Game (26 page)

“I’m going to be gentle,” she assured him, and then stroked his shoulder so lightly that even his hemophiliac blood vessels didn’t rupture. “You’re a good guy, Howie.”

“Will you tell Sam that? I also read that women trust other women more than men.”

She sighed. “Help me out tonight and, yeah, I’ll put in a good word for you.” Not that it would help. She couldn’t imagine a woman Samantha’s age hooking up with Howie. Although stranger things had certainly happened in the world.

“Score!” Howie fist-pumped. “What did the text say again?”

“It said ‘go 2 where it all began.’ ”

Howie frowned. “Where is
that
? Where
what
began?”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering. But it first said that this was about Jazz. So I’ve been thinking about Jazz’s past. Where it all began for
him
.”

“Hospital where he was born?” Howie asked.

“Too literal. I think it’s his house.”

“I just came from—ah. Oh, right.” Howie nodded grimly. “Got it.”

He flipped a uey and gunned the engine.

According to the dashboard clock in Howie’s car, it was three in the afternoon. Connie mentally subtracted the fourteen-plus hours by which the clock was always wrong (thirteen-plus during the summer) and decided that it was twenty of one in the morning when they pulled up to what had once been the Dent house. Not the house where Jazz lived now, the house Billy had grown up in—that was Jazz’s grandmother’s.
The short gravel drive Howie’s wheels now crunched led to the house owned by Billy Dent himself.

“Don’t go chasing…”

Billy Dent
, Connie mentally substituted. The rhythm still worked.
Don’t go chasing Billy Dent. Please stick to the normal and the sane that you’re used to….

Denuded tree branches seemed to clutch at the car as they drove along, almost as though the spirit of William Cornelius Dent possessed them.

Stop thinking like that, Connie.

“How long do we have?” she asked Howie. Anything to break the silence.

Howie shrugged. “My parents think I’m spending the night at Jazz’s grandmother’s house.”

“
Your
parents? Your overprotective parents?”

“They know Jazz is out of town. They figure it’s safe.”

“Yeah, but… with his aunt?” Connie was shocked. Howie’s parents, letting their son (try to) shack up with an older woman?

“Oh, that. They think she’s an ugly old crone.” He shrugged. “This might be because I told them she was an ugly old crone. I’m not entirely sure. Man, it’s been a while since I’ve been here….”

The spot where Jazz’s childhood home used to be was marked out by a series of stakes with caution tape strung between them. A sign read
NO TRESPASSING!
Another read
PRIVATE PROPERTY
.

Finally, one read:
THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED
.

Condemned. Yeah, in so many ways, really…

Where the house had once stood there was now a blank, a blighted sore on the face of the earth. A wealthy father of one of Billy Dent’s victims had bought the house at auction after Billy went to prison. Then, to great fanfare and with the press in attendance, he’d had the house bulldozed and the wreckage burned to ash in a controlled fire. Connie hadn’t lived in Lobo’s Nod at the time, but Jazz had told her about it. He’d watched his home go up in smoke on the evening news.

“It was like a party,” Howie said, his voice a mixture of memory and rage as he gazed through the windshield. “Watched it on TV with Jazz. People treated it like a Memorial Day barbecue. Brought hot dogs and marshmallows and roasted them over the flames.
Kegs.
It was nuts. Like burning the guy’s house brought any of them back.”

Connie reached for Howie again. This time he didn’t flinch and she briefly massaged the back of his neck, wary of his fragility. “You’re a good friend,” she said.

Howie snorted. “I know. Why do people keep telling me that?”

To that, she had nothing to say.

Howie parked with the headlights glaring at the bare, burned earth and the hole that had once been Jazz’s basement.

“What do you expect to find here?”

“I don’t know.” She got out of the car. In every direction, there were trees and hedges. To the east and west, she could just barely make out houses. Billy Dent’s neighbors.

They planted all that stuff to block off that lot after he
went to jail
, Connie remembered Jazz saying.
Like they could erase what he’d done if they didn’t have to look at where he’d lived.

Howie joined her by the foundation of the house. A few broken, burned cinder blocks littered the hole. In the glow of the headlights, they could see empty beer and soda bottles, as well as snack-chip bags and what looked like used condoms.

“People come out here for privacy, I guess,” Howie said. “Figure no one else would, right?” He inhaled deeply. “Still smells kinda burny. Even three years later.”

Connie squatted down near the edge. Howie suddenly grabbed at her, but she brushed him away. “I’m okay. I’m not gonna fall.”

“I’m more worried about the ground giving way.”

“It’s pretty frozen.” Her breath painted the air misty white. “Don’t worry.”

“Yeah, right.” Howie shivered and hugged himself. “Picked the wrong place to say
that
. I don’t believe in ghosts or demons, but if they existed anywhere, it would be here.”

Connie grinned. “I’ll protect you, big guy.”

“Much appreciated. What’d the next text say?”

“Next text and
last
text.” She showed it to Howie.

cherry. sunrise. jasper. down

“What the hell does
that
mean?” Howie’s earlier fear had been replaced with exasperation. He bit down on his lower lip—lightly—but even so, Connie saw a bruise begin there. He turned in circles, taking in the surroundings. “It was crazy to come here without telling anyone. I hate puzzles. And codes. And mysteries. And riddles. And—”

“It’s not tough,” Connie told him. She scanned her surroundings as best she could in the dark, with only the headlights to pierce the night. “I bet there’s a cherry tree around here. We go to it.”

“And then wait until sunrise? No way. I gotta get
some
beauty sleep.”

Ignoring Howie, Connie peered through the middle-of-the-night murk of the Dent property, searching out a cherry tree. With her luck, she realized, there would be more than one.

Wait a sec
, she thought.
Wait. What
—

“What does a cherry tree even
look
like?” Howie whined, voicing her inner thought.

A look of sheepish guilt/stupidity passed between them and then they both went for their cell phones.

Connie’s Google-fu was better and faster than Howie’s. “Here,” she said, holding up a photo on her phone. “A cherry tree.” She scowled. “But it talks about the leaves and…” She gestured around the winter landscape, the frost-rimed ground, the trees with their naked branches.

“No worries,” Howie said, grinning. “I remember. Over there.” He pointed to a large, many-limbed tree not far from the hole in the ground that had once been the Dent house. “That’s it. Right there. I remember what it looked like back then. It used to be in the backyard. Y’know, when there was a house here to be in back of.”

Together they made their way to the cherry tree. Howie stared up into its branches, lost in thought and memory. “We wanted to build a fort up there,” he said, his voice quiet, as though he were murmuring in church. “We were like eleven, I guess. Right up there.” He pointed with a shaky hand. “And I remember his dad was all for it. He said…” Howie suddenly turned away, savagely. “Damn! I can’t believe… I can’t believe I was such—”

“Howie.” She put her hands on his shoulders, a bit firmly, trusting the padding in his winter coat to keep him from bruising. “Howie, it’s okay. You were just a kid. You couldn’t have known.”

“That bastard.” Howie bit through the word like bitter
citrus peel. Connie had never heard him so distraught. “You know what he said? He gave that big crap-eating grin of his and he said, ‘Ain’t a bad idea, Jasper. A boy should have a private place all his own. Just him and his secrets.’ ”

Connie thought she could feel the memory, reliving it through the shudder of Howie’s shoulders.

“I thought that sounded so cool,” Howie said. “Goddamn… I thought Billy was the coolest dad in the world. What was
wrong
with me? Everything normal and good in Jazz’s life, Billy made it evil and disgusting.” He shook off her hands, spinning around, looking not at Connie but up into the tree instead. “We lost interest because, hell, we were eleven. But I bet Billy was picturing Jazz dragging cats and stray dogs up there and cutting them open.” He snorted. “Maybe even me. Figured I’d go missing one day and no one would know what happened, but Billy would know. That was Billy’s dream, right? His fantasy? For Jazz to turn into him?”

“Still is,” Connie said quietly.

Howie nodded once, firmly. “You know what, Connie?”

“What, Howie?”

“We can’t stop Billy Dent. Not the two of us.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“But we can ruin him. We can piss him off and take away the thing he wants more than anything in the world. Can’t we? Can’t we do that?”

Connie thought of kissing Jazz. Of her hands on him, of his on her. Of their hesitant first kiss and of the passionate ones that followed.

“Yeah. We can take away his dream, Howie. We can keep Jazz from becoming Billy.” Mostly, she knew, because Jazz would do the heavy lifting. He would have to—the danger signs and the tools were all locked up in his head, and no one else had the key.

“We can make it easier for him,” Howie said. “That’s what we do, right? We make it easier for Jazz to be normal.”

“Yep.”

She took his hand in her own. It was almost comical, the two of them wearing gloves so heavy that their fingers couldn’t entwine. But that was okay. It wasn’t about the contact. It was about the solidarity.

“So that’s the cherry tree,” she said after a while.

“Sure is. Sunrise.”

“I think that means we face east.”

Howie nodded and released her hand after a brief squeeze. At the cherry tree, they used the compasses on their phones to find east. “Now what?” Howie asked. “The next clue is ‘Jasper.’ ”

“I think we’re supposed to walk. And the last clue is ‘down,’ so we’re supposed to dig.”

“Sure, that makes sense. But walk how far? His age? Seventeen steps?” Without waiting for an answer, Howie immediately loped off to the east, counting out until he hit seventeen.

Shaking her head, Connie caught up to him as he looked around. “The ground doesn’t look disturbed at all.”

“Whatever was buried was buried a long time ago, I bet.”

“Why do you say that?”

Connie wasn’t sure why she said that—it just made sense.
It was the kind of thing Jazz would say with complete confidence, and when someone questioned him, he would rattle off an explanation that was
duh
-worthy.

Channeling her inner Jazz with all her might, she said, “Well…” and then it hit her.

“Look,” she said, speaking rapidly, before the idea could flit out of her mind as quickly as it had flown in, like a bug sucked into and out of an open car window. “We don’t know for sure who’s leading us on this wild-goose chase, but odds are it’s Billy or someone connected to Billy, right? So the first thing that happened after Billy broke out of prison was the FBI and the cops landed on Lobo’s Nod like it was D-day. They covered this place for weeks. So no one would be able to get here, of all places, to bury something. Which means that whatever we’re looking for here was buried at least before Billy went to jail.”

Howie nodded. “Yeah. All right, that tracks.” He stomped the ground with his huge foot. “And, yeah, if anything’s buried here, it had to be long enough ago that all the ground settled.”

Glancing back at the cherry tree—seventeen Howie-steps to the west—Connie shook her head. “It’s not right here. It can’t be.”

“Jazz is seventeen,” Howie protested. “I took seventeen steps—”

“Right. But first of all, we’re assuming seventeen is the right number. Think about it—if whatever it was was buried a long time ago, there’s no way the burier could know when we would come looking for it. Unless whoever it is specifically
planned on doing something when Jazz was seventeen. But that’s ridiculous because—”

“—because what if something made it so that this ‘game’ had to be triggered earlier?” Howie finished. “I get it. So maybe it’s Jazz’s age when the thing was buried?” Howie groaned. “How are we supposed to know
that
?” He turned away from her, morose.

“Come on, Howie. Don’t punk out on me. Whoever’s doing this
wants
us to play the game. We
can
figure this out.” She hoped. What if this wasn’t a game, but a joke? What if this was a setup, designed to get Jazz’s girlfriend and best friend out here where something could—

“The cherry tree…” Howie spun around. “We were eleven!”

Before Connie could stop him, he counted back toward the cherry tree, taking six steps. He jumped up and down at the new spot, excited.