The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

Around the town, hugging the edges of the closest of the green x’s, Ben had drawn a thick black circle. All three of the red x’s fell inside the circle, as did the whole of Sauls Run and Crook’s Hollow, the abandoned mines, and a stretch of the rugged and sparsely settled country to the north.

  Ben smoothed the map with knotted fingers. “It comes to an area roughly fifteen square miles in diameter. Some of the murders”—he jabbed a finger at the map—“here and here—come close to the edges of the town, which is part of the reason nobody noticed this for so long. But here’s the interesting part. If you plot the center of—”

  But Henry had already noticed it—noticed it with a species of sick dread.

  Holland Coal, he thought.

  So Raymond Ostrowski had lied. Something was going on up there, something more than a little EPA-dictated cleanup.

  He closed his eyes and took a long breath. When he opened them again, he collected the crumpled yellow sheets, folded them twice, and slid them into an inner pocket of his jacket.

  “That’s everything you know?”

  Ben lifted his hands. “That’s all of it.”

  “I’ll be going then.”

  He pulled on the jacket and opened the door. Halfway through the maze of empty desks—even that lone reporter was gone—he heard Ben speak again.

  “Henry—you have to understand. I didn’t know who to trust.”

  He turned to stare at the older man, framed in the doorway of his office. “I do understand. Perfectly.” He paused. Then: “I spoke to Crawford today. They couldn’t match your prints. So you needn’t worry about that anyway.”

  “Godamn it, Henry, give me a chance here. If we work together—”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He turned away.

  Outside, the Run lay quiet. Henry stood by his car for a moment, thinking of Holland Coal. So it was true, he thought. Somewhere in his past, in the abyss of his memory, the labyrinth of dreams, lay a link to his father’s death—a link he could not yet begin to fathom.

  Chapter 16

  He tracked Ostrowski down the following day. Around one—a safe three hours before Emily’s shift—he turned the Volaré north toward the Tipple. Yet he couldn’t help thinking of her as he got out of the car, the bruised sky an answer to some indefinable ache within him.

  Last night he had almost called her—had actually lifted the receiver, started punching the number. But that wise inner voice had counseled otherwise. Give her the distance she craves, it told him. She hadn’t broken it off, had she? She had only asked for time.

  Besides, what was the hurry?

  The dead were dead.

  If he had anything, it was time.

  He had cradled the receiver and surrendered to his restless dreams. Now, stepping into the Tipple with Frank looking up from his paper there behind the bar, Henry resolved to put her out of his mind, to focus on the matter at hand. For now anyway, for just a little while.

  But Frank hadn’t seen Ostrowski for days. “He comes in spells,” he said, “and then lays off for a while. You might try his place up on Breedlove Road.”

  Breedlove Road was a narrow country lane that dipped and climbed through the barren hollows west of town, and on his first pass that way, Henry missed the place entirely. But as he swung back toward the Run, he glimpsed it high in the shadow of a ridge, just as Frank had described it: a rusting trailer on a cinder block foundation, half hidden by pine and barren hickory. The rutted drive wound around back, where the trailer sprouted an additional room, a tumorous growth of weathered shanty boards and tin. Henry parked the Volaré in the lee of a dented Dodge Charger and killed the engine.

  Dogs whimpered quietly as he got out of the car. Turning, he could see them, a moil of lean hounds in a run forty yards back under the trees. They regarded him solemnly through the interlocked diamonds of the chain-link enclosure.

  “Anybody home, guys?” he said.

  When he stepped toward them, the dogs scattered like a covey of startled quail, fleeing to the hidden reaches of the run. Odd. Henry peered into the trees. There was something there, slumped bonelessly in the shadows at the far corner of the kennel, but he couldn’t quite make it out. It might have been an empty sack or an outcropping of stone. It might have been a dog.

  “Hey,” he called, but if the thing was a dog, it didn’t move. Henry felt a faint, uneasy stirring in his guts. He hesitated, thinking about walking up there for a look. Then the wind picked up, shivering him as it cut down through the trees. The hell with it. He hadn’t come here to stare at a dog run.

  Pulling his jacket closer, he turned away. The yard was barren and strewn with debris—a dented washing machine, a rusting sink basin, a mound of broken cinder block. Two cords of wood had been stacked against the bole of a great oak, and the weathered tarp that had been used to cover them snapped with every gust of wind. Despite the slovenly surroundings, however, the addition looked basically sturdy, the work of a capable if inelegant carpenter.

  He knocked on the door.

  “Mr. Ostrowski,” he called. And louder: “Hey, Ray!”

  He knocked again, waited, then moved over a few paces to peer through a dirty window. A wood-burning stove glowed in a far corner, dimly illuminating a clutter of Dumpster-quality furniture: a sofa and recliner, an industrial cable spool turned on end as a table. An open bottle of whiskey stood on the cable spool, and a black-and-white television flickered nearby, bathing everything in its ghostly luster.

  Henry pecked on the glass. “Hey, Ray! I know you’re in there!” He rapped again. “Come on, Ray!”

  Henry smacked the wall with his open palm, then stalked back to the door. “You lied to me, Ray! You lied about Holland Coal!” He pounded at the door, splinters digging into his fist. “That all you lied about? How come you can suddenly afford Wild Turkey, Ray? You want to tell me that? How come you’re drinking such fine goddamn whiskey all of a sudden?”

  He slammed his fist into the door one last time, feeling the ache of release in his shoulders, as though something bottled up for ages had finally been uncorked. Frustration, he supposed. Maybe even rage. Rage at all the lies, the half-truths and evasions. At his own long list of failures and inadequacies. The aching lacuna of memory.

  He reached for the doorknob, felt it give beneath his hand, and paused.

  Fuck it.

  Twisting the knob, he swung the door wide, a wedge of storm light, thin as gruel, pouring itself across the dusty, rough-hewn floor.

  “Ray?” he said.

  An icy band of metal kissed the hollow of his neck.

  In the woods to his back the dogs began to bay.

  In the moment of frozen terror that followed, Henry could hear everything: the dogs subsiding into mewls and the bright hard click the gun made as the hammer locked back and the whiskey-tainted respiration of the man who held it, his boots scuffing the denuded soil. The man took another breath and Henry could smell him, too, the whiskey and more: cigarette smoke and the yellow tang of unwashed flesh and the stench of dog on his hands.

  Henry swallowed coppery spit. The world steadied around him, and deep inside himself he found that adamantine core of rage, unaffected. The rage pried open his mouth, and using a voice that was nothing like his own, spat words into the chill air:

  “Was it you, Ray?”

  Silence, then, the wind whickering among the trees.

  He imagined the bullet smashing through his skull, what it would feel like, what his father must have felt. For a single reckless moment, his voice wild—

  “Was it?”

  —he thought he wouldn’t mind dying here in the ice-rucked dirt before this open door.

  A heavy shove sent him stumbling into the room. The door slammed behind him, plunging everything into a chaos of poisonous twilight, the television chasing shadow across the room. He fell to his knees, twisting to face Ostrowski, squat and grizzled and coming on, the revolver like a toy in his big hands. Henry scrambled away. A lamp went over
with a crash. Splintered boards drew him upright and gasping, the frigid barrel of the pistol tight under his chin, pinning him to the wall like a bug.

  “No,” Henry gasped. “No—”

  He swallowed, and they were still, frozen in the moment, no sound in the room but the heave of breath in their lungs and the faraway babble of the television. His mind seized upon it, for a moment Could think of nothing else: just the absurdity of dying this way, in a halfunfashioned shanty filled with Weather Channel drivel. Then even that sloughed away, leaving only the two of them, the gun wedged under his jaw and Raymond Ostrowski’s face like a strained flag, his eyes maddened and afraid.

  “Please—”

  Henry’s mouth had gone dry. He paused, trying to work up enough spit to get the words out—

  “Don’t. Please don’t.”

  Ostrowski’s eyes cleared, seemed to catch hold in the moment. “You,” he whispered.

  Ostrowski drew a long breath and released it, wincing, and then the cold pressure of the gun retreated. Ostrowski looked down at it, clenched in his big hand, and then he looked back up at Henry and laughed bitterly and turned away.

  Ostrowski coughed and lit a cigarette.

  “What happened to the peanuts?”

  “Reckon I’ll be lucky to die of that spot on my lungs.” He looked at Henry. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ostrowski grunted. Moving gingerly, like a man made of fine-blown glass, he picked up the bottle and poured three fingers of Turkey 101 into a jelly glass. “The sheriff.”

  He lowered himself carefully into the faded recliner by the cable spool and stared at Henry on the rump-sprung sofa. They fell silent, Henry thinking of Harold Crawford. Who is it you’ve been talking to, exactly? he had asked, his eyes as cold as sapphire chips in the setting of his face.

  “He was here?”

  Ostrowski just stared at him.

  “I need a little help here,” Henry said. “There’s something going on here. Maybe Crawford’s mixed up in it, I don’t know, but I need a little help.”

  Ostrowski said nothing.

  “Please—”

  “Anything I say, it’s between you and me. Understand?”

  “Sure. Absolutely.”

  Ostrowski grunted. “He’s in it, all right.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t know. Perry Holland is the one talked to me.”

  “Last fall?”

  “November it was, not long after old Zachary took ill and Perry Holland got to runnin things. He came in the Tipple one night, said a fella up Copperhead mentioned my name. That EPA shit—that’s what he told me, and it sounded reasonable enough. Lord knows I could use the money.”

  “But it’s not true.”

  “No. I hadn’t been up there more than a day or two and I knew that.”

  Henry said, “He wanted you to open up one of the mines, that right?”

  “Maybe you want to tell me how you know that.”

  Henry said nothing.

  Grimacing, Ostrowski leaned over to stub his cigarette out. “Way this works, I tell you something, you tell me something back.”

  Henry took a deep breath. “When we were boys, Perry and I, we sneaked into one of the old mines. We got lost there.”

  “What happened?”

  “I wish I could remember.” He lifted his hands. “I have these dreams.”

  Ostrowski laughed. “Funny you should mention dreams.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Old-timers—fellas had worked them seams since before the big war—used to say Holland mines had haints in em. Said they’d heard tales of em from old times, back round the turn of the century.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Haints,” Ostrowski said, as though speaking to a dense child. “Spirits. Nothin you could lay hands on, but you could feel em in the air. Men who worked them old shafts—they was all gone by then, of course, but people used to talk about it—they was prone to dreams, it was said.”

  An icy hand clutched Henry’s spine. He leaned forward on the old swaybacked couch.

  “In my dreams, it’s like a maze, these run-down tunnels, these rotten crossbeams—”

  “That’s right,” Ostrowski said. “It was them old shafts Perry had us workin in. Mines these days, you got a machine that drills holes and you put these bolts up there, eight feet long. Winches the rocks together, supports the roof. These old shafts, they musta been near a hundred years old. They had wooden beams instead. Slow going, it was, ’cause them old ceilings can come down on you just any time.”

  Ostrowski fumbled for his cigarettes, suddenly pensive. “Another funny thing. Them Holland mines played out forty years ago, but there was still coal in them old shafts. I’ve done a lot of thinkin on that just lately.”

  “What did you come to?”

  Ostrowski didn’t answer, his face changeable and strange in the flickering shadows of the television. When at last he spoke, he looked up and held Henry’s gaze. “I didn’t always used to drink like this. These days, the whiskey, it helps me sleep.”

  Henry took a long breath. “Nightmares?”

  “I wouldn’t call em that exactly. I’m down in them old shafts Perry had us workin in—but I’m not afraid really. I just feel somethin with me down there—I don’t know how to put it exactly. It’s like I got too close to somethin down there, somethin powerful, and maybe a little of it rubbed off against me. On my mind, you know, and I’m workin it through when I sleep nights.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Weren’t but six or seven—men like me every one of em, short a dollar and inclined not to say much if Perry Holland didn’t want em to. But I heard a little talk of dreamin all the same.”

  He dashed his cigarette, turning it thoughtfully on the rim of the ashtray. “All manner of things—old things and strange ones—buried down there at the bottom of the world. Way I reckon it, some old miner stumbled across somethin down there, and Holland—Jeremiah’s father this woulda been, back before the first war—just closed them holes and opened new shafts on the north face. Plenty of coal in those days, no end of it in sight. So he went where the diggin was easier, and men weren’t so prone to dreams. You boys were probably the first folk down them old shafts in fifty, sixty years. Maybe even the Hollands themselves done forgot what they found buried there, and the coal they left behind.” He held Henry’s gaze. “Sound right to you?”

  Henry shook his head. “Nothing sounds right. Nothing makes sense.”

  Ostrowski nodded. “That’s the Run for you. My daddy used to say the Run was a funny place. Old folk lingered here, he said. People got on unusual well. Holland mines never went union, you know. Bloody Mingo, Harlan across the river—they was like war zones. Holland mines wasn’t no safer, the money weren’t no better, but the unions couldn’t stir up a lick of interest. People here was just content. Shawnee thought that mountain was holy ground. I keep wonderin if that’s the reason—and if maybe I rubbed up against some of that down there, some old Indian medicine.”

  “Indian medicine?”

  “Them mountains was old when the white man came,” he said. “Full of gods and devils. Rub up against something like that, it’s liable to touch your mind.”

  Gods and devils. Henry shook his head, thinking of the dream. The ever-encroaching dark. The thunder of onrushing wings. He looked up. “How about you? You see anything when you were working down there?”

  “No.” Ostrowski studied his whiskey for a moment, and then looked back at Henry. “But it never felt just right,” he said. “And I was glad when it was done.”

  It was after three by then, the sky graying down toward dusk. Ostrowski got to his feet and shuffled across the room to punch up the fire.

  “When did Crawford get involved?” Henry asked.

  “He was sittin up there in his police car one morning when I got to work. That’s the first I ever saw him. This woulda been late December, a day or two
after Christmas. He and Perry Holland had some words, I guess. Looked like they was arguin anyway. Later that day Perry told us we was done. We’d opened the shaft and shored it up more than a mile down. Perry gave us a little extra money. To keep our mouths shut—that’s how I thought of it.”

  He racked the poker and dusted his hands against his pants. Henry watched him walk back to his chair, older than he had seemed at the Tipple. He moved gingerly, his torso stiff, his arms held away from his body. Yet there was something else, too, as if a weight of years had all at once descended upon him. It took him a minute to catch his breath after he settled in the recliner.

  “You haven’t been back since?”

  Ostrowski mulled the question over for a while.

  Henry glanced at the television, waited. The room had grown warmer, now, almost oppressive. Sweat trickled at his collar.

  Ostrowski said, “I ain’t never had nothin. Worked all my life and I ain’t never had a thing. You look at this place and you can see it ain’t no way for a man to live.” He waved his hand, a gesture that took in the entire room and the trailer beyond it, dingy and small and packed to the roof with the stink of whiskey and smoke and bacon grease. Ostrowski leaned forward, taking in a sharp breath. “I want you should understand why I did it. I lived my whole life in places just like this one, or worse.”

  Henry felt himself go cold inside, cold and empty and remote, the diamond vacuum between the stars. Suspicion—

  —it was you, wasn’t it, Ray—

  —flared up inside him once again.

  “What did you do?”

  “Not long after New Year’s Perry Holland shows up here. Sat right where you’re sittin now, offered me money to do a thing for him—”

  And now he said it aloud: “It was you.”

  “I don’t know nothin bout your daddy. I told you that.”

  “What, then?”

  “He took me down into them tunnels. He had some blastin caps; he wanted me to set some charges.”

  “He wanted you to bring the mountain down.”

  “Not the mountain. A stretch of tunnel is all, maybe five hundred yards. Dangerous work, and it weren’t strictly legal, but the money—” He shook his head. “I never saw that kind of money.”