Dark Channel

by Ray Garton

  “I’m … sorry. I’m sorry.” Lauren lowered her eyes to the pack of Marlboro Lights on the table. She hadn’t had a cigarette since they’d been taxed so much that one pack cost as much as a paperback novel, but she reached for Joan’s now, her fingers quivering as she shook one out and lit it with Joan’s butane lighter. She coughed lightly with the first drag but not at all with the second. “I have a son,” she said quietly.

  “So why did your husband say you—”

  “He’s not my husband,” she whispered, then quickly added, “Please, please keep that to yourself, I don’t know what he’ll do if he finds out I told you, but—but—”

  “Are you in trouble?” Joan’s eyes were wide now, her suspicion replaced with concern.

  “No, it’s nothing like that. I’m … my son is—”

  The door opened and Jordan’s laughter accompanied Coogan’s apologetic voice: “—let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

  “No, you don’t have to do that. We just had some with lunch.”

  “Dessert, then. I insist. That’s twice in one day I jump down your throat for no reason. Nothing wrong with being curious, for crying out loud. It’s a free country. How about a piece of pie?”

  “Well, if you insist.”

  Lauren turned to see a young blond girl follow them in and hurry behind the counter into the back of the diner.

  Jordan and Coogan headed toward the table.

  Lauren quickly looked at Joan and breathed, “Please don’t say anything. We’ll talk.”

  Joan nodded, stared at Lauren a moment with a tight, worried expression, then looked up at the men and smiled.

  “How you doin’, sweetheart?” Coogan asked her, gently putting a hand on her head.

  “I’m okay, Coogan.”

  “Atta girl. He had family, didn’t he?”

  “A sister in Seattle. I should call her.” She sighed heavily and closed her eyes, leaning her head on Coogan’s ample belly.

  “You want me to do it, Joanie?”

  “Oh, no. I will. I just don’t look forward to it.”

  Chelsea waddled out of the kitchen and stood beside Coogan. “Cindy’s here, babe. You go home now, okay?”

  “No, Chels, I think I’m going to do some shopping.”

  “Sounds like a plan. You need some cash?”

  “No, but thanks.” Joan stood and turned to Jordan. “You mind if I steal your wife away for a couple hours? I could use some company right now.”

  “Sure, no problem,” Jordan said, then to Lauren: “You want to meet back at the hotel?”

  She nodded, unable to look at him.

  Joan dismissed herself to get her things in the back, and Coogan asked, “What kinda pie you like, Lorne? Apple? Banana cream? Peach?”

  “Banana cream’s fine.”

  When Coogan went to the counter, leaving them alone, Lauren stood and busied herself putting the cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “You all right?” Jordan whispered. She nodded, still not looking at him.

  “Okay, listen. See what you can find out about Paul Kragen. Apparently she knew him, so see if he had anything to do with the Alliance, if he didn’t like them, maybe. Okay?” When she didn’t respond, he said it again, and Lauren nodded. “Try not to be too long.”

  Coogan returned to the table with two slices of pie and Joan came back out, apron gone, purse slung over her shoulder. Lauren was silent as Joan said goodbye to the others and they went out onto the sidewalk where—

  —Paul Kragen’s blood was drying to a rusty brown on the concrete.

  Joan stumbled and made a quiet strangled sound in her throat before quickening her pace, eyes front, neck stiff. Two leftover tears rolled down her cheeks but were quickly swept away with a trembling knuckle.

  “I’m gonna be okay,” Joan said with a sniff. She seemed to be speaking to herself rather than to Lauren. “Now. I think you should talk to me, Bonnie.”

  “My name is Lauren.”

  Joan stopped, turned, and studied Lauren for a long moment, her puffy red eyes hard as they moved carefully over Lauren’s face. Then she nodded, began walking again, and said, “Yeah, you should definitely talk to me.”

  Lauren did talk; she told Joan everything.

  6.

  Jordan spent nearly an hour in the Lemurian talking with the men at the coffee counter. Actually, he did more listening than talking because the dominant topic of discussion was Paul Kragen.

  They talked about his generosity, his sense of humor, his sensitivity (although the Lemurian regulars saw this as more of a weakness than a strength—they could not quite understand a man who cried at sad movies and made no apologies—they all thought highly of him anyway); they praised his community spirit, his talents as a journalist and his reliability.

  But no one spoke of his death.

  Jordan waited, expecting someone to ask, Who could do such a thing? or to say, When they find the son of a bitch who did this …

  But no one did.

  In spite of their apparent admiration for Paul Kragen, the men at the coffee counter did not question his death; they did not express outrage or indignation. They seemed instead to accept it, perhaps even ignore it, and spoke only of what a good man Paul Kragen had been.

  “What did he do at the newspaper exactly?” Jordan asked during a pause in the conversation. “Did he write a column or was he a reporter?”

  “Both,” Coogan said. “He wrote a column every week and did some reporting, too.”

  “Good writer,” the man called Flash added.

  “A little opinionated,” Amos said.

  “That’s what made him so interesting,” Coogan responded, lighting another Camel.

  Then at the end of the counter in a quiet voice that barely rose above the others and the clamor from the kitchen, Wally mumbled into his coffee cup, “Guess he was a little too interesting.”

  Although this resulted in a few self-conscious harrumphs and loud sniffs at the counter, Jordan acted as if he hadn’t heard the remark and fought his desire to pursue it. Instead, he stood, thanked Coogan for the pie, reminded him of their dinner date that night, and said goodbye to the others, telling them he wanted to take a walk through the town before going back to the hotel.

  He indeed planned to walk through town—straight to the library, where he hoped to find a few samples of Paul Kragen’s work. Jordan suspected he knew what Kragen’s favorite topic was, but wanted to confirm his suspicion by reading a few of the columns himself.

  Coogan left the diner, too. His shoes felt heavy as he walked to his pick-up truck parked around the corner and it was only with effort that he did not hang his head and stare at the ground. Coogan himself felt heavier than usual and seemed to sink deep into the patched and taped seat of his truck. He tried not to drive too fast, but wanted to get to his bed as quickly as possible. The short trip seemed much longer than it actually was because he felt some bad shakes coming on; he was surprised they hadn’t come much earlier because he’d felt their subtle beginnings, but now that they’d started—deep in his bones where they always started, too deep to be seen yet—they weren’t wasting any time in coming to the surface.

  After parking at the top of the hill, he walked through his store—which was being tended by eighteen-year-old Teddy Caulder—through his living room, and straight to his bed, slamming the door of his bedroom behind him. His legs weakened halfway across the room and he reached out for something to lean on, but only fell forward, slamming onto the mattress heavily with a deep and miserable groan. He clumsily propped himself up on one elbow and hugged his pillow to his big chest to hold back the tremors that began to roll through his body, but it did no good. His arms quaked, then his legs; his head rocked on his neck and his shoulders hunched uncontrollably. It hadn’t happened with such force since his wife died; it hadn’t bothered hi
m so much then because it was expected, it seemed a natural reaction to such a great loss. But this was different. It frightened him … because it told him he was more scared than he’d allowed himself to admit and Paul Kragen’s bloody death had jarred that fear loose, allowing it to rise up, like something bloated and rotten and clotted with moss rising from the bottom of a dirty river.

  Coogan groaned again, hugging the pillow even harder as he shook.

  He looked at a picture of his daughter and two grandchildren on his dresser across the room. They were all wearing the kind of smiles he’d not seen on their faces in far too long.

  Coogan did something else he hadn’t done in a long time. Moving unsteadily off the bed, he knelt beside it and silently prayed for them.

  In the library’s dense silence, the dry rustling of newspaper pages being turned sounded like great trees being mowed down en masse in the forest.

  Jordan could feel the librarian’s eyes on his back like two needle-thin laser beams. She was a skeleton with nicotine-stained skin—like yellowed parchment—so tautly stretched over her bones it seemed ready to rip and crumple around her at any moment. He was a stranger in a small tourist town that was not accustomed to strangers using the library, and he’d expected such scrutiny, so that, in itself, did not bother him. But in light of what he’d been reading, he began to wonder if he shouldn’t be bothered by everything.

  For thirty minutes, he’d been thumbing through back editions of the Grover Sentinel looking for Paul Kragen’s columns and articles. There was no shortage of them; Kragen had apparently been the Sentinel’s primary contributor. His column, Kragen’s Korner, was well written, usually humorous with serious undertones and always concerned with his community. But more than half of the columns Jordan read involved, in one way or another, and always negatively, the Alliance. It was obvious that Paul Kragen had not been pleased with the Alliance’s decision to set up headquarters in Grover.

  After apparently researching the group at length, Kragen had come to the conclusion that the Alliance—unlike many of the other small and unusual religious and spiritual groups that had made Grover their home—was in pursuit of more than just enlightenment, peace and harmony; he concluded that they would eventually seek out publicity, national acceptance, and of course, money, and that they would by no means remain small. Compared with other similar groups at the time, the Alliance had been a reasonably large group already when it made Grover its home base, but for some time Kragen had been predicting that it would become larger and more powerful—financially and politically—and this bothered him, mostly because he feared the group’s power would begin in Grover. He was afraid the group would quickly set deep roots in the town and have a strong effect on its people. On his people.

  In later columns, after his predictions began to come true, he used quotes from Hester Thorne’s many interviews on television and in national publications to make his point, and his point was this: the Alliance was an organization whose message was not only vaguely broad but so “wishy-washy and interchangeable” that it could, if properly manipulated, please just about anyone looking for something to believe in, and lacked the firm conviction of sincere principles and teachings that usually accompanied a belief system that simply wanted to convey a heartfelt message. Kragen maintained that, if carefully scrutinized, the group’s core message was morally and ethically questionable, but was so hidden in sweetened double-talk that most people couldn’t find it, let alone understand it. In short, Paul Kragen believed the Alliance was up to something. Without coming off as a paranoid crank ranting about global conspiracies, Kragen eloquently expressed his fear that the Alliance had greater (and far more sinister) aspirations than it was admitting to and this disturbed him for, apparently, one reason only: it was reaching for its secret goals from the town he loved, using the people he loved as a sort of innocuous front for whatever those goals might be. Although he never actually said so, Kragen was clearly determined to learn exactly what those goals were and to expose them to the people of Grover, to whom he was so obviously, strongly—and touchingly—devoted.

  Maybe he found it, Jordan thought, closing the last paper of the stack. Maybe that’s why he’s dead. Just like Harvey Bolton. After a moment of silently staring at the stack of papers, fingering a corner of the top one and chewing his lip, Jordan thought, Of course that’s why he’s dead, you idiot. But why doesn’t everyone else realize that, or even mention it? And if that’s the case, why did Kragen’s killers dump him half-alive in the middle of town while Bolton disappeared entirely? Did they think he was dead, maybe ? Or was it a message—a warning—to the whole town?

  Then again, maybe the Alliance had nothing at all to do with Kragen’s death, perhaps not even with Bolton’s disappearance. But Jordan doubted that; he doubted it strongly.

  “Is something wrong?”

  He jerked in his chair and looked up at the cadaverous librarian, who stood beside him with hands locked behind her back, eyes somehow gently curious and stern at the same time. Her voice sounded like something thick and wet being sucked down a drain.

  “No,” he said with a smile, “no, just thinking. That’s all.” She nodded stiffly and returned to her desk. Jordan returned the stack of papers to the proper shelf and left the library with his hands in his pockets.

  By the time Lauren was finished talking, she and Joan were seated on a bench at the edge of a grassy square in the center of town; picnic tables, a swing set and jungle gym were arranged on the grass in the shade of several tall oak trees that leaned protectively over the small park.

  Lauren could say little of Jordan’s reasons for coming to Grover, but she’d talked for nearly half an hour of her own. She hoped for some sympathy, perhaps even some advice considering Joan’s former involvement with the Alliance.

  But Joan said nothing, didn’t even look at Lauren; she stared, instead, at an old clock set into the Alpine-style false front of a building across the street. The clock’s face was cracked and the hands were frozen at eleven fifty-nine.

  “I don’t know why I’ve told you this,” Lauren said, deciding to stare at the clock, too. She suddenly felt foolish for telling her secret to a total stranger. She also felt guilty. What if Jordan found out? She wondered if she had put them in some sort of danger; Joan didn’t seem to be a threat, but Lauren didn’t know her and had no reason to trust her.

  “This was stupid. I’m sorry. Really.” She turned to Joan to say, Forget about it, okay? Instead, she just frowned.

  Joan Maher had a pleasant face, almost pixieish, but Lauren had thought from the moment they’d met that it was a flexible face; it could probably look very mysterious and sexy if Joan wanted it to and, if she became angry, probably very cruel. Now it looked deeply troubled. Her small nose was slightly wrinkled, eyes narrowed, lips pressed hard together as if a string behind the bridge of her nose were being pulled, tightening the features of her face.

  “Why?” Joan asked finally.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Why did you tell me?”

  “I … don’t know. I needed to tell someone, I guess. Jordan and I … we don’t seem to get along well. I don’t think he wants me here. But I’m desperate. I want my son and he said he’d try to help me get him back. And you said you were with the Alliance once, so I thought … I guess I don’t know what I thought.”

  “You want me to help you? Is that it?”

  Lauren leaned closer to her. “Can you?”

  After a moment, Joan shook her head, still staring at the clock, then she blinked, as if coming from a trance, and looked at Lauren. “You want some advice?”

  “Please.”

  “Go home and hire someone to kidnap your son. Don’t try to get him yourself,”

  “Hi … hire someone to … kidnap Nathan? I can’t afford that!” she hissed. “I told you, my husband took all of our money! I wouldn’t know how to hire a kidnapper a
nyway. I doubt they’re listed in the Yellow Pages!”

  “You can find someone in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine. They’re expensive, but … you want your son back? Borrow the money. Steal it if you have to.” She spoke quietly and calmly, as if she were telling Lauren how to write a resume. “Because if you try to get him back on your own, you know what’s going to happen? They’ll call the police the minute they know you’re on the grounds and you and your friend will be hauled off to jail. And you know what else? They’ll have the law on their side. They’ve broken no laws and you’ll be trespassing and disturbing the peace and god knows what else. They’ll press charges as hard and as far as they can and you’ll waste a lot of time with police and bail bondsmen and lawyers. And you won’t get your son back.”

  Joan’s words were like a slicingly chilly draft on the back of Lauren’s neck. “This has happened before, hasn’t it? Hasn’t it?”

  Joan turned to the clock again.

  “Has … has it happened to you? Is that why you’re not answering?”

  Joan’s face did not change; she stared at the clock. “Is he in trouble?” Lauren whispered. “Is my son in danger?”

  “Just do what I told you. Leave here. Okay? It’ll be a lot easier and a lot more effective. And a lot safer.” Looking at her again, Joan asked firmly, “Okay?”

  “I … I don’t know if I can.”

  Joan stood abruptly. “Then we shouldn’t be seen together. They don’t like me as it is.”

  Frightened, Lauren stood, too, but on weakened legs. She spoke rapidly and without thinking: “What did your friend mean? About the children and caves? Did they do that? Did they kill him? Coogan thought so. Didn’t he?” When Joan didn’t look at her, Lauren clutched her elbow with a trembling hand. “Did they kill him?”

  “Here comes your friend,” Joan said quietly.