Three Graves Full

by Jamie Mason

  • • •

  Her flitting foot-and-flashlight drill wouldn’t have left the illuminated circle in one place long enough for her to have picked out Ford’s legs from the scatter of fallen branches. Instead, now with Jason beside her, her phobia of the dark woods had relented enough for her to concentrate. She stroked the beam in a slow, wide sweep of the forest floor ahead of them.

  The flashlight kicked in her hand, a reflexive twitch, as her brain caught the inconsistency in the deadwood. At the end of the hunt, there’s always what you were looking for and what needs to happen next, but Leah froze in the grip of discovery. Then she slid the quivering bright fan of light up the long, denimed legs and brought Ford into the center of the beam.

  Jason gasped in confirmation, then saw that Leah had been struck motionless. He took the flashlight from her, and holding her wrist with his free hand, he eased her behind him. He broke into a run, pulling her along. They kicked away the covering branches and fell to their knees on either side of Ford.

  “Is he still alive?” Leah asked.

  “I don’t know.” Jason lifted the gun from Ford’s loose grip with one hand and gently shook Ford’s shoulder with the other.

  “Is he?” squealed Leah. She scuttled closer, hand hovering, tentative at his chest. “Mr. Watts? Oh, please God. He can’t be dead. If he came out here tonight just because of me, if he—”

  “Leah, you wouldn’t have come out here either except for Boyd Montgomery. You didn’t hurt Detective Watts. You didn’t hurt your fiancé. You didn’t do any of this.” Jason took Leah’s hand in his free one and ducked his head down to draw her wild eyes up to his. In the farthest glow of the flashlight’s halo, they could just see each other. “Don’t do that,” Jason said. “Put it where it belongs, on Boyd Montgomery. Let him take the blame for what he’s done.” Jason bent back to Ford and checked for a pulse, poking inexpertly at his neck. “Or even on me, I know. But none of it is your fault.”

  Leah was desperate to turn back and make one different move, just one, somewhere, anywhere, along the line of this day, this week, this life, to make this scene not true. The flood of random regrets poured out. “I shouldn’t have been out there tonight. I shouldn’t have had to see. It’s like—gloating. I always have to know. To snoop. It’s nothing! Nothing! And I wanted . . . It was easier with him gone. But Reid didn’t deserve it. Oh, please, oh, please. God, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have come. . . .” She rocked in her chant, lost in a begging panic.

  Jason, being lately attuned for confessions, heard every word. Leah presented normal, good, innocent. He’d just said so himself. It was easier with Reid gone. All of a sudden, it wasn’t a fantastically sick notion unique to him. If he could take that out of the woods with him if nothing else, it would be something.

  Ford’s eyelids fluttered.

  Jason sagged onto his heels. “He’s alive.” He shielded the light from Ford’s eyes and scanned down the front of his shirt. He touched the glistening, dark patch and his fingers came away only tacky. “He’s not bleeding too much right now, but he looks terrible. We have got to get him out of here.”

  He bent to Ford’s rolling eyes. “Mr. Watts? Don’t worry. You’re going to be okay.” Jason took his hand and Ford gripped back. Jason smiled over tears. “That’s it. Hang in there. I’m so, so sorry. Hold on. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  “Hurts,” Ford croaked.

  The run was still ahead of Jason and he had no idea how to manage all he should do before he made a try for it, but, for him, a moment of absolution was like water and sleep.

  Relief for Leah, however, was too much. “Oh, God. My head.” She doubled over, then scrabbled at the tree bark to pull herself up, and staggered away, hands on knees.

  Jason dropped Ford’s arm and ran to her.

  And to turn everything on its ear, his hand forgot to drop the gun.

  He draped his gun arm over her shoulder and guided her up, holding the light across her face to get a look at her sweat-greased shock. She looked awful—too pale and blank. “Leah, hang in there. It’s going to be all right.”

  There was a rustle in the undergrowth. And then a blast of light in his face, just in front of a pistol-slide’s grating snick into place.

  “Put the gun down,” said Tim Bayard. “Let her go, Jason.”

  28

  Tim had pulled up behind the truck and called for one of everything in Carter County’s emergency services. There was no one, upright at any rate, inside the cab. Leah’s car nosed crookedly off the edge of the ditch a few yards beyond. Bayard leaned over to get the flashlight from the glove box while Tessa crowded his efforts and scratched at the window, whining and prancing in her seat. He stretched over her, yanked the handle, and pushed the passenger door wide, more to be rid of her interference than to put her on point guard. But she was scouting at full alert and working hard before he’d closed his own door behind him. He watched her bustle back and forth, her nose pulling her every which way over the shoulder of the road.

  He checked the back of the truck and found it empty. A dark smear trailed down the outside of the window, and a faint stink wafted out of the cab, which was, as he’d guessed, empty. “What the hell?” he sighed.

  Bayard scanned the cars and the side of the road within the shallow arc of the flashlight. Other than the keys to the truck, which had been kicked up under the front axle, nothing looked as interesting to him as it did, apparently, to Tessa. He cupped his hands to his mouth and called, “Ford?”

  Tessa cringed and cowered, then trotted to his side in a crouch, ears swept back flat against her head. She looked up at him from low between her shoulders and chuffed softly. She crept forward, glanced back, and coughed the breathy woof again. Bayard, almost tired of being stunned by her, shook his head in amazement. Given the height and flexibility, she would have clapped her paw over his mouth and shushed him. She kept her head thrust forward and scrambled down the trough beyond the brink of the road and up the hill in front of them. Bayard had to jog to keep up.

  • • •

  Only one thing was stronger than loyalty for Tessa, and that was the pull of interest. Obedience brought her close to her two-legged pack, but her forever struggle was to keep at their side. Their wants weren’t exactly leashes, and she loved them. So, Tessa wrestled with disobedience now and then, to earn a Good girl even when the most desperate call of What was that? tickled her ears and crawled up her nose and stood the hair above her collar so tall and stiff that it tingled to a yammering itch.

  Having been washed in Ford’s pain nearly broke her heart. Whatever had happened had flung his hurt into the air in the hallway of that house. Tessa would have howled forever but for the intrusion of Tim. He pulled her back and asked her, What? What indeed? Others had been there with Ford: the man from the house, the woman from the park, the man from before, the one with the dogs. And then Tim had been able to smell something that she had not once she had lost the trail out there on the road. He had found Ford’s truck. She never understood what the people knew and what they did not. It didn’t make any sense.

  Now there was that same death again. It had saturated the hole behind the house, where the soil had drunk in the juice. A great deal more of it had been there on the tarp in the grass. Here was a little bit of it again. It was the deadest thing she had ever smelled. An old, strong death, wasted to the barest hint of whoever it had been and now boiling ripe with other life and process.

  Ford had been close by and on his feet. She knew he’d gone into the trees straight across from where the truck was stopped. He was hurt. Tessa would find him. But a wish called out to her. She want-needed just a moment to load more of that fussy death drama into her brain. It was only a small detour. Tessa looked back to that gap between the two pines, to the door in the woods that Ford had used to go into the trees. She wanted him, but that want bumped into the part of herself ruled by her nose. The lone wolf needled the good girl into a dereliction of duty.

/>   A shallow bowl of earth and leaves cradled a greasy, wonderful mess all pressed into a shirt with cookies in the pocket. Tim huffed and puffed up the hill after her, and he yowled at the smell of the dead-wet shirt, but was kind enough to run the light over it while she took it all in.

  “Tessa!” He was getting good at making yells sound like whispers. “Get out of there!”

  But he needn’t have said anything. Her head had already been yanked up by her ears. She’d heard voices, even better than cookies right now, lilting in on the breeze from the south. And besides, she was ready to go. Good girl.

  • • •

  Tim kept to the dog’s sensibilities and whisper-shouted to her from the edge of the hollow, even as he poured light onto the shirt wadded up there. The beam pooled in the rumpled fabric that was blackened with a dark crust, a rind of the now familiar stink. “Tessa! Get out of there!” It was too much. A shirt ripe with decomp in the woods after all the rest of the night’s nonsense?

  Tim had wisely gone to bed early, even before the late news, so as to rest untroubled; he remembered that his wife had snuggled up next to him, sighing happily. He’d been sleeping, warm and peaceful—he was sure of it, but, at this point, it was almost impossible to believe.

  “What the hell?” he moaned out loud.

  The dog’s head jerked up from the slimy pile of ruined shirt, and she’d taken off through the trees. Bayard was relieved to whisk his light away from the stinking puzzle, and he watched Tessa plodding through the leaves at the fuzzy edge of the brightness. She weaved her way around the swells of underbrush along a track running deeper into the woods, still hunkered down, still stealthy. Tim heard a female’s voice first. Not her words, but her tone: angry and afraid. He transferred the flashlight to free up his right hand, then drew his sidearm.

  The closer he and Tessa came to the voices, the more he was certain the evening’s players were lining up. The commotion sounded very much as if Jason Getty and Leah Tamblin were together, fussing, and not far ahead.

  Tessa slowed to his side. Her caution radiated like heat into his leg. Bayard switched off the light, then hooked the ring and little fingers of his flashlight hand under her collar, allowing himself to be led forward like a blind man.

  Tessa guided him tentatively at first, ramping up her speed only as his confidence in her night vision and his own footing grew. At a slow, bent-kneed trot in the woods on one of the oddest nights of his life, Tim Bayard became a true believer. Despite the suspense, he smiled in wonder, and it lit a swoon of affection for his helpmate. Tessa’s wagging tail whipped the backs of his legs.

  Tim felt the air of an open space against his cheek at the same instant that Tessa went utterly still. A light danced in the trees ahead. Rounding with her, silently, into the clearing, he saw two shadowed figures streaking to the right. Their flashlight swung wildly and he heard the voice that was almost positively Leah’s cry out in pain. The light drew around to reveal Jason Getty curling his arm over her shoulder, a short-barreled pistol in his hand.

  Tessa exploded from her pad of leaves, and Bayard crossed his wrists to point both his gun and his light at the pair. His left thumb lit the flashlight, while his right index finger settled against the trigger. The light dialed forward and back as he drew the slide.

  “Put the gun down. Let her go, Jason.”

  Getty’s face slid up a spectrum of confusions. He startled at the light in his face, gaped at Bayard, and, after quick-stepping away from Leah, he looked at the gun in his hand with all the goggling expected after a cry of Abracadabra!

  “But I didn’t—”

  “He wasn’t—”

  “Ford!” yelled Bayard. He’d finally made sense of the commotion flickering at the edge of his field of vision. Tessa nuzzled Ford Watts, who lay slumped against a tree. A tiny adjustment of the light and Bayard saw that the front of his shirt was soaked dark with blood. He swung his full attention back to Jason, who stood stunned and pinned again by the light.

  “Goddammit, Getty!” Fury trembled up through Bayard’s shoulders, and down into his arms, but his training kept it north of his wrists. His aim held steady. At the speed of thought, he tallied up the hours of paperwork and the stress of trial preparation against the cost of a bullet divided by the time he had between now and when backup arrived. His trigger finger anxiously awaited the sum.

  But Tessa, it seemed, also had a calculation in the works. Bayard watched Tessa spring at Jason, her paws landing on his chest, her face thrusting into his. Tim waited for the scream.

  But Getty didn’t scream. He didn’t flail, only staggered back a step as Tessa’s weight knocked him off-balance. She licked his face and wagged her tail like to shake her hindquarters loose.

  “Tessa, get back!” Bayard locked his elbows again, bewilderment banging sparks against his outrage. “Getty, drop your weapon!” Jason did. Tessa still mauled him with kisses. “Tessa, for God’s sake, get down!” Bayard shouted. It worked that time, or so he thought. Tessa wheeled around to his authority and cocked her head at him. Their eyes met, her pupils throwing back the blank, white reflection of his flashlight beam. She ran at him, leaping at the last second as she had with Jason. And as with her launch at Jason, it caused Bayard to lurch back. He braced, trying to nail his equilibrium down through his feet, but gravity yanked hard at his hips and kicked his knees loose. His finger twitched against the trigger and a shot roared into the trees.

  Jason ran.

  29

  With no truck, no plan, and hours burned off his escape, Boyd realized he was hopelessly separated from his getaway, but not all that far from the stand of forest he’d cut through earlier that same evening. But the setback was far worse than just lost time. They’d seen him from the road and surely called the cops by now; the manhunt would be marshaling fast even as he pinned down his location in the forest. If Boyd was plain about the whole situation, it was probably going down exactly that way.

  The first time he heard a voice droning under the sound of the leaves rearranging themselves underfoot, he’d held his breath until it felt like a hot cannonball in his chest. He placed the sound to his right, then it suddenly seemed slightly ahead of his path. He’d only turned his head just a little, but now the sound tilted far behind him, and down, fun-house wrong, as if the ground had sloped away, though no such hill was part of these woods. He shoved away the thought that his mind’s compass might be off track.

  Boyd tiptoed on and was stopped cold little more than a mile later by more voices, seemingly dead ahead. He strained at the ears until the voices—surely at least two—faded out.

  Now he was disoriented. Not about his place on the map, but as to where he could safely move ahead. Where were they? His confidence shrank back after every few yards he gained, and Boyd faced down the fear of wandering hesitant circles without a plan.

  He sucked in a breath and dredged his middle for that hard will that always drove him forward, but for a chilling change all he came up with was the scraping, hollow notion of how hungry he was. His hands stung with scratches from fending off the looping vines and whipping branches. Something had taken a sip from his neck and left a hot, itching knot in his skin.

  Boyd walked on, and the whispering trees had him snapping his head around to hear if there were words in the rustling. The pulse beating in his eyes rose up to loom clearer than the shapes of the trees ahead, fuzzing the whole picture to a dark, booming blur. He slid his feet over the rough ground, suddenly wary of roots that would grab and topple him. He swung his hands through empty air, reaching out, swatting great handfuls of nothing and more nothing. A horrible free-falling thrill swooped through his chest. His throat dialed down to a stingy straw. The air curdled and wouldn’t pass through. A scampering in the brush spooked a yelp from him, which in turn dropped him to a crouch for fear of having been heard. Then he found his knees didn’t want to unlock.

  Boyd tried to stand, but his thighs pulled against it, grinding him smaller and smaller whil
e a panic crowded the fight right out of him. He wanted Bart. The pining for his brother welled thick in his throat. He reached for the memory of Katielynn, but shrank back from the image of the hate burning in her eyes, a rich, red underscore widening across her chest.

  Boyd’s will had pulled him time and again ahead of his feelings, up over anything or anyone in his way. Eventually his will had run past it all, outrun even his own grasp, leaving him alone on a hill, gulping a cold breeze and sitting on a tremor that was trying hard to hatch into full-blown hysterics. He inched back until he butted up against a trunk and slid down, cornered in a cold sweat by the ghost of voices in the night that he could not make out for trying.

  • • •

  Tessa understood basic physics. She knew it innately and better than most high school science students. Cause and effect and the nature of opposing forces were her specialty. But in her way of knowing things, there were fewer distinctions. It was all the same to her. Pressure was pressure, no matter if it was a hand against a door or just the vibe of fright and anger clacking off the people around her like a hard rubber ball off the table legs at home. Among this group huddled in the woods, the pressure yielded cracks as real and wide as any she could shove her nose into.

  She left the pressure to itself, though. Ford was found! She pulled up from a gallop to a careful prance to duck down next to him once she drew close. He hadn’t opened his hand to her. Most people rubbed her head or scratched her ears first, which was pleasant enough, but Ford always stroked her jaw, making her squint with delight and sag into his open palm. He with his hand held out at chin height was what she knew, what was right. He even did it in his sleep when she trotted in for a midnight check on her people.