by John Lutz
Alan glanced sideways at her and grinned. “I guess that works both ways, city girl.”
“Better slow down, Alan.”
His grin widened. “Christ, a backseat driver now! This is no Cadillac—I need the speed to take the next hill.”
Kelly didn’t answer, knew Alan was right—she was too edgy. Opening her vent window and guiding a cooling stream of air onto herself, she scooted down in her seat, rested her head on the backrest, and tried to relax. There was a soothing quality to the greenness rushing past her, enveloping her.
Alan slowed the car as they passed a house near the road, small and covered with faded asphalt sheet-siding poorly disguised as brick. A woman was standing on the wood front porch, striking a broom handle against a post to dislodge feathery-looking dust from the straw bristles. She was wearing a flower-print dress and her blond hair was pulled back and tied with a ribbon. Without changing expression she lifted a hand to wave to them as they drove past. A large gray hound got up from the shade of the porch and trotted after the car for a short distance, then lost interest and turned back.
Kelly turned her head to look at her husband. “Do you know they believe here that if a dog howls clearly three times in the night it’s an omen of death?”
“Didn’t know,” Alan said, concentrating on the road.
“Or if you carry a small potato in your pocket, it’s a cure for rheumatism?”
“Might work,” Alan said. “I’ve never seen a rheumatic potato. You’ve been reading up.”
“I’ve been talking to Craig Holt. He’s really a storehouse of information about this region.”
“It’s his job,” Alan said.
“And his passion. Like photography’s your passion.”
“Is that bad?”
“Not in your case. But in Holt there’s something more, something I’m glad I don’t see in you. He seems to be driven by the need to stay secure in his superiority. There’s a calm relentlessness about him.”
“He can feel as superior as he wants,” Alan said, “as long as I get my third of the book’s advance and royalties for my photographs.”
“Did you say a third?”
“I did. And Holt thinks he can get a three-thousand-dollar advance against royalties.” Alan averted his eyes from the narrow road for a quick sideways look at his wife. “What’s the matter? You look strange.”
“I was just thinking, they’re very superstitious about the number three around here, especially concerning death.”
Alan reached over and patted her bare knee. “You’re too sexy to be spooky.”
They’d turned a sharp bend and the tires thundered over the uneven planks of a covered bridge. The car broke into sunlight and silence. Below the bridge was a wide, dry creek bed. A gray squirrel ran up the barren slope of the shallow creek, scampering madly among last fall’s crisp dead leaves.
“Bonegrinder’s claimed three victims,” Alan said. “Maybe that means the Peterson woman will be the last. Another victim would be contrary to local superstition.”
Kelly’s lips parted, but she didn’t know how to answer him, didn’t know if he was being serious.
“Why don’t you ask Craig Holt?” he said, downshifting for a sudden, dipping curve.
Kelly looked away from Alan, out the side window, into the dank and shadowed woods. “I will,” she said.
But she knew she wouldn’t. She’d keep her concern to herself.
Kelly sensed that Holt was the sort before whom it was unwise to reveal any weakness.
TWENTY-EIGHT
WINTONE HAD NEVER SEEN Holt in Mully’s. If he hadn’t happened to glance toward the dim back booths he wouldn’t have seen him this time, but there Holt was, seated facing the door and sipping a mug of beer. His pipe and a book of matches lay on the table before him next to a glass ashtray. Wintone nodded to him and took his customary stool midway down the bar.
Old Bonifield was sitting farther along, and beyond him sat a man named Whelan Eberly, a sawmill worker.
Mully set up a beer for Wintone. “Look like rain out there, Billy?”
“I wish. Sun ain’t quite down an’ you can already see the stars.”
Wintone took a first long pull of the cold beer that tingled the back of his throat and slaked the thirst in him. The mug was half-empty when he put it down.
“Talk ain’t died down none, Sheriff,” Bonifield said from down the bar.
“Wouldn’t know,” Wintone said, not looking at him.
“Thought you oughta.”
Frank Turper came in, waved a hand in greeting and sat on the other side of Wintone. Sweat shone on his padded cheeks, and the back of his collar was damp. “Hell’s got nothin’ on the weather out there,” he said. “Gettin’ bad when a man wakes up in the mornin’ an’ looks forward to evenin’ when it’ll cool off.”
“Mr. Holt here’s a educated man,” Bonifield said, swiveling on his stool. “Maybe he can tell us when we’re gonna get some rain.”
“You’d do better to go out and see if there’s a halo around the moon,” Holt said.
“I checked an’ there ain’t,” Frank Turper said. He turned to Wintone. “What you got figured, Billy?”
“On the weather?”
“On Bonegrinder.”
“Stands as it was.”
Turper looked at the sheriff with surprised dark eyes, incredulous tiny pits of exasperation in the expanse of his fleshy face. “You best do somethin’ soon, Sheriff! By the time the fear lets up around here the business’ll be gone for good. From what I been told, there’s already hammerin’ and sawin’ on the north bank. I ain’t listenin’ to none of this talk about you, but I need results.”
“The way to stop loose talk is to deny it,” Holt said.
Wintone didn’t answer him. He’d wondered what game Holt would choose.
“Folks is sayin’ you gone downhill last six, seven months,” Bonifield said to Wintone. “I ain’t agreein’, mind you. But who am I to deny it if’n you don’t?”
Wintone snorted. “Nobody’s askin’ you to deny anything.”
“No need to get tight in the jaw. It ain’t like you don’t need somebody stickin’ up for you.”
“Not your kinda stickin’ up.” Wintone finished his beer, ordered another.
“The stories I hear are about your wife’s death,” Holt said.
Bonifield, who had started to speak, lapsed silent, and Turper bent over his beer. Wintone stared straight ahead as if he hadn’t heard, but an almost lifeless stillness settled over him.
“They say it should have been looked into more closely,” Holt went on. “They say it was an accident that shouldn’t have happened.”
“No accident should happen,” Mully said, moving down the bar toward Holt. “If you’re done with your beer I’ll take the bottle.”
“But I’m not done. They say if anyone but a law officer had caused the accident he’d have stood trial for manslaughter. At least that’s the story I get. And who am I to deny it if the sheriff doesn’t?”
“Don’t mind him, Billy,” Mully said quickly. “He’s had four beers an’ it’s this heat. Time he left.”
Wintone barely heard Mully. His throat was dry and his stomach tight. He told himself he didn’t care what Holt thought or said, repeating that to himself over and over, and believing it less each time.
“No, I’ll be leavin’ now,” Wintone said, looking down at his somehow remote clenched fist on the bar.
He pushed himself away from the bar with the fist, swiveling on the stool to step down and begin walking toward the door, past Frank Turper still bent over his beer as if he were sitting alone at his own kitchen table. Wintone heard the footsteps behind him on the plank floor.
“They say the accident could have been avoided,” Holt said in a slightly slurred voice.
Wintone broke stride. Then, to his own surprise, he almost laughed as he walked on toward the door. Holt was cutting a ridiculous figure, a man trying to work a scene f
rom an old Western movie. The hell of it was that it was effective; the anger was smoldering in Wintone’s gut, threatening to ignite.
The footsteps dogged Wintone out into the street, and Holt was suddenly in front of him, facing him. Holt was holding his empty pipe lightly by the bowl, smiling his easy smile, and his eyes were clear. Wintone knew then that Holt wasn’t drunk at all; he had perfect control of himself.
“They say you killed her,” Holt said softly.
It was the smile Wintone swung at. His fist grazed Holt’s cheek and the smile disappeared as the smaller man sprawled in the street, twisted to rise immediately and rush at Wintone. Wintone chopped with his left fist, connecting with hard bone just behind Holt’s ear.
“Billy!” Mully’s voice called. A door slammed.
Holt was up again, bleeding from where the first blow had struck. He charged Wintone again, but the anger had gone out of the sheriff. He was consciously trying not to hurt Holt now. Wintone stepped aside and was going to grab Holt’s wrist, but Holt pivoted and landed a numbing blow to Wintone’s shoulder. Wintone raised a forearm defensively that caught Holt across the face, pushed him away. Holt charged again, was pushed away again to fall in the street. His nose was bleeding now, and his pale shirt front was spotted.
He lay there without trying to rise this time, propped on his elbows and looking at Wintone through a mask of congealing blood. Wintone could tell by the expression on Holt’s face that Holt had won, that he’d accomplished what he intended. In Sarah’s eyes, Wintone would look like a brutal redneck.
Holt contorted his long legs and struggled to get to his feet; someone helped him. He stood staring at Wintone, rocking lightly back onto his heels and cautiously touching his bleeding face as if assessing damage. “I won’t press charges, sheriff,” he said thickly. “You needn’t worry …”
Wintone spun, pushed past several of the people gathered at the scene and walked fast toward his office.
He was enraged at himself, and not a little ashamed.
TWENTY-NINE
“HE HAD NO EXCUSE to hit the man,” Alan said, fastening the zipper on his canvas backpack.
Kelly was sitting on the bed, lacing shoes over thick socks to protect her ankles from burrs and insects. “You can’t be sure,” she said.
Alan looked at her in surprise. “Come on, Kel, Wintone’s a representative of the law. He lost his temper, sure, but that’s more serious for him than for someone else.”
Kelly stood, adjusted the thermostat on the motel window air conditioner so the cabin would be cool when they returned from their hike and picnic. “You’re right,” she told her husband, “only when Craig Holt told us about it this morning, I couldn’t help getting the impression he was almost glad the whole thing had happened.”
Alan laughed. “Why would he pick on a man like Wintone, a county sheriff who outweighs him by fifty pounds?”
“He admitted he might have had too much to drink.”
“Well, maybe that explains it.” Alan slipped the aluminum-framed canvas backpack onto his shoulders and adjusted the straps for comfort. “Still, Sheriff Wintone’s supposed to be able to handle aggressive drunks half his size.”
Standing by the door, Alan looked at his wife with appreciative suppressed longing. Her baggy T-shirt and slacks couldn’t conceal the grace of her body. Her long hair was tied back with a green ribbon, in the same fashion as the hair of the woman on the porch of the ramshackle house they had passed during their drive yesterday.
“About ready?” he asked.
“Almost.”
“Anything else you want to put in the backpack?”
“No, but what about that?” She pointed to a goat-bladder wine container lying on the dresser, the sort of container seen emitting a thin stream of wine while held above the eager, open mouths of perspiring Spaniards in postcard photographs. Alan had bought it in a souvenir shop in Chicago.
He picked up the bladder, made sure the cork was tight. The leather strap was too short to sling over his shoulder, so he turned and had Kelly fit the bladder into one of the backpack’s zippered canvas pockets. “That’s a quart of sweet strawberry wine,” he said, “poured in there carefully without benefit of a funnel, so be careful.”
Precious as the wine was to him, she noticed that his camera was more precious, slung separately by its leather strap about his neck. There was actually a callus along the back of Alan’s neck from the strap.
“Did you pack the sandwiches?” Kelly asked.
“First thing,” Alan told her. “Local-butchered ham I bought in Colver. Let’s stop playing Did You Forget or we’ll forget to go.”
They left the cabin, locking the door behind them. Alan was slightly surprised by the intensity of the heat, but they would be in the woods from time to time, shaded and cool.
Kelly trailed him as they followed the lake road for about half a mile. Then they cut onto a faint grassy path into the woods where the ground was flat. A rabbit broke from its camouflage of brown stillness in front of them and made the cover of high brush in three long bounds. The trilling chatter of birds sounded from every direction. Among the trees it was shaded enough for Kelly to be grateful for the sun’s warmth when they passed through areas of light.
In a small clearing they sat at the base of a huge elm for a while, talking and joking while Alan prodded the hard ground with a gnarled stick he’d picked up and proclaimed to be walnut. When they rose to walk on, he took some photographs of the clover-dotted green clearing, which was almost too pastoral to be real.
Soon there was no semblance of a trail, and the woods grew thicker and more shadowed. Kelly didn’t worry about being lost. Alan was an experienced hiker, and always carried a compass in the backpack. He walked loosely with his hiker’s stride in front of Kelly, casually easing the way by swishing at the brush with the gnarled walnut. Around them was constant, subtle movement, birds flitting, the scurrying of unseen animals. But the day was too clear and warm to be menacing. There really was nothing frightening here, within the shadows that had seemed so foreboding to Kelly from outside the woods.
Alan stopped suddenly and pointed with the gnarled stick. Through the trees they could see the flat blue-green plane of lake water.
“I thought you knew where we were,” Kelly chided him.
“I do. I just didn’t know where the lake was. I know where we’re at in relation to the motel.”
They changed direction to angle away from the lake. Alan tried to remember the contour of the shoreline in their vicinity, but the map he’d seen had shown a line too irregular to recall in detail. For that matter, the lake was so large and undefined that he was sure there’d be coves and bends to the shore not shown on the map.
They walked on for another twenty minutes, through woods that suddenly had become almost too thick to allow passage. The sun was only occasionally visible through the intertwined, leafy branches above. And the ground had become uneven, a series of rocky washboard hills that made passage difficult.
Then they were out of the woods into brilliant sunshine, standing in another clover-strewn clearing, this one larger than the last. And beyond the clearing, on the other side of a sparse growth of wind-sculpted trees, the lake again, its flat surface almost unnaturally tranquil in the still air.
“The shoreline must curve south to west here,” Alan said. He looked at his wristwatch. “It’s almost noon, and I can’t think of a prettier place to have lunch.”
“Don’t try,” Kelly said. She skip-ran to a spot near the edge of the clearing, where the ground was perfectly level in the shade of the tallest of the nearby trees.
Alan walked over to join her, squared his shoulders and wriggled out of the canvas straps so he could lower the aluminum-framed backpack gently to the ground.
While Kelly got the sandwiches and cheese from one of the backpack’s canvas pockets, Alan walked toward the lake, gazed through his camera viewfinder, checked the angle of the sun over his shoulder. He turned then,
and though the light and range weren’t right, he took a shot of Kelly spreading a large red-and-white checked cloth napkin on the bent grass.
Kelly sensed too late that she was being photographed, and she gave him a mock-angry grimace and then smiled, motioned with her arm that it was time to eat lunch.
The ham sandwiches were as good as Alan had predicted. He and Kelly ate slowly and deliberately, savoring the surroundings as well as the food.
When they were finished with lunch, Alan lay on his back with the canvas backpack for a pillow, experimenting with the wine bladder to see how high he could hold it above his open mouth and still be accurate with the steady stream of sweet strawberry wine. Kelly sat back, supporting herself with stiff arms in an oddly little-girl posture, watching him with amusement tempered by the knowledge that she would have to wash his shirt. Both the shirt and the backpack were already soaked with wine.
“I hope you drown, if it’s possible,” she said.
He started to laugh, choked and sat up, swallowed. “It’s possible!” He lay back down and resumed his game. “We can’t stay at the motel forever, you know” Kelly said, “even though the rates have come down.”
“It’s deductible.”
“As long as there’s something to deduct it from.”
“There will be,” he assured her, holding the wine bladder again at arm’s length. This time he was accurate. “Enough talk of room rates and taxes,” he said, placing the cork in the wine bladder while he was ahead. “Why don’t I photograph my favorite model?”
“Does this come under the category of work?”
“More pleasure than work, in this case. But if enough comes of it to make the deductions worthwhile …”
“You’ve made your point,” she said with a laugh. She stood and brushed her slacks with both hands, building up a rhythm.
“Not here,” Alan said, stuffing the remains of the picnic lunch into the backpack. “We’ll walk to where there’s better light and background.” He got to his feet with the effort of a man well fed and hoisted the backpack onto his shoulders, working his arms through the straps.