by Ronald Malfi
When they’d walked far enough away from the vehicles, Ben paused and looked around. It seemed implausible that someone could be thrown this far. Without saying a word to Cal, he turned around and headed back to the Pontiac. Maggie was perched on a large stone at the shoulder of the road, her skin pale, her hair an unkempt nest of bristling auburn wires. From this distance, and in the poor lighting, her eyes looked like hollow black sockets. Eddie stood above her, asking questions in his soft, placating voice.
Ben bent down and examined the skid marks on the pavement. To even call them “skid marks” was hyperbole; Ben spotted two smudgy exclamations of melted rubber on the surface of the road, hardly noticeable. It meant Maggie Quedentock hadn’t been going all that fast when she’d slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel.
Ben stood up, popping the tendons in his back. Out of nowhere, he felt ridiculously old, despite his thirty-five years. He looked over to Eddie who appeared engrossed in his little notepad, where he was jotting some notes. Ben went over to them.
“Hey, Maggie,” he said. “How’re you doing, hon? You okay?”
“Jesus. Yeah, Ben. Hi. Sorry.” Her voice had the squeaky, broken quality of a badly dented trumpet.
“Nothing to be sorry about.” He looked to Eddie, who shrugged his shoulders. “What happened here, Maggie?”
She told him—she’d been coming down the road when, in a split second, someone jumped out in front of her car. “I think…” She stuttered and quickly averted her eyes. Her whole body trembled. Then she met his eyes again. “Whoever it was just came right out of the woods. I tried to stop, but then the car started spinning.” Her voice hitched. “Did you find anyone out there?”
Ben shook his head. He could hear sirens in the distance. “You have a few drinks tonight?”
“Earlier I had a few.”
“How much earlier?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe around seven o’clock? I was down at Crossroads.”
“Were you alone?”
Her brow furrowed. “At Crossroads?” Her voice was paper thin. She appeared to chew over the answer to his question. “Yes,” she said finally.
“Okay. Any chance what you hit was a deer?”
She looked directly at him then. Those eyeless pits in her skull stared straight through him, chilling his blood to ice water. It was only after he realized she had mascara smeared around her eyes that he released a slow and weary breath.
“It looked like a person,” she said in a low voice then immediately dropped her head again. “I mean, I saw…I think…it was a little boy, Ben. I mean, I think it was.”
A wave of heat radiated through Ben’s body. “You think?”
“I’m almost positive…but…”
“But what?”
“No hair,” she said. “The kid didn’t have any hair.”
Without missing a beat, Ben thought about how he had fished a hairless boy out of the cold waters of Wills Creek last week. The boy had been in the water for an unknown period of time, the color leached from his flesh and the hair shorn from his scalp. Thinking about it now made Ben Journell uneasy.
“When the ambulance gets here, have ’em give Maggie a once-over, then have them wait around until I can do a better search of the surrounding woods,” Ben told Eddie.
“You got it,” Eddie said, stuffing his notebook back into the breast pocket of his shirt.
Ben got back into his cruiser just as the whirling lights of the ambulance approached in his rearview mirror. He pulled around the Pontiac then slowly coasted up the shoulder of the road, shining the windshield-mounted searchlight into the trees. He clicked on the high beams too, though all that seemed to accomplish was to give substance to the clouds of exhaust clogging the air. Fat, white moths swirled in the funnel of light. He was looking for anything—busted tree limbs, trampled underbrush, perhaps some blood on the bark of a tree. But he could see nothing.
Eventually he brought the car to a stop and put it in Park. When he stepped out, he first thought that the temperature had dropped another ten degrees, but then realized he had been sweating to death in the cruiser. Beneath his uniform, his Kevlar vest seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.
Clicking on his flashlight again, he stepped off the road and into the tangled underbrush at the cusp of the woods. Each exhalation clouded before his face and he could feel the sweat on his forehead and at the back of his neck freezing in the night. He crossed several yards into the trees, the network of bare branches crisscrossing the moon above his head. Beneath his heavy boots, dead leaves and fallen tree limbs crunched like potato chips. He paused, scanning the area with the flashlight’s beam. Everything moved—the trees, the twiggy shrubs, the shadows. The world was alive with the chorus of countless insects.
The longer he stared at a spot of darkness, the more he could convince himself that things were moving within. At one point, Ben thought he could hear a high-pitched keening coming from somewhere far back in the woods—a distant falcon screeching from a branch.
“Ben?” Eddie said, coming up behind him.
“Christ. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“The EMTs want to know what they should do. They checked over Mrs. Quedentock and said she looks fine, she’s just a little freaked out, you know? She doesn’t want to go with them, says she doesn’t need an ambulance and just wants to go home. The EMTs are just sitting there, waiting. What should I tell them?”
“Tell them I got some extra flashlights in the trunk of my car,” Ben said. “They can go home after we check the other side of the road.”
5
They searched the woods off Full Hill Road for nearly two hours but found no evidence of a person having been struck by Maggie Quedentock’s car. The EMTs became quickly annoyed and said they had more important things to do than traipse around the woods for what would probably amount to an injured deer, and they soon left. Ben didn’t blame them. He was just relieved that no victim had been found.
It was after three in the morning when the cruiser pulled into the empty parking lot of the police station. At this hour, even Shirley was gone. Any emergency calls would be rerouted to a dispatcher in Cumberland. With the exception of the floodlight that cast an unwavering beam on the American flag in the front yard, the entire building was dark.
Ben parked in a spot right up front then elbowed Eddie awake. Jerking up awkwardly from where he’d been slouched, snoring, against the passenger window, Eddie La Pointe looked around, temporarily disoriented.
“Go home,” Ben told him.
“You going, too?” Eddie already had the passenger door open. The sound of crickets infiltrated the vehicle.
“In a few minutes.”
“Crazy night, huh?”
“You got it. Goodnight, Eddie.”
“Goodnight, Ben.”
Eddie slammed the door and padded across the parking lot to his car with his head down. Ben watched him drive away and turn onto Belfast Avenue before he shut the cruiser down and climbed out. Ben could tell it would be a cold winter up here in the mountains. The trees were already whispering about it and the air smelled smoky and cool. He unlocked the station doors and pushed them open on hinges that shrieked like banshees. Green-and-black checkerboard tile floors, oatmeal-colored walls, fizzy sodium fixtures in the ceiling that didn’t always work—he had become so used to this place that it felt like crawling back into the womb each time he walked through the doors.
In the dispatcher’s cubicle, he fed Shirley’s goldfish, Abbott and Costello, muttering to them as he did so. Then he went into what the guys called the “Batter’s Box,” the spacious room segregated into four cubicles where the officers sat when they weren’t out on the road. Ben unbuttoned his shirt and pulled his vest off, his undershirt matted with sweat. He hung the vest on one of the cubicle walls, directly over a stack of Eddie’s Fangoria magazines and the very slim case file on the unidentified boy whose nude body had washed up on the shores of Wills Creek early last week. To date,
the boy had not been identified or claimed by anyone and, as far as Ben was aware, the pallid, hairless body still sat in a stainless-steel drawer at the county morgue over in Cumberland.
Ben continued down the hall to the kitchen, where he retrieved an apple from the foul-smelling communal refrigerator. There were photographs of some of the officers’ kids stuck to the outside of the fridge with magnets. Taking a knife from his belt, he began cutting the apple into wedges as he headed toward the two-car sally port at the far end of the station. He opened the door to the sally port and felt along the wall for the light switch, while popping one of the apple wedges into his mouth. Dim yellow light poured down from an industrial spotlight in the center of the ceiling housed in a wire casing that reminded Ben of a catcher’s mask. The port was empty—all of the officers took their vehicles home with them—and the room was as cold and as silent as a cave.
That was why he’d put the bat back here.
It was a tiny thing with short brown hair and ears like little radar dishes. It had the fuzzy face of a pig with moist, black eyes. As Ben approached the bell-shaped birdcage that sat on a shelf among paint cans and plastic quarts of motor oil, the creature inside began to twitter and chirp. It hung upside down from the perch, its tiny head bobbing and its piggish little snout sniffing the cool air.
“Hey, bud. You hanging in there?” Two days ago, the thing had gotten trapped in the sally port. He had wanted to let it go but the other guys thought it would be cool to keep the bat as a mascot of sorts, at least for a little while. Mike Keller had gone home and returned with the bell-shaped birdcage. When Chief Harris had simply grunted his indifference, more interested in his upcoming vacation with his wife than any police business, Ben had acquiesced.
So here I am now, three o’clock in the goddamn morning, sticking apple wedges into a birdcage.
He couldn’t help but smile to himself.
“There you go, buddy.” He dropped the final wedge into the cage.
The bat chirped and fluttered its wings.
Both of us trapped here in this town, he thought, surprised by the depth of his comparison. Suddenly, he wanted to release the bat into the night, but he fought off this urge at the last minute.
“Two peas in a pod,” he told the bat before shutting off the light and going home.
Chapter Three
1
From the sky, the rural western Maryland hamlet of Stillwater might appear to be a ghost town. It sits at the bottom of a river valley, bookended to the east and west by the tree-studded swell of the Allegheny Mountains. The town itself is bisected by Wills Creek, which traverses the concrete slalom of the Narrows before emptying into the Potomac River east of town. The roadways twist and wind and turn to dirt the farther out into the foothills they go. The only testament to the town’s connection with the outside world is the two-lane concrete ribbon that is U.S. Route 40, which clings like bunting to the side of Wills Mountain. This cut of asphalt runs for over two hundred miles across the state, from Garrett County straight out to Elkton, where it continues on into Delaware before it disappears completely like the vaporous contrail of a jetliner.
In the predawn hours this Saturday, the streets of Stillwater are empty and dark. Many of the streetlights along Hamilton and Susquehanna are still out due to damage from the recent storm and its subsequent flooding. The stone-fronted shops along Hamilton resemble mausoleums. The bell tower of the Methodist church on Poplar Ridge Road rises before a backdrop of stirring vermilion light that has just barely begun to bleed into the sky. A low susurration whispers through the trees as eddies of autumn wind work their magic along the empty streets.
The old folks rise earliest. These are generations of farmers and blue-collar workers who have eked out an existence for themselves—much as their forefathers had done before them—applying their brawn and discipline toward hard manual labor. Sully Goodwin rises to the horned leaves of the holly bushes scraping against his bedroom window. Since Hugh Crawly split town, Sully has taken over Stillwater’s mail delivery. Without showering, he dresses silently in the dark, his eyes still partially lidded and crusted with sleep, his mouth tasting of the foul cigars and stale beer he had the night before over in Cumberland. His mail truck sits out front of his ranch house—an old Ford station wagon with a detachable orange bubble light that adheres to the roof with magnets. When he’s done with today’s run, he’ll drop the bubble light off at Bobby Furnell’s place, since Bobby uses that same light on the cab of his F-150 when he works construction over in the Gap.
Old Porter Conroy rises early as well, despite having been up late last night dealing with the police and fretting over his livestock. He has a long day ahead of him. The mutilated livestock will need to be incinerated and their remains either buried in the western field or trucked out to the dump. Undoubtedly, he will have to call the Kowalski brothers, those unreliable knucklehead alcoholics, to lend him a hand. Five bucks apiece and he’ll have them doing manual labor all day. He will have to replace the locks on the barn doors, too. For the first time in all his life, he considers getting one of those Yale padlocks Dean Cropsy keeps on his boathouse. Who would have thought it would come to this? He’s got an old remedy for getting rid of the bats as well, but it will take him much of the afternoon to prepare it—a fetid stew that goes on like apple butter but stings the eyes something fierce. Then it’s off to his brother’s place in Charles Town for a few days. He’s decided to lose himself in a sea of slot machines and watered-down cocktails. He knows his problems will still be waiting for him here in Stillwater, but damn if the temporary relief doesn’t do a world of good for his old soul.
Out on Full Hill Road, old Melba Codger sits in her recliner and stares out at a set of blackened windows. In her senility, she believes she can see many shapes capering in the darkness just beyond the glass.
In a two-story A-frame on Susquehanna, seventy-year-old Cordell Jones creeps out of bed, careful not to disturb his wife, and slinks downstairs to the kitchen without turning on a single light. There, he indulges in a sandwich piled high with sliced deli meats and cheeses, mayo and purple spirals of onion. May his acid indigestion and high cholesterol be damned.
Sarah Kamish has not slept well for quite a while now. She leaves her husband in bed—his snoring like the pulverization of granite in a crusher—and wends ghostlike about the rambling old farmhouse. Her son, twenty-two-year-old Michael Kamish, was killed last summer in Iraq…and while she has been haunted by his death every moment since it happened, she has been troubled for the past week by what she assumes to be her own slipping sanity. Late last week, just as she drove back from Cumberland along Route 40 and as the sun set behind the western mountains, she thought she saw Michael standing on the mud-caked embankment of the Narrows. He was still in his military uniform, with a white satchel slung over his right shoulder. As she drove by, his head turned slowly and mechanically and followed her progress along the highway. Sarah slammed on the brakes and got out of the car. She went back around the bend of the highway and crept down the sloping hillside of the embankment that led to the overflowing waters of the Narrows. Of course, it was all just a hallucination; Michael was not there. There in the tall grass, she cried for twenty minutes before returning to her car and driving back into town. Now, Sarah cries silently to herself as she stands in the darkened living room of the old farmhouse—a farmhouse where her parents once lived and where she grew up. It is hers now—hers and her husband’s—and they will be the last of their meager lineage to reside there.
Joe Flip, better known to the patrons of Crossroads as “Flip the Drip,” finds himself jarred awake from a dream that has left him in quite an impressive state of arousal. The details of the dream are lost the moment he opens his eyes, but he knows it had something to do with Wendy Crawly, the attractive, middle-aged waitress who works down at the Belly Barn. Even if she is quite a few years his junior, she continues to be awfully flirty with him whenever he stops into the Barn for lunch. She has
a nice smile and nicer tits and—not for the first time—old Flip the Drip wonders if she’s just been aching for it ever since her husband split town with a younger broad. Recalling the way Wendy Crawly’s breasts fill out her waitress uniform, Flip the Drip fumbles his meaty cock from the fly of his boxer shorts and proceeds to masturbate with the discipline of millworker.
On the outskirts of town, where Wills Creek empties into the steady, black drink that is the Potomac, a woman named Hazel McIntosh is already making coffee in her kitchen. It is still dark outside and she can see nothing beyond the blackened panel of glass above the kitchen sink as she rinses her coffeepot, save for the twinkling of moonlit diamonds glittering along the surface of the river. The flooding had been bad and the river had rushed up to greet the old house where she lives alone with her seven calico cats, and it swept her lawn furniture away. Nights earlier, she had been staring out this very window when she saw a section of the Highland Street Bridge go cruising by. One of its stanchions poked up out of the water like the smokestack of a ship. She guessed that it had been washed straight out into the Chesapeake…or, for that matter, the Atlantic Ocean. Stranger things have happened in her lifetime.
Small towns are secrets kept by the elderly. The old keep watch, and while they don’t quite realize it—not on any conscious level, that is—there is a certain primal part of their makeup, perhaps ingrained in their earthly DNA, that keeps them up and alert and continually rising early to beat the sun at its own game. And it would be a lie to say that, on occasion, one or more of these individuals doesn’t feel a tingling sense of stewardship during these dark, predawn moments—a sense that they have been selected to keep watch over a town that, for years now, has been slowly dying beneath their feet.
The people of the Narrows keep watch.