by Neely Tucker
She just turned and disappeared back into the shadow of the woods, leaving him there, standing, arm raised, waving at a ghost.
EIGHTEEN
HE WOULD NEVER catch her. Running across the fields and into the woods, having no idea where she had gone, that was foolish. But he had to get to her, and fast. Just that quick, the idea had blossomed from the back to the front of his mind. He knew who she was.
Gimp-legging it around the side of the house at a half trot, he made it back through the weeds, to the concrete stretch in front of the house where the car was parked. Jiggling the keys out of his pocket, he dropped them, picked them up, and then slammed the door shut behind him. The car took him back down the driveway at a rattling clomp, shocks be damned. The gravel road came up on him quicker than he remembered and he slammed to a stop, the plume of dust catching back up with him, cascading over the car.
Left, back up to the road he came in on? Right?
“Fuck,” he shouted, banging the steering wheel with a fist. The lady at the rental counter, she’d tried to persuade him to rent one of those GPS things. He’d scoffed—like he couldn’t read a map—but now, here he was, time evaporating, stuck with pulling the folding map from the glove compartment.
Staring at it now, mashed flat on the seat beside him, he saw the county roads weren’t exactly a grid, but they were close. The woman had come out of the woods to the west. That meant she had to be coming from somewhere directly behind the Waters’ place. The properties, he was guessing, abutted, back to back. If true, that meant she would live on the next road to the west, and they would share a north-to-south property line. All he had to do was get there.
Where was he on the map, where was he . . . ? He folded the map to a quarter panel to narrow it down. Spark Road . . . the creek . . . here. He was here.
If he turned right, going more or less south, there was another county road, like Spark, heading due west. That would take him—he followed it with a finger—here. Gotdamn. He was right. There was another north-south road, just like the one he was on, maybe two miles west. Complete with Spark Road at the north, it formed a box.
He set his odometer and pulled out hard to the south, spraying gravel. The light was going, fading by degrees. It got dark, he’d be fucked. He’d never find her tonight, and tomorrow she’d be gone or never answer the door even if he knocked on the right one.
Two point three miles down, across the open fields, he could see the intersecting road at least a half mile in the distance. Hallelujah. No plume of dust rose from it, so no car coming, and he swung the rental hard to the right as soon as he got to the intersection, no more than a tap on the brakes before he floored it west, the car fishtailing. He was plowing past a cemetery, goosing it up to fifty, sixty miles an hour. The road was nearly a straight shot. Two miles down to the next intersection and at the next dirt road, he swung back north, again resetting the odometer.
Now he’d need to come back north the same distance—two point three miles—and he’d be more or less directly west of Waters’s place.
Shadows falling, stretching across the road. Stars coming out above. He leaned forward over the steering wheel, willing the car forward, slowing when he got to the two-mile mark.
The land was still wide open, pastures with trees in clumps, the main tree line running far to the east from this perspective. A driveway up ahead led to a trailer built on a redwood platform. The windows were dark. He all but ran to the front door, catching his breath, then knocking. A dog barked from inside, a yapper. It came to the door on the other side, pissed off, jumping up against the door. Another knock. Nothing.
Back to the car, pulling out, shadows falling all the way across the road now. Dark don’t catch me here.
A quarter mile up, two trailers sat in their packed-dirt-and-crabgrass lawns, maybe fifty yards apart, a couple of fruit trees between them, a pickup in front of one, an old Buick in front of the other. The windows were dark in both. He was at a crawl, debating whether to stop, when, in the back pasture, coming past a sturdy wooden barn, he could see a figure moving. It was a black-haired woman. She wore an open checked shirt. Jeans. She was headed for the trailer on the left, slowing, her head coming up, looking at his car.
“Gotcha,” he breathed, throwing it into park right there at the side of the gravel road, not wanting to give her the chance to get inside.
By the time he was around the back of the car, she had reached the edge of the trailer. She had pulled out a pistol but was not walking any faster. She just came steadily toward him, past the trailer, into the scrubby front yard.
“Hi,” he called out, stopping three steps past the car, pulling both hands away from his body, but not being so ridiculous as to raise them. She stopped, halfway to the drive, a dog barking from her own trailer now. She recognized him from before, he could tell. Her eyes flickered with it. She didn’t speak. She didn’t raise the pistol. She just kept it at her side. That she didn’t raise it told him that she felt plenty capable of snapping it up, firing, and blowing him back into the gravel.
“Ma’am,” he said, “my name’s Sully Carter, and I work at a newspaper in Washington. I was looking for the person who discovered Russell Waters’s body after he died last year. I’ll drive all the way back into town to the liquor store, come back, and leave a bottle of bourbon in your mailbox if that’s not you.”
* * *
“You don’t have to take your shoes off,” she was saying, looking back over her shoulder, turning the lights on in the small front room. “Jasper. Sit. Now.”
Sully and the dog both did as they were told. The dog, a country mutt with a little pit bull to him, wasn’t happy about it but settled by the couch.
Standing by the door, taking two steps inside, Sully saw that it was comfortable but basic. An upholstered couch with a faded throw neatly folded over the back. A recliner, television, newspapers and magazines in a rack. The paneled walls held family pictures, some art-fair-quality paintings of the prairie, buffalo in the distance. The kitchen and a dining nook were just past that. Sully, mindful of Jasper, asked if he could come to the dining nook.
“Yep,” she said. She was in the kitchen. She’d put the pistol, an old-school six-shooter, on the countertop. He could hear cups being set down.
“I don’t want to interrupt dinner if—”
“We call it ‘supper’ out here. I work overnight. Shift at the hospital starts at ten. You can eat with me or watch.”
“Sure, I’ll—”
“You can have spaghetti. If you don’t like that, you can have spaghetti.”
“I’ll go with the spaghetti.”
He pulled one of the hardback chairs out from the table and sat. His backpack, notebook, recorder, everything was still in the car. There was not a chance in hell he was going back out there to get it. He was in—for whatever reason—and he was not about to break the fragile spell that put him here. He looked at the dog. Jasper was losing interest.
“Hope I didn’t spook you,” he said. “I apologize, following you around to your property from the other place.”
“I don’t spook. It was reasonable tracking. You want water, coffee?” She looked at him, her black eyes steady. They didn’t seem to take in any light at all. “Or whiskey, since you offered to fetch it.”
“Ah, water would be great. Dry throat. And if you’re having a splash of God’s own, I’d be obliged.”
She did not answer but turned back into the kitchen and busied herself. The kitchen was as narrow as a hallway. If she turned sideways, she could have one hand in the sink and the other in the fridge. He heard the tick tick tick of a gas stove, the whoosh of it catching, pans rattling. When the water was boiling, and he could hear (and smell) the sizzle of ground beef going into the skillet. She came back to the table with four glasses. Two were tall, brimming with ice and water. The other two were short, round, and empty. She retreat
ed, reached to a shelf above the refrigerator, and pulled back a bottle of Knob Creek.
She poured two fingers for him and two for her, neat. “One and only one round,” she said. “Like I say, I got work.” She went back to the kitchen without touching hers.
“What do you do at the hospital?” he called out.
“What’s it to you?” she called back.
He took a sip. “Whoa, look, I don’t want to get—”
“R.N.,” she said. “The name is Elaine Thornton. But you’re not ever putting either one in your newspaper. Or anywhere else. Clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Stop with the ma’am shit.”
“Okay.”
Time ticked on. A little air in the conversation wouldn’t hurt. He sat back, sipping the bourbon. Cooking seemed to take up her attention and he contented himself to think for a second, taking in a breath down to his lungs and letting it out again. The best idea was always to be direct, to state the thing clearly. If it went screwy, then at least later you’d think it had gotten screwy for the reason that you came, not for some chatty bullshit you were trying to be clever about.
“So. Elaine. You, ah, you knew Mr. Waters? Russell?”
“All my life. Our properties are back-to-back. As you seem to have figured out. You grew up in the country to have sussed that out that quick.”
“Did—I did, yes. Louisiana. By the river. And you were the neighbor who found him, called the police?”
“Nobody else would have found him for a month. And, no. I called the hospital to send the wagon. They called the police.”
“Was Terry there at the time?”
“Nope.”
“So, Terry, he just got loose when his father died? What happened to him after that?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, I mean, I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘nothing.’ He turned up at the Capitol last week, shooting—”
“When I said nothing, I meant nothing.” She came back to the table, a spatula in hand, picked up her glass and took a shot. She leaned forward on the chair back, wagging the spatula for emphasis. “That’s why I let you in, if you’re wondering. I wanted to ask you a question. Namely, what in the hell is wrong with you dipshits in Washington? Terry Waters has been dead and in the ground for close on eight years now. Why do you people think he’s shooting up the place?”
NINETEEN
COUGHING OUT THE bourbon, putting his hand to his mouth to catch the spittle—“He was—”
“I helped put him in the dirt myself.”
“—four days, I don’t—”
“You really want to, you can see him yourself. You were standing not a hundred yards from his grave over there at the house.”
He coughed, and coughed again, looking at her, sitting back in his chair. He coughed twice more. Felt his face going flush, the lack of oxygen. She turned and went back to the kitchen.
“I, I just don’t understand. I saw the man. Terry. Talked to him.”
The bubbling sound of water boiling, dimly, the simmering beef. A jar opened. She was putting in the sauce. Ragu bounced through his mind.
“You talked to somebody who said he was Terry,” she said, not looking over at him. “Terry has been dead since early fall of, what was it, 1992. September. Russell came and got me. I was out back with the horses. Russell was drunk. How he walked all that way that plastered, I don’t know. There’s a trail there through the cut. Say what you will about the man but Russell could hold his liquor.”
“And—”
“He told me Terry had died. That was all he said. ‘Terry died.’ The sum total. What do you do with that? So we walked back through the woods, the pasture, to his house. It’s a long way. He didn’t say anything. ‘Terry died,’ he said, me there with the horses and a bucket of feed, and he turned around and started walking back. So, the hell, I set the bucket down and followed him.
“We got to his house, it was more of a mess than usual. Furniture knocked over,” she said, her voice flat, turning to the sink to drain the pasta, going on and on in that long, almost atonal delivery, looking out the window over the sink into the pasture, the land going full dark. “The walls, you know, it’s that brown paneling, I’m guessing you saw it. Flimsy as it gets. There was a hole in it. Terry was in the hallway. He was on his back. He’d been shot with a shotgun. Blown up. You ever seen what a shotgun will do to people?”
Finished draining the pasta, she reached behind her, turned off the heat on the beef, looking over at him, gauging his response.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“My mother.”
“What about her?”
“She was killed. With a gun. Three shots. A pistol, not a shotgun. My girlfriend, I’d guess you call her, she was killed by shrapnel. To the head. In Bosnia.”
She looked at him, her eyes moving over his scars, returning to his.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
She piled pasta, then spooned some ground beef in a thick red sauce over it, onto one plate, then another, set them both on the table, produced silverware, tore off paper towels and handed one to him, a napkin. She sat, a hand flicking her hair back over her shoulders.
“Then you know. He was a mess. I asked Russell what happened. He had, he had been taking care of Terry since forever. Marissa, that was the mother, she wasn’t shit.”
“Nobody else seems to know anything about her, even her name.”
“I saw her. Twice, I think it was.”
“Do you know what happened to her? Terry—this guy in D.C.—said somebody killed her.”
“That’s some happy horseshit. I don’t know and Terry didn’t neither. She lived down in Texas. She was white. Maybe from the panhandle. You can like the panhandle if you want but I say it ain’t shit. Russell worked at an oil rig down there for a spell. Something was wrong with Terry from the get-go. Marissa cut bait when he wasn’t but a pup. Russell brought him up here. By the first grade, second, he was clearly off. Schizophrenic, you ask me in my professional sense. People in Stroud, though, they’ve told you and the others about what he’d do to animals.”
“Yes.”
“So Russell brought him back home after all the trouble in town. What else could he do? Send him to the state? Abandon him? Cuss Russell, but the man wasn’t a quitter. Blood was blood. He kept that boy, difficult as he was. People in town, they will tell you that Russell never brought Terry into town.”
“I heard that.”
She blew air through her nose, not quite a snort, twirling her fork around the spaghetti. “They won’t tell you that they told him not to bring him into town, warned him. I don’t know if it’s better somewhere else, but people here, they’re scared of mental sickness. Terry frightened people. People told stories. Kids. Legends. Anytime animals turned up dead, Terry was said to have done it. The talk, you wouldn’t believe. He was a shape-shifter, he walked with the spirits, he drank human blood, he ran with the wolves.”
“He was the Thing in the Dark.”
She looked at him again, appraising. “Yes. The thing. The bogie man. The thing that moves in darkness. The terror of the night. So Russell wound up staying home with him. He’d take the odd day job every now and then. That’s why he had the fence around the house, did you know that? He’d let Terry keep the door open and he could go out or not. He’d have me look in on him. I stayed over there a handful of times while Russell worked out of state. Can’t imagine what it must have been like, the years going on like that, the two of them alone.”
“There’s a story,” Sully said, forcing himself to eat, his mind reeling, trying to keep the story straight for later, “that Russell kept him tied up with a rope.”
“Fairy tales,” she said softly. “There wasn’t no rope. There was that fence, a pen, attached to the back of the house.”
“But medication,” Sully said. “You said you thought it was schizophrenia. There’s Thorazine, there’s newer stuff. You’re a nurse. You would have told him about that.”
“Told isn’t convincing. Russell didn’t understand what was wrong with Terry any more than anyone else. I got a psychiatrist from the hospital to come out to the house one time. He prescribed him something, I don’t know, and Terry took about three of them and went berserk and Russell dropped it.”
Sully, carefully watching Elaine, was making sure to eat as much as she did, and at the same pace, more or less. People got touchy about hospitality.
“But, whatever it was that last day,” she said, “Terry tried to stab Russell. He got a knife and came after him. Russell dodged him and knocked the knife out of his hand, or so he told me, standing there in the hallway of his house, Terry dead on the floor. They fought and rolled over and Russell got away from him to get the shotgun in the bedroom. He came out and Terry had the knife again and came at him. So he shot him.”
She stopped talking, as abruptly as she’d started. She went back to her spaghetti. Sully was getting used to her conversational style, if that was the word. No wedding ring. He surmised that was one of her brothers’ trailers next door. That led to an educated guess that she had never married rather than divorced. That would be one tough hombre if there had been a husband.
“Russell, he have any cuts on him, like that?”
She didn’t look up. “You think Russell, he was lying? That he shot Terry to be rid of him?”
“It’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you meant.”
He hitched his shoulders slightly, letting the question hang.
She swallowed her bite of spaghetti and finished the rest of the bourbon. Ten seconds went by, fifteen. “Russell wasn’t bleeding, if that’s what you’re asking, least not that I could tell. The house was so turned upside down and Russell so, so staggered that it didn’t occur to me. Still don’t. He didn’t say Terry cut him and he didn’t say he didn’t. He said he came at him with a knife.”