Blunt Darts

TWENTY-SIXTH

– ¦ Stephen told me that he'd found Blakey's rental car at the base of the trail up the front of the mountain. Stephen advised me, however, that the hood was up. I told him that it was an old trick and that I was sure the car would work. Besides, I knew I couldn't go back down to my car the way I'd come up, or even by walking along the perimeter road.

My face was pretty much numb, but my rib was killing me. Stephen cut my ankle bonds, and I found after a while that I could still walk, at least around the room.

I had some canned fruit cocktail and some dry chocolate candy with almonds. Stephen wanted to leave so we could arrive in Meade at approximately 9:30 P.M. I told him that in my condition I wanted to complete the downhill part of the trip while it was still bright outside. He agreed.

We started down. The ladder was the worst part of the ordeal. On the trail, I asked Stephen to help support me a few times, which gave me the opportunity to frisk him unobtrusively. He wasn't carrying any weapons.

We got to Blakey's car just at sunset. I lowered the hood. It started on the second try, and Stephen rewarded me with a smile.

I had to take the dirt road very slowly. Once on the paved road back to the Pike, we stopped at a supermarket. A sign in the window read "Closed all day tomorrow, July Fourth." Stephen went in to buy me some more bread. While he was gone, I did another quick search of his knapsack. Clean.

Stephen got back in, and we continued on to the Pike. I asked him if he thought the judge would be at home, since the next day was a holiday.

"Sure," he said. "He always gives a big speech after the parade. He'll be home tonight, practicing it like every year."

Then we talked about Valerie, camping, and the army. He knew a lot about the service, obviously from reading up on his Uncle Telford and what he had done. I judiciously avoided my visit to Kim Sturdevant's house.

I've never been much for kids. Even when Beth was alive, I was perfectly happy to borrow somebody else's kids when Beth and I acted as free babysitters for the afternoon. Then, having had my fill, I could return them at night, like short-term library books.

Stephen, though, was different. He truly appeared to be a gifted, sensitive boy. I tried to square that with how he had handled Blakey. I decided that his maturity and intelligence might have permitted him to shoot Blakey to save me, but I couldn't account for his disposing of Blakey's body in such a way as to gain leverage over me. He was, I suppose, one of the few individuals, child or adult, who interested me more the more I came to know him.

On the well-maintained roads, I began to forget about my rib. Over two hours later, as we turned in to the Kinnington driveway, however, the lurch onto gravel brought tears to my eyes.

I braked the car to a halt, but not because of my rib cage. There was a heavy double chain stretched across the driveway. The chain was anchored at both ends by short, stout metal poles.

"I don't remember this from my earlier visits," I said.

Stephen was staring at the chain. "That's all right. There's another way. In fact, it's a better way."

I sighed and gingerly shifted to face him. "Stephen, what kind of way is it?"

"It's a path, on the other side of the hill. It leads up to the back of the house."

"Can we drive the car up it?"

Stephen turned to me. "No, but it's shorter than climbing up this driveway." I frowned, but Stephen continued quickly, "No, really! It'll be a lot easier on you, I promise."

I nodded. He said, "Back the car up and keep going down the road like we were."

I followed his instructions. As we drove, I asked Stephen why rich people's driveways weren't paved.

He said the judge felt that paved driveways encouraged passersby to drive up them and that gravel driveways did not. Also, gravel drives were more genteel and therefore more in keeping with the "overall Kinnington environment." It must have been a great environment for the poor kid, I thought.

We slowed about half a mile after the driveway and took a right onto a narrower but still paved road. At Stephen's direction, I pulled to a stop near an old stone fence marker.

"This is it," he said.

I eased out of the driver's side, but Stephen stumbled in the dark and into some bushes as he was swinging open the door.

"You all right?" I whispered.

"Yes," he said. "Just a few scratches."

I could hear him scuffling back up to the car and gently closing the door. We left his knapsack in the car. The crickets were chirping madly, and there was a scent of freshly mowed grass in the warm, heavy night air.

"Come on over here," he said from the other side of the car. "The path is right here."

I moved around to the back of the car and fumbled with Blakey's keys at the trunk as my eyes tried to adjust to what night vision the moon would allow me.

"What are you doing?" asked Stephen.

"I'm checking for a flashlight. Look in the glove compartment, will you?"

"Don't bother. I searched the car at the ranger station. There's no flashlight."

I pocketed the keys and reminded myself that things would probably progress faster if I left the lead to the genius.

I was pretty stiff from our drive as we started up the path. The moon was just bright enough to allow me to see where I was walking. The path was only two feet wide, but some worn spots indicated it used to be wider. Stephen obviously was at ease climbing it, partly youth and partly familiarity.

"Did you clear this path yourself?" I whispered.

"No," he laughed softly, getting a few steps ahead, then waiting for me to catch up. "The men who cleared the underbrush and deadwood from the grounds here used this because it was easier than carrying the stuff up past the house to the driveway. My uncle and my father used to play on it as kids, too."

I stopped and looked around. Even in the weak light, I could see a lot of brush intruding on the trail and deadwood alongside of it. "Looks like it's been a while since the landscapers have been around."

Stephen's voice had no laughter in it now. "It has. The judge and Blakey do… did what there was to be done."

I looked at him quizzically, but in the moonlight I couldn't read his face and he probably couldn't see mine. "Your grandmother told me that you have over seventy-five acres here. Why the hell doesn't your father have someone come to take care of this stuff?"

Stephen turned up the trail. "You'll see," he said flatly as I began after him again.

I tried to go slowly, on the theory that the less frequently I had to breathe, the better my ribs would feel. After about five minutes of climbing, however, the throbbing pain was distracting me and increasing with every step.

I noticed I was focusing my eyes on the ground. Not just the path under me, but the yard or so in front of me as well, my head bobbing slightly. That snapped me back for a moment to Vietnam. When I was there, MP lieutenants were shuttled into infantry platoons if the infantry companies were short of young officers. I hated patrols in the jungle, or "the bush" as the troops called it, and I was terrified of land mines, which killed or maimed so unpredictably that they would have seemed whimsical in a less personal setting. The Cong would stretch thin wire across the trails as trips for the mines. You bobbed your head to vary the moonlight hitting the path ahead of you in the hope that a change in the angle of light and sight would pick up a stretched wire that the point man might have missed. It had been a long time since I had been reminded of that, and I hoped it would be a longer time before the memory surfaced again.

Lost in thought, I nearly fell over a stone or maybe an exposed root in the path. I cursed under my breath as I stumbled and my rib shrieked.

"Are you all right?" whispered Stephen, just ahead and out of sight.

"Just a few scratches," I mimicked.

He laughed softly again and urged me on. Just as I thought I would have to call a rest, Stephen let me catch up to him on the trail. "We have to go off the path a little ways here."

"Why?"

"You'll see," he said, turning into the brush.

"Stephen, wait a minute," I said. I leaned back against a tree to ease the pressure on my breathing apparatus. "I'm hurting pretty badly. Detours are not a happy prospect right now."

His voice dropped very low, so low I could barely hear him, even in the summer stillness. "I want you to believe me. I want you to see this before we see the judge. Please, it's important. P1ease?"

"See what, Stephen?"

"Please?"

I sighed. "How far?"

"Not far," he said quickly. "Maybe twenty yards. He couldn't… Maybe not even twenty."

I told my rib that the kid had been through a lot. "All right," I said. "But let's take it real slow and easy, 0kay?"

"Sure. Slow and easy."

"Real slow and easy," I corrected.

"Right," he said, and we slipped under a branch and began edging in.

We had moved about his twenty yards when he stopped and sank slowly down to his knees.

"This is it," he said, looking down but not otherwise moving.

I eased down on one knee. There was a decaying log with a large clump of wildflowers growing around it.

"What is it?" I asked quietly.

"Her grave," he said. "My mother. This is where he buried her."

I had nothing to say. I looked at Diane Kinnington's place and I thought of Beth's place. Both were on hillsides, and both had flowers. And each, it seemed, had one faithful mourner.

"I was there when he shot her," Stephen said in the low, flat voice. "It was…" He stopped. Then, "Afterwards, he locked me in my room. The judge had hit me, knocked me out, I guess, but I woke up. I heard him, through the window, at the tool shed. I got up and looked out, but it was too rainy and dark to see well. The judge was carrying some tools, I could hear them clanging together, and he was hurrying down the path with them. I must have passed out then, because the next thing I remember is being in an ambulance on my way to Willow Wood and nobody would listen to me."

"They'll listen now," I said, forgiving his failure to remember that he had been catatonic. I restrained myself from patting his shoulder. He was only fourteen, but he didn't seem to need any comforting.

Stephen continued. "When I was at Willow Wood, I had time to think." He changed his voice and said, "'All the time in the world'," as though he were mocking a doctor's phrase there. "I figured out what must have happened, but I couldn't tell anyone about the judge covering it up. Who'd believe me against him? When my grandmother got me out of Willow Wood, I came home and acted like nothing… like the judge hadn't done anything. I was afraid to tell my grandmother, afraid that he'd kill her too. When I could, I searched. I had to be really careful. I searched for the gun, and finally found it. But first I had to search… for her."

The ache was getting me, so I shifted knees. Stephen tensed when I moved, then relaxed and settled from his knees onto his haunches. He had yet to look away from the grave. "I had to be sure the judge didn't realize I was searching, so I didn't do it every day, sometimes not even for a week. It was tough not to, but it was a quest, and I couldn't let her down by being discovered. I knew from what I saw at the window that he had buried her somewhere down the path. But it had been almost a year, and I didn't know if he would have dug… moved her, moved her while I was away at Willow Wood.

"Then one day I found this spot. I remembered the fallen tree from a storm we'd had that year. But the tree didn't look right, and I realized it was because of all the flowers. There were flowers other places, but there hadn't been any here and now there were lots and lots of flowers, but mostly in this one little spot. At first I thought that God had put them here special, special for her and special for me so I could find her."

He rubbed his right forearm across his eyes. I found myself doing the same.

"Then I read in a botany book that flowers grow over bodies that aren't… in coffins. That's when I was sure she was here. I came to visit every day, but I'd walk in from a different direction each time, so as not to make a path that would let the judge know I'd found her. Some days, I wouldn't even come right up to her, because I didn't want the plants around her to look trampled." He finally swung his face toward mine. "Did you ever have anybody close to you be buried?"

I hadn't stopped thinking about Beth since he'd begun. "Yes," I said in a choked voice.

He tried to examine me in the moonlight. "You're crying," he said. He looked back down at the grave. "I'm ready to see the judge now," he said.

So was I. So…was…I.