by Joe Hart
“Garrison, stop.” The deputy turned, a confused look neighboring on stupidity hung on his face. “I’ll handle it,” the sheriff said, and strode past his subordinate toward the figure that hadn’t moved.
As he approached the man, he studied him, waiting for the signs of flight that he half expected. The man didn’t even seem to be looking at him. The dark glasses were trained on the still-dripping car below them.
When he was within speaking distance, the sheriff stopped, his hand resting on the butt of his service weapon. Something familiar surrounded the man, an aura of recognition that he couldn’t place.
“Sir, this is a crime scene. You can’t be here right now.” The sheriff searched the area behind the man for a four-wheeler or vehicle that he might have driven.
The man raised his hand to his face and pulled off his glasses, and looked directly at the sheriff. “Hello, Sheriff Dodd.”
Dodd’s mouth opened and then closed. His hand reached from his weapon to his own sunglasses and pulled them from his face.
“Lance?”
The man nodded and a melancholy smile drew across his lips.
“Holy shit.” The sheriff stared for a moment longer, and then something locked into place within his mind. He glanced back over his shoulder at the tow truck and the car attached to it. His head drooped forward, and he shook it in disbelief.
Without looking at Lance, he said, “You called it in, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
Dodd looked up and saw the grimace that had contorted Lance’s face.
“How?”
He heard the air expel from Lance’s lungs. It sounded sad, like the last breeze before the first snowfall.
Lance lowered his eyes to the ground at his feet. “My father told me. I must have blocked it out, and I only just remembered. He told me what he’d done to her and that she was in the river near the weeping willow.”
Sheriff Dodd turned and saw the ancient tree that sat just up the rise from the riverbed, its low boughs hanging in a mournful show of respect. He shifted his gaze back to the child he had carried from the field beyond in the light of a moon over twenty years before. “I’m sorry.” It was the only thing he could think of to say.
Lance nodded and turned from the river. He scanned the horizon and hunched his shoulders as the breeze returned, whispering of the fall that had only just begun. “Thank you. I wanted to tell you that. I never got to say it before.” Lance looked across the distance between them, at the aging sheriff. The man was different now, but also very much the same. He still held dignity and a rightness that time hadn’t stripped him of.
The sheriff nodded and squinted again at the man before him, not really understanding what he was feeling but knowing enough not to question it. It was as if something tired and worn had finally ended.
Lance turned and walked across the field without another look back. The sheriff heard his receding footsteps breaking the dry chaff of the last crop as he went.
“Sheriff?”
Dodd looked down to where Garrison waited, his hands twitching nervously at his sides. He pulled his hat down closer to his head and stepped down the slope of the hill, toward the awaiting deputy and divers, who had stored their gear away. There was work to be done and no one else to do it.
The door of the Land Rover snapped shut, locking out the coolness of the day. Lance sighed and looked down at his hands, which sat on his thighs. The plastic and titanium prosthetic pieces clicked as he flexed and moved the fingers that he could still feel but were no longer there.
“You okay?”
He looked to his right and smiled at the imploring look on Mary’s face. “Never been better,” he said.
The concerned creases in her brow remained until he leaned across the center console and kissed her on the mouth. When he sat back in his seat, her expression relaxed and he saw the tension that had been building prior to the trip begin to dissipate like mist in a morning sun.
“Are you feeling okay?” he asked.
She tilted her head and nodded, rubbing her growing belly for a moment before reaching out to hold his hand. “Just fine. I’m just worried that the nursery won’t be done in time.”
Lance looked into her teasing green eyes and sighed. Mary laughed and squeezed his hand.
“I’ll finish painting soon. We have another four months, you know,” Lance said, turning the key in the ignition.
“I know, and I’m not pressuring you, although I don’t know why you keep insisting on pink when we don’t know what it is yet.”
Lance smiled and looked out of the driver’s window at the shorn field beside the SUV. Mary had objected over and over again when he’d first brought the paint and stuffed animals home from the store, which were definitely girlish in nature. He told her he’d repaint and return the animals if he was wrong, but he just had a hunch. She had rolled her eyes at him and left him to the plastering of bunnies and pink ducks on the walls of the room they had designated as “baby’s space” in the quaint house they’d purchased only months before.
He had withheld the image in his mind from her, unlike what had transferred between Anthony’s ghost and himself when the specter had touched him the second time in the room while he’d pretended to be bolted to the chair. Anthony had shown him exactly what he’d done to his wife the night he’d caught them trying to escape. It had flashed in fast-forward through Lance’s brain, and he’d screamed internally as he watched the river flow around the car’s windows as it sank beneath the surface, his mother’s unconscious face vanishing below the ebb of water.
But the memory that drove him to buy the female articles for the room he wasn’t ready to share yet, although it still danced across the field of his mind daily, his vision of the little girl in a pink sundress he had seen staring out of the window of the car, her dark hair matching Mary’s almost exactly. And he bet if she had turned to look at him, her eyes would have been green.
He smiled again and saw Mary examining his face, looking for an answer. No, he wasn’t ready to tell her what their daughter would look like yet. For right now, he’d keep it to himself.
“How far are you from being done?” Mary asked as he pulled the Land Rover onto the paved road and began to accelerate from the field behind them, a house he refused to look at dotting the background.
“Maybe another week,” he said, raising his eyebrows and smiling with one side of his mouth.
“I’m so sorry you had to start the book over from scratch.”
“It’s okay. This version is even better than the first one I wrote, as it should be.”
The car was silent for a while, with only the humming of the tires beneath them and the whistle of the air outside.
“Is it a good ending?” she asked, reaching out to hold his hand again.
He squeezed her fingers in his palm where he could still feel her warmth, and nodded. “Better than I ever imagined.”
THE END
Author’s Note
First off, thanks so much for reading Lineage. It’s readers like you who make independent writers like myself yearn to create more. Also, I’d like to take a moment to tell a little about Lineage’s background and how it came to be.
Lineage came to me in bits and pieces after I’d published Midnight Paths in October of 2011. As I said in the foreword, I’ve always been in love with ghost stories. The best I’ve ever read is The Shining, hands down. No other book has literally jolted me from the story with what was on the pages. A well-written ghost story has always been the pinnacle of scary for me, so I decided that I would write something contemporary with enough twists to keep people guessing. Several of the scenes within the story came from experiences in my everyday life, like the part where Lance is looking at his phone in the middle of the night and then sees the face of a ghost looking at him. I was looking at my phone one night, and when I shut it off, I was blind from the light of the screen. I thought, What if there is a face, inches away, looking at me right now
? Scared the hell of out of me, and I logged it for the story.
Lineage was a labor of love over a six-month period, and as I wrote it I surprised myself with where the story actually went. Most times the story takes on a life of its own, but this time it was alive without my realizing it!
In any event, I hope that you enjoyed the dark journey, and as always, any feedback and reviews on Amazon are greatly appreciated! If you would like to keep up with me and my upcoming projects, please find my author page on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Joe-Hart/345933805484346 or follow me on Twitter- @AuthorJoeHart.
Once again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for spending your hard-earned dollars and time on something I created. There is no better feeling a writer can have than knowing a complete stranger enjoys their work.