They were images from when I was small, before Mother and Father were too tired to hide their fights from me. Saturday morning pancake breakfasts and games of catch out back, afternoons spent helping Mother with her strawberry patch and pushing a hand-powered mower across tough crabgrass and clover.
Good memories, mostly, and pleasant ones. I’d missed those—I hadn’t thought about them in too many years.
Right about then I realized I still rested on the ground. A blade of grass was tickling my ear, but otherwise it was as fine a bed as a man could ask for. Stretching out my legs, I decided against getting up quite yet. I could smell the tang of the red clay, sharp and cold and mixed with the sweet scent of the crushed grass underneath my head. The dew off the leaves had soaked through my clothes here and there, but it wasn’t uncomfortable so much as it was refreshing. It was as if my skin had been drinking it in, taking water directly from the land that had cradled me.
I rolled over and stared straight up at the sky, a swath of true Carolina blue framed by the dark green of the pines. Thin lines of white cloud drifted past, grace notes on the music of the heavens. As for the stones, they hung there just outside of my field of view, but I could feel them. There was no heaviness to the knowledge, though, just an awareness of their presence as something right and proper.
And sleeping in their shadow had felt right and proper, too—at least for one night.
I stood and dusted myself off, more out of habit than out of hopes of brushing stray blades of grass off my legs. The rational part of my mind cursed me for a damn fool, but its voice was small and tiny, and I didn’t listen to it long.
The lemonade was still on the counter when I walked back into the kitchen, so I poured myself a glass and took a sip. It was warm, of course, and sharp. I was amazed that yellow jackets hadn’t found a way to get into it. They, unlike the fireflies, had no problem with the homestead, and there was a nest somewhere on the property that spit out plenty of the damn things every time I wandered around outside. Still, the drink refreshed me, and I found myself feeling stronger than I had in days. Yesterday’s problems didn’t seem so puzzling. In the light of day, Carl’s figure shrank in my mind. He was just an old man trying to do right by his own code, never mind that his code was thirty years out of date. I’d find a way into town today and talk to the police, then maybe get another car. Seeing me on the land clearly pained Carl somehow, so it was just the honorable thing to do, to make sure he didn’t have to see me here anymore. I’d release him from his promise, whatever it might have been, and we could go our separate ways.
As for the fireflies, they were still a mystery, but one I was willing to live with by the light of day. I wasn’t willing to kill any more fireflies to satisfy my curiosity, and they wouldn’t give up their secrets. Let them stay away, then, and I’d live without them until the time came for me to move on. After that, they could do what they pleased.
“Moving on.” The words sounded strange to my ear that morning, and I felt in no hurry to do that. At first, I’d wanted to stay here two weeks, no more. Now my thought was more of fall. Summer here had always been pleasant, my memories told me, and there was money in my pocket. I could easily stay here through the heat and the long, slow days, recovering from Boston at my own pace. Sure enough, it would take me out of the game for a while, but by the end I’d admitted the game had not been something I’d ever enjoyed that much. No, it was better to stay here for a few lazy months, sipping lemonade and looking out over the black fields at night.
The door to my parents’ bedroom remained resolutely shut as I walked past it and down the hall. For all I knew, it had been shut since the day after Mother’s funeral. I had closed that door and walked away, and if Carl had ever opened it, there was no sign. Perhaps today I’d look inside, take possession of it and make it my own.
First, though, I needed a shower and a clean change of clothes. I ducked into my bedroom, rescued the last clean pair of boxers from my travel bag, and took a pair of jeans and a shirt to go with them. Socks I’d find later, I decided, after I’d had a chance to walk on the grass barefoot. I’d need to do laundry today, I realized, and that was not something I looked forward to. The washing machine was ancient but serviceable, but the dryer had the look of a fire waiting to happen. Best to hang up a line out back, I decided, and let nature do its part.
The shower refreshed me further, hot water washing the last of the night’s worries away. I wouldn’t even call Carl for a ride, I decided. I’d walk toward town and hitch, and maybe meet another of my neighbors that way. I needed someone besides Carl to talk to. That much I knew, and hitching a ride seemed as good a way as any to find some conversation. My friends in Boston had mostly melted away when the business had, and no one had called me since I’d left. I had expected that to continue, even before I’d lost my cell phone in the underbrush. So, if I wanted to hear human voices, I’d have to find them here.
The air dried me off almost as fast as the towel did. It was promising to be a hot day, unseasonably hot, and dry as well. I shrugged into my jeans and buttoned down my shirt, ran a comb through my hair and a brush across my teeth, and pronounced myself fit for human company. I took a pair of socks from my dresser—too small for a grown man, both the clothing and the furniture that held it—and my shoes from the floor, and then I went outside to feel the grass between my toes.
Forty-five minutes went by before I’d had enough of that to declare myself ready to go. Father had always frowned on walking barefoot on the grass, though he’d loved to do it himself. Snakes worried him, and so did ticks and chiggers and every other biting creature on God’s green earth. Mother was more practical and often talked him into going without shoes so he couldn’t caution me when I did, too. The grass was thick and tight, with no bare patches or dandelion stands. Carl had been doing good work, it seemed, and it felt like heaven under my feet.
Enough was finally enough, though, especially if I wanted to make good progress toward town before the day’s full heat came up. With one last look down at my toes, I sat on the porch and pulled my socks onto my feet. I wiggled my toes one last time, then slipped the tennis shoes on over them. They were scuffed and old, but with the laces pulled tight, they fit my feet well. I’d used them for just about everything except tennis back in Boston, and they’d been the first things I’d packed. They were dirty and worn and softer than cotton, and somehow they belonged here.
I locked the door behind me, a big-city habit I suspected I wouldn’t be able to break. Fortunately, I’d kept the house keys on a separate chain from the ones for the car, so they hadn’t vanished along with it. Even if they had, I still had the keys Carl had left, but I was just as glad not to need them. I’d tucked them in a kitchen cabinet and fully expected never to need them again.
And so, with the sun coming up over the tree line behind the Tolliver farm, I took the long walk down the drive to the road. When my feet hit gravel, I turned to the right, toward town and all the wonders it might hold. With a last look back at the house—just in case, though I couldn’t see the damn door from where I stood—I started walking.
Town had in fact gotten closer since my last visit, moving out into the countryside in bites and chunks. Still, it had mostly advanced on a line that hadn’t taken it straight in my direction. What that meant for me was that my property values had gone up a bit, but that my walk into town had stayed long. Best of both worlds, that was the way I figured it, and on a fine morning like the present, I was happy to test myself against the distance.
The town had a name, of course. It was called Maryfield on the maps, but to everyone who lived outside it, it was simply “town.” Hell, most of the kids I’d gone to school with, even the ones who lived in town, called it that, too. It was the core of our world, the place we went to see movies and buy baseball cards. In the same way New Yorkers of my acquaintance referred to “the City,” it was “town,” and that was all that need be said.
Mind you, my upbringing had
not been entirely parochial. Father had made sure we traveled on occasion, and so I’d gotten to see beyond Maryfield’s borders. There had been plenty of long car rides; to Memphis, to Washington, to Atlanta and beyond. Lengthy drives and short visits were most of what I remembered, and being the envy of my classmates when I got back with souvenirs and stories. Those little tastes of life outside might have been the start of it, now that I thought on things. If I hadn’t had those moments, I might never have needed more. I might have stayed.
Such were the thoughts I had as I took long strides up the road toward town. It wasn’t paved out here, just hard-packed dirt with a thick coating of white gypsum gravel. The road surface didn’t change to pavement until you were just outside the limits of the town proper. Once you got onto the gravel, it rattled itself off the undercarriage of your car like bullets spat from an old gun. The gravel sent up dust, too. Get on that stretch of road and a gray cloud rose up behind you like a rooster tail. You could see a car coming a half mile away, easy, and on a clear day even farther.
I saw a cloud just like that boiling up in the distance now, a good ways off. “Carl,” I guessed out loud and kept on walking. The remnants of the mason jar lay scattered on the ground to my left. Embarrassed, I swept a few of the larger fragments off the road with my foot as I passed. Everything you do at night is still there come day, I told myself. It was a hard lesson, and one I’d often forgotten, but here was the truth of it sitting out in plain daylight.
The car coming down the road was closer now, though the dust obscured it beyond recognition. I made up my mind not to pay any heed to it, even if it was Carl coming out for some reason of his own. I’d just keep walking, and to prove my resolve, I edged over to the side of the road, as close to the drainage ditch as I dared.
Another dozen steps and I could hear the sound of tires on gravel and a tired engine growling. It was Carl all right, hunched over his wheel and looking upset. I smiled and waved, and he scowled harder.
The truck skidded to a stop right in front of me, so close that a shower of stones bounced off the tips of my shoes. I could see Carl work hard at rolling down his window as I stepped to the side and prepared to walk on past.
“Get in,” he said, and coughed from the dust in the air.
“You’re headed the other way,” I said brightly. “I’m walking into town, and I wouldn’t want to put you out. So I thank you for the offer, but I feel I must decline.” I even raised a finger to my brow in imitation of a salute.
“I’m going back into town,” he replied. He swung his door open to block my way. “I’ll take you.”
I poked my head through the open window. “But you just came out here. I wouldn’t want to take you away from whatever business brought you out this way, Carl. So again I thank you, and I’ll get moving now.” I sidestepped around the door, making sure not to step in Old Man Tolliver’s drainage ditch, and then I started moving again.
Footsteps crunched on gravel behind me, and a heavy hand landed on my shoulder. I spun around, half under my own power. “You’ll get in the truck,” Carl said, “and I’m not taking no for an answer.”
I frowned at the hand he still had on me, and after a second it dropped away. “Look, Carl,” I said in a much more sober tone, “let’s be straight here. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I know you’re up to something. As such, I’m not very likely to accept your invitation, however kindly it’s meant. The fact that you clearly drove out here just to pick me up and maybe turn around doesn’t make my mind any easier about the whole thing. So let’s deal with this like men. You drive back into town, or take care of your business out here. I’ll keep walking, and if I find someone else and they’re friendly, I’ll hitch with them. Otherwise, it’s a good walk, the sort Father might have needed back in the day.”
I saw him stiffen at that, and the lines of his face tightened. “Now isn’t the time to be talking about that sort of thing,” he said in a low, sharp voice. “It’s a long walk into town, and a longer one back. I just thought I’d save you the trouble.”
“Hopefully, I won’t be walking back,” I said. “If the police can’t find my car, I’ll need a new one, and I don’t think I can wait for the insurance company to settle before I get one.”
“The police won’t find your car,” he said flatly. He climbed back into the cab of his truck. Gravel shot out from beneath the wheels as he did a three-point turn as fast as anyone I’d ever seen. The right corner of his front bumper barely missed knocking me into the ditch, and then he was gone. The truck rumbled off into the distance, leaving me choking on the dust and fumes.
“Now that’s interesting,” I said as the cloud slowly settled back onto the road. Then I started walking again.
I finally caught a ride about two miles farther on. It was a young fellow I didn’t know who stopped, pulling his pickup over to the side of the road and telling me to climb in back. He’d offer me a seat in the cab, he said, but his dog was sitting there and it had precedence. His face was open and broad, and he had a black sweep-broom mustache underneath a nose someone had broken a couple of times. I decided I liked the man right off, and settled into his cargo bay next to a couple of bags of cement and some ornamental bricks.
We spoke, when the ride wasn’t too noisy, through the window in the back of the cab. His name was Samuel, and he’d moved into town proper a couple of years before Mother died. He’d heard about my house and was interested to see who lived there. It, and Carl, it seemed, had become a local legend. Kids told stories about it, about how it was supposed to be haunted. No one had ever actually seen a ghost, of course, but that didn’t stop the talking. The brave ones would drive out there at night in the summer and repeat my experiment with the lightning bugs. That didn’t make me feel any better for what I’d done, but it told me the fireflies had been acting strange for a while.
At least, that’s what Sam said, and I believed him. There didn’t seem to be any reason for him to lie. His dog was a tick hound named Asa, sad-eyed and slow moving. It just sat in that front seat and watched me all the way in. It was a well-trained dog. It never made a sound the whole time we rode together.
When we finally hit town, Sam—he said he preferred it to his given name—pulled over in front of the police station and let me hop out. “If you ever need another ride, you can call me,” he said, and then drove off. I realized after the fact that he hadn’t given me a last name or a number. Calling him would be difficult if I had the need. Then again, I was in town to make sure I didn’t need to make that call, or any others I didn’t want to make. I turned to the building and made my way inside.
I had only vague memories of the police station from my youth, but what I saw before me matched them pretty well. The building was two stories tall and made of brick, with a sign over the doorway that proudly announced that this was in fact the home of law and order in our town. There had been three policemen back in the day—one for day shift, one for night, and one to serve as backup whenever and make sure anyone in the holding cell didn’t get too cute. Crime pretty much consisted of domestic disturbances, drunk and disorderlies, and the occasional kid busted for shoplifting bubble gum and a Coke. I hoped, as I pushed my way past the heavy wood doors, that not much had changed.
The first thing I saw when I stepped in was a heavy woman sitting behind a heavy wood desk. She looked up at me the way a cat looks up at a squirrel on a too-high branch: like I might be interesting if I moved a little closer.
“Morning,” I said, taking those steps. “I called in yesterday about a stolen car, and was wondering if I could talk to somebody about it.”
“Hang on one moment, honey,” she said, and she started riffing through the thick piles of paper on her desk. Behind her were a few other desks, mostly unoccupied, and an office door with a nameplate that read CHIEF HARPER. The whole place was painted pink for no reason I could understand, though there was still some good hardwood molding up here and there.
The woman caught me
looking at the walls over her shoulder. “It got painted that color ten years ago. Some state study said that pink was a calming color and it would help make felons less violent. What they forgot to mention was that it would drive the rest of us nuts, and there’s no money in the budget to repaint it for another five years. Until then, you’ve never seen so many policemen trying to get back to walking a beat.” She laughed, the sort of cackle we used to call a witch laugh when I was growing up. The few policemen working at their desks looked over at her, then shrugged and went back to whatever it was they were doing. Several had computers on their desks, I noted. Progress reaches everywhere, or so it seemed.
“Here it is, sugar,” she said after the echoes of her laugh died away. She opened the file on her desk, and a meaty finger traced down the scribbles of writing. “One car, stolen from the old Logan place yesterday morning. Mr. Logan—and I am assuming that you are the Mr. Logan in question—called in to report a 2006 Audi missing. Audi. We don’t get many of them around here.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Between you and me, I don’t think it was stolen for parts.”
“I don’t really care much what it was stolen for,” I said, “so long as I get it back. Can you tell me whom I need to talk to, Miss…” I let my voice trail away.
“Officer Hanratty,” she corrected me. She extended her hand to shake. I took it. Her grip was strong, though she stopped short of actually trying to crush my fingers to peanut butter. “And you talk to me. The rest of them would just figure it for a joyride and start asking around the high school cafeteria. Which, come to think of it, ain’t all that unlikely. A pretty little car like that would have been one heck of a temptation.”
“It would have been one heck of a walk,” I retorted. “You don’t get out to my place by walking, and I didn’t hear another car out there.”
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