing a pair of my fuzzy slippers, sporting a serious case of bed head. “You’re going over the Bible again?”
I’d waited at the hospital all day, but heard nothing more about Yancy. When visiting hours ended, they cleared me out and I headed home. Now, for what seemed like the millionth time, I sat huddled over Pop’s things, reading through the Bible passage, his sermons, turning pages in his diary, running my fingers up and down the pages, hoping something finally clicked. The diary was full of personal thoughts and observations, eloquent, heartrending, and all of it precious to me, but he hadn’t mentioned Cesar or Dee Dee. He hadn’t said a single thing about someone following him or hearing a stalker’s confession. “I’ve cleaned everything. It was either this or retiling the bathroom.”
Barb grabbed milk from the fridge, poured herself a glass. “It’s almost midnight.”
I looked up. “Then what are you doing up?”
She sat across from me, yawned. “I’m still on Africa time.” She eyed the books and papers spread out in front of me on the table. “Anything?”
“If somebody confessed to him, he wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone, but could he have written it down?”
Barb shook her head. “Nope. Not a word, not a hint, nothing.”
I reached over the sticky note. “Then this can’t be about his killer. It’s got to be about something else. 430/HWY. There is no 430 highway in this state.” I stuck the note on top of the Bible. “Assuming that’s what HWY stands for.” I clawed my fingers through my hair, then shoved the mess of papers away, tired of looking at them, frustrated that I wasn’t getting it.
“Okay, this is what I think I know. Pop was being Pop. He somehow met and befriended Cesar, maybe through one of those youth programs he headed up, maybe during one of the Masses Cesar attended on the sneak. Cesar trusted him. Maybe Pop even introduced him to Reverend Crowell at Gentle Peace and that’s how he met Dee Dee. Maybe Cesar met Dee Dee some other way, I don’t know. But now they have a problem, right? They’re in love, pretty soon they’re expecting a baby. Her folks are going to go nuts about the whole thing. Who would they rely on to intervene, smooth the way? Pop, that’s who.”
“That’s what I’d do,” Barb said, sipping her milk. “So Pop goes to the church that night to talk it over with Cesar, and something horrible happens?”
“Buddy and Boss happened,” I said. “Yancy’s there. Maybe he came to get more candles, maybe he came just to get warm. Whatever, he’s in the church. He hears angry voices and sees two men arguing with Pop and Cesar. It gets out of hand. Buddy and Boss are unknowns, but one or both of them has got to be connected to either Cesar or Dee Dee. One of them confessed.”
“And you can’t fill in the blanks until you talk to Yancy. Meanwhile, there’s nothing else here?” She reached for the diary and began to leaf through it.
I got up to pace. “Nothing in that diary that I can see. I focused in on the months and weeks leading up to his death. He told me in my office the stalking started in January. There’s nothing about any of that in the book. Everything is in cryptic bits and pieces. There’s no pattern, at least none that I can see.” I faced her. “I admit I’m not at the top of my game here.”
Barb smiled. She understood. “Two heads then.” She pushed her glass away. “He purposefully tried to keep Cesar and Dee Dee a secret, so whoever he was trying to hide them from had to be someone close, right? Which, I think, lets out your father.”
I stiffened. “It doesn’t. I only have his word for where he was when Pop and Cesar were killed. He knows that church. He knows Pop. It could very well have been him sitting beside him in that confessional, the one threatening him. Even if he could have, Pop wouldn’t have wanted to tell me that.”
“So you’re thinking he waited all this time to do something this horrible? And he just happened to stumble in on the other situation? The star-crossed lovers?”
“It’s possible.” I picked up the stic
ky note from the table, my eyes bleary from overuse. “Letters. Numbers. It’s like algebra.”
She grinned. “Yeah, which you flunked.”
I stopped suddenly, my mind niggling at the edge of something I didn’t dare scare away by moving. Algebra. Numbers and letters. What about letters for numbers? Pop would go for that, right? I reeled. “Romans. Maybe it’s not about the verse, but the title of the book? Romans. Numbers. Roman numerals?”
Barb glanced at the Bible. “But he hasn’t written any Roman numerals.”
“One fifty. That’s a number. You’re the teacher. What’s that in Roman numerals?”
“CL,” Barb said.
CL dash DB. “CL, Cesar Luna. DB, Deanna Baxter.”
Barb stood, excited. “The kids.”
My eyes held hers, afraid to blink. “What about 430?”
She shook her head. “That’d be CDXXX. That’s not on the note. It could be a date, though. April thirtieth?”
I rushed back to the table, fanned through the diary, concentrating on the entries for April, but like the first hundred times through, nothing jumped out at me. “Or a time, maybe,” I said, getting a niggle of recollection. “A time, not a date.”
Four-thirty every day, no earlier, no later. Howard’s got a bladder that runs like clockwork. Lillian Gibson. I could practically feel my brain power into overdrive. “I think I know what it means.”
* * *
It was sheer agony waiting for a decent hour to pay a call on Lillian Gibson. Now on her front porch, I laid on the bell waiting for her to answer, hoping she could confirm what I had a sinking feeling was true. There was no answer. I checked my watch: 9:15 A.M. Was she already up and out this early? I peered in through the window, but the place was dark. I trotted over to Cummings’s place, slipping into his backyard, looking for an easy access point, but in addition to his sound-proofing improvements, he’d also added a pretty decent security system. Why was Cummings’s early morning departure with his family in tow written in Pop’s note. Had he planned to meet them someplace? Where the heck was Lillian Gibson? I walked back to my car, pulled Cummings’s business card from my console, and dialed his number, getting voicemail. I left a message. I wanted to talk, I told him, about his family’s trip. Then I waited.