Read HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Online
Authors: T. J. BREARTON
Tom didn’t pretend to be confused by what Samuel meant. Whoever “Samuel” was, Tom decided, once and for all, so he could move on from it, Samuel was not composed of the same stuff as normal people.
“What is three-degree black-body radiation?”
Samuel smiled. “Some astrophysics term, I think.”
Tom sighed. He ran a hand over his head. He took his glasses off, set them on the dash, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose, in the crooks of his eyes. That magic feeling, he thought, oh that magic feeling went away. Another song came to him then:
Ride Captain Ride.
Blues Image had released that song in the spring of 1970, and he’d listened to it all summer long. Listened to it with Maddy and Jim when they went camping together.
He pulled out of his reverie and face-massage and looked into Samuel’s green eyes, hunting around a little in there. It was like looking into anyone else’s eyes, almost. It was like that, sure, until you looked a little harder, a little longer, a little further. And it wasn’t something else you saw in there, no, Tom understood, it was what you didn’t see in there.
Everyone hid. Everyone, if you looked at them long and hard enough, looked away. Judges and priests and Buddhist monks. You found a point in each of them where they had something tucked away, something hidden, and sometimes it was as simple as fear. Everyone, when you looked in there for long enough, was afraid of love. Because, Tom thought, and had thought many nights while he lay awake, alone in a motel or alone in his home, love was terrifying, because love was everything.
Samuel looked right back at Tom, completely. It was unmistakable. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish him from anyone else, this kid, on the street, in a crowd, anywhere, unless you were right with him, right beside him. The air was fragrant with that detergent smell, that liniment scent.
“You’ll protect them,” said Samuel.
He opened the door and got out.
Tom called after him, “Who’s behind it?”
Samuel looked in at him from the open door. “You need to call Trooper Cruickshand. He’s going to need your help. And the Goldfine girl . . . she’ll tell you what you need to know.”
Samuel smiled, and closed the door. Tom turned and watched as he walked off, away and out of the garage, his hands buried in his coat pockets.
Tom reached for his cell phone.
Elizabeth watched the blood siphon from her arm. She watched it move through the tubes.
“Honey,” said the nurse as she smoothed Liz’s hair back from her forehead, “you okay?”
Elizabeth looked at the woman and nodded, her head on the pillow. Liz liked the woman. She gave off a motherly, protective glow, and it was strong. Liz thought of her own mother, too often crying, too often unloading her burdens on her children. The nurse reached over with her other hand, a finger curled with a painted nail on its tip, and used it to brush Liz’s cheekbone.
Liz realized her own face was wet with tears.
She looked over at the little boy on the bed beside her. There were a few nurses and a doctor crowded around, but she could still see him.
He was serene. He was just three years old, they’d told her. His eyes were closed, no longer gunked-up. Or had she dreamt that they were in the first place? She made a mental note to ask someone about the baby boy’s eyes, what it had to do with blood transfusion and brain issues, but she was afraid she’d never get an answer. She was sleepy, and might not remember to ask. She tried to drive the question in deep. She’d noticed that while everyone worked well to hide it, there was a palpable sense of flying blind. Liz knew that so far, at least, a pediatric neurosurgeon had been by, an ophthalmologist, a neurologist, and a few physicians. Everyone was having a look, it seemed, and then murmuring professionally before leaving. It was a medical merry-go-round.
Liz continued to watch the boy. His tiny, shining, ruby lips pressed lightly together inside of his child-sized oxygen mask. Why had they sedated him? She wanted to ask the nurse beside her, Maddy, but she now felt like she shouldn’t speak. If she started to open up, it would all come rushing out of her, a kind of confessional of the sort of things that she’d held inside for the past three years of her life, the things that she knew she was still running from, still avoiding places she could be trapped in, leaving behind people that might ask too much.
Jared was safe. Jared didn’t ask all that much of her. He came from money and she came from money, so there was no pauper-princess syndrome. His family lied and her family lied, so there was an inherent comfortableness in their relationship, where the truth was relative and on a need-to-know basis. He liked his privacy and she liked hers. She tried one time to open up to him, and she’d told him some things about her past, and she’d cried, but it hadn’t been right. It was better the way it was. He came to her in the night, stinking of bourbon, and that was okay. He would cursorily ask if she’d come, but he didn’t really care, and that was fine, too. She could have been anyone to him, and that was what she wanted for now. Someone who didn’t really care.
Secretly, yes, somewhere inside of her she yearned to tell all; she could see that. She sat and listened and watched Jared and his friends, or her own clan from home, and watched as the days gradually had darkened around her, and around them. Weeks could go by, months, and people she knew would come and go, and certain people she would let in a little further, but none of them asked. None of them asked what had become of anything, what had become of her, why she wore the locket she wore.
She had managed to cultivate just the right group of people, who were particularly selfish, and while she knew she had selected this group herself, she wanted to scream, to ask them why they didn’t notice, or didn’t care, why they didn’t ask questions — the obvious questions. What was this life if it was concealed? She was beginning to wonder, but, she also knew she was beginning to slip. She was beginning to
become
it.
Liz knew that she was at a fork in the road. She had known it was coming for a few weeks now, had felt it, had dreamt it, but she’d especially experienced the portent of it the other night. Sitting there wrapped in the blanket, overlooking the pond, she’d known. Part of her was dying. It was the part that would be able to think like this, would be able to question, would still yearn for those people to step outside of themselves — not just them, for
anyone
to step outside of themselves and ask why, and want to know. She could go the other way. She could just blend into it, be taken into it, become it. In a year’s time, maybe more, maybe less, she would be unrecognizable to herself. She would be gone, this Liz would be gone.
She watched the blood flow out of her and she closed her eyes. She sensed it going. Like nothing else, of all that could be, of all that remained untold.
Liz reached over and gripped the nurse’s hand, Maddy’s hand. She looked up into Maddy’s eyes and she saw that the nurse was looking down at her, watching her. She had questions to ask, so many questions. She wanted to know all about the little boy, where he came from, who his mother was, why she was here, why her blood was compatible, what sense any of it made, but she couldn’t. She didn’t. Maddy’s eyes brimmed with their own tears, and the woman was smiling. Liz felt, then, if anyone would listen, if anyone would care, it was this woman whose hand she was holding.
The cop had been in the room for a minute, the investigator, Milliner. He had come in just before things had begun and he had talked with Maddy and she had nodded and then he had left. Now it was just the three of them, Liz, Maddy, and the little boy.
Within minutes, they were rolling the two of them down the hallway to the surgical unit.
Tom walked the floors of Fletcher Allen Hospital. He was on the pediatrics level. A young woman was pushing a stroller with a small boy wrapped completely except for his face. Tom said hello and she said hello and he asked how the baby was doing. The young woman said that she had been in the hospital with her child for two months. The baby had been born with some of his intestines on the outside. Tom nodded and listened and then they parted ways.
There was a room where toys abounded and small chairs were parked around a low table and coloring books were out and
Dr. Seuss
books lined the shelves. Another woman was there, with a little girl in a blue dress and her hair done up in pigtails. Tom said hello, and admired the room, and made a joke that it was the break room for all of the very short doctors. The woman smiled. Her baby girl had cystic fibrosis, and was undergoing some new form of treatment.
He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He felt as though he were securing the area, clearing it for his own peace of mind. What Samuel said had been disturbing.
The defectives were coming. They would come for the child.
Cruickshand had not answered his phone. Tom decided to go outside and try again, and have a smoke at the same time.
As he took the elevator down, something occurred to Tom. It wasn’t so much rational thought, or even an image, it was just something that washed over him. As the elevator descended Tom saw all of these children, young “defectives” themselves, born into great physical adversity. He saw the parents, the caregivers. Some with no money, some with money. Some politically conservative, some liberal, some young, some old. There was no one type, not superficially. The type was something else. Somehow, in some manner, these people had been given a gift. A type of strength, or grace, or both. Either they had had it to begin with, or they’d cultivated it, Tom didn’t know. But, he felt, nearing the ground floor, they had been
chosen
. And then they, themselves, had chosen, too.
Tom walked out of the set of electric sliding doors and into the cool night. Flakes were falling as the spring evening heeled its way back into colder territory. He lit his Marlboro and dragged and watched the people come and go. Then he flipped open his phone and prepared to dial Jim again.
That’s when he saw them, standing along the road where the arc-sodium hummed as round, amber balls of light over the sidewalk. Kids — younger than Christopher and Samuel. Eleven, twelve years old. There were dozens of them, standing in a line along the sidewalk. Watching the hospital. Watching him.
“Jesus,” said Tom, his breath coming out in front of him. “Here we go again.”
Divers bobbed in the pond. There were people everywhere. Red Rock cops. County deputies. The Sheriff, Johnston, was there. Jim’s fellow state troopers. EMTs. News crews. It was almost midnight, and there were damned news crews here. Didn’t those goddamned people ever sleep? The Sheriff was taking the interviews.
Jim wondered where Assistant DA Sarah Locke was. Maybe
she
slept. Probably she was sleeping next to someone or other. Sarah was another looker. A
smoker
, Jim and his buddies called her. He’d asked her out before; she was a divorcee, but she’d been a stuck up bitch about it, saying she didn’t date cops. What a fucking line. Jim thought, as he had more than once, about writing and publishing a book. He’d call it, simply, “Cunts,” and he’d write all about women like Sarah Locke, and about their bullshit lines, their bullshit lives. Then he’d write about taking them anyway, giving them a good solid fucking that they’d never forget, handcuffs and all.
Jim blinked. He swayed on his feet. What the hell was he thinking?
The activity surrounding the Kingston place was unlike any he’d seen in his twenty-four years as a trooper, save for the manhunt for Chad Rowe and Billy Preston, two escapees from Red Rock Falls Correctional some three years ago, and the search for the boy who’d disappeared from the convenience store after calling 911 — that’d been quite an undertaking: a hundred people sweeping the woods, flashlights, dogs. Something out of this world, Jim had thought, all those people organized and searching for one little boy. They’d never found the poor son of a bitch, though. Never found him. It had been too cold, anyway, Jim had always thought, and the kid had probably frozen to death the first night. Probably they’d never found a body because it had been dragged off by coyotes, maybe a bear. Tommy Milliner had never forgiven himself, either.
There was a time, Jim thought, when mountain lions roamed the Adirondack forests. When there was real danger from the animals. You still got a call about a bear in someone’s back yard, raccoons tearing up a garbage shed, coyotes coming around and nabbing a few chickens, sure, but that was nothing. That marked the death of the true animal way, anyhow, when they came around the humans and started to feed on their refuse and take easy prey. Human beings were dumbing down the animals. Robbing them of their instincts and resourcefulness. Making them just as sick and lazy as the humans were. Maybe that was why some stupid loon had been splashing around in the pond when its instincts should have had it finding cover.
Jim spat to the side. He stood on the edge of the Kingston lawn, the land steep in front of him, dropping down and away to the pond at a sharp angle. He watched the divers, their facemasks and slick wetsuits shining with pond water and rain. Jim watched them, his hands on his gun belt, wad of Honeycutt Special in his lower lip, and waited for them to pull a young girl’s body out from the rain-pocked water.
Jim wondered where the other girls were. He turned and walked toward the house and then around it and made his way through the gaggle of people amid the twirling red and blue lights, flashing purple against the surrounding evergreens. The air smelled of exhaust and oil.
In the back of a Red Rock County car was the Kingston boy, Jared. Jim batted away a reporter with a microphone and opened the passenger door to the car and got in. Officer Branch was in the driver’s seat, taking a statement. Jim interrupted her.
“Who else were you working with?”
The kid looked scared, tired. He was dirty and wet. “
Nobody
,” he said. “I was hunting a coyote. They came around last night. A whole pack of them. I put the ones I killed in the shed . . .”
“Bullshit,” said Jim, grabbing the mesh between them. He leaned in. “You had girls in there, you son of a bitch. I saw them. I saw them myself. You must’ve had someone else haul them out. Who?”
“Jim,” said Michelle.
“Shut up,” he said to her. “What about the guy?”
“What guy?”
“The one your girlfriend mentioned, smartass. Before she got hauled out of here this morning, she called
us
, said there was a guy.”
“There was a guy here? Who?”
Jim banged out of the patrol car. “Alright,” he said. He opened the back door to the vehicle, reached in and grabbed Jared Kingston by his clothes, attracting the attention of other officers, neighbors who’d come around, and the media. He shoved Kingston up against the side of the car, paying the onlookers no mind. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Jim was inches from the Kingston boy’s face. He could smell the kid’s sour breath, traces of alcohol, sweat, bile. He released his grip. Branch had gotten out, too, and was standing on the other side of the car, watching. Jim started to walk away and then spun around and got back in Jared’s face. “I know you,” he said to the kid, his voice almost a growl, his lips curled back. “I know you,” he said again, and grabbed the kid, and shook him once, and let him go.
Trooper Jim then strode to his own vehicle, got in, and fired it up. He blared the horn at the other cars and trucks and the news van blocking the road. People promptly got in and moved out of his way.
* * *
Michelle Branch resettled Jared in the back of her vehicle. Investigator Blaine, from the next county, came over and Michelle rolled down the window.
“What was that all about?”
Jared blurted out, “What guy? What guy was here?”
Blaine looked at him and then back at Michelle Branch.
Michelle put the vehicle in drive. “I’m taking him in. See you at the station.”
Blaine nodded and stepped back as the patrol vehicle rolled out. He turned and looked at the Kingston house sitting there in the dark.
The activity was mainly on the other side of the house, at the pond. Blaine headed in that direction, pulling out his Nikon and snapping pictures here and there, of the shed, of the porch, the woods around it, the trail leading around to the back and to the pond. He watched the divers, listening to the sounds of splashing, the water that was as black as oil, skimmed with darting bugs.
The pond felt like a
thing
to Blaine, something other than a body of water, something with a kind of awareness. He put the camera to his eye and snapped a picture.