Twice Dying (11 page)

Monks said, “How do you want to handle this?”

She shifted in the seat, with the sound of snapping elastic.

“Tanager’s seventeen. He’s been held back in school. Maybe he’s a little slow. Maybe because of everything that’s happened with Caymas.” She was taking something else from the bag, unfolding it. “I don’t want him to think we’re from the hospital, at least at first. I’m guessing he’s just trying to hide and get through it all. If we come at him officially he might freeze up. I’ll try to start him talking and see where it goes.”

“If we’re not us, then who are we?”

“We’re spreading the word of the Lord.” She smoothed a dress over her front, raising knees and then rump to pull it on. It was denim of a medium blue color, loose-fitting, calf-length.

“You think that’s fair to the kid?”

With sudden sharpness, she said, “I don’t think there’s anything fair about any of this. Zip me up.”

Monks did, fingers fumbling along the bumps of her spine. She retied the scarf with quick jerky motions. It was dark blue, bringing out the pallor of her face, and he realized she was not wearing makeup.

“I’m not much of an actor.”

“You’ll do fine,” she said, more kindly. “You don’t have to talk. Just look stern.”

The fog was thickening, their headlights creating a tunnel, barely penetrating in some pockets. There were no signs of habitation now except for an occasional dirt road entrance marked by a mailbox.

He said, “Long way for a preacher to come calling.”

“The Lord loveth not the spirit that is weak.”

He smiled. Clearly, she had been doing her homework.

“I heard you were getting married,” he said. “A couple years back.”

She leaned her head against the window, lips twisting briefly.

“Matthew,” she said. “A rising star in the investment world. He wanted me to quit my job. Move to a safe clean suburb of the mind, away from the slums where the poor people live. You?”

“Gail and I stay in touch.” While he had never thought of it in those terms, hrs ex, had moved to that suburb, too.

“You told me once she’d decided you were bad luck, and she was afraid it would rub off.”

He said, “Chances are she was right.”

Abruptly, Monks braked hard. A small burly shape was ambling down the road’s center toward them, making no effort to budge. As he skirted it, the headlights picked out a badger’s white mask: beasts that would fight to the death before giving ground.

He said, “How hard have they tried to find Caymas?”

“He was scheduled to report to the outpatient clinic in Ukiah for decanoate injections twice a month. Stopped showing up more than a year
ago. His family said he’d disappeared. He’s a registered child molester, not allowed to leave the area. There’s a bench warrant out for him.”

“But nobody’s looking?”

“They never do. Everybody’s glad those men are someone else’s problem.” She took out a cigarette and held it. With the scarf and dress, it gave her the look of an actress in a Western movie, taking a break. Monks reached to push in the lighter, but she shook her head.

“I don’t want it on my breath,” she said. “He was attractive to kids—Caymas. Isn’t that strange? The perfect older playmate. Always knew the right thing to say, to coax a child into playing a game. Keeping a secret. Most of the NGIs are scary. But I’ve only met a couple like him.”

“If we did happen to run into him, you’d recognize him?”

“He’s not somebody you forget.”

Monks’s right hand moved to his coat pocket, touching the Beretta. In a worst-case scenario, it lust might provide the leverage to get them out of there.

He corrected himself. Worst case was that Caymas would have to dig a hole big enough for two bodies, not one, back in the dank redwood forests.

“Dennis O’Dwyer heard a rumor that when Robby Vandenard was a kid, they couldn’t keep pets around,” Monks said. “They’d end up dead.”

“It all fits with what’s been creeping up on me, about Robby. Men like him almost never commit suicide.”

Monks drove a distance further before the implication hit him. When he turned, she was watching him patiently.

“Robby had a lot of nasty stuff on Jephson,” she said. “I’m not saying Jephson had him killed, but I bet he didn’t weep at the news.”

Two miles later the headlights found the number, hand-painted in red on a battered mailbox shaped like a small Quonset hut. A dirt road led into the woods. They followed it two hundred yards before it curved to reveal a sprawling, wood-sided house with lit windows and smoking chimney.

Several vehicles were parked in no apparent order: pickup trucks, a dark customized van on its way to being trashed, a newish mini-station wagon, a fifties-era ton-and-a-half with wooden slat side racks and a flattened tire that made it list to one side. The shapes of other buildings, sheds and shacks and a looming hulk that might have been a barn, merged into the darkness beyond, with a few lights visible in the distance. The overwhelming sense was of a compound of hostiles.

The bark of a large dog boomed out, instantly picked up by others. Several low shapes appeared on the run, big black and yellow mutts with bared teeth and bristled spines, lunging through the light cast by the headlamps.

The front door of the house opened. There was no porch light: only a shadowed shape just visible, waiting inside. They got out, Alison fending off the growling dogs swarming her legs and thrusting noses in her crotch. She walked ahead of Monks to the porch, a hand purse clasped in front of her.

The woman waiting for them was in her fifties, buxom, well-preserved, wearing a multicolored peasant skirt. This would be the brood mare, Monks thought: Haven Schulte. One hand was on her hip, the other out of sight, as if gripping the barrel of a shotgun. Behind her came the sound of a television, voices and laugh track suggesting a sitcom. Another shape appeared behind her: a man, younger, watching them intently. He turned and spoke to someone unseen in the house. Monks felt a drop of sweat from his right armpit hit his flank. It was very cold.

“I
am
sorry to disturb you good people,” Alison said. Her accent had gone unobtrusively Southern. “I’m Sister Helen and this is Brother Roy. We’re from the First Denominational Pentecostal Church of Santa Rosa, and we’ve come to call on—” She opened a slip of paper and squinted at it in the dimness. “Tanager Shoo—Shool—”

Haven Schulte said wearily, “We’ve told you everything we have to tell you.”

“Ma’am”?

“You’re cops, right?”

“No’m,” Alison said, puzzled. “We leave collection boxes in public places. People fill out forms asking to talk to us. To bring the Lord into their lives.” She held the slip of paper up tentatively.

Haven Schulte’s gaze remained on her several seconds longer, then moved to Monks. He was having no trouble looking somber.

Over her shoulder, Haven said, “Get your brother.”

The man behind her walked outside, brushing past Monks with careful insolence. He was in his late twenties, with lank stringy hair and a presence thick enough for Monks to feel. The dogs fell in with him as he disappeared into shadow toward the compound’s rear.

“We have some literature we’d like to leave with you,” Alison said, opening her purse. She took out several pamphlets and offered them forward, but Haven folded her arms.

“You can wait here.” She turned and went back in the direction of her interrupted TV show.

The night was peaceful and had a pleasant chill, with the soothing scent of pine smoke lacing the air. It brought Monks an abrupt memory of camping in the Sierras with Gail and the kids, all of them still young.

He kept his gaze centered on nothing, alert for movement at the edges, listening hard.

Minutes later, he picked out human footsteps among the patter of dog paws before the figures came into sight. The brother who had gone was
back followed by a teenaged boy wearing huge baggy shorts and a knee-length T-shirt with a down vest over it, an outfit that made him took at the same time knobby and shapeless. His hair was cut floppy on top and close on the sides. His face was an unformed white oval that expressed bewilderment.

Tanager. Just about the same age, Monks realized, as his own son.

“I didn’t fill out any paper,” Tanager said. The brother, on his way back inside, stopped and waited just at the point where the dim light faded to shadow.

“It might have been someone else, thinking of you,” Alison said quickly. “Somebody you might not even know cares about you. We’re not asking you for anything. We just thought you might want to talk a minute.” She turned to the older brother. “The rest of your family too, if they’d like. The Lord can light up a dark night like this.”

He gave a throaty barking laugh and climbed the porch stairs, boot heels coming down with emphasis. The dogs followed him to the door, then milled uncertainly.

“Somebody who might think you’re lonesome,” Alison said to Tanager. She moved closer to him, her face earnest and concerned, a teenaged bo y’s wet dream, if marred somewhat by the presence of Monks and, perhaps, Jesus. “We all have things that hurt us, that we feel like we can’t tell anybody.”

Monks tried to look compassionate, which under other circumstances would have been easy. He held the doorway at the edge of his sight. There was no one visible now. Whoever the brother had spoken to had never appeared. Might still be in the house. Might have gone out a back door into the night.

More quietly, Alison said, “That person who cares about you? She put her name on this paper.”

Tanager’s gaze turned surprised. “Who?”

Alison shivered. “I’d love a chance to wann up, just for a minute. Do you have a room?”

Tanager lowered his head with shy pride. “I have my own cabin. With a stove.”

Alison smiled.

They followed the boy past the rear of the house, where uncurtained windows gave a view of a large kitchen, empty of humans, with dishes stacked on the drainboard. The dirt path led on past a rail-fenced corral. Snufflings and a musty odor suggested horses or pigs. After that came an aging single-wide trailer, with paint shedding in patches from ridged aluminum siding. The windows gave off the blue-white light of another television. On a couch watching it sat two young men with a girl between them. She looked to be about fourteen years old and about seven months pregnant.

Ahead another fifty yards, standing alone, the
shape of a small cabin with a single lit window was coming visible. The path narrowed to a foot trail through the dense trees. Monks restrained his body’s urge to pant.

“You live out here by yourself?” Alison said.

“Nobody else wants it. It’s too far and there’s no plumbing.”

“You must be very brave. I’d be scared to death.”

“I fixed it up,” Tanager said with sudden eagerness. He opened the door. The spreading light revealed old rough-sawn board-and-batten siding that had been patched with newer wood. The door and window trim were freshly painted, a hopeful red. A shed roof extended out a few feet from one wall, protecting a stack of firewood and the carefully tarped shape of a motorcycle.

The inside was a single small room with a bunk, a few shelves of books, a small boom box, and a Nintendo game on the screen of a small TV A large poster of Michael Jordan was tacked above an old school desk, stacked with high school texts and papers. It was a world, a sanctuary, and it cried out his need to escape.

One corner was lined with galvanized sheet metal, with a sheepherder’s stove set on a brick hearth. The aged black iron radiated heat and the wood inside crackled comfortingly. Alison stepped toward it. Monks remained by the door, doing his best to stay invisible.

“That feels wonderful,” she sighed. “I can’t believe you fixed this place up yourself. How long did it take you?”

Tanager’s gaze shifted awkwardly around the room, not quite meeting hers. His face was round, unformed, just beginning to sprout brindle whiskers.

“A couple months. My brothers helped with some stuff.”

“I’ll bet your girlfriends love it.”

His face reddened with pleased embarrassment. “Not really.”

“Come on. Have you asked anybody up here?”

“No,” he said, the word half-swallowed.

“Well, they would.”

Monks smiled gravely, senses bristling for the stealthy footstep, the shadow crossing the window.

“Lord, now I’m starving,” she said. She took a Cadbury chocolate bar from her purse, broke it, and offered half to Tanager. He accepted with mumbled thanks.

“Are you nervous about asking girls out?”

He nodded, eyes downcast.

“Let me tell you something. Girls like boys who’re shy. It means there’s somebody important underneath. They want to get to know you, who you really are. Go for walks. Listen to music. Just talk. You’ll find out.”

Mouth full of chocolate, Tanager watched her hopefully, not seeming to find it bizarre that a
pretty missionary was giving him advice on how to get laid.

“You said somebody put their name on that paper?”

She nodded. “Can you guess who?”

Her tone was subtly different: the teasing still there, but betraying tension. Tanager’s face went wary.

“All right,” she said. “Here.”

She held out the slip of paper. He stepped to her hesitantly and took it. His lips moved to silently pronounce the name;

Alison.

He looked up swiftly, now alarmed.

“Don’t be scared, Tanager,” she said. She moved toward him a step. “Tell me who Alison is,”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she a girl who likes you?”

He shook his head.

“Why does that name make you nervous? Did somebody give you a message? Something you’re supposed to tell Alison?”

She took another slow step, as if she were trying to gentle a colt, hand outstretched.

“You can tell me. Because I’m Alison. I’m not from any church, Tanager. I’m a doctor. I worked with your brother Caymas.”

He jerked away from her touch, eyes glistening. “You lied.”

“I didn’t want to scare you,” she said quickly.
“I’ll leave if you want, but I think you have something to tell me. Is it about Caymas? Do you know what happened to him?”