Authors: Sarah Kernochan
Jack gets out of his car, heart quickening. An aura of failure and incipient violence hangs over the mean lonely bungalow slumped under the shadow of Rowell Hill. The house seems devoid of life. He can’t push away the image of Hoyt shot gangland-style, or hanging from a rafter, the overturned stool below, his sins caught up with him at last.
At the front door, Meltzer reaches over the daggers of glass bristling from the pane and turns the inside knob, stepping into the house. Before calling Hoyt’s name, he takes a moment to stare at an intimate hell: sagging floor, scorched rug, abused furniture, decaying books. Empty liquor bottles—most of them from Jack’s cellar—bob up from the depths of the sofa cushions like victims of drowning.
Mixed with the odor of the dear departed grape is something else, a sick stench coming from the kitchen: a carcass smell. Crossing the sticky, matted surface of the rug, he peers through the kitchen doorway.
The rotten smell originates from the garbage pail, which brims with at least three days’ worth of food scraps. The floor is gummed with ancient spills. The dinette table, however, is spotless. A clean plate sits before a chair pulled slightly away, as if inviting someone to sit. On the plate is a supermarket cupcake in a pleated paper shell, vibrant pink frosting and bright blue sprinkles on top—an innocent, perky touch in an otherwise squalid setting.
In any case, no one is here.
Jack is about to withdraw from the kitchen when a ring of cold metal presses into the base of his skull. The rifle barrel prevents him from twisting his head to look behind, but he’s pretty sure he’s about to be fucked up by Hoyt Eddy.
“What are you doing here, Meltzer?” The man’s breath is raspy, humid, arrhythmic; shaking hands hold the rifle barrel to Jack’s neck.
Now might not be the time to fire Hoyt. Coming to the house was a mistake, like wearing a tin hat in a lightning storm.
“Hoyt, please. Put the gun down.” Jack feels the cold metal withdraw, hears Hoyt reset the safety, then retreating footsteps. When he turns, Hoyt is tossing the rifle onto the coffee table, sinking onto the sofa, bottles clanking around him; he has a week’s worth of beard, glazed eyes, and a maniac’s calm. Hoyt asks, “Is it your habit to sneak into a man’s house while he’s away?”
His mouth dry with fear, Jack swallows hard. “I thought you were home. I saw your truck.”
“It was supposed to be hidden. In any case, I’m not here.”
The arrogance of the man!
Jack can hear his wife exclaim. Angry now, he wants to loose a volley of accusations—the theft of his wine! the hole in his lawn!—yet he remembers the phrase: “You can’t break something that’s broken.” There’s no point in finishing off a man who’s finished.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” he asks.
“Why would you think that?” Hoyt’s drooping eyelids snap up. Jack wonders how long it’s been since the guy slept.
“You don’t answer your phone, your windows are smashed, your truck’s in the woods—it looks like you’re hiding from somebody.”
“The only one I might hide from is you. You could be a trifle peeved at me, over the state of your estate. As it happens, I’m not hiding. I am lying in wait. There is a distinction, my friend.”
“Don’t call me your friend.” Meltzer glances at the rifle, far enough from Hoyt’s reach that Jack can risk a little rancor. “You had a professional responsibility to me, which you walked away from. You owe me an explanation.”
“I had an epiphany.” Hoyt belches in his throat. “I spent the night in a hole and saw the Virgin Mary.”
“You could at least apologize.”
“You want remorse?” Hoyt grabs the gun and levels it at Jack, flicking off the safety. “Get the fuck out of my nightmare.”
Driving home, Jack decides not to tell Audrey about his contretemps with Hoyt, his hasty retreat at gunpoint. An employee departs, and the vacancy is quickly filled. By the time the backhoe arrives, the sinkhole disappears, and new turf is laid, Jack will have forgotten Hoyt.
“THE MELTZERS ARE BACK,”
Thom Sayre mentions over the noise of the fans, draining his iced coffee and rattling the ice cubes inside his cheek.
They’re passing the time with town gossip. It’s sweltering inside the firehouse; even so, Hoffmann is making a pot of chili on the hot plate. The other three volunteers coming off the day shift are drinking beer. When the frankfurters are done on the grill outside, the firemen will sit around the parking lot in folding chairs, slapping mosquitoes, the sound of traffic on Route 404 dwindling as nightfall draws near.
“Thought I heard their copter,” says Bern D’Annunzio, who volunteers Friday nights. “Wonder what it’s like to be that rich.”
“Don’t look at me.” The postal service doesn’t pay Thom diddly, but he still feels a secret pang of guilt for taking that money from the old guy, the P.I. from Virginia. It isn’t technically a bribe; all Thom has to do is keep his eyes peeled for the girl when he makes his rounds, then call Fancher if he spots her. It isn’t very much money, either, but there must be something unethical about it if he’s ashamed to tell his pals.
Bern changes the subject to the Goldilocks case. Last night there was another incident down the road on Rabbit Glenn. Tisha Baxter called in hysterical, said a bear wandered in from Rowell Hill and snatched some barbecue chicken cooking on the patio. “Her husband Lonny says it wasn’t a bear. He’d seen it from the bedroom and it was a longhaired woman or a hippie. ‘There ain’t no bears on Rowell Hill,’ says Lonny, ‘and even if there was, they wouldn’t lift the lid up and close it after taking only one piece of chicken and some napkins.’ Brenda just about hit him over the head with the spatula. ‘You didn’t see nothin’, you been passed out in your frickin’ chair in front of the TV since the ballgame ended!’ She made us write it down as a bear attack just to back her up.”
Their laughter gets drowned out by the bawling of the firehouse siren: it’s sundown. Hoffman goes outside to check the grill.
He finds two hot dogs missing, and some napkins.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-O
NE
T
hey haven’t even reached the halfway point on Rowell Hill when for the third time Brett Sampson has to stop, gasping for air. He sinks onto a rock to suck on his inhaler.
Collin glances nervously around the chaos of snarled foliage and topsy-turvy trees, branches and vines so dense that the sunlight shatters into mere specks when it reaches the forest floor. The boy looks down at the half of the hill they’ve already hiked. Collin was given the map and the compass to carry in his backpack, while Brett hacked ineptly through the brush with his new machete.
The boy points to a bush near Brett’s elbow. “Is that poison ivy?”
“Let’s…assume so,” Brett wheezes. “Don’t touch it.” Tanned and fit from bike riding with Gita Poonchwalla, Collin hasn’t broken a sweat after an hour of climbing. He’d be with Gita right now, except that her parents just got back from Mumbai and they took her shopping for back-to-school supplies.
Anyway, she seems less interested in spending time with Collin, now that Jane’s gone. “Our mission is complete,” she told him the other day. “Shaarinen has fled.”
Collin misses her daily company, and the urgency of their work; he’ll probably never see her again after summer’s end.
Our Gana Mother of Fire
…He prays to the goddess for a fresh challenge that would reunite him with Gita, at least for the remaining two weeks before Brett drives him home to his mother.
“Let me see the map again,” says Brett, his breath returning.
Collin hands it over. Brett spreads the photocopied map on his knees, studying the faint property lines, the elegantly penned names of land owners and lot measurements, the wriggle of streams, the date “1848” and surveyor’s signature at the bottom.
“I don’t get what’s the big deal about an old wall,” Collin mutters.
“It’s about history.” Brett kneads his right shoulder where it aches from swinging the machete. “History’s fascinating because you try to imagine how things used to be, a long, long time before you were born.”
“But there’s nothing on this map that’s here anymore. Just woods.”
“Then think of this as a nature walk. At a minimum you’ll learn something about the woods, okay?”
Collin grunts derisively. Why is Brett so obsessed with this map, this so-called “nature walk”?
He’s got some other reason he’s not letting on.
Brett adds, “I just wanted us to do something together.”
Not true: his dad was forced to take him hiking because Collin couldn’t go to Gita’s and the boy couldn’t be left home alone. Ever since Jane ran off, Brett’s been mad at him. He doesn’t understand that Collin saved him by betraying Jane. His dad was in danger every minute he spent with the Maximum Evil; he would have ended up as a pile of bones she’d picked clean.
“Here’s where we’re headed.” Brett’s finger marks a spot on the map. “Pease Pond.”
AFTER THEY CREST
the hill they come upon a small, desolate lake.
Brett looks as if he’s about to pass out; his tortured breathing has worsened. Nevertheless, he busies himself with the compass and the map while Collin eyes the shimmering pond. Even though he’s learned to swim, he still recoils inwardly, feeling himself dragged inexorably toward the water’s baleful edge.
“It sucks here.”
Brett doesn’t look up from the map. “Bet there’s lots of fish.”
“I don’t like fishing.”
“Not that you’ve ever tried it.” Folding up the map, Brett stuffs it in Collin’s backpack. “We’ll go ‘round the pond to the other side and then keep heading west.”
Brett starts picking his way around the pond’s edge, balancing on precarious rocks and climbing over roots, his boots sometimes slipping into the silty water.
“This is so wack.” Collin tries to keep the hysterical edge out of his voice. “We’re not going to find anything, and we’ll get lost.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Sullenly Collin looks down at his sneakers as he hops from rock to rock. The next time he glances up, his father is some thirty yards ahead. Jumping up on the trunk of a fallen tree, Collin walks its gnarled length to the root mass that, clotted with dried mud, hangs over the pond. Tempting his fear, he clambers over the roots, crawling out as far as he dares.
When he looks down at his reflection in the water, a proud, courageous boy stares back.
The avatar, mortal enemy of Shaarinen.
“Son!” his father calls. “Hurry up!”
Collin’s reflected face frowns with annoyance. Then he tenses: there’s something underneath his image in the water. As he shifts uneasily, his face slides away like a mask, revealing someone else’s head.
He stares into the empty eye sockets of a drowned woman.
The water over her face is glassy, motionless, her hair snarled in the pebbles and grass of the pond bottom; pale rags of flesh curl away from her skull.
Collin’s scream rips the quiet.
“Dad!”
Brett comes running. Jumping off the tree trunk, Collin clings to his father’s waist. Brett strokes his curls awkwardly, patting his slender back.
“What happened?” Collin points a trembling finger toward the pond’s edge. Brett peers into the water. “I don’t see anything. What was it, a snake?”
“I want to go home.”
“We’re not turning back,” Brett says firmly. “It’s better to face your fears than run away.”
Collin pulls away. “I’m not afraid of anything!”
“
Something
scared you.”
“Nothing scares me!” Collin’s voice rises to a shout. “I’m a god!”
Brett’s eyebrows lift in amused surprise. “Cool. Then we can keep going.”
PERIODICALLY CHECKING
the compass, Brett leads them through a crowd of conifers. The ground cover changes to grasses and dried pine needles.
A little distance further, they find what he’s been searching for: an old, tumbledown stonewall. Brett practically breaks into a dance. “It’s still there—right where the map said it would be!”
“So what.” Collin sits on the wall, which stretches in both directions, snaking out of sight.
His father ignores him, puzzling out loud, “Which way do we go from here, though? Right or left?”
Collin notices the ground slopes gently downward to the south. Downhill means home. “Left,” he says quickly.
As they trek south, the wall sometimes crumbles away, stones scattered and hidden by overgrowth; further on, it magically reassembles, like a film forwarding and reversing.
Collin’s mind drifts back to the woman in the pond. His heart beats faster; a confusion of images crashes over him: all his nightmares of tidal waves and undertow and plummeting down dark water, mixed in with the corpse’s submerged face, the vacant eyeholes.