The Winslow Incident (18 page)

Pard felt a nearly overwhelming
impulse to haymaker the man into next week. Instead, he reined in his fury and
said, “Disparaging my good name is as good as destroying your own.”

Tiny brayed.

“Don’t come crying to me,
Clemshaw, when you’ve got no livelihood. Listen up, all of you—I’m trying
to do you a favor.”

“Pard’s right,” Marlene said.
“Think about it—this could really hurt us next season.”

“Aw, hell,” Gus said. “The
tourists come more for blackberry pie and Lamprey River trout than Holloway rib
eyes.”

“What is
wrong
with all of
you?” Pard pressed his fingers against his forehead. “They can get those things
a lot easier down in Stepstone without having to brave the pass. And I bet
those folks down in the valley will be more than happy to soak up our lost
tourist dollars.”

Tiny narrowed his eyes at Pard.
“What are you hiding?”

“Not a damn thing! Not a single
cowhand is sick and we eat beef nearly every damn day.”

“But what about your dead cows?”
Ivy asked. “What about Indigo?”

“Enough about my herd! You’re
barkin’ at a knot! Cattle get sick; it happens. Stop trying to connect
invisible dots.”

No one would meet his eyes now.

“Look,” he continued, “we need to
work together here. Let’s not allow things to get blown all the hell outta
proportion.” Everybody looked sheepish and uneasy, so he figured he must
finally be getting through. “And we need to keep a lid on this or else we’ll
end up like Hawkin Rhone with an orchard full of apples no one will touch at
any price. Is that what you want?”

Heads were shaking.

“Didn’t think so,” Pard said.

“It almost feels the same as then,
doesn’t it?” Ivy said.

“Like when Missy Rhone—”
Kohl started.

“All right, all right.” Pard
gestured at them to quiet down, though he couldn’t help but think,
Same
family, two of the worst things that ever happened to this town.
He shook
his head.
“No need to flog that dead horse. Now let’s all go on home and
stay there until this blows over.”

He turned back to the bar and took
a long draw from the glass. “Thanks for the beer, Marl,” he said.

“Anytime.” Marlene was looking at
Pard with concern.

Or maybe that look held the first
stirrings of distrust, Pard couldn’t be certain.

The crowd parted to let him out of
the tavern. After he burst through the batwing doors and into the hot night
air, he heard the jukebox start up again. Across the street in Prospect Park,
Hap Hotchkiss was doubled over—one hand on his belly and the other
pushing back his hair—losing his biscuits to the pine needles. And in
front of the Fish ’n Bait next door to the Buckhorn, Cal was rearranging
plastic letters on his
Today’s Special Critters
board.

“What the hell are
you
doing?” Pard wanted to know. Usually Cal closed up shop by noon.

“Folks’ll be in early for bait and
tackle.”

“What folks?”

“Gonna be lots of anglin’ around
here from now on.”

“Why’s that?”

“Seeing as we can’t eat your beef anymore
and we’ve got all these fish storms.”

All argued out, Pard left Cal to his task,
thinking,
This situation is not good at all.

B
am, bam, bam!
Somebody knocked with
startling force. Bam! Bam!

Nate Winslow heard the windows
rattle as he hurried through his living room to the entry, one hand on the grip
of his gun. With his other hand, he jerked open the front door just as Pard
Holloway was about to pound it again.

“What can I do for you, Pard?”
Nate asked, feeling worn out and not up for a fight with his brother-in-law. It
took great effort just to stand there, holding onto the door, and suddenly Nate
wondered if his outward appearance betrayed how truly bad he felt inside.

Pard brushed past Nate into the
house, knocking him away from the door. “You need to do something about this
right away, Sheriff.”

Plunking down onto the staircase,
Nate tried to guess which
this
Pard meant. Pard always said the word
sheriff
with such derision.
As though it tastes bitter on his tongue
, Nate
thought.

Looming over him, hands on hips,
Pard said, “These people of yours are fixing to make things a whole lot worse
than they already are.”

“People
are
worse,” Nate
agreed. Then he could tell by the perplexed look on Pard’s face that he hadn’t
responded correctly to what he’d said. What had he said?
Already, Nate
could not remember. His stomach gave another sickened lurch.

Pard stood for a moment, staring
at Nate, appearing to consider. Finally, he cleared his throat. “You’re right
then, Winslow,” he said with an air of conclusion. “We need to quarantine the
town.”

Have we been talking for a
while?
Nate wondered. Hadn’t they just
gotten started? He felt as though he’d definitely missed something.

Pard stabbed a finger down at him.
“And do it quick or you’ll send the whole place into a panic.”

“Shouldn’t we consult a doctor
first?” Nate tried.

“Doc Simmons can handle it.” Pard
dismissed further discussion with a flick of his hand. “Besides, phones are
out. I’m guessing another rotted-out pine split in two and took out the line
again. Damn bark beetles.”

Alarms clanged in Nate’s head.
A
veterinarian is going to handle this? What if things get as bad as they got
with Missy Rhone?
He began to protest, “But a quarantine requires—”

“Listen,
Sheriff,
time is
of the essence here. I’ve taken care of my ranch and quarantined my cattle. Now
it’s your job to take control of your town. Or else I’ll do it for you.”

“We need to get the authorities up
here.” Nate was certain this was what they needed to do. Right away. Why hadn’t
he thought of it before? When had all this started anyway?

“We
are
the authorities,
Winslow, and we clean up our own messes around here. Always have, always will.
You know that better than most.”

Nate grappled with the
implications of Pard’s statement. “What are you saying?”

“A helluva mess that was, too.”
Pard rocked on his heels and whistled.

Nate endeavored to maintain a
semblance of control, when really he felt like crawling into a closet and
shutting the door. They had all agreed that summer that no one would miss the
old man. That there was no point in Sean Adair getting into trouble—what
was done was done. They’d all agreed on that. And Nate and Dr. Foster had
buried the body the full six feet deep.

Only now Nate sensed Hawkin Rhone
clawing at the earth.

Pard cleared his throat again. To
get Nate’s attention, Nate supposed. “Just so we’re clear, Sheriff: that radio
of yours quit working too. Because I’d hate to have to dredge all that up
again, truly I would. Especially since Jules Foster isn’t around anymore to
back your version of it.”

“Are you threatening me,
Holloway?”

“Threatening?” Pard feigned a look
of surprise. “No, just applying a little leverage, Winslow, to keep you herded
in the right direction. Hate to see you stumble off a cliff.”

All at once Nate realized he
didn’t want to be in charge anymore.
What if I can’t handle it?
With
sudden panic, he understood that he was too sick to handle anything. Maybe he
should just let Pard take over.
He’s okay, isn’t he?
So hard to tell.
Nate massaged the muscles aching in his arms while his pulse raced and his
stomach flopped around like a hooked eel.

“So what’s it gonna be, Sheriff?”
Pard glared at him while Nate struggled to muster a response. “A quarantine
then? Good idea. No one in, no one out. Effective immediately. Your orders,
Sheriff.”

Pard left then, evidently
satisfied Nate wasn’t going to give him any trouble.

Feeling incapable of rising from
the step, worried they may have woken Hazel in her bedroom upstairs, Nate laid
his head across his arm and hoped things wouldn’t get any worse—and that
the past would stay buried across Three Fools Creek.

A
fter the ghosts began to stir in the tower of The
Winslow that summer Hazel turned twelve, but before her grandfather’s heart
attacked him in the sunny bedroom upstairs, she sat with Sean inside the
granite wall surrounding the cemetery. There were no messages written on the
wall that day either.

Hugging
sunburned knees, curious how long the corpse beneath them had lain buried,
Hazel leaned forward to consider the epitaph burned onto a pinewood cross
planted at her feet, gone crooked with age.

Here lies
Dinky Dowd

Not another
breath was he allowed

By order of
The Hon. E. A. Winslow

1889

She looked at her twelve-year-old
friend Sean slumped against the wall beside her, and worried they would run out
of dead townsfolk and candy money soon.

Their tenth straight day of ghost
hunting had been launched that morning after they pestered Patience’s grandfather
for a dead man’s name until finally Ben Mathers challenged them to find Dinky
Dowd. When Patience became spooked during their fruitless search of the grassy
church cemetery, she quit the game, and Hazel and Sean had raced across town to
the weedy silver miners’ graveyard. Since Sean was first to spot Dinky’s grave,
he’d won the prize of taffy and Jolly Ranchers they’d bought at Clemshaw
Mercantile and stashed at the playground for later. But Hazel knew Sean would
share with her, unless Patience ate it all first. More than once they’d met
back up in Prospect Park and found Patience waiting for them on the red
merry-go-round, wrestling with a mouthful of the rightful victor’s taffy.

Now, after contemplating Dinky’s
corpse decaying beneath their feet, Hazel decided, “Hanged is a lousy way to
die.”

Sean pitched a rock at Dinky’s
grave marker before turning his light brown eyes on her. “Hanged is what
happens when you knife George Bolinger through the heart in the Never Tell.”

“Shot. In the gut.” She rubbed her
own unscathed neck. “I hope I never get hung.”

“Try not to kill anyone in
Winslow.”

“I’ll try. But even if I did, I
don’t think my great-great-grandfather would sentence me to hang.”

“Somebody would,” Sean said.

Squinting past the scatter of
other graves to the empty space beyond the edge of the canyon, Hazel wondered
what would happen if it rained too hard and the hill gave out in a wave of mud.
Maybe all the markers and coffins and bones would stream over the precipice and
splash into the water below. Maybe the whole stupid town would slide into the
Lamprey River.

She inhaled warm, pinesap-tinged
air, and then blew out her cheeks. “I wish it’d rain.”

“Never rains in July,” he said,
fishing around a droopy foxglove for more rocks to throw.

She glanced up between the
branches of the purple-leaf plum tree, its leaves black against the heat-washed
sky. “Never,” she sighed. Abruptly she rose and brushed stickers off the back
of her shorts, feeling hot and ornery, and thinking that a grilled cheese and
brain-freezing chocolate shake back at the Crock were starting to sound pretty
good. “I’m bored of ghosts.” She nudged Sean’s foot with her own. “Let’s do
something else.”

He stood to face her. “Dare you to
jump in Three Fools Creek.”

She looked her best friend in the
eye. “I’ll take that dare.”

“Bullshit.”

“What will you give me if I do
it?”

“Don’t matter. You won’t.”

“What will you give me?” she
repeated.

“I’ll give you whatever you want.” He narrowed
his eyes at her. “What
do
you want, Hazel Winslow?”

“
M
aybe this isn’t such a good idea.” Hazel
swatted a skinny alder branch out of her path.

“Don’t think about it.” Sean
placed his hand between her shoulder blades and gave her a soft shove. “Just
go.”

They crunched down a trail covered
in dried pinecones while the air grew thick with the rising heat and the scent
of warming resin. And the deeper they continued into the woods, the more Hazel
wondered if she’d completely lost her mind.

After the path disappeared beneath
a tangle of ferns, she tripped over a fat tree root. To keep from falling, she
grabbed an overhead branch and pitchy pine needles rained down on her head.

“Yuck!” Hazel clawed her fingers
through long waves of hair. Then she spun to frown hard at Sean. “What if he’s
over there?”

“Maybe he’ll invite us for lunch.”
He shrugged, grinning. “Squirrel soup.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “You
truly are the village idiot, I swear.”

When she turned around again, Sean
plucked more needles out of her hair and off the back of her shirt. Despite the
uneasy feeling roiling her stomach, she plodded forward, regret building with
each step that she’d taken his dare.