The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Henry took a deep breath.

  “I remember,” he said. “I remember going down into the tunnels. There was a lot of rubble at first, but it cleared out some. It was damp and we hadn’t gone very far before it was cold, too. I remember that—how cold it was even in July. Perry begged me to stop. But I wouldn’t. I was so angry, and every time Perry spoke it just made me angrier. The whole time Perry was crying, and …” He took a deep breath.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I just … I left him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Next thing I remember we were outside. We had had a fight and Harold Crawford was there. My mother was dead. I knew it as soon as I saw the police car. Nobody had to tell me. I knew it the way I knew—the way I knew—Dad—” He paused for breath, swallowed.

  “The way you knew what, Henry?”

  “Nothing.”

  “At the church the other day, you were talking about the day your mother died. You said you were afraid someone would come and take your dad away, too.”

  “It’s just the way kids think—”

  She clutched his hand. “Don’t run away from this.”

  “Jesus, Emily, don’t you remember the talk—”

  “Yes, I remember the talk but, Henry”—she massaged the tiny muscle between his thumb and forefinger, working the tension away—”you have to say it. You have to face it.”

  “He killed her,” he whispered. “I think he killed her. And everyone in town knew it.”

  She took his face between her hands and held his gaze. “Maybe they did, but no one—no one, Henry—ever blamed him.”

  “I did,” he said. “I blamed him. And at the same time, I was so afraid they were going to take him away.”

  “No one was ever going to take him away from you,” she said.

  “But someone did,” he said.

  In the silence that followed, the gray room itself seemed subtly altered, strange, the knotted sheets, half visible, twisted into shadowy whorls and ridges like some alien landscape.

  “I’m not crazy,” he said.

  She studied him for a moment, her face sober.

  “I was ten when my father died, Henry. It wasn’t even remotely my fault, but I felt responsible all the same.” She rolled onto her back and rubbed her temples with the heels of her thumbs. “I know how it feels. Like you didn’t measure up somehow.”

  “This is different.”

  “Is it? All I’m saying is the past doesn’t go away. It has consequences. Your mother didn’t just die, Henry. She suffered an enormous amount of pain and you had to watch that. You felt powerless, betrayed. And all that other stuff—your suspicions about your father, the flood, whatever happened between you and Perry—all that stuff hitting you at the same time, you’d be crazy if it didn’t make you a little crazy.”

  “You think I’m imagining that my father was murdered? That it’s some kind of huge psychological projection?”

  “Not necessarily. I’m just saying that it makes a kind of sense. That maybe it helps you feel better about yourself if you believe he didn’t kill himself, if he was murdered. That way you get a chance to save him, to hunt down his killer, to make it up to him.”

  “To make what up to him?”

  “Whatever it was between you two. To forgive him, maybe.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that simple. I haven’t talked to Perry in years. Why did he show up at Dad’s funeral? And what about Asa, with these mystery investments in Holland Coal—when everybody knows the mines have been closed for decades? Or Penny Kohler. She says Dad went to the mines that night. She’s almost sure of it. Everywhere I look the mines come up. Once or twice, I can accept as coincidence. But this—this is a pattern. Dad saw something up there, something that shook him up enough that he called Benjamin Strange—”

  “He might have been calling about the church social, Henry.”

  “He said it was a big story. Why would Ben lie about that? Something is going on here, Emily. Somebody was in my house when I got home. I could hear him breathing.”

  He paused, that phrase—

  —I could hear him breathing—

  —resonating in his mind. He felt a fleeting moment of recognition—something about the ragged, laborious nature of the intruder’s respiration—but before he could catch hold of it and take a closer look, Emily was speaking.

  “But it’s all so crazy. Murder and conspiracy—and then, if that’s not enough, some kind of mystical force that wards off violence and disease.”

  He sat up and switched on the lamp.

  “What about your mother, Emily—”

  Her face hardened. “My mother doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Maybe she does. Not directly, but if there is some kind of force, if it is fading away, that would explain some things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like why she got sick. You said it happened overnight, like somebody threw a switch.”

  “I said it got worse, Henry. She’s had emphysema for years.”

  “But the way you describe it, it fits the pattern.”

  “How?”

  “It was a chronic condition, but she basically held her own against it, right?”

  “Sometimes she took a turn for the worse.”

  “But that’s the pattern. Those downturns, I bet they correspond to the periods Ben was talking about—the times when crime and illness surged.”

  He reached out to her, but she flinched away.

  “I don’t want to talk about this, Henry, okay?”

  “Emily—”

  “Look,” she said abruptly, “I can’t do this right now. Mom …” She took a breath, then looked up at him. “The doctors say it’s just a matter of time now. Probably sooner than later. At first, I thought, maybe if we spent some time together, maybe it would help, but this …” She shook her head. “But this is—If I got my hopes up and—and something happened—If it didn’t work out—I don’t know if I could take that.”

  Her voice broke. She turned away, dislodging Aquinas.

  The cat stalked away, the room silent but for the faint tattoo of his claws against the hardwood floor.

  Emily’s shoulders heaved.

  “Hey,” Henry said.

  She shrugged his hand away. “This was a mistake.”

  “What?”

  “I just can’t do this. This is too fast.” She sat up with her back to him.

  “Emily—”

  “This was a mistake.” She stood, reaching for her clothes. “I’m not ready for this. I’m sorry.”

  He watched, paralyzed, as she dressed and hurried out of the room. And then something shook him awake, a shrill internal voice—

  —don’t blow it this time—

  —that propelled him from the tangled sheets and into the hall, still struggling into his clothes. She was at the base of the stairs before he caught up with her.

  “Emily—”

  The look in her eyes—not anger exactly, but hurt and fear, a hurt and fear so deep he couldn’t fully plumb it, as though he had touched some central place inside her, a nerve chafed raw over long years—stopped him cold.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You need so much, Henry. You always have. And right now, with Mom and everything, I just don’t have that much to give. You understand?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll call,” she said, “when I can. Okay?”

  “Yeah, okay. That’s fine.”

  She let herself out and he held that image in his mind for a moment, her slim figure poised against the dark, snow spitting down around her from the enormous pressing vacuum of the sky. Then the door shut, and he was alone in the silent house. In the dim kitchen, he made coffee and sat staring out into a welter of storm and night, his mind filling up with things he didn’t want to think about. It was dawn nearly before his own words came back to him, barbed with a truth he hadn’t even noticed.
/>   I could hear him breathing.

  Chapter 15

  By the time Henry angled the Volaré into a spot on the courthouse square the next day, the snow had tapered off to flurries. He killed the engine, silencing the radio in the midst of talk about a second front rolling in later in the week. Beyond the windshield, the bank sign cycled through a litany of time (1:07 P.M.) and temperature (28° Fahrenheit).

  Henry tugged on his gloves before he got out of the car. At the door of the Observer, he paused momentarily, steeling himself for the confrontation to come.

  “Mr. Sleep!”

  He turned at the shout.

  Harold Crawford hurried across the street from the courthouse, waving his arms. He dragged in a long breath as he stepped onto the sidewalk. “I’m glad I caught you. It’ll save me a phone call.”

  “You have something?”

  “The lab work on your burglary. Nothing we can use, unfortunately.” He paused. “You notice anything missing at the house?”

  “No.”

  “All’s well that ends well, then.” He blew into his hands. “How are you bearing up?”

  “Fine. I’m doing fine.”

  Crawford shook his head solemnly. “It’s just a hell of a thing.” He reached out and shook Henry’s hand. “We’ll keep working on it. I promise you that, Mr. Sleep. Meantime, you holler if we can do anything for you.” He pushed his hat back on his forehead as he turned away. The gesture reminded Henry of the man who had driven him home nearly two decades gone, the young deputy nervously chewing at his lip as he turned to answer the boy’s question:

  It’s my mom, isn’t it?

  I’m sorry, Crawford had said, and Henry could still recall the sympathy in that voice.

  On impulse, he said, “Sheriff, there is something else.”

  Harold Crawford wheeled around to face him.

  “My father,” Henry said.

  “What about him?”

  “I was wondering. When you did your investigation, did the subject of Holland Coal ever come up?”

  “Holland Coal?”

  Crawford took a step closer, and Henry felt a twinge of doubt. Memory gripped him: the look on the sheriff’s face when he had asked to see the case file, something like anger rocking down behind those eyes.

  “I don’t recollect anything like that,” Crawford said. “Maybe I should look into it. Who is it you’ve been talking to, exactly, Mr. Sleep?”

  And Henry—thinking abruptly of Crawford lumbering back into the lives of Asa and Penny, people who had suffered enough in all this mess—seized the next name that came into his head. “Raymond Ostrowski,” he said.

  “I see.” Crawford glanced at the newspaper office and nodded. “Well, I’ll check it out, Mr. Sleep, but it’s hard to see what it could mean. Those old mines have been closed long as I’ve been in these parts. Like I said before, this kind of thing, it’s awful hard to solve.”

  He held Henry’s gaze for a long moment, and once again Henry had the disquieting sense of something else behind those pale blue eyes, the hateful regard of a serpent maybe, icy and remote. Then Harold Crawford turned away.

  Henry watched him all the way across the street.

  Grateful for the warmth, Henry shucked his coat inside the newspaper office, a long, narrow storefront tiled in green and white. The receptionist directed him to Ben’s office, in the back corner, past a disused layout area complete with old-fashioned pasteup boards and a common work space where a lone reporter sat staring glumly into a computer terminal.

  The door to Ben’s office stood ajar.

  “Working hard?” Henry said.

  “Hardly working.”

  Ben sat with his feet propped on the radiator, staring out the window into the alley. Small and cluttered, the office smelled faintly of air freshener and cigarettes. On a table to one side of the desk, a computer cycled through screen-saving patterns. Beside it stood a radio tuned to talk. Ben silenced it as he spun in his seat to face Henry.

  “You been listening to this stuff?” Ben asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Heavy weather coming in.”

  “I didn’t come to talk about the weather.”

  Ben looked up.

  “Something on your mind, Henry?”

  “You lied to me.”

  Ben sighed. “Yeah, I guess I did. You want to come in and talk about it?”

  Henry closed the door and sat down. He watched as Ben raised the window sash and fished a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “You mind?”

  Henry shrugged.

  Ben lit the cigarette. “They give me hell for smoking in here.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  Henry said, “You know, for some crazy reason, I trusted you.”

  “Well, you should have.”

  “Why? You broke into my house, practically killed—”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Henry. I knocked you down—and doing it just about killed me. By the time I reached my Jeep, it was all I could do to breathe. Drove half a mile, pulled over, and coughed. I thought I’d never quit coughing.”

  Henry leaned forward. “Why?”

  “Well, I have cancer—”

  “Goddamn it, Ben—”

  “Hell, Henry, it wasn’t personal—you know that. I was just following the story. When I heard you out there, I didn’t know who the hell you were—but I sure as hell didn’t want to wind up like your father.” He dashed ashes out the window.

  “All that stuff you told me the other night—is that true?”

  “Far as I can tell.”

  Henry dug the yellow scrap of paper from his pocket and tossed it on the desk. “You took something from my father’s office,” he said. “I want it back.”

  Three yellow sheets. Henry didn’t know what he had expected—something more complete, he supposed, something with a nice tidy explanation. Certainly something more than three crumpled sheets haphazardly covered in his father’s cramped hand.

  Folding them over, he started to stand.

  “Maybe you should take a look at them first.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time to look at them.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Henry. I can help you.”

  He hesitated. “They were on the desk?”

  “In the desk. In a file full of tax receipts.”

  “Hidden.”

  Ben shrugged. “Maybe.” He flipped the cigarette out the window. “Why don’t you take a look?”

  Henry thumbed through the papers. On the first page, his father had scrawled a list of surnames and dates—perhaps twenty of them—but he couldn’t see a pattern. He looked up at Ben.

  “Whose names?”

  “Various folks unlucky enough to get themselves murdered in the last forty years or so. The dates check out.”

  “None of them were killed in the Run?”

  “Not a one. The paper reported them all, but none of them died here. I suppose that’s what he was checking.”

  The second page looked more familiar, notes toward a sermon maybe, or one of his father’s obscure theological speculations: lists of biblical references, some hasty notes on Hebrew etymology.

  “You make anything of this?”

  “Greek to me,” Ben said. “Or Hebrew. Maybe it’s something else altogether. It just got mixed in.”

  Henry flipped to the third page, a second list of twenty or so names and dates. Here there was no mistaking the larger pattern. The dates fell in clusters—’78, ’80, ’87, December ’96—and Henry recognized a couple of the names—Kimball and Samford—from his previous conversation with Ben.

  “I’ve tracked it further,” Ben said. “Seventy-three and sixty-six. Random intervals, but the pattern holds—death and crime rates skyrocketing overnight and dropping off just about as quick. Each time it happens things get a little worse, but people always stopped short of killing each other.”

  “Until now.”

  Ben nodded solemnly. “That’s right. Until no
w. Sort of makes you wonder what’s going to happen next, doesn’t it?” They were silent for a moment, and then, his voice soft, Ben said, “Your dad did the heavy lifting, Henry. It was just a matter of checking the names and dates.”

  “So you lied about that, too.”

  “Christ, Henry—”

  “He do the research here?”

  Ben sighed. “I don’t think so. Library, I suppose.”

  Henry rattled the sheets of paper. Below the list of names, his father had sketched a crude circle. A series of x’s had been scrawled in black ink at varying distances from the perimeter. Two red x’s appeared within the circle. “What about the sketch?”

  “That’s where it really gets interesting,” Ben said.

  The diagram of the circle and the black x’s, it turned out, was a rough map.

  “It took me a while to figure that out,” Ben said, “but it was fairly obvious once I had thought about it. If no murders had been committed in the Run in a century or more—maybe never—it makes sense to try to plot the effect, to figure out where the borders are.”

  “But he didn’t use a map.”

  “He didn’t have to. He grew up here, right?”

  “He lived here just about his whole life.”

  “So he knew the town, knew the lay of the surrounding country. And because he was only interested in getting a rough sense of the pattern, he probably just sketched it from memory.”

  “So why’s this especially interesting?”

  Digging through a stack of papers on the desk, Ben produced a second map of the region, a real map. “Take a look,” he said, unfolding it.

  Standing, Henry saw that here and there Ben had plotted x’s like those on the sketch. There might have been forty of them, in green ink, scattered over the nearby towns; beside each, Ben had noted the date, recording them as far back as 1937. In the Run itself, three red x’s appeared, one in the southeast quarter of the town, off Mill Creek Road—that would be the Samford murder—another on Widow’s Ridge—

  —my father’s x—

  —and a third in the wooded strip between Crook’s Hollow and the abandoned Holland Coal property, where Ian Barre must have died.