by Jamie Mason
“Goddammit.” She pounded the hood of the car with both fists and yelled, “Just tell me one thing!”
Frozen in the expectation of a rhetorical hailstorm, Jason didn’t even breathe.
“Just tell me I didn’t take up with the wrong fucking murderer!” Leah snatched the flashlight out of his hand and hurled the door closed with a force well set to break the frame.
Jason’s voice box felt folded into an origami swan and it couldn’t be trusted to deliver more than a papery quack, so he followed her, silent and ungainly in the wake of her fury.
Leah gripped the light and started sweeping the spaces between trees. “Detective Watts! It’s Leah Tamblin! We want to help you. Please tell us where you are. Detective? Mr. Watts? Please! Can you hear me?”
Jason and Leah crunched off into the woods, through the ankle-deep drifts of old leaves. He stayed close to the light and to Leah’s back and he felt the last opportunity for his confession zipping up behind them. He’d never have another chance to explain. One way or another, it soon wouldn’t matter anymore.
Jason cleared his throat and, in a low voice, started his tale.
• • •
Tessa’s nose never left the ground between the house and the carport, her direction tugged this way and that by an invisible string of the past, over the traces where people had lumbered and shed the elemental ghosts of their intentions. Her head snapped up and she bolted down the driveway. At the street she turned to the right, but slowed straightaway from a gallop to a trot.
Tessa swung her head back to Tim. Mike had joined him, arriving just in time to find that the initial search of the house had not turned up many clues as to what had happened. The dog loped back to Bayard, and she touched his wrist with her teeth and flew back down toward the street, taking the right turn with a paw-pedaling, graceful dog-skid.
The deliberateness wasn’t lost on Mike either. “Why does she keep doing that?”
“I have no idea. Ford’s wife thinks it has something to do with him. This is nuts. Mike, it’s no good us standing around doing nothing.” Tim looked back to the house with longing. Wood and shingles. Closets and rooms and evidence. Investigating thin air and dog sense was not his specialty. “All I’ve got is a dog going berserk.” He puffed out an exasperated breath. “I’m going to walk with her a bit. See if I can figure out what she’s doing.”
But when Bayard tried to walk down the road at her side, Tessa reversed her direction and made for his car as if her tail were on fire.
“What now, Tessa?” Tim bellowed before catching himself. He grimaced a silent apology to the dark houses at hand and waited for the neighbors’ lights, which never came. He’d got away with one, and his tension was better for the small release. Tessa stood by the car, wagging urgently, dancing in little hops.
Bayard met Mike halfway up the driveway with Tessa padding at his heels. “Mike, do me a favor, just wait for the team and keep the peace once they get here. Watch the place until I get back. You don’t have to do anything. Just watch. Call me on the radio if anything happens.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“How should I know? I’m going to take the damned dog for a drive, but I need you here in case I’m making a mistake.” Bayard bit his lip, immediately regretting saying it. He peeked to see if she had heard. He felt guilty for having even thought it. Following Tessa’s lead wasn’t wrong. Their progress was only banging up against that barrier of silence that made theirs an inexact partnership. She knew things he couldn’t begin to guess, but he did believe now that she could help if only he could follow her the right way. He had no doubt they’d understood each other’s purpose, but the gap in being able to convey the details could render the whole marvel completely useless. And Tim Bayard was far from used to throwing himself down rabbit holes.
As he buckled himself behind the wheel, he reached over to pat her head in apology. Tessa pulled away from her rigid windshield vigil long enough to lick his hand, but only just. She drilled through the darkness on the street ahead, seeing and knowing what Bayard could barely guess. They left Getty’s house behind and crawled down Old Green Valley Road, two sets of eyes and ears, but more of one mind than Bayard could ever remember feeling before.
• • •
Boyd groped the front of his shirt, poking around for a sore spot or, heaven forbid, a hole in his middle. The oncoming headlights had lit up his shirt like Christmas, and kind of like Christmas, it had been mostly a field of white and red. The woods had got him out of sight faster than the road would have, and he just plain didn’t know the lay of the land on the far side of the median. Route 10 marked the boundary of his expertise, so he’d run to where his feet could think for him. At any cost, he was glad to be clear of those two maniacs who would have mowed him down right there on the shoulder of the road if he’d dallied. The relief was short-lived. All the fighting and running had rekindled his own heat and sweat. The reek from his clothes set him gagging. His empty stomach tried to turn itself inside out up his throat. At the edge of the woods, he tore the stinking top shirt from his back.
Dashing through the trees in his undershirt, he could barely see the branches flying up to slap his face, much less any detail of his belly. His prodding fingers bounced all around as he stumbled, most likely missing the problem at each pass. He didn’t feel injured, but that didn’t lend itself to the sort of serenity it might have. Boyd had once put the square base of a key through the palm of his hand when he’d slammed at it in a fury for being stuck in the lock. He hadn’t felt any pain for hours then either.
The more he thought about it (as much as he could think about anything beyond getting far away and getting there fast), he figured it was the cop’s blood on him. What he’d seen of the guy’s face in the moonlight was enough to know that the man was on the wrong side of fine, even if Boyd hadn’t full-on killed him back at the house. It wasn’t really his fault in light of the way things had worked out, nor any of his concern.
However and why ever it had happened, the cops were near onto him, so Boyd forced himself to a stealthy walk. He was running on nothing. In a day and a half, he’d been nervous, tired, confused, terrified, furious, and occasionally full of swagger in great swinging blocks of time, and he realized he was just about wore out from feeling things. Given a little time and a short stretch of quiet to think, he’d be able to right himself to the map in his head, even in the dark and even having plunged into the trees without strong heed to where he’d got in. His sense of direction was that good. But he was a lousy tracker. Sound didn’t play to him like clues. Shifting winds only left him cooler on a different side of his face, and the passage of other creatures left their impressions too low for Boyd’s eyes, which were always scanning ahead for landmarks. He did not want to find that detective. And he certainly didn’t wish to be found by him either. So he made like a shadow and crept on, near as silently as was possible.
• • •
An obscene violin version of some pop song shredded Maggie’s patience. The hospital operator had left her on hold forever, all alone with the fight to stay focused while part of her mind, Pavlovian-style, played Name That Tune. Her attention hiccupped in the middle of the endless chorus. Her rambling thoughts plucked the sound of gravel rasping under squealing brakes from her imagination or her memory, she couldn’t tell, but it was faint and clear, and married to the disconnected idea of trees flying past her at a gallop. The vision flitted against the desperation that hopped up and down to know what news might be coming down the line from the nurse. The quick daydream distracted the idiot savant in the background, who had almost placed that stupid, cheerful melody.
She pulled the phone just far enough away to hear the wind in the eaves of the house, to make sure she hadn’t heard Ford’s truck pulling into the garage, and her skin prickled at how the gusts rattled the spring leaves, demanding that she think again of trees. Maggie clapped the speaker back over her ear to hear the last notes of the orchestra wave
r and fade. She had it. It was “I’m a Believer.” And simultaneously, a spike of terror.
Maggie had been looking for, waiting for, praying for, Tim Bayard’s number to light up the telephone display ever since she’d sent him out into the middle of the night with their dog. She’d narrowed her hopes to that single line she’d cast, had concentrated all her efforts there, to the exclusion of everything else. But the image of the trees was so strong and so—
Maggie nearly dropped the handset. She jabbed the button to get a clear dial tone. “Ford!”
27
At the T-stop of Old Green Valley Road and State Route 10, the dog-and-cop show came to an impasse. Two lanes streaked off to the right, and a cut-through in the tall, grassy median made a twin set of highway lanes headed opposite, sending just as logical a choice streaming to the left.
“So, what now?”
Tessa said nothing beyond a clipped whine.
In the hour before dawn, the town center of Stillwater didn’t own enough urban urgency to warrant a peep. Out in this far-flung border, they may as well have been on the moon. Bayard parked squarely in the middle of the deserted lane, flicked off the engine, and threw his back hard against the seat. But he tapped the hazard lights to life, just in case. A moment of knuckle-chewing yielded no inspiration, so he got out to listen for the whisper of more nothing to breeze past him. He released Tessa into the night and watched her scour the asphalt and grass verge with her snout.
“What do you know, Tess?”
She ignored him.
He gave her a minute to pick up the scent and leaned against the warm hood of his car, hypnotized by fatigue and the tick and buzz of the engine. By the second burr between the ticks, it was obvious that cars didn’t vibrate like that. But cell phones humming in their fancy new holsters did. Tim nearly snapped off the clips in getting to it, and he scooped up the call before it could tumble to voice mail.
“This is Bayard.”
Maggie yelled into his ear, “Tim! It’s Ford!”
“Oh, thank God. What did he—”
“He’s in the woods. I think he’s in the woods past town!” Her voice was shaking, and what Tim had taken for exaltation was actually frantic tears. “I don’t know why I think so, but I think we heard a tire squeal—park, and maybe—out there into the woods off 10—nearly out of my head”—her sentence was perforated by a gap in the reception—“this feeling.”
“Hang on, Maggie. I didn’t catch that last part.” Bayard jogged to the other side of the car and shook the phone in hopes of rattling loose a few more bars of signal. “What?”
“They’re checking the hospital, but I don’t think he’s there.”
“Okay.”
“What? I can’t hear you. Tim!”
He banged the phone against his thigh. “Maggie, I’m at Route 10. Right now. Can you hear me now? This is where Tessa brought me.”
“Tim, you have to find him! Something’s happened. I just know it.”
“I’m going to drive Route 10.”
“I’m coming out there.”
“Maggie, no! If he can call, he’ll call you at home. You have to be there if he tries. Stay there. I’m going to go on with Tessa to see what I can find.”
Lit up as he was, Bayard still had to choose—left or right. “Anything, Tessa?” he asked as he waved her back into the car and scrambled around to his own seat behind the wheel. He rode the window buttons, pumping them as if it would make them go faster, to let in the night for her, with all its invisible clues. But at the crossroads, she had found no markers. Her ears twitched and she lifted her nose to the wind, but the guiding pull was out of range. She panted sympathetically, but that was all.
Computers have no forethought. They can calculate at terrifying speeds without any ability at all to leapfrog a gap if the next step isn’t weighted by logic and the proper syntax. Even Tessa, with all her awareness, didn’t show the capability of making the odd guess, of plotting it out by drawing on past experience, unused trivia, and pure fiction to lead the way. That was exclusively human.
If Ford was hurt, he may have tried to make it to the hospital, which would mean a left turn. If he had headed for home instead, it would be a right. Left or right? Right or left? Tim’s head swiveled with the options knocking back and forth. Tim took a deep breath and then a giant step over any sort of surety and turned right.
He drove slowly, letting Tessa hang her head from the window without any way of knowing if it was useful or merely pleasurable for her. He crept up over the steering wheel to see what was to be seen a foot and a half sooner. A few minutes felt like an hour. Finally, around a bend, his headlamps threw back a refracted red glow from the corner of an extinguished taillight. Bayard held his breath as the tight cone of illuminated road swung into place and dragged the details from the dark shapes on the side of Route 10: red paint, tailgate, wide cab like a flexed bodybuilder. Ford’s truck. And ahead of it, Leah Tamblin’s car.
“I’ll be damned.”
• • •
In the dark, through the trees and underbrush, there wasn’t so much a path as there was a path of least resistance. Thickets sprang up and closed off avenues with no warning, and all forward progress bent to the will of the woods. Trespassers went, with little option, to where it guided them. The two terrors, of nighttime forests and of having possibly been party to the murder of a policeman, balanced Leah in their tug-of-war and kept her upright. Her head was killing her. She swung the beam of her flashlight over a soothing pattern in time with her crunching footfalls: light to the left, right foot down, light to the right, left foot down, top left, right foot, top right, left foot, down to the left . . . She tried hard to be searching as diligently as she was counting the cadence, but it staved off the panic, at least.
“Leah!”
“What? Do you see him?” Fear and hope pressed in on her neurotic bubble.
“See who?” Jason asked. “I called you a bunch of times and you didn’t answer.”
With that, her dread recurdled to fury. “See who? Are you crazy? Are you even looking for Detective Watts?” She shoved the blade of light into Jason’s face and he fell back, wincing.
Jason shielded his eyes and peeked through the slats of his fingers. “You didn’t say anything about what happened.”
“Why? What happened?” Confusion protected some mustard seed of faith that they were still speaking the same language.
“About what I just told you. About me and Harris.”
“Jason, Jesus!” She came at him again, flashlight raised above her head like a club. She stopped just short of bashing him. “Are you out of your mind? There is a man probably bleeding to death out there because of us. I’m trying to save him.” She glared a few thousand volts at him. “So, in a word—no!—I wasn’t really listening to you.” The unevenness of the terrain vibrated up through the stomping soles of her thin work flats. Her marching rhythm was ruined.
She heard him trotting behind to catch up. “But it’s important that you believe me.”
“Why?” she yelled without bothering to stop or to look back at him. “Why is it important, Jason? Just now, why in the hell should that story matter at all?”
This stopped him to silence so suddenly that she turned to see if he’d fallen into a hole. Her light found him tall, sad, and utterly lost. His hands hung limp at his sides. “Because it’s the truth.”
She shook her head at him. “The truth? Look, if I don’t go to jail over this, the best thing that can probably come out of tonight is that I’ll have to live with what’s happened to Detective Watts for the rest of my life. The rest of my life! That’s the truth. You, too, you know. But you don’t do much of a job of looking out for yourself, do you? You’re a mess.” She sighed. “But I get it. You don’t trust yourself with anything. Not even your own best interest. Pfffft. You’re in here with me when you could be across the state line by now. But you let me drag you along. Not that I don’t appreciate it, as it turns out. A
ll things being equal, I’d rather be home in bed.” Leah pressed her hand to the sore spot on her head and groaned. “But thank you, for what it’s worth. You probably should have run, though. Really. You should have a vote in your own life. You just let me decide for you. And that Harris—even a guy like that. Yeah. As long as they’re someone else, they’re always more right than you are. That’s sad. There’s the truth.”
The analysis hung there, awkwardly, between them.
“I thought you said you weren’t listening.”
“I wasn’t listening, but I heard you. There’s a difference.”
• • •
Ford Watts would have got off the shot if they’d made it there a few moments earlier. His hand was still curled around the pistol he’d finally freed from its holster. He’d carried it strapped to his ankle all day, every day, since his return from Vietnam, but his ankle had seemed a reach too far each time he’d tried for it, gut-stabbed as he was and fighting with Montgomery.
He’d watched the bobbing light winding a track toward him, feeling his strength draining into the ground and leaving it warmer beneath him than his own limbs. He’d followed the beam’s progress back and forth over the path he’d taken earlier, where he’d stumbled on roots and snagged invisible branches in the dark. The length of white light dragged his eyes left and right like the swing of a hypnotist’s watch until his lids slipped down and closed. He fought the wave of peace that settled through his shoulders and laid soft, warm hands around his aching heart. He thought of Maggie in her coral sundress on a hot day, years before. The sun was going down behind her and she handed him the screwdriver he needed to fix the gate latch. She was laughing and her eyes met his. Nothing special. Everything. His gun hand drooped to the ground, his finger slipped from the trigger, and the pain snuffed out like a doused candle.