The Winslow Incident (13 page)

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, but her
shoulders shook with sobs. Tears fell to her lap with the same soft sound as
water dripping from leaves after the rain stops.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They’ll
come back for you. They’ll remember they forgot you here.”

When she lowered her hands to her
lap, Aaron noticed the rings on her fingers. Three, with bright stones that
reminded him of Jujubees. And her tears kept dripping. He realized the carpet
around them had grown wet and squishy beneath his antsy feet.

“Can’t you see it?” she suddenly
asked in a voice full of breath.

That made him even more anxious.
Still behind her, he couldn’t see her face, and he suddenly worried that if he
did, he wouldn’t like what he saw.

“See what?” he asked, not really
wanting to know. Maybe he should just walk away, go back and hide in his safe
bedroom down the hallway in his family’s quarters.

But before he could escape, she
lifted her head as if to look around the hotel.

Then she sighed. A long, sad sigh.
“Can’t you see the stain of every miserable thing that has ever happened here?”

Aaron reached down to touch her,
to comfort her, and to tell her to stop talking like that because she was making
him really, really afraid.

He leaned forward, expecting his
hand to land on her shoulder. Instead his hand went straight through her and
suddenly the staircase yawned wide before him, willing him to tumble down.

At the last moment, his hand
grasped the banister.

She had looked so
real.
Blinking
hard, the boy suffered a realization that turned his blood cold.
I can’t
tell them apart anymore.
How was Sean supposed to protect him if he
couldn’t even tell the living from the dead?

On shaky legs, Aaron ran.

And all of a sudden, he no longer
felt the floor beneath his feet, no longer felt anything at all, in fact.
Looking down from above, he could see himself running along the hallway.

His body, that is. His body was
still running—he just wasn’t inside it anymore.

Day Four of
the Heat Wave

A
fat wet catfish splat onto the boardwalk
before Cal’s feet.

He watched it squirm on the worn
wood, watched it gasp with its whiskered mouth.

Cal sniffed the briny air. “I’ll
be damned.”

He looked up to the sky as several
more showered down and clattered heavily against the roof of the Fish ’n Bait.

Awestruck, his jaw dropped.
It’s
raining fish.

He glanced down at the creature
struggling for its life. “I’ll be damned.”

Then Cal noticed townsfolk up and
down Fortune Way scrambling for shelter as the sky darkened, thunder bellowed,
and fish poured from the heavens.

Arms outstretched, Cal tried to
grab hold but they wriggled out of his hands to land in the street with sickly
plops.
I’ll be damned
, Cal thought right before a catfish hit him on the
head.

A
wash in sunshine, Hazel turned onto Fortune Way
to see Cal sitting on the edge of his roof, fishing into the space between the
Fish ’n Bait and Buckhorn Tavern. When she got closer she saw bartender Marlene
Spainhower crouched in the dusty passageway tugging on Cal’s line.

Cal raised his rod and reeled in
the line, shouting, “Whoa, whoa!”

Marlene squeezed her face together
to suppress the laughter that shook her petite frame. Then she noticed Hazel
and put a finger to her mouth,
Shush
.

What the?
Hazel marveled. After she had finally calmed down Patience
last night, her dad had returned from his wolf hunt at the Rhone place looking
even more shook up than when he’d left. Without a word he’d walked past them in
the living room and into the kitchen where Hazel heard him take a bottle from
the cupboard and scrape a chair away from the table.

“I better go now,” Patience had
whispered, the sheriff’s strange behavior clearly refueling her fear. Then she’d
left for her house next door while Hazel listened to her dad fill his glass.

The pit of dread born in Hazel’s
stomach at that moment had grown so much overnight that she wasn’t surprised
this morning to see Cal perched on the bait shop roof, fishing the dirt. Wasn’t
surprised to see Hap Hotchkiss pushing his lawnmower down the middle of Fortune
Way. And wasn’t surprised when she walked into the Crock to find it already
packed and noisy. They weren’t even supposed to open for another
hour—Hazel had decided to come in early to set up for breakfast in case
Rose was still sick.

Hazel wove her way around the
tables—it seemed as if the whole stinking town was crammed in
there—asking people to scoot in their chairs so she could get to the back
where she found a pale and harried Rose Peabody at the coffeemaker just pushing
brew
for a pot of decaf.

“What’s going on?” Hazel asked,
following Rose through the swinging kitchen door.

“Order up!” Owen Peabody pounded
the bell twice even though they were standing right there.

“We had over a dozen people
waiting for us to open.” Rose was seriously flustered. “Last night, nobody.
Today, everybody!” She grabbed two plates and headed back to the dining room.

Owen plopped more bacon onto the
hot grill and it spat back up at him.

Hazel leaned both arms on the warm
metal counter and watched him add a scoop of butter to a short stack with
sausage and eggs. She always thought Owen looked like Popeye, especially around
the oversized jaw, and since Rose looked like Olive Oyl, they made a perfect
match.

“You feeling better, Owen?” Hazel
asked.

“Right as rain, m’dear.” He
cracked open two eggs on the already full grill, not bothering to pick out bits
of shell.

“You sure?” she said. He didn’t
look right as anything. A sheen of sweat covered his big arms and had soaked
through the t-shirt covering his barrel chest.

“Never better.” Owen grinned at
her.

That gesture unsettled Hazel
deeply. It was not his usual good-natured grin, but rather a manic-looking,
teeth-baring gape. “Owen,” she tried, “maybe we should close up?”

The counter was covered in plates
of The Special. He spun the order wheel and looked at the sole ticket. “Okay.”
He rubbed his hands together. “Three more specials.”

“Owen—you’re cooking up the
same order.”

“Two by two by two.” He flipped
pancakes prematurely and battered the bacon.

She plucked the ticket off the
wheel. “This is from yesterday.” Hazel remembered taking the order from James
Bolinger and his grandfather Gus yesterday morning because James—growing
boy that he was—had bashfully ordered
two
Two by Two by Twos and then
left her a hefty tip as a token of his adoration. “You already cooked this
order, Owen.”

“Look. I’m doing my job here.
Please do yours and get these out while they’re still hot.”

Hazel had hoped things would get
back to normal today; clearly things were not headed that direction. Feeling
topsy-turvy, she considered suggesting again that they close up, but decided to
hightail it out of the kitchen instead once she saw Owen pick up his huge
chef’s knife.

After hastily tying on her frilly
yellow work apron, she carried two plates of food into the dining room and set
them on the table near the waitress station, where Jay and Julie Marsh sat
looking confused.

Jay managed to stop pulling on his
moustache long enough to acknowledge her. “Thank you, Hazel.” He turned to his
wife. “Try and eat something, Julie. It’ll make you feel better.”

Julie gave Hazel an odd look
before squinting at her plate. “Are there potatoes?”

“I can get you some hash browns,”
Hazel offered.

Julie made a repulsed face. “I
hate potatoes.”

“Then I won’t get you any hash
browns?” Hazel looked quizzically at Jay.

“It’s fine, Hazel,” Jay said.
“Thank you.”

When Rose brushed by, Hazel
followed her to the toaster. “Did you order any specials?”

“I can’t remember.” Rose covered
her mouth with her hand and dashed for the restroom. Toast popped up loud.
“Butter that, will you?” she called back, muffled, before disappearing.

As Hazel slathered the bread, she
thought,
What the hell?

Returning to the kitchen where
Owen was flinging food all over the place and again to the dining room to
deliver more plates, Hazel repeated this back and forth for twenty minutes
before deciding she needed to go find her father and tell him what was going
on. Ignoring demands for coffee refills, and wondering what had become of Rose,
Hazel pushed her way out of the Crock onto the sidewalk.

The Peabodys’ chocolate Lab was
out front chasing her own tail. Molly spun in an endless circle, whimpering
because she couldn’t quite catch it.

“You’re not very smart, are you?” Hazel
asked the dog, feeling slightly guilty for doing so because Molly was Jinx’s
girlfriend.

Hazel looked over to the corner of
Fortune Way and Civic Street, at the squat brick building that was once Mathers
Bank but now served as the post office and the seldom-used jail. In fact,
nobody had been incarcerated there since her dad busted Tiny Clemshaw a few
years back for driving while intoxicated. Her dad’s office occupied the
southeast corner and she could see all the windows shut up tight.
Where is
he?
He’d been gone when she woke up—something that’d never happened
since her mother left. Now she had no idea where to even look for him.

Two doors down the opposite
direction, Ivy Hotchkiss stood with her hands on her hips looking up at Cal on
the roof of the Fish ’n Bait. “Come on down,” Ivy told Cal, “before you hook
somebody in the eye.” And across the street in Prospect Park, Ivy’s husband Hap
Hotchkiss mowed pine needles with his gas-powered lawnmower.

This is food poisoning?
Hazel marveled.
What did they eat?
Again she hoped
that she wouldn’t get it too.

She noticed Patience sitting
statue-still on the porch steps of her Grandfather Ben’s mansion on the corner
of Park Street. She appeared to be staring at the playground area in the park .
. . as if waiting for Hazel or Sean to return victorious from the ghost hunt so
they could finally eat the rest of the candy.

Wondering how Sean felt today, she
decided to walk down to Rhone Bakery to check on him as soon as Rose came out
of the bathroom. She was tempted to split right then but for some reason felt
compelled to stay and help the Peabodys. Perhaps because last night an
overwrought Rose had chosen to inform her that she’s like a daughter to them.

I’ve been taken emotional
hostage
, she realized, remembering how
those Olive Oyl eyes had shone with such sympathy and affection after Hazel was
abandoned by her mother.

Just as a car accelerated onto
Fortune Way, she spotted Jinx trotting across the street from the park, heading
for where she stood in front of the Crock. “Jinx, no!” she shouted. “Wait
there!”

When the dog took this as
encouragement and picked up his pace, Hazel stepped into the street and waved
her arms, shouting to the oncoming car, “Stop, stop!”

The El Camino lurched to a halt
just in time for Jinx to saunter in front of it on his way to the sidewalk. Molly
the chocolate Lab whined in greeting to her boyfriend.

Hazel waved to the driver.
“Thanks.”

Kenny Clark, Holloway Ranch’s
youngest yet crustiest cowpoke, leaned out his window. “You better tie up that
mongrel. Next time he won’t be so lucky.”

“Thanks, asshole.”

Kenny narrowed his eyes. “Trespass
at the ranch again and I’ll shoot first and let somebody else ask questions
later.”

“You already shot at me, you
dumbass! Does Friday night ring a bell? Poor helpless calf? Shoot anywhere near
me again—even threaten me again—and I’ll have my father haul your
ass to jail.”

“Oh, look out . . .” He pretended
to gnaw on his fingernails. “The
sheriff.
” He made an even uglier face.
“You Winslows think you own this town.”

“Own it? If we do, it’s for sale.
Cheap. Got any money?” She gave him a facetious smile.

His middle finger said it all as
he gunned his engine and peeled out.

She responded in kind before
looking down at Jinx. “What’s the matter with you? You’re gonna get yourself
run over.”

He wagged his tail and licked his
snout and saliva flew onto her bare calves.

“And you’re really slobbery today,
you know that?” She gave the red dog a few pets on the head.

He complained
more,
more
when she stood back up.

“Sorry, gotta get back to work.”

He whimpered again before he and Molly
turned and padded up the sidewalk toward the Buckhorn Tavern . . . maybe they
could score a hot dog there.