“I’m Ben Journell.”
“You knew my dad,” Brandy said, catching him off guard.
Yes, he’d known Hugh Crawly. Though Hugh had been a few years older, Ben had gone to school with him and, for a couple of years back in the days of their unbridled youth, they’d maintained a laconic, easy sort of friendship. In a town as small and inquisitive as Stillwater, Ben was certainly aware that Hugh Crawly had picked up and left his family in the night roughly a year or so ago with a woman purportedly half his age. Ben would have never mentioned the girl’s father to her, for fear of dredging up bad memories and overstepping his boundaries; now that she’d mentioned him, Ben found he didn’t know how to react. His hands fumbled along the brim of his hat, which he held in front of him.
“I did, yeah,” he said eventually.
Wendy smoothed a hand through her daughter’s hair. “I’ll make you something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” Brandy said.
Wendy went to the refrigerator anyway and began to take out some lunch meat and half a loaf of French bread. Without looking at him, Wendy said, “Ben?”
“No thanks, Wendy. I’m good.”
He watched her cut frantically through the bread.
“Have a seat, Brandy,” Ben said, pulling one of the kitchen chairs out for the girl. He reseated himself at the table, setting his hat on the tabletop and looping one finger in the handle of the coffee mug.
Brandy sat down, her eyes never leaving him.
She’s trying to be tough,
he realized.
She’s trying not to cry.
He couldn’t help but wonder how tough a kid suddenly had to be when their father sneaks away and never comes back. Especially if that kid had a younger sibling they felt obligated to look after. This made him think of his own father, and even as a grown adult with no siblings, he had felt completely lost and frightened when his father had died. He recalled the nights in the house after his father’s death when he thought he heard the old man getting up and walking down the hall to the bathroom…only to remember that he was no longer among the living and it was only Ben’s bittersweet memories playing games on him in the night.
“When was the last time you saw your brother, Brandy?”
“Last night. He was downstairs watching some horror movie on TV when I went up to bed.”
“What times was that?”
“I’m not sure. Mom had already gone to bed. I guess around eleven.”
“And what happened when you got up this morning? Your mother said you noticed he was gone.”
She told him about finding the kitchen door open, mud and wet leaves on the floor. “When I went out to hang the laundry, I noticed his bike was still against the garage, too. That’s when I started to get worried. Oh,” she sparked to life and looked at her mother, who was still busy making sandwiches at the counter. “We found his shirt, too.”
At the counter, Wendy set the knife down. Her shoulders appeared to slump.
“Yes,” Ben said. “Your mom told me about the shirt.”
“I went to his friend Dwight’s house because I thought he might be there. He wasn’t.”
“Dwight?”
“Dandridge. They live a few blocks up the road.”
“Did Dwight say where he might have gone?”
“He said maybe to Hogarth’s Drugstore. There was something in the window he said he wanted to buy.”
Wendy came over and set a hefty sandwich down in front of her daughter. Brandy stared at it with a muddled look of contempt and sadness, like someone looking at a dead animal on the side of the road. Without a word, Wendy returned to the counter and began preparing another sandwich.
“Did he have an argument with either of you?” Ben asked.
Brandy shook her head.
“He’s an eleven-year-old boy,” Wendy said from the counter, her voice slightly raised. “He’s always arguing.”
“I understand.”
“Go upstairs, Brandy.”
The girl looked at her mother, her face expressionless.
“You heard me,” Wendy said. “I need to talk to Ben alone.”
Brandy pushed away from the table, hugging herself with both arms, and crossed silently into the next room. A moment later, Ben heard the stairs creaking as the girl ascended. She’d left her sandwich behind, untouched.
Wendy sat down in her daughter’s chair. Her hands shook and the worry and fear were clearly visible on her face.
“What is it, Wendy?” he said. Of course, he knew Wendy well enough too, though she was a Stillwater transplant. Hugh had met her when he was living and working in Pittsburgh and he’d brought her back with him like some kind of prize he’d won at a state fair. Wendy was still pretty, but she had been youthful and beautiful back then. For the first time, Ben wondered why she had remained in Stillwater after Hugh had left. This wasn’t her town, wasn’t her home. She owed nothing to the land or to its people. Ben doubted she felt the same obligation he’d felt in staying here to take care of his ailing father. Moreover, she did not have that obligation tethering her to Stillwater. Ben had it and it had become stronger, not weaker, after his father had died. He wondered what could be going through Wendy Crawly’s head.
“Those storms we’ve been having,” she said, her voice wavering. “The creek has been flooding and the Narrows are like rapids, Ben. And I keep thinking about that boy that was found down by the—”
Ben placed his hand atop hers, silencing her. “Matthew knows to keep away from the Narrows, Wendy. Right?”
She nodded.
“Chances are he’s at some friend’s house. Sometimes parents don’t realize when their kids are upset and want to rebel. Maybe you guys exchanged a few words and he wants to make you worry for a night.”
“I’ll tan his hide,” she uttered, suddenly crying and laughing at the same time.
“I’ll stop by the Dandridge house when I leave here. Maybe Matthew’s friend Dwight lied to your daughter and he’s spending the night over there. Or maybe he’s at another friend’s house.”
“He…he doesn’t really have many other friends.”
“Could you write down some names of the friends he does have? I’ll check in with each of them.”
“Okay,” she said, rising from the table and going to one of the kitchen drawers. “Thank you, Ben.”
She returned to the table with a pad and pen and began writing. Ben watched her write as he sipped some more coffee. He was trying not to let his uneasiness show. Brandy had said Matthew had been watching TV around eleven o’clock last night. In his head, he was doing the math, wondering if the boy would have had enough time to make it from his house out to Full Hill Road by midnight. It was a long shot, sure, but he couldn’t stop thinking of Maggie Quedentock insisting that she had hit a boy with her car.
2
It had been twenty-four hours since Maggie Quedentock’s incident on Full Hill Road and Evan still hadn’t noticed the damage to the Pontiac.
She had arrived home last night from the scene of the accident at around two in the morning. Under the spray of a hot shower, she’d curled into a fetal position and cried, partially for the fear that still lingered in her from the accident and partially because of what she had done with Tom Schuler. After the shower, she’d dressed in a knee-length nightshirt then slipped between the cool sheets of the bed. The bedroom window was cracked open, allowing a cool autumn breeze to infiltrate the bedroom. Evan’s shift wouldn’t end until six—he’d be working the nightshift at the plant over in Garrett for the next two weeks—and she’d struggled to find sleep before she heard the VW Beetle rumble into the driveway.
As it turned out, sleep
did
find her, but it came in fits and starts. Images from earlier that evening bled together to form a grotesque diorama of flickering motion pictures. Several times she awoke, believing she was still making love to Tom Schuler—she could actually feel his calloused hands running sloppily over her body, could actually smell the alcohol on his breath and the cologne he wore. Other times, she relived the accident on Full Hill Road, only this time with the slow motion of a frame-by-frame analysis—the darkened roadway, the swerve of headlights cutting through the night, the sudden, bright image of a small, frail figure darting out from the darkened shoulder into the bright glare of the car’s headlights. She’d jerked the wheel and spun the car around in real life…yet in her dreams she continued to plow forward, running the child down. Sometimes she felt the car rumble over the child’s body. Other times, the child was thrown up over the hood, slamming against the windshield, blackening Maggie’s world.
At one point she awoke, her throat sore from possibly crying out in her sleep, and a film of sweat coated her flesh. From the partially open window she thought she heard movement out in the bushes. She got up and checked but could see nothing. There were black clouds stretched across the moon and the fields were like pits of tar yawning all the way out to the foothills of the mountains. Terrified, she closed the window and got back into bed.
Evan got home around six thirty in the morning, lumbering through the semidarkness of the house in his careless, noisy way. She feigned sleep when he crawled into bed beside her without showering or even brushing his teeth.
At ten in the morning, after a night of fitful sleep laden with nightmares, Maggie got up, leaving her husband snoring in bed, dreaming the dreams of the blissfully ignorant. Outside, the sky was overcast. Clouds the color of gunmetal hung low to the ground, and a soupy mist collected in the valley between the mountains. Had they owned a garage, Maggie would have salted the Pontiac away within it, and perhaps her anxiety would have been a little lower. But they did not have a garage and the Pontiac was parked around back. She’d possessed the foresight to park backward in the dirt turnabout, the rear of the vehicle facing the house. Looking at it now from the bank of living room windows, Maggie wondered how she was going to explain the accident to her husband. It was only a matter of time before he discovered it.
Evan had slept until four or so in the evening before staggering from the bedroom in search of something to eat. Maggie was pretending to read a Heather Graham novel in the kitchen when he came in. She looked up and smiled at him, overly friendly. Evan didn’t seem to notice.
“How was work?”
He grunted and went immediately to the refrigerator. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a sleeveless undershirt, his muscular, tattooed arms exposed. At forty five, Evan looked like he could have been a decade younger.
“Let me fix you something to eat.”
“Up to you,” he said, moving to the coffee pot on the counter. He touched the pot and frowned when he found that it was cold.
“I can make a new pot,” she offered.
“I’ll just heat it in the microwave.” He filled a mug, put it in the microwave, and punched the buttons with the knuckle of his index finger. The appliance hummed to life as an orange light blossomed behind the tempered glass door.
She attempted to engage him several times in casual conversation. Finally, drinking his coffee while leaning against the kitchen counter, Evan Quedentock laughed.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“Being so nice to me all of a sudden. Makes a guy worry.”
“I’m always nice to you.”
He snorted. “Yeah. Sure you are.”
At some point during the rest of the evening, she fell back into her normal state of complacency. Evan busied himself in the basement while she prepared dinner and did a load of wash. The incident on Full Hill Road could have been nothing more than a waking nightmare, a bad dream. The same as what had happened with Tom Schuler—their rendezvous at Crossroads and the clumsy, wild, drunken sex at his house on the edge of town. Yes. All of it—a dream.
It wasn’t until she received a text message from Tom Schuler that the reality of it all came rushing back to her. She was unemployed, had been since the bank shut down eight months ago. She relied solely on Evan to take care of her. What if he found out about Tom and kicked her out of the house? Where could she go? She tried to imagine herself moving in with Tom on the outskirts of town, but the concept was so foreign and preposterous that she couldn’t do it.
She took her cell phone into the bathroom and read the text.
Had gud time last nite. More pls!
She shuddered, feeling disgusted. She quickly deleted the text then considered flushing the damn thing down the toilet.
Don’t be stupid.
She thought,
More pls!
“Maggie!”
The bathroom door shook at the booming of Evan’s voice. A second later, she heard the back door slam.
“Maggie! Get out here!”
Oh, Christ…
“Just a minute,” she called back. Bending down and opening the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, she wedged her cell phone beneath two towels. Then she stood and caught her reflection in the mirror.
What have you done, you selfish bitch? What have you done?
“Goddamn it, Maggie! Come here!”
He was standing in the entranceway of the living room in work boots and a backward baseball cap. He had a checkered flannel shirt on over his ribbed undershirt. As he stood there he tugged off a pair of work gloves. He had just come in from outside.