by Joe Clifford
Hitting the highway, she pulled up the address for the secluded, creepy house on the edge of the Plotter Kill Preserve. She tried Nick again, but once more the call went straight to voicemail. She left a message, explaining where she was going, whom she was meeting, and what she hoped happened next. Even at her most optimistic—and hopeful was not a trait Alex Salerno naturally possessed—she knew there was no guarantee the text had even come from Cole. That crowd the other night had been rough. She needed a plan. If she saw cars, any other people, she’d err on the side of a setup. From the perimeter, she’d be able to tell if Cole was lying about being alone. If it looked like he had company, she’d come back later with Nick, maybe Tommy too. Even Riley, if he was sober by then and she was up for dealing with that.
Compulsion and curiosity pulled her along, the burning need to learn the truth. Even before Sharn, Alex felt Cole had been hiding something. She could see it in his face, his eyes, the way he carried his body, a man tormented. A man with a confession he was dying to get off his chest.
Alex’s cell rang as she raced. It wasn’t anyone she wanted to talk to now.
“Forget about the farm,” Alex tried telling Noah Lee, who kicked off the conversation in high gear, prattling about the Brudzienski property. “Dead end,” she said.
“Maybe not,” Noah said. “Did some digging. I took your advice and called the probate court where Ron Earl Brudzienski’s will was filed. Wren is potentially on the hook for a lot of money—”
“I know. I talked to Riley.” Alex searched for the signposts up ahead. “If Benny gets moved to Jacob’s Island, the state can seek restitution. And if Benny were to somehow get cleared, Wren has to decide whether he lets his brother die in the streets. I don’t think he’s looking forward to facing that dilemma.”
“No dilemma. He doesn’t have a choice. There’s a provision.”
“What provision?”
“One that mandates Benny’s continued care. A percentage of the profits from the farm. Hard and fast numbers. In writing. Legally binding.”
“How much of a percentage?”
“Thirty-three and a third.”
“A full third?” Alex asked.
“Three kids, so yeah. Every cent has to be accounted for. It’s very thorough.”
Alex hated admitting she’d come to view Benny as less than human, assuming his parents would have done the same. Which made her the shittier person.
“So we have a motive,” Noah said.
“For what?”
“Who put Benny in the hospital. You know how big the Brudzienski farm is? They have more property than just the one in Reine.”
“Hold on,” Alex said, trying to read exit names. “You’re getting a little ahead of yourself.”
“You think, what, it was an accident? Bad timing? Benny was already headed for inpatient hospitalization. Ron Earl had started arrangements before he died. Found that out too. If Benny isn’t brained in that trench, he’s shipped to Brattleboro Acres. Wren is executor of the estate. You know how much Brattleboro costs? Let me tell you, it isn’t cheap. As long as his big brother stays in Galloway, Wren is pocketing a fortune.”
“First off, there’s no foolproof method for beating a man to within inches of his life.” Alex didn’t know what finally shorted Benny’s circuits, but the provision cemented Wren and Riley’s partnership. Riley had admitted as much, just without the hard stats to back it up. If Riley was trying to prevent formal charges against Benny because he had lingering doubts of culpability, Wren had no choice but to get behind him. A third of all profits explained the expansion and diversification of the family farm, as well—why, for instance, Dan didn’t work there. The more outsourcing, the greater the rotating overhead, the less technical “profit.”
“This is huge, Alex. You were right. This story is turning into something much bigger than just Kira Shanks.”
“There’s no ‘just’ about it. A girl is still dead.” She slowed to make sure she had the right turn. “What about your father?”
“What about him? He wanted me to stand up for myself. You wanted me to stand up for myself. This is me standing up for myself.” And Noah was off and running, citing additional research he’d done, figures, stats, projections, the cost to run a farm, how much money they made, lost, spent on advertising, electricity, refrigeration, upkeep and maintenance, interstate shipping—the kid swelling with pride over a job well done. She let him drone on, her own brain overtaxed with this latest influx of info, which she couldn’t reconcile with Cole Denning’s text message and whatever waited for her at Plotter Kill.
She didn’t even remember when Noah clicked off, her head configuring myriad combinations and possibilities. She needed to stay sharp, stay focused. Time could often get the best of Alex and devoting limited mental resources to the farm right now wasn’t helping solve anything. She almost had a stable foundation constructed, until she repositioned a tab and the whole damn thing fell apart. Like removing a lower block during a drunken game of Jenga. Even if Wren benefited financially from Benny staying in the hospital, it still didn’t explain what put him there. She couldn’t connect worlds. Wren and Dan. Meaghan and her crew. They didn’t mix. Except through Benny. And Kira. Or maybe it was the other way around? Alex didn’t care about wills, projected income, or the best convalescence money could buy. She cared about blood and genetic samples found at the Idlewild Motel; about what really took place on that cold November morning seven years ago. She cared about the mentally handicapped man found bludgeoned and left to die in a culvert, vilified without a chance to defend himself. Because the more she looked into this, the more certain she’d grown of Benny Brudzienski’s innocence. And Cole Denning was ready to help answer these questions. Why did Noah have to call right then? She had believed she was speeding toward a solution. Now she felt all twisted around. She should’ve let the call go to voicemail.
Coming off the 90, Alex caught Rob Roy Road through Rotterdam, entering the preserve via the south side. Unlike last time with Nick, she bypassed 5S, which offered a better view of the front porch and clearer vantage point to weigh odds of an ambush. Problem was this route cut through the boondocks. She lost what little cell service she had, two bars turning to one, one to none, taking all direction with it. Unfamiliar routes delivered her down darker paths. Knotted up, she had no idea where she was going, heart beating faster, palms, neck, forehead damp with sweat. Tall trees loomed stark and foreboding, boxing her in. Her skull still throbbed from the sucker punch at the motel this morning.
A faint moon peeked out of a bank of silver cloud. Behind a grouping of shagbark, Alex killed the lights, coasting to the edge of a small pond where no wind blew. Elodea and frogbit blanketed murky waters. Alex reached behind her seat and retrieved the baseball bat, holding it low at her side, creeping through the long reeds and skinny trees.
Coming to the clearing, Alex saw Cole Denning sitting on the porch, an old man alone in his rocker on a lazy summer’s eve.
The house sat across a large plot of land, empty in the aftermath. A lot of ground to cover. Nothing about Cole or the situation screamed danger. If anything, the moment almost felt too tranquil.
Muddying her sneakers, Alex split bushy bearded weeds and blue stems, soles stuck in the muck as she tried to tread lightly toward the porch on heightened alert. Eider squawked in the bulrush.
The man kept rocking, head turned to listen to the night songs of the country.
As she got closer, Alex offered a half wave. The gesture was not returned.
Alex now saw she’d been mistaken. Cole Denning was not rocking. He was not moving at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Whether due to distance or inability to focus, apprehension, inherent caution—the anticipation that something wicked this way waited—Alex had missed the obvious. The first being the Remington, which lay beneath Cole Denning’s rocking chair, the expelled red casing at his feet, precariously placed, convenient
to find. As she went up the porch steps, Alex scanned the area. Nothing. No one. Immediate vicinity swept clean. The evening birds whispered lullabies in the butternut hickory, owls hooting in the hills. The scene pristine, surreal.
She leaned the bat against the railing, inching closer to inspect the fatal blast. The death was fresh, as if traces of life lingered, fragments of soul humming in the ether. Now that she was standing next to the dead man, she could see his head cocked at a perverse angle, and the entry wound became clearer. The shotgun had been placed under his chin, turning the left half of his jaw to hamburger, popping a hole the size of a tea plate out the top of his head. The other half of his face, the one turned toward her, remained intact. Cole’s eyes were wide open, a twinkle of shine to them, slight curl on his lips. He seemed a man at peace.
A blood-flecked, handwritten note sat in Cole Denning’s lap. Short, sweet, to the point.
Forgive me Kira for what I’ve done.
When the screen door flew open, the setup, like the shell and note, felt too staged, the timing and collective gasps too rehearsed, the first in a string of “Oh my Gods” coming a tick too quick.
All four girls walked out, single file, Meaghan, Trista, Jody, Patty, each covering their mouths in horror, before any could’ve seen the full extent of the damage. Alex eyed the shotgun.
“What happened?” Meaghan asked as the others fanned out.
Patty inched close enough to feign reading the letter.
“What’s it say?” Jody said.
“He admitting putting Benny up to it,” answered Trista, who remained stationed in the back. The tallest of the pack, she was still farthest from Cole and the note.
Alex brought out her phone. “We should call the cops.”
Meaghan came beside her, covering Alex’s hand and tucking the cell away. “Before we bring the police into this, let’s be sure we’re all seeing the same thing.”
“Do you see what we see?” Patty asked.
“I see that Cole is dead.”
Behind her, Alex heard the shotgun picked up. She looked over her shoulder. “You think you should touch that?”
Jody cradled the Remington, stroking it as one would a pet. Alex noticed the gloves. Jody didn’t consider Alex’s question, backtracking to the perimeter, standing alongside Trista. With one fist wrapped around the stock, Jody kept her stare locked on Alex as she stuck her other hand deep in the pocket of her padded coat, jostling shotgun shells, rolling them over like fistfuls of stone for the wishing well.
“You see what we see, don’t you?” Meaghan titled her head to call Alex’s interest.
From the corner of her eye, Alex saw Jody loading the Remington, one shell, two shells.
“When my daddy was alive,” Jody said, “we used to go hunting every season.” She shouldered the shotgun, pretending to line up a target over the reeds. “Bagged two-hundred-pound bucks in those woods. Venison all winter long. The meat is salty, gamey. But you get used to the taste after a while. My daddy was a real good shot. Runs in the family.”
Alex knew what she should do. Stop asking questions, accept their version of events, slink off, surrender, forget she ever heard the names Kira Shanks or Benny Brudzienski. Forget the truth. What did she know anyway? Other than this didn’t end with Cole Denning’s confession and shotgun suicide on the porch.
There were so many times since Parsons when Alex hadn’t been sure if she wanted to live or die. Nights that dragged on till long after the party was over, and she’d find herself sitting in an unfamiliar bathroom of a house she did not know, alone, coming down, sobering up, looking for an outlet to charge her phone so she could call a friend who wouldn’t come pick her up as she tried to convince herself she’d had fun. Mornings spent blocking out the sunlight with cheap, stolen sunglasses, pushing against the grain, heading to sleep while the rest of the world headed to work, long walks punctuated by big trash compactors crushing garbage and the grating sounds of everyone else’s progress.
Alex had no vested interest, no skin in the game. She could tell these girls what they wanted to hear, offer enough resistance to make it sound plausible, let them think they’d convinced her to see the light, swallow a little pride, no problem. She’d swallowed worse. But she couldn’t make words of contrition, however insincere, come out of her mouth, no matter how hard she tried.
Prolonged silence makes people talk, give themselves up, anything to fill the void.
“You know Sharn is full of shit,” Patty said. “He never got over Trista.”
“Shut up, Patty.”
“What? It’s true. Poor little rich boy. When he got tired of slumming he went running back to his life on the hill, spreading lies, acting superior because he can fly first class to Spain any time he wants.”
Meaghan glowered across the porch. Mentioning Sharn meant they knew he and Alex had talked. It tipped hands, blew cover stories. And as long as hands were tipped, Alex was betting the over. She stared at Cole’s limp, lifeless body, now turning blue in the pale moonlight, noting the resemblance.
“I met Cole’s father at the Idlewild today.” If talking to Sharn upset them, what would snooping around the Idlewild do? Like Blue Lou Boyle, this was a game of show and tell. The girls didn’t need to tell Alex anything; they’d already shown her everything.
“You shouldn’t have come back here,” Patty said. “You had your fifteen minutes. Are you really trying to milk a few more? How pathetic can you get?”
“How long you think you can keep this up?” Alex could’ve been referring to partying at Plotter Kill, staving off growing up, or covering up murder.
The butt of the gun exploded against the back of her neck, a hard, fast check snapping her head forward, dropping her to a knee. White stars flashed behind her eyeballs. Alex reached into the darkness for something to hold onto, a wall to balance against. Someone swung the stock, zeroed between her eyes. After Sweetwater and Idlewild, Alex was a little quicker, better prepared, reflexes more honed. Or maybe she was just luckier. She juked enough for the blow to clip the side of her shoulder but she laid herself out by the porch steps as though it had been a direct hit. The Louisville Slugger she’d abandoned leaned against the banister, an arm’s length away.
“What the hell did you do that for?”
“Oh, come on! She wasn’t buying any of this.”
“Bullshit!”
“What if you killed her?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“You hit her in the head. There’s blood!”
“Fuck,” someone muttered.
“That looks bad.”
“Jesus.”
“Everyone just relax.”
“We have to call an ambulance.”
“You split her skull in two. She’s gonna bleed out.”
Alex ached but was wide awake. Facedown and eyes closed, she heard everything, feeling the four’s panic set in. Took her a second to realize they were scared of her injuries sustained at the motel earlier, a skull that had been split open by a bottle of rye, which made her wonder how hard Cole’s father had hit her and how bad the damage really was.
“What are we going to do?”
“We change the plan. Write a new letter.”
“How? We can’t ply Cole with whiskey this time.”
“So we write it on a computer, print it out.”
“Can’t the cops check that?”
“Check what? Fingerprints on the keys?”
“Time of death?”
“Not within the minute. Listen, it’s simple. That bitch accused Cole. We have the text he sent from his phone. She came to see him. No one has to know we were even here.”
“Like we weren’t at the Idlewild?”
“Who’s dragging a body to the river this time?”
“Shut up!”
“They got in a fight. He killed her, felt guilty, shot himself. End of story.”
“Maybe she’s right.”<
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“No, she’s not.”
“This is crazy.”
“Any crazier than what we did?”
“Shut up! We agreed to never talk about that again!”
“A little late for that, isn’t it?”
“Is she still breathing?”
“I think she’s still breathing.”
“She’s not breathing.”
“Give me the gun.”
In a single surge, Alex pushed herself up and lunged for the baseball bat, grasping, gripping and swinging as Trista pumped the Remington. Maybe Jody knew how to handle a gun, but Trista couldn’t shoot straight. Unaccustomed to the force and recoil, she splintered a porch beam ten feet away. The next blast tore out a chunk of ceiling, plaster raining down. The bat cracked Trista’s ribs and she dropped the gun, wailing and clutching her side. The boom echoed, scattering evening birds from the trees. Alex swung the bat again, this time taking out a knee. Trista thudded to the porch floor, a sack of wet grain. Patty and Jody jumped on Alex’s back, scratching, screeching, clawing, twisting the pile around, knocking into Cole Denning’s corpse, which slid from the chair, dragging the whole bloody mess to the ground. On the slick, red wood, the girls pulled hair and gouged eyes, nails raking skin. Only one of them knew how to throw a punch though. Two clean shots, and Alex extracted herself from the scrum, scrambling to reach the Louisville Slugger.
Getting to her feet, Alex stared down the barrel.
“There’re no shells left.”
“You sure?” Meaghan’s hands trembled.
“You ever fire a gun?”
“Shoot her!” Trista screamed from her knees, cradling her cracked ribs, as Jody and Patty fought to free themselves from the dead man whose blood was all over them.
“What did you do to Kira?” Alex said.
“Shut up! Don’t say anything, Meaghan!”
“You don’t understand.”
“Tell me.” Alex’s voice soft, reassuring.
“Shut up!”