by Joseph Fink
34
“Not the smartest move, waiting in plain sight,” she said, sitting down next to Keisha. She was still wearing her motley imitation of a police uniform. She didn’t smell like the Thistle Men had smelled, but she didn’t smell human either. She smelled like rock being crushed to gravel, like earth and the burning smell of friction. “Maybe you remember me? Officer Cloud.”
“I figure if you wanted to find me you could.”
The woman looked over at the guards. They stared hard at Keisha, but when they looked at the officer, their eyes slid away quickly, as though they might be injured if they looked for too long.
“You know that they can’t protect you. Not if I decide to kill you now. I wouldn’t think twice about taking them with you.”
Keisha nodded. “Sure, I know that. I also know that I don’t need protection.”
The woman laughed. “Boy, I love your spirit. One gets so tired of mewling and tears. But you have something different in you, don’t you? You’re not afraid.”
Keisha met her strange, unfocused eyes. “You got me really wrong, Officer Whatever. I’m always afraid. Life makes me afraid. And if I’m already afraid of life, then what are you?”
“Certainly not life,” said the woman, her voice low and earnest. “But I think you misunderstand your situation. I’m not a . . . what do you like to call them? A Thistle Man. No low monster looking to feed. Go ahead, punch me in the face if you want.” She leaned in close. Her face was a patchwork of shadow in the off-center lighting over the bench. Her breath smelled like ferment and mud. “Hit me as hard as you like. Do you have heather oil on you?”
Keisha hesitated. Pulled the small bottle out of her pocket.
“May I see it?”
What difference does it make at this point? Keisha thought. She handed it over. The officer opened the bottle, sniffed it, then put it to her mouth and took a long pull.
“My boys, anything that reminds them of those oracle freaks and they get weak in the knees. I’m not so easily impressed.” She handed the bottle back, looking straight ahead and leaning back against the wall. “That tasted disgusting.” She smacked her lips.
“So you’re who Thistle sends when their regulars can’t get the job done.”
“Thistle doesn’t send me anywhere.”
“Well, I’m going back to bed, Officer . . .”
“Table.”
“Officer Table, it was nice talking to you. My regards to Thistle.”
Her heart pounded and her head felt light, but she forced herself to stand and walk steadily back to her truck, then inside and onto her back and waiting with her eyes open, but the woman did not follow.
As Keisha drove on the next morning, she went over again the questions that these last days had left her with. Starting with: the Bay and Creek secret base. Why in the world had she been allowed to see it and then allowed to leave? There couldn’t be a fundamental objection to killing in order to maintain the secret. That base was huge and well staffed and she suspected there were others. For a secret that big to have been so well kept, blood must have been shed in the past. An organization with absolute mercy would eventually have faced leaks, and Bay and Creek had stayed under the radar for who knows how long. They would have no moral objection to killing her.
One theory was that Alice was protecting her. But again, this went against how well Bay and Creek kept their secrets. If a person not wanting their loved one killed was enough to keep that loved one safe, then the secret of Bay and Creek would have been leaked years ago. Not even Alice, no matter how high she was in the organization, should have been able to protect her like this.
As Keisha thought about this, she noticed a fellow truck, painted an eye-peeling yellow, driving erratically. It shuddered past, pushing its engine to a whine. Covering the entire passenger-side window was a series of cardboard signs. All of them said, in handwritten scrawl: “I Not Bad Boy.” She couldn’t see the driver. Soon she lost them, and filed it away as possibly dangerous or possibly just another oddity of the road.
The only conclusion she could draw was that Bay and Creek wanted her to see that base and walk away alive. And the only reason they would want that was if it helped their cause. If it helped them fight Thistle.
And then there was the question of Thistle. When it had only been the Thistle Man, the sole creature, it could have been dismissed as merely a predatory animal taking an interest in possible prey. But this had moved beyond that. When the Thistle Man had failed, then this officer had arrived. They were determined to see her dead, once they had tired of playing with her of course.
Bay and Creek wanted her alive, and Thistle wanted her dead. She must have a role in this war, one she couldn’t see yet. She was meant to be useful somehow. She only needed to stay alive long enough to figure out what her role was supposed to be.
She stopped at a Cracker Barrel to pee, and when she came out, that yellow truck was there. Every inch of its windows plastered in those signs. “I Not Bad Boy.” The doors were open. Standing on the hood of the cab was the woman in the ramshackle police uniform. Her chin was stained with blood, and when she saw Keisha, she started howling. Not like an animal. Like an alarm. “WOOP, WOOP.” No change in her expression, her eyes locked on Keisha’s and that high, mechanical howling, “WOOP WOOP WOOP.” Keisha ran for her cab, and the officer didn’t chase her. Keisha fumbled into first gear and got herself out of the parking lot. The officer stayed on the hood of the cab, dripping blood onto the yellow paint, howling, and watching Keisha go.
35
For all of Alice’s traveling, she and Keisha only ever took one road trip together. Keisha had always preferred to stay home. With her anxiety, it was the one place where she felt halfway safe. But her anxiety was why they had gone. Two years after the change in Alice, there was a summer where Keisha’s anxiety had gotten so bad that air had stopped working for her. She would breathe in and breathe out and still feel like there was no oxygen at all. She was in a perfect vacuum of panic. Alice found her sitting on the shower floor, not having done anything but let the water wash over her for twenty minutes, and Alice said, “First off, Chanterelle, there’s a drought, and second, let’s go on a trip.”
Keisha was terrible at being on a road trip. The long miles. The way the miles related directly to the hours in a ratio that could be bent but not broken. This was normal to Alice, but horrifying to Keisha. Every minute seemed to stretch so long, and the scenery was repetitious and blank. Keisha had to stop and pee every hour or so, which she could tell annoyed Alice, but Alice would never say, and anyway Keisha was happy, because what Keisha hadn’t noticed was that she was bored. And bored was a big step up from dysfunctionally terrified.
The second night they stayed at a motel where the rooms were themed, the Sea Captain’s Room and the Forest Room and so on. They chose the Wildlife Room. There was a lamp shaped like a wolf’s head. Keisha had discovered, to her joy, that one of the four channels on the TV was PBS, when Alice got a call. Her conversation was casual, “sure, sure” and then she hung up, and, like it was an unrelated thought, suggested that she might drive down to the supermarket, get them a few things for dinner. “Do you want to come?” she asked, but Keisha had had enough of sitting in a car, and This Old House was on, so she shook her head, sat cross-legged on the bed with a pillow clutched to her chest.
Alice was gone for a long time. Over two hours. The fear returned. Keisha stared at the curtained window, wanting to go outside, to get help, to do anything. But she could only wait, and wait, and wait for Alice to come back. The air stopped working again, and Keisha gasped uselessly against the anxiety. Because she knew her wife would never come back.
Her wife came back. “Supermarket was closed,” she said. “I looked all over,” she said. But only the gas station was open, so she bought a feast of gas station snacks.
Keisha hid her anxiety. Didn’t want her wife to feel the pressure of knowing how much Alice being gone had destabilized her. They
sat out on the balcony. The sunset over the parking lot, and the self-storage center next door, it was beautiful. They ate their gas station feast. It became one of Keisha’s favorite memories. The two of them with almost nothing, and still they had everything.
But Alice was gone a long time. Way longer than fit her story. She had lied. Keisha had known that. And Alice had seen immediately how anxious Keisha was underneath her pretended calm. They had both smiled and worked around what both of them knew.
On an impulse, Keisha pulled off the last exit before the Mexican border and parked her truck at a gas station. She hadn’t picked up her latest shipment and so she had no trailer now, only her cab. Driving without a trailer felt light to her, which was silly in one sense, because it was still a big lumbering machine, louder and heavier than any car she had ever owned. But all feelings are relative, and now she felt something close to flight without all that tall bulk dragging behind her.
The woman from Thistle was never going to let her live. Keisha had a role to play in this war, something that made her too important for Bay and Creek to dispose of, and too dangerous for Thistle to let escape. So she had decided to do the only thing she could. She would drive her truck over the border, ditch it somewhere, buy a car with cash, and through a series of those transactions, each more south, she would find some new life to live. Not forever. She hadn’t given up on happiness for herself. But somewhere quiet and safe where she could wait it all out. Until her role in this conflict was clear and she could return, do whatever it was she was supposed to do, and then maybe, finally, impossibly, return home.
A car full of college students pulled up next to her, two of them getting out and jogging into the station. A family in a minivan laughed at a joke that would make no sense to anyone outside of the family. She watched the cars pass on their way to Mexico. It was going to be easy to let herself follow that current. To drive until the dusty hills grew wet and lush, until she reached another border, and then another border after that. Until the weather grew hotter and then colder again. Maybe very cold. Who knew how far she would go?
It wasn’t fair that it was going to be her who played this role. But then, was it fair for all the victims of the Thistle Men? Killed by the caprice of bloodthirsty creatures for no better reason than that the people happened to be there when the creatures’ hunger rose. At least she had a purpose to their hunting of her that all those other victims had lacked.
Or most of them. That name came to her again. Cynthia O’Brien. One murder held a secret, the figure in the hoodie at Crystal Springs had told her. Had Cynthia been like Keisha? Had she had a role to play, a role that had been successfully suppressed by Thistle?
Without thinking about it, Keisha already had her phone in her hand, idly searching Cynthia’s name again, while still believing entirely in her flight from the country. Cynthia, she already knew, had been a local historian who had been researching a number of government records involving an eminent domain issue when she had been unexpectedly murdered. The issue had been small and quiet enough that no one had connected her work to the tragic randomness of the attack upon her. But Keisha couldn’t help wondering what Cynthia had found in her research that left Thistle with no choice but to target her.
All of Cynthia’s papers had been donated to her local library, outside of Tulsa. The oracle said something about a library in Oklahoma. So did the email from Officer Campbell. Keisha looked at the address of the library for a long time. She looked up as the car full of college kids pulled away and turned on the road toward the highway. Keisha, too, pulled away onto the road, but she joined the current of cars moving away from the border, heading back north, as she started the long drive toward Oklahoma.
36
Keisha parked outside of the Lillian Adler Memorial Library. The building was a converted house, and the parking lot was a patch of gravel in what had once been a backyard. She felt the gravel crunch under her feet as she approached the door. There was a dangerous piece of knowledge inside this small converted house. She entered.
A young woman smiled up at her from the front desk. “Hi there, can I help you?”
Automatically Keisha scanned the room for escape routes and danger. The room didn’t offer much of either. While the library technically had a second exit, it was only about ten feet from the main door. A dodge around fire code by a lazy builder. There were a few other patrons, an older woman absorbed in a thick novel, a schoolkid studying while waiting for a parent to get home from work and pick him up, no one who looked like they were likely to be spies for Thistle. But then, she couldn’t afford to make assumptions.
“Yes, hello,” she said to the librarian. “I’m Keisha and I was hoping you could help me . . . uh . . .”
“Mercy.”
“I was hoping you could help me, Mercy. I had read that the papers of Cynthia O’Brien were moved here after her death. I’m a genealogical researcher hired by the O’Brien family and I was hoping that I could take a look at them?”
As soon as Keisha said Cynthia’s name, a flicker crossed Mercy’s face, but a moment later she regained her look of friendly concern.
“Well, sure, I would love to have been able to help you on that. I don’t know how much help they would give you with genealogy, Cynthia’s stuff was mostly municipal records from her research. Pretty boring unless you really care about the minutiae of our town.”
“I promise I would,” said Keisha, but Mercy’s face stayed frozen in bland customer service mode.
“Well, that may be, but unfortunately we don’t have her papers anymore.”
“What happened to them?”
“We had a bad flood in the library. The pipes. Froze solid and burst. Water went everywhere. We had to throw out half our collection. When we went to check her papers, it was a box of pulp. Ended up in the garbage, I’m afraid.”
“In the garbage.”
Mercy’s customer service smiled widened as her brow furrowed. It was an unconvincing combination.
“That’s right.”
Keisha considered how best to approach this. After all, Mercy herself could be from Thistle. What better way to protect whatever secret was here than to plant one of their own to squat over it, with a friendly smile and a watchful eye, quietly taking out anyone who asked the wrong questions. In that scenario, the papers had probably actually been turned to pulp and discarded, leaving Thistle to pick off any loose ends who were dumb enough to walk through the front door. It was entirely possible, maybe it was even likely, but what good was it to worry about that? If she was going to die, she would die. She leaned in close and dropped her voice past library quiet into a whisper.
“There’s a war,” she said.
Mercy frowned. “Pardon?”
“There’s a war, and Cynthia knew something about it. I think you may know something about it too.”
“There are a lot of wars, ma’am.”
“Please, Mercy. This war took my wife from me. It took my life. It took every moment of every day for the last few years.” She was crying and tried to control herself, then decided it might be useful and let herself go. “I need to understand why all this happened to me. And I think the answer is in Cynthia’s papers. I don’t think they were destroyed. I think you’ve been keeping them safe. And, even if you didn’t know it, I’m the one you’ve been keeping them safe for. Please help me, Mercy. This is my last chance at understanding.”
Mercy looked at her for a long time with a neutral expression, then sighed.
“I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t. Wait here. If anyone needs help, tell them I’m on break and will be right back. Mostly no one needs help.”
Mercy walked past her. Keisha stood at the desk. No one in the library paid any attention to her. About ten minutes later, Mercy returned holding a box.
“Soon after Cynthia’s estate passed these to us,” she said, “we started getting weirdos coming by asking to see them.”
“Weirdos asking to see them?” Keisha said,
smiling.
“Not your type of weirdo. Strange men. Real creepy. Others who I think were government types. See, Cynthia had been researching a conflict with the government, and it got me thinking that maybe they were trying to destroy her work.”
“So you pretended the job had already been done.”
“I had to. I didn’t think we were safe as long as we had these papers. So I turned off the heat. Let the pipes burst. Hated to do that to the books, but I figured if they were government, they’d be able to check on something like a flood. I took the box of her work home, put it in a closet, and hoped no one would ever ask about it ever again.”
She put the box in Keisha’s hands. It was light, only half full of paper.
“Don’t tell me what it says,” said Mercy. “I don’t want to know. But I really hope you find what you need. I do.” She kept eye contact with Keisha for a second, then said, “Ok,” and returned to her desk.
37
The papers all were related to an eminent domain case in which the federal government was trying to build a power plant in a mostly unpopulated area. The power plant appeared to be related to the military, or in any case there wasn’t a lot of public info available on the technical details or where the power would be going. To build, they needed to move out the occupants of about ten houses scattered through the area. But they hadn’t counted on how fiercely the occupants would fight for what was, to an outsider’s view, a not tremendously valuable piece of real estate. There was a court proceeding, one the government was guaranteed to win because no judge wanted to start any sort of precedent threatening the mechanism of eminent domain.