‘I don’t see Hank,’ she fretted aloud.
Charlie reached over and groped for her hand, squeezing hard. ‘He’ll be along any minute, I’m sure.’
‘I wonder if Dante will know where to find us.’ Bronwyn’s voice was shrill.
Charlie pulled to a stop just inside the gates, and they tumbled out into the warmth of the summer night, in which the faint cool whisper of the surrounding woods could be felt.
That was when Mary heard it, the drone of an engine in the not-so-far-off distance, no doubt one of the earthmovers she saw scattered about like abandoned Brobdingnagian toys. But why was it being operated at night? As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she scanned the scoured expanse before her, a good fifteen acres at least, mounded with dirt and crisscrossed with trenches. Several hundred yards away a bulldozer was rapidly approaching in a pale cloud of dust.
She saw something else, too, something that brought her heart swooping up from her rib cage to lodge in her throat: a small figure in its path, racing to outdistance it, racing as if for dear life. Noelle? Oh sweet Jesus, it
was
Noelle. The bulldozer at once became menacing in Mary’s mind, a charging rhino of Jurassic proportions.
‘Charlie, look!’ She grabbed his arm.
Charlie saw it, too. His face went gray in the moonlight, and he made a low noise deep in his throat. Without a word he took off, sprinting faster than she’d have believed possible.
Before Mary could follow in pursuit, the sound of a car caused her to wheel about. She couldn’t see its make but had no doubt it was Hank’s. As it roared through the gates, skidding to a stop behind the Blazer, she dashed to meet it, leaning in through the open window. Hank’s guileless midwesterner’s face behind the wheel was drawn and hard, nearly unrecognizable.
‘For God’s sake, Hank,
hurry!’
She gestured wildly in the direction Charlie had gone, catching only a brief glimpse of the rifle glinting on the seat alongside Hank before he plowed into reverse. She leaped back. Sharp bits of gravel spun from his tires to nip at her calves, but she barely noticed. Because she, too, was running
…
running to meet her daughter.
Dust stinking of diesel filled Noelle’s mouth and lungs, and a stitch in her side had turned to fiery agony. The monster’s hot roar was all around her, a furnace in which she was being consumed. Yet, amazingly, her legs continued to churn beneath her.
Time, though, seemed to have wound down. It was as if she were viewing everything in slow-motion instant replay from a seat in a stadium high overhead. Her feet had grown heavy, but a queer lightness had overtaken her. As she ran, stumbling more often than not, her gaze was no longer on the horizon but on the miracle of her shadow, stubbornly lurching over the hard ground, propelled by the grace of God alone.
Quite calmly, she thought,
I’m going to die.
As she ran, she prayed:
God, look after Emma … she’s only five, and it’s a hard world for a little girl without a mother. Nana’s too old and sick, and Daddy, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, is a guy. My mother will give her what she needs …
Noelle had always believed it an old wives’ tale that in the final seconds before death your life flashes before your eyes. But now she knew it to be true. In a series of strobelike images, she saw herself at eight, on a summer camping trip at Lake George, clinging to her father as he carried her over a suspension bridge … and with her mother, at age twelve, shopping for her first bra … and, at sixteen, in the back of Gordon Hockstedder’s Chevy Impala with her jeans scrunched down around her knees.
She saw Hank, too
…
Noelle had a clear picture of him seated on the bench in the square, his large hands resting on his knees. Fleetingly she thought how lovely it would have been if they could have ended up like those old couples strolling hand in hand through the park, each hoping to be the first to go because life without the other would be intolerable. When she was gone, would Hank—
A new sound tunneled its way into her head: the high-pitched drone of a car engine. As she staggered along, bent nearly double from the stitch in her side, Noelle lifted her bleary eyes and saw what appeared to be a cloud of dust racing toward her. She blinked, and the cloud materialized into the shape of a car. Would it reach her in time? She risked another glance over her shoulder: a fleeting impression of a chrome grille twinkling dully in the moonlight like bared teeth—teeth that were going to eat her alive. All at once she was too numb and weary to care.
The car skidded to a stop several dozen feet ahead of her, throwing up a great swirling raft of dust. Through it she could make out the distant figures of a man and woman running toward her.
A gunshot rang out.
For a startled instant Noelle imagined it aimed at her. Her knees buckled, and she nearly fell. She almost
wanted
it to be over—for the sweet relief of being put out of her misery.
Then in rapid succession came two more shots, and she realized in some still-functioning part of her brain that they were being fired
over
her rather than
at
her. The realization was like a sharp instrument piercing the thick shell into which her mind had retreated. The panic she’d held at bay rose once more. But there was something else, too, a feeling she hadn’t had in so long she almost didn’t recognize it: hope.
The roar at her back seemed to diminish.
Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw to her astonishment that the Cat had abruptly veered off course and was now cutting east, toward the concourse where surveyor’s stakes tied with red plastic tape marked the buildings that would one day rise there. Yet something was wrong. Its direction appeared aimless, that of a rudderless boat…
…
headed straight for the dump truck in its path.
Instinctively she found herself croaking,
‘Watch out!’
In a trancelike state of almost exquisite horror, she watched the Cat plow broadside into the truck with a cracking boom, much like the noise their huge elm had made when it crashed through the roof of the garage during last winter’s record-breaking storm. For a surreal instant, the two earthmovers appeared locked in an obscene embrace, like embattled lovers, groaning and bucking. Then the truck reeled onto its side, vanquished, while the Cat continued to butt at it, a track wedged against its crumpled bed, grinding fruitlessly.
The stink of diesel filled the air. There was a deafening whump, and suddenly the two were engulfed in a great orange-red rose of flame.
Noelle cried out again, watching it bloom up into the night sky, momentarily illuminating everything around her: the angled neck of a nearby crane, a stack of conduit pipe stacked alongside a trench. Shadows danced over the rosy-hued landscape like revelers about a bonfire.
‘Noelle!’
Somewhere in the midst of all the skirling madness a voice was calling to her.
For a terrified split second she imagined it to be her husband rising from the flames to complete his gruesome task. Then she saw that the figure racing toward her wasn’t tall like her husband with Robert’s long-legged stride. This man was several inches shorter, though equally athletic, and her heart soared as his dear face swam into view.
Hank …
There was a moment when all the jumbled pieces fell into place—his idling car, the rifle in his hand, the flaming wreck spitting sparks up at the sky—before it was eclipsed by a relief so profound she sank to her knees in gratitude.
‘Hank.’ She choked out his name.
Roughly almost, he pulled her into his arms, and she caught the clean laundry scent of his shirt mingled with the stink of sweat. With a low, strangled cry he buried his face in the crook of her neck while his hands set out to reassure him that she was still in one piece. They slid down over her arms and rib cage before reaching up to cradle her head. ‘You’re bleeding … oh, Jesus …’ When she began to cry, he clasped her to him, murmuring, ‘Shh, it’s okay. It’s just a little cut. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’
‘Your sh-sh-shirt.’ She wept with her face pressed to his collar. ‘It’ll be r-ruh-ruined.’
‘It’s all right,’ Hank said soothingly, his own voice catching. ‘I’ll buy a new one. You can help me pick it out.’
For some reason that only made her weep harder.
‘I c-couldn’t r-run anymore,’ she sobbed.
Lovingly he caressed her cheek. ‘I know.’
‘He’s d-d-dead, isn’t he?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Okay. Okay then.’ She nodded, frowning with the fierce concentration of a slow pupil struggling to make sense of it all. Just over Hank’s shoulder she caught sight of her parents with their arms tightly clasped about each other, which for some unfathomable reason made perfect sense.
‘You’re going to be just fine.’ Hank reassured her once more. ‘There’s nothing to run from anymore.’
Then he, too, began to sob.
Together they rocked as if in the palm of some great, unseen hand that was comforting them.
CHAPTER 18
F
OR THE REMAINDER OF AUGUST
and well into September, it was the talk of Burns Lake. In Murphy’s Diner old men swapped stories over thick white mugs of joe. Housewives getting their monthly perms at Lucille’s Beauty Salon clucked to one another loudly over the drone of hair dryers. Parents of young children spoke of it when their little ones were safely out of earshot or fast asleep in their beds, keeping their voices lowered all the same. In shops all up and down Main Street business was brisker than usual for this time of year. And at Burns Lake Elementary, where Trish Quinn’s long-time fiancé, Gary Schmidt, was winding up fall tryouts for the football team, he whispered about it in the locker room after hours to Amanda Wright, his current squeeze and mother of one of his team members.
The last time the town had seen anything even remotely as sensational had been in June 1985, when the postmistress, Alice Burns, ran off with a traveling aluminum siding salesman and was later found strangled to death in a ditch on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie. This was different, though; it made people distinctly uneasy that they could have allowed themselves to be so profoundly deceived. Many took it as a personal betrayal of sorts. For others it was a case of a good man’s simply snapping beneath the weight of his conscience.
What no one was especially eager to face, much less look squarely in the eye, was the disquieting truth at the heart of it: that all those years they’d been harboring a cold-blooded killer.
Incubating
him, so to speak. The towheaded boy upon whom they’d smiled fondly, seeing him perched on his father’s shoulders as Cole marched down Main Street as grand marshal of the Fourth of July parade. The fair-haired youth who had brought tears to many an eye when he’d spoken so eloquently as valedictorian of his high school class. Last but not least, the man whom many, though not all, had looked upon as a shining example of what one could achieve while remaining essentially decent. If Robert Van Doren had incited some whispering over the years, it was chalked up to the jealous husbands and boyfriends of women he’d bedded and the disgruntled employees he’d fired. No one was perfect after all. What man with a roving eye and a soft spot for the pretty ladies could resist when it was constantly thrown at him?
But there was no getting around certain facts that had come to light in the wake of the terrible occurrence out at Cranberry Mall. Months later, when the county sheriff’s department had completed its investigation into the death of Robert Van Doren, as well as the far less recent ones of his brother and former girlfriend, it was concluded that Corinne Lundquist had been a victim of suicide as first recorded. Buck Van Doren, on the other hand, had expired from a crushing blow to the back of his skull, a fact that had been previously overlooked due to the extreme nature of the injuries that were presumed to have claimed his life.
Several arrests were made in the wake of those findings. Among them a fellow named Grady Foster, a pipe fitter formerly in Robert’s employ who’d moonlighted as a bouncer at the Red Crow Tavern. A big man sporting an earring in one ear, with bleached blond hair sheared off at the top and tied into a ratty ponytail in back, he’d broken down and confessed to having vandalized the
Register
and Mackie Foods warehouse as well as the First Baptist Church. When questioned about the desecration of Buck’s grave, though, he claimed to have been no more than a bit player. He’d dug down only as far as the coffin, he said, after which Mr Van Doren had sent him home. His former boss must not have trusted him to complete the job, but neither was he alive now to corroborate Grady’s story. Grady was consequently sentenced to eighteen months in the Schoharie County jail, the toughest sentence allowable by law.
The first week in September hundreds showed up for Robert’s memorial service. Some came out of curiosity, but most out of respect for his grieving parents, who, aside from occasional sightings of pale, shell-shocked faces glimpsed through the windows of the Cadillac (old beyond their years and bearing only a passing resemblance to those of Cole and Gertrude), had been in virtual seclusion since that fateful night.
Noelle Van Doren and her little girl, Emma, who, other than her dark coloring, bore a striking resemblance to her father, were among those who came to pay their respects. They were accompanied by Noelle’s parents and teenage sister … and the town doctor, Hank Reynolds. It was noted, with raised eyebrow, that Mary Quinn and Charlie Jeffers, divorced lo these many years, appeared on the friendliest of terms nonetheless. But the lion’s share of the gossip was reserved for Charlie’s wild young daughter, arm in arm with that hoodlum boyfriend of hers, right out in the open with her father looking on. Elmira Cushing whispered to Shirley Hemstead, who repeated it to Sylvia Hochman at The Basket Case, that unless her eyes were deceiving her, Bronwyn Jeffers had a bun in the oven. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but that didn’t stop tongues from wagging.