Three Graves Full

by Jamie Mason

  The detective staggered away, taking full advantage of the surprise he’d delivered. He loped off, as best he could while clutching his midsection, up the hill and toward the trees.

  • • •

  Bayard didn’t try to talk himself out of it. Jason Getty was an iffy link from Leah’s arrival in town to Ford’s absence, but the nagging idea was bolstered by the messages she had left, which had been demanding in tone, if still reasonably polite in content. She had driven all the way to Stillwater just for more information. She was hell-bent to own all the details, needed to know everything in its precise order to be able to move on. He knew the sort and even admired the moxie. The only things left for her in Stillwater were the case file and the crime scene, and since she wasn’t looking at the case file in her car, in the park, in the dead of night . . .

  Sitting in Ford’s living room hadn’t helped. There’d been no word from the station. Driving the town hadn’t turned up any cast bread crumbs. The lateness of the hour was a nuisance, but also a fairly reliable shield. Either it would help the situation to look around for Ford and Leah at the crime scene, or Getty would be asleep and left to dream on, none the wiser.

  The street in front of Getty’s place was deserted—no Ford, no Leah Tamblin. Bayard tested the balance of his reaction, relief against disappointment. He leaned his head back on the headrest and looked out over the last of his ideas.

  Bayard had always thought that things watched too long or too intently seemed somehow to watch back. The pressure of staring down a blank-faced house in the dark for more than a few minutes tickled at his common sense. Tendrils of nothing tracked through his hair, raising it at its roots, and stationary objects swore up and down to his peripheral vision that they could move—just a little bit.

  People rarely rattled him, though. He could entertain his overactive intuition for hours by reading the fine print of another man’s face. But inert things had only the subtext he gave them, which was never a problem unless he had nothing to do except note that the hedges beside him were hunkering down in a suspicious manner. The impromptu stakeout nibbled at his nerves.

  He watched a sudden wind in the trees make the night shadows lower and raise over the windows, looking, for his discomfort, like a set of blinking eyes and a mouth flexing fearful or angry in a door-shaped snarl. Enough of that had been already too much to begin with, so he let off the parking brake and slipped the transmission into neutral and steered the car off the curb as it drifted back out of the sight line of the house. Nothing indicated that Jason had heard him. No lights had come on, he’d heard no noises. But Bayard felt better sitting out of the house’s challenging stare just the same.

  Tessa fidgeted in the passenger seat, unable to get comfortable in the narrow bucket.

  “It’s okay.” He stroked her, fumbling to find ears to scratch without looking away from the street. His gaze bounced between the corner of the house that he could still see and his rearview mirror, and every few seconds he’d snatch a peek at his cell-phone display. No calls. Ford hadn’t made it home. Tim’s eyes stung for want of blinking. He wouldn’t call Maggie until he had something to tell; wouldn’t rattle her with news of no news. He shoved back at the prodding feeling that he should be somewhere else.

  The air went stale in double time between Tessa’s panting and Tim’s mulling. He turned the key to spark the battery and ran the windows down. Tessa’s immediate whine surprised him. She leaned out the window, rigid, chuffing at the ends of her whimpers.

  “What?”

  She glanced back to him, then twisted around again to strain at the window, keening high in the back of her throat and punctuating the song with low, whispery barks.

  The hairs on Bayard’s arm danced in waves. He grabbed a flashlight and looked at Tessa.

  “You stay here. I’ll be right back. This won’t take long.” One dog ear cocked doubt in his general direction. “Well, it shouldn’t take long, anyway. I hope.”

  She peaked her brows at him and chewed the air, licking her chops.

  “It’ll be fine. Don’t get all wound up.” He squeezed his temples between both hands. “Why am I talking to a dog?” He patted her head. “Gotta go, Tess.”

  But Tessa had other ideas. Tim opened his door and she bounded out, scrambling right over him, oblivious to the sensitivities of the human male lap. Bayard’s breath caught in his throat in a harrowing moment of anticipation between the dog’s planting her paw in a safe-ish spot and the inevitability of its sliding into the danger zone at the relaunch. Physics and anatomy collided and Tessa cleared the door in a nimble spring. Bayard groaned and slumped over the steering wheel, sucking in air over gritted teeth, then growling it out again, not much better for the oxygen. Tessa waited for him, tap-dancing and smiling, in the middle of the street. Bayard gripped his knees as the swirling, green pain crawled into his belly and died a slower death than he had time for.

  He eased his legs around and stood up, fighting a spine that was still intent on curving a belated protection over his nethers. “Tessa, get back in the car.” He scowled at her and flung a guiding finger to the interior. “Go on, now. Back in.”

  Tessa crouched and chuffed a low, imperative bark.

  “Get. Back. In. There.”

  She bolted off and ran back to the spot of her disobedience and repeated the relay twice, each time taking an additional stride toward Jason’s house. Bayard didn’t know how to argue with a dog. At this point, he wasn’t even sure of the wisdom in it.

  “Okay, fine,” he said to no one in particular. And to Tessa: “You. Keep quiet.”

  He clipped the lead onto her collar. “You’d better not just have to pee.”

  24

  Leah found herself well out of practice of hoping for the best from this night, but she tried to commit to the upside in the scene playing out at the end of the headlights’ reach.

  Impossibly, Ford Watts was back from the dead. She’d seen a boot in the truck, but still couldn’t get all the way to believing that somehow he was okay. Yet there he was, clearly and unmistakably alive, as he stumbled up the hill at the side of the road, clutching his middle. A starburst of butterflies blazed through her, making the blood fizz in her ears. She thought perhaps she was fainting, but instead of black gauze falling around her eyes, she felt wide-awake and poked all over with exclamation points.

  Her voice was even more reluctant to leap to hope and she could only whisper, “Jason, look! Up on the ridge! It’s Detective Watts!” And on the heels of that: “Oh, God.”

  Boyd Montgomery, with a rose printed across the front of his shirt, stood up alongside the truck and stared at them, pinned to his place by the headlights. He’d popped into sight from a crouch down near the front tire of Detective Watts’s truck.

  Leah knew that the rose was out of place, but couldn’t slot it into its proper priority. Her head throbbed and her thoughts fuzzed at the edges. Who cared what was on his shirt? What did it matter? But Leah’s newborn optimism couldn’t build a wall faster than her common sense could tear it down. It wasn’t a rose. The man’s shirt was covered in blood. Montgomery scanned the ground again as they neared, then bolted up the hill after Ford Watts.

  “Jason, look!” she said again.

  But Jason didn’t look. And he didn’t answer her cry either. Instead, Jason sped up.

  As they careened past the truck, Leah fell back against her seat and then the passenger window. She twisted around in time to see Montgomery reach the tree line. Her clarity came back online in a hot rush. There was pain left, to be sure. A direct sort of pain, though—burning straight down the offended nerves without distracting every passing thought along the way. If she squinted her eyes, she could think clearly, and beyond that, everything else worked fine. Especially her conscience.

  “What are you doing? Stop!”

  Jason didn’t. He dropped the pedal, which, in turn, dropped Leah’s sore head against the glass for that one last crack, this one of the sobering variety
.

  “Jason, stop!”

  And still no response. The car bucked over the rough shoulder of the road and lost its hold on the fine gravel under the tires, the back end flicking like a mermaid’s tail to get back onto the asphalt. Then she realized Jason couldn’t see. She watched his face in fascination, almost detached from the moment. So strange—cataracts of pure fear fogging clear eyes. They may as well have been bricked over. He stared straight ahead, but whatever he was seeing, it was all much farther away than the band of blacktop spooling out under the headlamps.

  “Jason,” she said, quietly this time, and touched his arm. “What’s wrong? You have to stop.”

  Apparently he didn’t.

  “Where are you going?”

  Jason only shook his head.

  “We can’t just leave him alone back there! For God’s sake, he’s hurt!” With the simple statement came a tidal wave of guilt, not unlike, if she had known it, the crippling blame Jason had felt watching her struggle to her feet in his backyard. And like a rogue wave, it slammed into her, dragging salty dread down through the pit of her stomach, drenching her in regret. “Oh, God. We have to help him. We have to go back.”

  Jason plowed ahead, trying to outrun a nervous breakdown by driving fast and talking faster. “I can’t. It’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Leah watched the needle of the speedometer nod over to her side of the car.

  A crazy giggle bubbled up in Jason’s throat. He laughed harder, snorting a little as he came up for air. Then his snickering congealed to a sob.

  “You don’t even know what you’re asking. If I help him, do you think he’ll help me?” He darted a look that expected the obvious answer, whatever that could possibly be. Jason shook his head. “I have to keep going. I can drop you somewhere. I’m so sorry,” he babbled, squeezing the fight out of the steering wheel as if it meant to jump free.

  Leah checked for turns ahead, but they zipped through a featureless black, overdriving the halo of visibility in front of them. By the time they would see a problem, it would already be two seconds too late.

  “Calm down,” she said. “And, for God’s sake, slow down. What are you talking about?” He looked terrible. Leah knew the phrase not a friend left in the world. She’d said it herself, meaning no harm, to describe sad nobodies. But she’d never believed it, never thought that those people were completely friendless. Not really; not literally.

  Jason was utterly alone with something that had taken up a hot and reckless presence in the car, leaving her stranded, also alone, locked out of his reality, but strapped on to its blind ride. “Jason, please. You’re scaring me.”

  The hook of this plea was a brand-new barb. Jason had disappointed Patty, and he’d driven Harris to utter contempt. But as far as he could recall, he’d never scared anyone. It crawled like wasps over his skin. He had accepted, even in bewilderment, the changes that his time with Harris had burned into his character. But not this.

  The line, although he couldn’t have known it until he’d treaded all over it, was in that Harris had delighted in other people’s fear of him, where Jason never could. He looked at Leah again, in hard focus for the first time since he’d tried to set her free in his foyer. It wasn’t in him to put her in this kind of danger, to scare her so terribly. Whatever play he’d make, it wasn’t this.

  He drove on, his foot lightening on the pedal, his shoulders drooping. “Okay.” He slowed and made a U-turn in the median and sped back the other way.

  Relief wilted Leah and the road rattled up through the suspension, making a trembly, dark blur of the view outside the window. She dug a flashlight from the glove box and prayed they weren’t too late.

  The last bend in the road straightened out under their tires, and Leah tapped Jason’s arm, excited and fast, with her full, flat hand. “Here it is.”

  Jason bounced over the grass and cut across the opposing lanes. He stopped the car in front of Ford Watts’s truck.

  Leah squeezed his arm. Jason knew he could just let her go. Take the car and leave her to hunt for Detective Watts alone. But Montgomery was out there. He had been adamant that he meant them no harm, but he’d also said that all he wanted was a car. A good bit of spilled blood since then had painted that little white lie a bright shade of pink.

  Would Jason wear that on his conscience, too? Stranding her to watch her own yellow-smiley-face aerial fob fly off into the distance with no explanation and a double murderer closer at hand to her than the help she needed? He wouldn’t and he knew it. He’d keep the keys. He’d wait to see what happened. It could still go a few ways.

  Leah looked through the car’s windows to both horizons, shortened in this stretch of road by the hills ahead and behind, searching for someone to flag down. She twisted in her seat to catch the white glow of headlights spilling over the rise. There weren’t any. But they would come. There was always someone.

  Just then, moments into hope’s triumphant return, a muffled buzz purred against the seat and a song lilted up beside her: a catchy little jingle, a factory-bland, preset ringtone. Jason cried out and wriggled in surprise. His hands swatted at his pocket as if it had caught fire.

  Leah couldn’t precisely name the reaction that raced up her backbone and exploded into her head like stadium lights. The mutable wave twisted, changed color and temperature as it rose: confusion, shock, some dishwater-dull horror, and all tinged in a sour-sad disappointment.

  “You’ve had a cell phone the whole time?”

  25

  The house was completely dark and still, and Jason Getty’s car sat locked and empty under the carport. Bayard flicked open the cover snap on his gun holster and somehow couldn’t quite muster up feeling silly about it. Something was off. He kept his footfalls careful to preserve the quiet, but he wouldn’t stoop to tiptoeing. If his hand had been in his pocket instead atop a .40-caliber pistol, he would have looked every bit the casual neighbor ruled by his dog’s bladder. That is until he sidled up to the living-room windows, SWAT-style, for a peek inside. Luckily for Bayard, at that distance from the road, he was all but invisible. Shadows layered the front rooms of Getty’s house, but nothing hinted at overtly sinister in the black outlines of the furniture and walls.

  Tessa trotted at the length of her leash, changing directions, testing the wind, ears tugged every which way by sounds that Tim couldn’t hear. At the side of the house, the breeze delivered the ghost of a reek. Trash? Compost? Tessa was off like a racehorse, dragging Bayard at the end of her strap. He fumbled with the switch on the flashlight and stumbled along behind the dog.

  The smell had only to become a fraction stronger before it was unmistakable to Bayard, but by then Tessa had towed the both of them most of the way to the open pit at the back of the yard.

  “What the hell?” Bayard flicked the beam over the edge of the hole while Tessa nosed in the dew-damp grass just behind him. Her snuffling went frantic as she dug at the ground, pressing her snout into the soil.

  Bayard knelt at her side. “What is it?” He shone the light onto the patch of ground that Tessa raked with her paw and nose. He couldn’t see past her. “Hang on, Tessa. Let me see.”

  She pushed his hand away from her discovery, but Bayard cupped her scuttling muzzle and guided it aside. “Just let me take a look.”

  The fur of her beard was clumped into sticky strands. His hand cooled where she had painted soggy swirls there, tossing her head to be rid of his hold. He let her go, and the night air lit up the damp in his palm. It was wetter than a dog’s nose would have left it, and he didn’t have to be an animal expert to know that. He drew the light over his hand and found it smeared with red blood and dirt.

  Bayard’s instincts hummed in every limb, but the confusion of the puzzle before him left him rooted in place. He traced the flashlight into the trees, then again to the blood on his hand, and over the rear of the house. Midway to the back deck, a shallow mound in a patch of flattened grass caught the beam and locked his wris
t. Tessa took the light like a zip line and ran out the slack of her lead.

  “What the hell?” In the back of his mind, Bayard began keeping track of how often he’d say that this night.

  • • •

  For Tessa, the ground from the front of the house to the back was tangled with trails. The rush of sorting the scents from all the many fresh, crisscrossing paths buzzed through her brain so that she had to work to concentrate, a rare thing for a mind so used to sifting intangibles.

  The pit had scared Tim. The smell of dead things almost always spiked ammonia-fear from people, even if they didn’t run. Smells didn’t frighten Tessa. People had to be sized up, and animals had to be chased, befriended, or sometimes intimidated, but smells, for Tessa, were the best source of the daily news. Some smells felt like a smack to the nose, and some made her drool and beg, and then some needed to be marked over with a squat. Tessa understood all these things and minded accordingly.

  For all that needed minding here, it had been a busy news day indeed. She didn’t know why Tim passed right by, but they always did, the people. The yard was jumbled and too busy with trampling and bleeding when people were usually asleep. But she was not afraid, because the top story of the night was recorded right here in the grass. Whatever else might be wrong, her master had walked this very ground, and she would drag Tim to understanding if she had to.

  • • •

  It took some convincing to pull Tessa back to the car, but back they had to go. Tim’s phone and radio were still inside, and it was time to send up the alarm.

  “I’m going on in,” Tim said to the officer en route. “Get here fast, but no lights or noise. The last thing I need is the whole neighborhood out in their jammies gawking at this mess. Hurry.”