Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

Try sorting that mail. Her eyes would be blurred by moose-names by the time she finally settled onto a stool for her moose-cow mule. Screw it, she’d just order the vodka neat. Get right to the point.

  Becky, originally from Vermont, had found her way to Maine courtesy of an absolutely worthless boyfriend and then stayed for another one. At least then she’d been closer to Portland, where you could get a decent meal and hear a good band play without driving two hours. When the fine people of the United States Postal Service offered her a promotion that sent her to Greenville, she should have researched the area a bit better before accepting. She’d been ready for a change, though—a bad relationship choice or two had stung her in Portland—and when she went to Greenville to interview, it was July and the place was pretty enough and she’d said why not. She hadn’t really thought through the winter yet. Or realized that she was really moving to Moosington Center, capital of Mooseville, Mooseland.

  We have other animals, she thought now, dumping a stack of letters into an outbound bin as the door chimed and two men walked in.

  Strangers. This wasn’t uncommon in the summer, but Becky knew most of the people who came in after Labor Day. Plus, one of these guys was black. She definitely knew all of the black guys in Greenville. Which wasn’t saying much, considering she had more fingers on one hand than Greenville had black guys.

  “What can I do for you?” she said cheerfully. Her voice was always cheerful. This was one of the reasons she remained employed and placed in front of people. She could be in a miserable damn mood and still sound perky as hell, just as happy as you wanted to believe. Becky Conway’s lyin’ voice was her greatest attribute. And my ass, she thought. Definitely.

  “We’re a little lost,” the white guy said. He wasn’t bad-looking, muscled up and a little rough around the edges, which was how Becky liked her men, but there was something off about his eyes. She squinted and figured it out—they were different colors. Weird. She looked at the black guy, and his eyes seemed absolutely colorless. What was that kind of paint that didn’t have any shine to it? Matte? That was this dude’s eyes.

  “Head south,” Becky said. “If you’re lost, trust me, south is the right direction.”

  The white guy smiled a little at that. “I bet. But I don’t mean lost as in we don’t know which way to drive. I mean lost as in we’re here and we don’t know where to go next.”

  Becky slid the outbound-mail bin across the table and turned back to face him, cocking an eyebrow. “Is that supposed to make sense?”

  “We’re looking for someone who didn’t provide us with a street address,” he said. “Just the PO box. Which is here.” He glanced sideways, taking in the bank of locked boxes. “Think you can help us out?”

  “Wouldn’t be legal of me to,” Becky said. “But gimme the name just for giggles.”

  The hell did she care who they were looking for? Only thing Becky was looking for was a transfer. Maybe getting fired was the fastest route out of here before the snow flew.

  She seemed to be entertaining the white guy, who was grinning at his buddy, but the buddy was not smiling. He was one poker-faced son of a bitch. Kind of seemed like a cop, whereas the white guy kind of seemed like he’d go out of his way to avoid a cop.

  “Leah Trenton,” the white guy said. “Box three seventy-three.”

  “Don’t know her,” Becky said, which was a lie, and she certainly knew box 373. She was forwarding the mail in box 373 every week. Premium priority forwarding, which was a royal pain in her ass, and expensive.

  The black guy took out a phone and set it on the counter. A photograph was on the display, and Becky was about to shake her head and say she didn’t know the woman in it, but then she stopped herself, cocked her head, and took another look. It was an older photo, but she did know the woman. She was Ed Levenseller’s girlfriend…maybe. Anyway, they went around together. Becky had never been clear on the exact formality of the relationship and didn’t particularly care. Ed was one of those guys who never seemed to loosen up much around Becky and would stick to beer when you wanted him to have a bourbon. Leah Trenton was around Greenville less than Ed but still a fair amount. She’d be there at all times of year, coming and going and occasionally checking her mail. She hadn’t done that for quite some time, though, because her mail was being forwarded.

  “Why you looking for her?” Becky asked.

  “You do know her, then?” the black guy said. He had a voice with no treble, just bass.

  “Why you looking for her?” Becky repeated.

  The white guy smiled at her. “You’re not a bullshitter,” he said. “I like that.”

  “Do you, now,” she said. “Well, you can imagine how that makes my day.” He thought he was charming. Figured he was slick enough to impress a hick postal worker, at least. But Becky had dated a lot better than him.

  And a few worse.

  He leaned on the counter. “Uh-huh. Smart as you are, I bet you don’t really need to ask that question either. Couple of guys show up from out of town with a PO box and a name but nothing else, what’s your guess on why we’re looking for her?”

  Becky looked him in the eye and leaned across the counter herself. Got close to him. Held his attention for a moment before whispering, “You want to murder her.” Then she straightened up and laughed. It had been a pretty good line, she thought. The white guy laughed with her. His black compadre did not. He just put the phone back in his pocket.

  “Debt collectors?” Becky said.

  The white guy’s smile widened. Up close, his mismatched eyes weren’t so weird. In fact, they were kind of intriguing. The green one was pretty. Shame he didn’t have two of them.

  “Got us,” he said. “Your pal in box three seventy-three is running a little late and low these days.”

  “She’s no pal of mine.”

  “Thought you didn’t know her,” the black guy said.

  “That’s right.”

  “You know she gets mail here, though,” the white guy said. “And you probably know that a lot of them come with stamps that say things like final notice or urgent.”

  Actually, Becky didn’t recall any of those arriving for box 373, but she’d met debt collectors before, and there was no doubt in her mind that these boys were here about something that was past due. Intuition was one of her strong suits. Like her voice. And her ass.

  “You guys know I can’t answer that,” she said.

  “Does she come in and pick them up? Tell me that much?” the white guy said, still smiling but looking plaintive now, like a bad dog nosing for a treat he doesn’t deserve.

  “She might somewhere,” Becky said, eyeing the clock, which showed it was two minutes to closing time on Friday afternoon. Bring on the stool and the mule. “But she doesn’t do it here. I can tell you that much.”

  “It just stacks up and nobody gets it?”

  Becky shrugged. Said, “That’s one option.”

  They thought about that. It was the black guy who got it first.

  “Forwarded,” he said. “This one’s just part of the chain. She’s got more lined up.”

  Becky didn’t answer.

  “Where’s it go from here?” the white guy said. “Please. Hook us up. We’re sick of driving around here. We need to head south, like you said.”

  “If it goes somewhere from here,” Becky said, “I don’t know what happens to it. I’m just telling you, you’ll be wasting your time if you hang around waiting for her to walk in that door.” She pointed at the door theatrically. “And I’m about to walk out of it, fellas. Quittin’ time. On Friday. The math does itself. I’ve got a date with a moose-cow mule.”

  That made her laugh but neither of them joined in. They were looking at each other as if they were trying to decide what to do next.

  “Moose cow,” the black guy said. She waited to see if he would laugh. He did not.

  “I was nicer than I needed to be,” she told them sweetly. “But that’s all I got, okay?”

&nb
sp; “I could use a drink myself,” the white guy said.

  “She’s talking about a drink?” the black guy asked.

  “I thought so,” the white guy said. He turned back to Becky, fixed the brown eye and the green eye on her, and said, “Let us buy you a round for your trouble?”

  She looked from him to the black guy, who was standing there so motionless it was like he’d been bolted to the floor, and tried to imagine him ordering a moose-cow mule. The thought of it made her lips curl into a smile. She pointed at him. “This one has to order whatever I want him to,” she said. “Is that a deal?”

  “Sure it is,” he answered in that all-bass voice. He looked like you could zap him with a Taser and still not get a reaction.

  “All the moose down in Mooseville liked moose quite a lot, but Becky, who lived north of Mooseville, did not,” Becky told him in a deadpan voice.

  He didn’t so much as blink. Just gazed back at her. She snorted.

  “You are some piece of work. But I’m gonna make you laugh, buddy. Better believe that.”

  “I look forward to it,” he said. Tone of voice like he’d just scheduled a colonoscopy.

  “I bet you do,” she said, coming around the counter and walking toward the door. “Go on and get out of here. I got to close up. You don’t want to stand in my way. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow.”

  The white guy smiled. “You wanna tell us where to find you for that drink and the laugh?”

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Becky Conway said, opening the front door and waving them out. “There’s a moose in the name.”

  Naturally, they went to the wrong place first. They tried the Stress Free Moose before finding her at the more respectably named Moosehead Brew House. There, they bought her four drinks before she told them that box 373’s mail was now being forwarded to Camden. She didn’t remember much of what she said after the fifth or sixth drink. They kept buying; she kept knockin’ ’em back. Hell, it was something different, and in Greenville, Maine, after Labor Day? Something different was always a desirable night.

  She got the white guy to dance with her. She did not get the black guy to dance. He sat on a barstool in the corner, back to the wall, eyes on the door, like some sort of old-time gunslinger. She gave up and tried to force him to pick a song on the digital impostor of a jukebox that had been blaring bad bro country for most of the night.

  “Something that suits your personality,” she said, by then expecting absolutely no reaction. She was surprised when he actually got up and went to the jukebox. Then she choked on her drink when Tupac’s “California Love” came blaring through. The wild energy of the song couldn’t have been less like him, this unblinking dude who looked like he had a resting heart rate of thirty and an exercising heart rate of thirty-one.

  “That’s funny,” she told him as he took his barstool and leaned back against the wall again.

  “Yes,” he told her.

  Now let me welcome everybody to the Wild, Wild West…

  “What’s your name?” Becky asked. Slurred, maybe. She was getting ahead of herself a tiny bit. Better slow down. But a fresh copper mug of moose-cow mule was being pressed into her hand by the white guy.

  “They call me Bleak,” the black guy said, and Becky laughed again, laughed hard. He was funny, this guy. They call me Bleak. Now that, unlike the song, actually seemed to fit him.

  Fresh out of jail, California dreamin’…

  She danced with the white guy again. The bar was crowded and she was spilling her drink. She wasn’t sure what number drink it was. She wasn’t sure how or why she got to talking about Leah Trenton, explaining that she was some kind of hunting guide but probably thought she was better than everybody because she wasn’t big on socializing, just kept to herself, and she’d been completely MIA for most of the summer and then began having her mail forwarded to Camden. She wasn’t sure why she got to talking about Ed Levenseller, let alone writing his address on a cocktail napkin beneath her own number. She was better with addresses than phone numbers. Perks of the profession.

  She knew she was drunk, but it felt different than usual. Higher and faster, her head floating at thirty thousand feet while her heart hammered back down on earth. How many drinks had she had? Better question: How many of her drinks had she watched them handle? You had to be careful, taking drinks from strangers. You had to be careful or you ended up feeling like…

  Like this. Down on your hands and knees in your own living room looking for people who’d just been there with you but now seemed to have vanished as if they’d been imaginary the whole time. Her head drifted higher and her heart pounded faster and she looked for help but couldn’t find it. Her friends were gone.

  They weren’t your friends.

  No, maybe not. She needed a friend. She needed one real bad.

  Where’s the phone? Find the phone.

  She fumbled at her pockets, but the phone wasn’t there. Pockets too small, jeans too tight. Where was her purse? The couch, maybe? She smelled vomit and didn’t remember getting sick. Her head floated higher, higher, higher. Heartbeat thundered lower, lower, lower. She crawled for the couch, made it about ten feet, and fell onto her side. The room spun around her and she thought she saw the two men for just an instant, standing in the hallway, watching her with unblinking eyes, but then they were gone and the spinning went on and darkness crowded in at the edges. She tried to remember what to do, where to go, who to call. She couldn’t find answers for any of those questions, though. The only thing she remembered clearly was that she hadn’t gotten the black guy to laugh after all.

  Matter of fact, Becky realized as blackness washed in and over her like an eternal tide, she didn’t think he’d even smiled.

  23

  While they waited for the bus that morning, Matt Bouchard told Hailey he had a good start on the research and that they should meet in person to discuss it.

  “Can’t you just e-mail it?” she asked.

  Good thing he was prepared for this question. He hadn’t spent the entire night online and wasted valuable lawn-mowing money on a Genealogy.com subscription just to hand his intel over without some face time.

  “Nope,” he said with what he hoped passed for an air of disappointment. “I wish. But when the information is confidential and privileged, it’s such a risk. I’ve got a Gmail account, and…” He paused, made a show of considering, then shook his head. “I just don’t trust the security on that. One hacker could cause a lot of trouble for Google, you know? So what we do—I mean, my mom and the other pros—what they do in this business is stick to hard copies. It’s safer, because you can destroy them.”

  Hailey cocked an eyebrow at him as if she didn’t completely buy the reasoning but then shrugged. “Whatever. Where do you want to meet up?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Someplace where nobody is listening,” she said. “Not school or my house or anyplace like that. Someplace private.”

  Excellent. Privacy was good. Privacy with Hailey Chatfield was a wonderful idea. “You have a bike?” Matt asked.

  “Yeah, my aunt got me one, but I don’t ride it. I’m not ten.”

  Matt nodded, trying to pretend that he wasn’t embarrassed. “I’m only on mine for business. It saves time, you know.”

  Hailey’s lip twitched. “Sure,” she said. “Okay, so if I ride my bike for business, where would I go?”

  He was all too ready for this question, because he’d spent two summers imagining where he’d take a girlfriend if he actually had one.

  “Rockport Harbor,” he blurted out. “There’s a park right by the harbor, but there’s also a trail that goes up to a waterfall, and almost nobody uses it. It’s real pretty up there and, like, totally private.”

  There was the lip-twitch smile again. “You do a lot of business by the waterfall?”

  She was only a year older than him, but she had a way of asking teasing questions that made him feel as if she believed she was twenty years older.
/>   “Not a lot,” Matt said, refusing to take the bait of the question or back down from his chosen meeting place. “It’s a good spot, though. For your needs.”

  “For my needs,” she echoed. “Great.”

  Then the bus arrived and Hailey went straight to the back seat. Matt fell into the middle of the bus, not wanting to follow her. Kids nodded at her, but that was all. She was interesting to everyone because she was the new girl and everyone thought she was pretty because…well, because that was an objective fact. She popped her AirPods into her ears on the bus, as if she wanted to build a wall between herself and the rest of the kids.

  Matt sat with Danny Knowlton and listened to Danny’s theories on the New England Patriots, trying hard to pretend interest and not glance repeatedly at the back of the bus. Yesterday, Danny had asked Matt if he could see into Hailey’s bedroom from his house, and everyone had laughed when Matt hotly said he had no idea. His friends were all equipped with teenage-calibrated lie detectors. Everyone already knew he had a crush on her, and none of them thought he had a chance.

  They also did not have a meeting scheduled at the waterfall, however. Bouchard 1, losers 0.

  24

  When the kids left for school, Leah sat down at the computer, determined to do some research into the death of Everett Spoonhour and work proactively to either address her paranoia or lessen it. Something about the computer in the new house bothered her, though. She was suddenly conscious of things like IP address tracking and, damn it, cell phone tracking. She wished the kids didn’t have phones but it hardly seemed like something she could take away from them now. Let me have your only link to the friends and world you left behind. We’re not going to use them anymore.

  No, she wasn’t going to do that. But all the same, she missed those days out by Moosehead where Hailey had hunted for a cell signal in vain, and Nick had expressed dismay over the lack of Wi-Fi.

  It was safer there. You made a mistake, bringing them to Camden.

  But what could she do? Keep on the run for the rest of her life, without even knowing whether she was truly being pursued?