A Welcome Grave

5

I drove to Morgantown along a road that embodied autumn the way only a painting or postcard usually will for people who live in the city. Crimson and auburn trees lined cornfields gone weathered and broken, a pale gray sky hanging over it all. The clouds had thickened even in the short time I was at the orchard, spoiling the chance for a nice sunset. The wind was cooler, but no rain fell.

Morgantown was more of what I’d seen in Nashville, only without the obvious design toward tourism. As I sat at one of the two stoplights, waiting for a green light, I thought that if you snapped a black-and-white photograph of the street ahead of me, and captured the stone buildings with their colored awnings and plate glass windows, only the modern cars would clearly separate it from the 1950s. One business sign boasted about handmade furniture; another offered shagbark syrup. It was one of those places that made you glad to be off the beaten path, away from interstate exits with seven chain restaurants and two truck stops.

I killed some time walking around the little town, checking out shops and nodding at passersby, then found a restaurant and wasted forty more minutes on dinner. Dusk settled as I drove back to the orchard, the brilliant shades of the trees fading into muted browns and casting long shadows over the road. I left the windows down, but the air coming into the cab of the truck was cold enough to make me wish I’d asked for another cup of coffee for the road.

The big barn at the orchard was dark—the doors shut, the parking lot empty except for a few farm vehicles. Floodlights near the parking lot entrance lit up displays made from dried cornstalks, haystacks, and gourds, and a scarecrow hung from a post beside the barn. I parked the truck and rolled the windows up, the windshield fogging immediately as the interior temperature warmed.

Outside, the silence made me pause next to the truck. I live in an apartment beneath which traffic passes at all hours of the night, sometimes with stereos pounding or sirens wailing. A quiet night is one where I can’t hear a woman having an animated cell phone conversation in a convertible or the loud laughter of men coming out of the bar up the street. Here, the only sound was the wind. It didn’t whistle or howl, just offered a quiet, constant rustle though the leaves and over the grass.

I walked up to the barn’s front porch, my shoes slapping off the boards, and then went around the side of the building, the way Kara Ross had taken me earlier in the day. A moon that was about three-quarters full provided the only light on this side of the building. I knew there was a name for that stage of moon, waxing or waning or something, and it had that coppery color it gets only in the fall. I turned the corner and found the door to the loft apartment.

The note was gone, every trace of tape peeled away. I banged my knuckles off the rough wood and waited. Nobody came down to open it, and I didn’t hear anyone move upstairs. I knocked again and got more of the same. There was no knob, just an odd hooked handle and a lock. I tugged on the handle, but the door didn’t open. Jefferson’s son had gotten the note, but he hadn’t waited for me. Maybe he hadn’t been as intrigued as Kara Ross had predicted.

I turned away from the door, shoving my hands into my pockets and tightening my shoulders against the chill night air. Out ahead of me, the black surface of the pond rippled as the wind passed over it. I was watching that when I noticed the figure in the gazebo.

There was no light in the little building, but the silhouette of a man was clear. He was sitting on the bench beneath the fancy trelliswork that passed for walls, as still as the scarecrow that hung in front of the barn. When I saw him, I tensed slightly, a human presence somehow seeming threatening in a spot that was absolutely desolate at night. Then I realized the man had to be Jefferson’s son. If I lived in this place, I’d spend my evenings down by the water, too. The gazebo and the pond were maybe a hundred feet from the rear of the barn, and I was surprised he hadn’t heard me approach or knock on the door, but maybe the wind had carried the sounds away from him. I set off down the stone path that led to the gazebo, stepping carefully in the darkness.

By the time I was halfway there, I could see he was sitting with his back to the pond, facing me. He must have seen me at the door, and yet he hadn’t said a word, just sat there and watched. I’d planned on calling out a hello before I reached the gazebo, but his behavior was so odd that breaking the silence seemed wrong somehow, and instead of speaking, I just kept walking.

When I reached the gazebo, I went up the three steps and onto the main surface, only a few feet from him. I could see now he was wearing jeans and a heavy flannel shirt; thick dark hair hung over his shoulders and across his forehead, a few strands in his eyes, blending with the shadows. His chin was close to his chest, but his eyes were up, on me. There was a bottle on the rail beside him, some sort of whiskey, not much left in it. I was opening my mouth to say hello when I saw the gun.

It was resting on the bench beside him, but his hand was around the butt, and even though my night vision was still adjusting, I could tell his finger was on the trigger. The barrel was pointed at me but not raised. I stopped moving forward and looked from the barrel of the gun to hollow dark eyes that were watching me without interest or emotion.

“My father’s dead, isn’t he?” His voice matched his eyes.

I tried hard to look at his face and not the gun. “Yeah,” I said. “He is. That’s what I came to tell you.”

The hand with the gun shifted, and then it was pointed at my chest, maybe six feet separating me from the barrel. It was the kind of range that took shooting ability out of the equation. Even if the whiskey bottle on the railing had started out full, he wasn’t going to be able to miss if he pulled the trigger.

I stayed as still as I could. My mouth had dried out as quickly and completely as desert sand after a cloudburst, and I could feel my heartbeat picking up, the blood beginning to pound in my temples and wrists, my leg muscles trembling the way they do after a long run.

“Listen,” I began, but he cut me off immediately.

“I could kill you,” he said. “Could have as soon as you came around the corner.”

I didn’t try to talk again. I’ve had guns pulled on me before, and I’ve even talked a few men into lowering them in the past, but this didn’t feel like a situation where that was an option. There was no quality of indecision to Jefferson, and also none of the boiling emotion you usually get when someone pulls a weapon. He spoke and sat like an actor trying to finish a scene alone—everyone else might have left, turned the lights off onstage, even, but he knew his role, and he was damn sure going to finish it.

“Wouldn’t do any good to kill you, though, would it?” he said. “You didn’t come alone.”

Now I felt like I had to say something, although I didn’t know exactly what, and with that gun pointing at me, I definitely didn’t want to pick the wrong words. I swallowed, trying to still myself so that when I spoke my voice would be calm and not escalate the tension of the moment.

“At least he has a reason,” he said. “You got nothing but greed.”

The gun moved again, a twirling flash, and in the darkness I wasn’t sure what he was doing with it, only that it was moving, and instinct forced me into motion. As I heard the clicking sound of the hammer being pulled back, I made a stumbling, awkward lunge to the right that would have accomplished absolutely nothing had Alex Jefferson’s son fired at me instead of jamming the barrel of the gun into his own mouth and pulling the trigger.

The bullet exploded out of the gun with a sound loud enough to make everything else in the world temporarily disappear, and then it punched through the back of Matthew Jefferson’s skull and scattered his brains into the pond. His body rocked back, following the path of the bullet, but then his shoulders caught on the railing and threw him forward. He slumped off the bench and fell, landing facedown at my feet, a pulsing crater where the back of his head belonged.

I think I tried to shout, and maybe I even succeeded. If I did, though, I didn’t know it. All I could hear was the gunshot, still echoing through my head, even louder now. I looked down at Jefferson’s son, blood pumping out of what was left of his skull, and then I was scrambling backward, climbing over the gazebo railing without taking my eyes off the body. I fell over the railing and landed awkwardly in the bushes below, fought my way out of them, and staggered up the hill. When I reached the barn I fell on my ass, sat with my back against the weathered boards, and stared at the gazebo.

He had not shot me. The gun had been pointed at me, held just a few feet away, and then it had been fired. He had not shot me, though. I had not been shot.

“You didn’t get shot,” I said aloud. “You did not get shot.” I’d hoped the sound of my voice would calm me, but instead it made the shaking start. It worked its way through my hands and into the rest of my body, and I forced myself to get back to my feet and walked through the gardens to the stone path. I stood there, taking deep breaths, until the shaking stopped, and then I reached into my pocket and took my cell phone out. The first time I tried to open it, my hands weren’t steady enough, and I dropped it into the grass. The second time, I managed to punch in the three numbers I needed.

I told them what I needed to tell them. The dispatcher wanted to keep me on the line until the police got there, but I hung up. I walked slowly back up to the gazebo, feeling a need to see the body again—maybe to reassure myself that it wasn’t mine.

The blood had spread, pooling around the body. The gun had tumbled from his hand when he fell and lay beside him. Even outdoors, with a steady breeze blowing, the smell of the blood was powerful.

“You’re a millionaire,” I said to the corpse. “That’s what I came to tell you. I don’t know who the hell you thought I was, but that’s what I came to tell you.”

It got hard to look at him then, and I turned away and refocused on the pond that had swallowed a piece of his skull. The moonlight reflected on the whiskey bottle that remained where the dead man had sat, and I saw the bottle was resting on a piece of paper, pinning it to the railing. I stepped closer and saw it was that apple-shaped stationery upon which Kara Ross had written my note.

Matt—

Man from Cleveland here to see you.

Will return tonight.

Family business.