Three Graves Full

by Jamie Mason

  “Okay, just hang on a second,” Jason said.

  “Don’t you stop,” Montgomery warned.

  It startled Jason to find that, once he got going, he could lie with an agile talent, especially when the stakes tugged at the gambler hiding somewhere deep inside him. He stared strong into Leah’s bulging eyes and ticked an almost imperceptible nod of encouragement to her. Then he dropped his voice as invitation for Boyd to do the same.

  “Is this really your wife out here? They told me it was,” he all but whispered, eyes steady to catch clues to Boyd’s reaction. “Did you do it like they said you did?”

  “No. It ain’t her.”

  “Is it? I mean, who does that? Shoots his own wife? In their home?”

  “Shut up. I said it ain’t her. You don’t know me. Anyway, lookit, there’s a hole over that way. I don’t even know what that is. It don’t matter, I’m just gonna close you two up in that shed, and I swear on the Bible, I will not hurt you. I just need to be getting outta here.”

  “I dunno,” Jason said, shaking his head, but looking Boyd dead in the eye. “Did you offer Katielynn any kind of deal, too? Did she get a chance? Did she let her guard down and do as you said? Or did you just get off on it? Is that why you came back here?”

  Boyd roared and lunged, angrier than he was careful.

  Leah felt Boyd’s bellowing as a tickling hum in her back. She hammered his shins with her heels and shimmied out of his grasp.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Boyd said. And it was meant for both of them. He stepped forward, his long legs spread wide enough to trip her escape and he stopped Jason’s charge with his fist. The blow landed dead center and Jason staggered back, gaping soundlessly, trying to take in air over a paralyzed solar plexus.

  Boyd’s fingers scrabbled over Leah’s ribs to get a good grip, and he hauled her back to him, but this time she fought it, snarling and twisting instead of shocked and compliant as she had been.

  “You asshole! You son of a bitch!” Leah raked at his face with her nails, but he held her back easily. They fell short and only tagged a short stripe into his neck, then caught mostly filthy collar, then shirt, then buttons, then air. “Reid!” she sobbed.

  Boyd caught up a fistful of Leah’s hair close to her nape. “What are you yowlin’ about? He was with my wife!” Boyd yanked her closer and growled into her face through gritted teeth, “He wasn’t worth the bullets it took to drop him.”

  A flash in Leah’s eye sparked a flare of cruel amusement in Boyd Montgomery’s. He sent a teeth-rattling shake down his arm that snapped her head back. “Ha! And what’s more—you know it. Yes, you most certainly do, don’t you, little girl?” He jerked her head again.

  Leah looked into the eyes of Reid’s murderer. They met in an instant of recognition, and hers flickered one part hatred, three parts loss, and a dram of disgrace as the small, mean truth burned acid into her tears.

  “You go to hell.” She was trapped in a less than ideal fighting posture, but swung her foot anyway.

  Montgomery, who seemed unable to keep score against all the little girls he’d underestimated in his time, took the blow in the groin, a glancing shot from the side of her heel that laid him hard to his knees and, in his fall, set her free.

  Jason, with his first lungful of air settling back over the pain in his middle, stumbled after her. “No, wait! Hang on,” he wheezed.

  She disappeared back into the house. Jason fell inside, just seconds behind her. He pulled the door into the wrecked jamb and slotted home the top safety bar, which by every suspense-film standard should have juddered out of his quaking fingers at least three times, but didn’t. He caught up with Leah in the hallway.

  “You have to make a run for your car,” he said.

  “No, Jason, please. Please don’t leave me. He’s out there. He killed Reid. He killed Detective Watts. I can’t make it. He’ll get me.”

  “You can do this. There’s only one of him and two of us, if he’s even still out there. If it’s clear, run for your car and lock yourself in. I’ll stay between you and the house. Drive slow. You can make it.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Leah would have been the first to admit that she had some abandonment issues, but the cosmopolitan fear of losing a boyfriend or parental approval, or a job or social status, barely compared to the fundamental terror of drifting out of reach of the last human being standing between her and a murderer. But she didn’t argue. She simply nodded and fell in line without the slightest intention of letting Jason get any farther than grabbing distance away.

  • • •

  She could make it. Of course, she could make it. Bit by bit, Jason had lost all of the relief that had come with Leah’s assuming it was Boyd Montgomery, not him, who had cracked her skull. Every time he looked at her, he felt worse. Blood had slipped down through her hair and pasted a curl to her temple. A fan of red crept across the white corner of her left eye, and tears cut shining tracks through the film of dirt and blood on her cheeks. Despite all hideous evidence to the contrary, Jason was harmless. He was nonviolent to the next to the last degree.

  And now he meant to leave her. A worm of shame curled into the back of his throat. But her car had the keys in it. She could make it. She’d expect him to go for help because good people wouldn’t imagine it any other way. He’d have to cash in on that, too, her decency, so that he could buy a margin.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” she whispered.

  “For everything.”

  “We’re going to be all right, right?”

  “You’re going to be fine.” He believed it. More than that, it didn’t require belief. It soothed to a certainty, as if somewhere on a parallel thread of time and circumstance, it had already happened. To keep her safe, to allow himself to do this, he cast her in his future memory, her face destined to come to mind from time to time. I wonder how she’s doing; if she has nightmares; if she wonders about me . . . She would drive off to an ice pack and a harrowing story to thrill everyone who loved her. It required no more faith than knowing where he’d parked his car.

  Hand in hand, they crept down the main corridor. Jason leaned his ear to the front door and heard solid wood, nothing more. He freed the bolt and led Leah onto the stoop. Jason’s die-hard habit pulled the door closed behind them, and as it shut, the cell-phone symphony orchestra pealed Beethoven’s score of doom from the hallway again.

  He turned on the top step and saw that where he’d parked his car, where he always parked his car, was the very thing that would capsize his new plan right into the crapper.

  The big detective had parked smack in front of Jason’s car. Stout brick pillars framed the entrance of the carport, without enough depth to the structure to even entertain the idea of running a stunt-double crash through the posts. He was utterly blocked in. Hope was a wisp of exhaust from the running truck, but before it could waft any inspiration over Jason’s next move, Boyd Montgomery limped out from alongside the carport. The truck was his for the taking.

  Jason was snared in the desperately stupid alternative of leaving with Leah or running down the road like a lunatic all on his own. What was he going to do, steal her car right under her nose? Ask her to drop him at the train station in his stinking clothes? The sheer size of the problem blocked his airway, and the panic backed up in his throat. It was so wrong to do any of this in the first place, and so exponentially more wrong to involve Leah any more than she’d already fallen into it.

  “Come on!” she said, and ran for the road. And not being able to think of anything else to do in its place, he followed.

  Jason and Boyd looked at each other over the lawn that already needed mowing again. No way would Jason ever get to the truck before Boyd. He was standing right in the path to the carport, and bruised balls or no, he was standing strong. Insects scritched in the woods; a shred of cloud streaked across the moon; tires whooshed and faded out down the distant highway. M
ost of the drama had played indoors, muffled by brick and drywall. Outside, with only a few short squeals from Leah and one growl from Boyd, they’d brawled over the yard in quiet hisses and undertones. No more fuss than a cat fight or a fox taking a bit of rabbit home for supper. Old Green Valley Road slept unaware.

  But something seemed more wrong to Jason than even the night’s troubles allowed for. The maddening subliminal squeak of a loose end. Harris had been pummeled to paste. There was nothing to be done about it. Except for the mush pressed into everyone’s clothes and hair, he would remain there, ground into the grass and smeared across the tarp for the detective to find. The plan, however ridiculous it had ever been, was lost. Jason briefly wondered if he’d been inside his own house for the very last time. He left the idea to haunt the place in his absence and sprinted to Leah’s side. She dove for the passenger door.

  “I’m a wreck,” she said. “You drive. The keys are in it. Run! Go!” She slammed the door behind her.

  As he climbed in behind the wheel of her car, he heard the truck drop into gear and flare to life. Boyd Montgomery flailed at the dashboard controls in the cab, screeched locked tires over the parking brake, sorted out that little problem with a lurch, then rumbled down the long driveway. The driver’s-side wheels churned up grass and half a shrub as the truck arced into the street.

  Seeing that Boyd wanted the road to the right, Jason immediately fitted the reverse gear and started backward to buy as much distance in the shortest amount of time, but Leah’s scream drove his foot reflexively into the brake.

  “The phone!” she cried. “The detective had a phone! Jason, stop! It was on the floor by the door!”

  He’d just begun teasing with the notion of letting Boyd drive away from them and then convincing Leah to part company right where they sat. He’d tell her it would be good for them to have their own cars. He’d tell her that he’d be right behind her. It was a good idea. Just let him go and then let her go. That’s what he was missing, yes? No? It tickled maybe. But Leah’s hand was already on the door handle. She would, if he didn’t stop her, call down the authorities right in Jason’s own foyer—from a cop’s phone, no less.

  “No, we should follow him,” he said. The words came faster than any sense they didn’t quite make. Jason knocked the transmission into drive, hit the gas, and whisked her away from her eureka moment and any opportunity to call in the cavalry. The truck ahead bounced over the curb.

  “What? We have to call for help! Jason, no, wait!”

  “He’ll get away. We have to know where to tell them to go, right?” The crazy lie rolled out smoothly on a common sense tone.

  “I don’t—”

  Leah’s nimble little car ran right up on the bumper of the truck, but the bellowing eight cylinders easily pulled a widening gap. Then the switch clicked in Jason’s mind; the squeaky uncertainty snuffed out. A cop’s phone.

  “Leah. We ran right through the house. Where was he?”

  “Where was who?”

  “Detective Watts. His phone was on the floor, but where was he?”

  Slack wonder turned their heads first toward each other and then to the tailgate lights receding ahead.

  20

  Maggie Watts opened her eyes in the dark. She’d known before she’d woken up that she was still alone in the bed. A breeze played over her shoulder where there should have been warm bulk shielding her from the open window. Year-round, Ford insisted on having it open, if only a crack, while they slept. His mother had drummed it into him that fresh air while sleeping was second only to a daily dose of fish oil and apple-cider vinegar for warding off colds, flu, the blues, bad humors, and hay fever. He’d almost never sneezed in the thirty-seven years she’d known him, so arguing the point was little more than an exercise.

  The whisper of air on her bare skin had tickled her subconscious into sending up an alarm. She wondered how long she’d been asleep, then wondered at her wonder. All she needed to do was turn over and look at the clock to know how long she’d been there. She was stalling.

  Maggie had always been plagued by a muddled radar. Often, and usually for no reason at all, the face of a friend or a loved one would spring to mind, hemmed in by neon exclamation points, blinking distraction. Thoughts of someone would ride shotgun to every task, fuzzing her concentration until she gave in and phoned the person to check if everything was okay. These feelings, heavy and textured as they were, rarely produced news of any kind, much less any advance warning of doom or even garden-variety emergency. A few times, though, the caller and callee had felt uncannily connected to each other by the coincidence of mutual thoughts. Probably not enough for a supernatural label, but still. And the numbers she’d regularly dreamed had only twice won her prizes—fifteen hundred bucks in a lottery once, and a year’s supply of dog kibble in a jelly-bean count at the Pet Depot at Easter.

  But awake and bothered, the track record of her unreliable clairvoyance was of no help at all.

  Ford throbbed in her mind. She rolled over and saw that she’d been in bed not half an hour. “Oh, good Lord, Margaret. Go to sleep.” Maggie talked out loud to herself with ease and always had, without apology.

  She managed to doze off again, but was snatched from a dream, breathless, already half sitting up by the time her eyes fully opened. “Ford!” She reached out in the darkness and found his side of the bed still empty. Her dream left no images for her to replay, but the tone of it held her dangling over the void of sleep, wrapped in an echo of black panic. She slid searching hands across the cold sheet as if Ford, of all people, could somehow have made himself small enough to miss.

  Fully awake and jangled at the nerves, Maggie, as was her habit, pulled on her bathrobe before dialing the bedside phone. She refused to speak on the telephone in the altogether, even to her own husband, although she couldn’t sleep comfortably any other way than bare naked. At bedtime, Ford always switched from his long list of pet names to calling her Lady Godiva. She only wanted to hear him say that and to tell her to go back to sleep.

  The ghoulish green of the backlit handset struck a mood in keeping with how a phone call in the middle of the night, incoming or outgoing, is not often a good thing. One ring: Fine. Two rings: Well, he has to get to it, Margaret. Three rings: Come on, Ford. Four rings. Five rings. Click. “This is Ford Watts with the Carter County Sheriff’s Department. If you feel you have an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. If you just want to talk to me, wait for the beep and leave a message. I’ll get back to you.”

  Maggie cleared her throat. “Yes, Mr. Watts. This is Mrs. Watts, alone under the Wattses’ blankets. It’s not an emergency. Not yet, anyway.” She giggled in the pause. “Anyway, just checking on you. Get yourself home or call me and tell me not to wait up.”

  She disconnected and her smile faded with the seconds that ticked away from having heard his voice on the message. She sat in the dark, staring at the phone-shaped black hole in the nightstand shadows. She started to shrug the robe from her shoulders, but caught it as it slipped down her back. It wasn’t cold enough in the house for goose bumps, but Maggie had them anyway.

  She pulled the chain on the old bedside lamp, and the details of their bedroom, hers and keenly now Ford’s with his robe over the footboard and his change jar on the dresser, leapt at her, overbright and too colorful for the middle of the night. She jammed her pillows behind her back, but two paragraphs of her nightstand novel frustrated her. She’d had to read each line four times to get the words to stick. She tapped her front teeth with her thumbnail. Twice she reached out for the phone and twice she recoiled before an exasperated sigh put a halt to the dance. She grabbed it up and redialed.

  “It’s me again,” she told his voice mail after bouncing her knee through the endless ringing. “I’m being silly. Will you call me anyway? I just want to know you’re okay.” There’d be no more sleep until they spoke.

  • • •

  Maggie rebraided her hair, but kept to only the silk kimono over h
er birthday suit. No sense in dressing as Ford would be calling soon or, better yet, be home in the flesh, and she’d be back in their bed shortly.

  She lasted halfway through a cup of chamomile tea and up to the first ad break of an infomercial extolling the wonders of a rubber rug rake.

  The number pad took the brunt of her restlessness as she dialed Ford’s cell phone a third time. The call rang to his voice mail, and she hung up before the message tone demanded comment. He’d either gone out of range or turned the ringer off.

  If he’d drifted into a pocket of dodgy reception on the outskirts of town, Maggie was only a little annoyed. He should have called her if he was going much farther than the park. It was the middle of the night for heaven’s sake, and his night off what’s more.

  And if he’d turned it off, there was going to be a quarrel. Maggie mostly stifled her instincts because, more often than not, they left her with nothing but a red face to show for it. She was a practical woman in the interest of peace, and at some cost to her nerves. But Ford knew, if she’d called—and twice at that—she really needed him, if only to tell her that he’d be home soon.

  Her patience didn’t make it another ten minutes. “Tessa?”

  The dog had followed Maggie from room to room, matched at both ends by droopy eyelids and a sagging tail, bobbing in time atop shuffling paws.

  “What do you think?” Maggie drew resolve from the automatic consent to be found in Tessa’s steady brown eyes. Tessa always agreed first no matter what, out of loyalty, then again once the question was actually asked out loud. “Want to go for a ride?”

  The dog’s ears perked to cinnamon-fringed peaks at the string of her favorite words. Is it time to eat? ran a close second, but riding always took precedence over food and sleep.

  Maggie tried Ford’s phone one more time as she dressed. “Dammit” was the only message she left.

  • • •