Nightshade

CHAPTER 7

THIS ISN’T HAPPENING, Joan told herself. It can’t be happening.

The whole scene seemed somehow surreal — she was sitting next to Dan Pullman in the front seat of his Taurus, and everything beyond the windshield looked perfectly normal. It was a perfect late fall morning; the ancient maples, birches, and oaks that had been protected by generations of her husband’s family were clothed in brilliant foliage that was almost blinding against the clear turquoise of the sky.

But it was all wrong!

The sky should have been a heavy leaden gray.

There should have been a cold drizzle falling through sodden leaves.

A chill wind should have been blowing, which would at least have accounted for the terrible cold that had fallen over her, making her shiver even in the warmth of the car.

They were half a mile from the house, moving along one of the narrow unpaved tracks that twisted through the woods. The road eventually wound around to the base of the waterfall and the swimming hole that was a favorite picnic area not only of the Hapgoods, but of everyone else in town. She and Bill were always careful to leave it undisturbed until late in the season, when the trees were bare and the road would be covered with shimmering leaves. Then, on a morning as perfect as this one, they’d go out and walk the road, hand in hand, listening to the rustle and crunch of the leaves underfoot, sometimes even abandoning their adulthood to roll around in them like children, their noses filling with dust until they were sneezing helplessly. But this morning the leaves that had already fallen were crushed, the ruts in the road laid bare by the wheels of… How many cars? Had they called an ambulance? For some reason — maybe to keep from thinking about what had happened — Joan found herself trying to remember if she’d heard the wailing of a siren while she’d been moving through the aisles of the market, doing the shopping as if nothing was wrong.

And nothing should have been wrong — she should have gotten back to the house just as Bill and Matt returned from their morning hunt. The scene began to play itself out in her mind: the two of them bursting into the kitchen through the back porch and the mud room, their faces flushed with the chill of the autumn air, regaling her with details of the hunt, each giving the other the credit for whatever they’d bagged.

Matt, grinning at Bill, saying, “I wouldn’t have even seen the deer if it hadn’t been for Dad.”

Bill, sloughing off the compliment: “Matt’s got the eye — and he’s a better shot now than I ever was! Another couple of years and he’ll be good enough for competition!”

But as the car rounded a sharp bend in the road and braked to a stop, the happy scene in her mind was shattered by what she saw.

Two police cars, their lights flashing incongruously in the morning light, were parked haphazardly beneath the canopy of immense maples. And a boxy ambulance, bearing the orange and white paint of the aid unit of the fire department. Its lights, though, were not flashing, and her heart sank as she realized why: for the ambulance, at least, no emergency existed.

Then Joan saw it.

Bill lay facedown on the other side of the stream. If she had stumbled upon him while walking in the woods, she might have assumed he’d merely fallen asleep.

She might even have left him undisturbed, and enjoyed watching him sleep. But the activity around his motionless figure betrayed the truth of what had happened as clearly as the lack of flashing lights on the ambulance.

Yet even in the face of what she had heard from Dan Pullman and what she saw before her, a glimmer of hope still flickered inside her. Before the police car came to a complete stop, Joan scrambled out, waded across the stream, and hurried toward her husband, crouching down beside him.

Reaching out to him.

Touching him.

His skin was cold, his flesh unresponsive.

His hair was matted with blood.

The flicker of hope in her heart guttered and went out.

As the terrible finality of what had happened settled over her, she could no longer bring herself to look at her husband’s body, and raised her eyes. Seeing the bluff rising a few feet away, she suddenly understood.

An accident — just a stupid accident! He and Matt had been on the trail at the top of the bluff, and Bill had lost his footing! “How could it have happened?” she blurted, barely even conscious she was speaking aloud. “He knows that trail so well! He — ”

Then Dan Pullman was beside her. “It wasn’t the fall,” he said softly.

Joan gazed blankly at him, as if the words he’d just spoken had been uttered in some foreign language. Not the fall? What was he talking about? Then, slowly, she became aware of the figures around her.

Figures — not people.

The paramedics, in their white uniforms, made sense to her.

So did the police officers.

But Marty Holmes and Paul Arneson were standing with their sons a few yards away.

Looking at her.

Looking at her, but not talking to her.

And Matt! Where was Matt?

Then she saw him. He was sitting in one of the police cars, his face ashen, his eyes staring straight at her.

Staring at her, but not seeing her.

“What is it?” she whispered, turning back to Dan Pullman. “What killed him?”

When Pullman still said nothing, she reached out again, took Bill by the shoulder, and turned him over.

His body rolled onto its back, and now she could see it.

A hole exactly in the center of his forehead.

Perfectly formed.

But not bloody.

Shouldn’t there have been blood?

She reached out, her fingers hovering over the strange hole, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. Then her gaze shifted back to Dan. “How?” she breathed. “Oh, God, Dan, how…?”

“We think Matt shot him,” he said softly.

“An accident,” she breathed. “It had to be…”

Dan’s jaw tightened, and she saw the pain in his eyes, and finally he shook his head. “We don’t know, Joan. It might have been an accident, but — well — ” He bit his lip, then forced himself to go on. “Apparently there was some kind of argument.”

He continued speaking, but Joan didn’t hear his words; as the full reality of what had happened broke over her, a wailing scream of grief rose in her throat. “Nooo,” she howled, shattering the eerie quiet that had fallen over the scene. “Noooooo…”

* * *

IT WAS THE ringing telephone that first told Gerry Conroe that something had happened. After twenty years of running the little paper that managed to serve most of Granite Falls’ needs with its one edition a week, he had grown accustomed to a certain pattern: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays were the big news days, if you could really call the stories in the paper news at all. In truth, he thought of most of what he published as features, not news. Perhaps the scores of the high school athletic teams might be considered news; even the latest slate of officers for the Lions Club, Rotary, or the Gardening Ladies might fall into that category. But for hard news the people of Granite Falls turned to the Manchester Guardian rather than the Granite Falls Ledger. Thus, it fell to Gerry to keep them abreast of local doings, and everyone knew that if you wanted something in the paper on Monday morning, you’d absolutely better let Gerry know before lunch on Friday, and even then you’d better be able to convince him that there was a good reason to make changes that close to press time. So in Gerry’s life, Saturday mornings were generally quiet, spent helping his two-person staff finalize the layout of the paper so it could be sent down to Manchester to be printed on Sunday, coming back to Granite Falls just in time to be delivered Monday morning. So when all three of the office lines suddenly lit up at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, he knew immediately that something in town had gone wrong.

And when Kelly, who had started working Saturday mornings a year ago, appeared at his office door — her face ashen and her eyes glistening with tears — he knew it was serious, and very close to home.

Not Nancy. Please, not Nancy.

But when Kelly spoke, the blow her words dealt him was almost as powerful as if she’d told him something had happened to her mother. “It’s Uncle Bill,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “He — They say he’s dead!”

For a moment Gerry Conroe’s mind simply refused to accept it. Dead? Bill Hapgood couldn’t possibly be dead! They’d just had dinner at Bill and Joan’s last night, and this morning Bill was taking Matt —

In a flash, it came to him.

A hunting accident! Another damned hunting accident!

Suddenly, his shock at what had happened was tempered with fury. Every year it was the same — every year he printed the same editorial, questioning the whole idea of men going out hunting deer in this day and age. And every year he heard all the arguments from all his friends: if they didn’t argue that hunting was “in their genes,” they tried to raise it to a constitutional issue.

“What’s the point of having the right to own guns if we don’t own them?” Bill Hapgood himself had argued just a few weeks ago. “And we have to own them — some day we just may need to defend ourselves against our own government. So if we own them, it follows that we should know how to use them.” When Gerry had suggested that Bill had just named the exact purpose of shooting ranges, his friend only laughed. “Don’t give me that nonsense about target shooting — that’s all well and good for a novice, but once a man’s learned to shoot, he wants a challenge!”

And now Bill Hapgood was dead.

Mindlessly, stupidly, dead.

Then, through his anger, he heard Kelly speak again.

“They think Matt might have done it,” she whispered.

Once again his mind reacted without thought. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard — ” he began, but the words died on his lips as he remembered the scene at the Hapgoods’ last night.

Until he’d heard Matt argue with his father, he hadn’t thought him capable of such anger and bitterness.

Except Bill wasn’t Matt’s father.

Bill was Matt’s stepfather.

Not that it had ever made any difference to Bill. How many times had he heard Bill say that Matt was exactly the son he’d always wanted? Recalling the angry dinner, Gerry did his best to banish the idea that came with that memory. What was he thinking of? Was he seriously thinking that Matt might have shot Bill on purpose?

Ridiculous!

It was an accident.

It had to be an accident.

“I’d better get out there,” he said as he pulled on his jacket. “Where did it happen?”

“Not very far from the falls,” Kelly said. She followed him as he walked out of his little office and through the single large room where the two-person staff worked. “I want to go with you, Daddy.”

Her words jolting him to a stop, Gerry Conroe turned to look at his daughter. Go with him? But she was just a little girl!

“I’m almost sixteen,” she said, seeing his thoughts etched on his face. “I’m not a baby anymore.”

“For God’s sake, Kelly — why would you want to go out there?” As she hesitated, he knew exactly what she was going to say, and didn’t need to hear her explanation before he made up his mind. He was already shaking his head when she spoke.

“I want to see Matt. If they really think he — ”

Gerry held up a hand to silence her. “No,” he said. “You’re only fifteen years old. You don’t need to see — ” His throat tightened and he couldn’t bring himself to finish what he’d been about to say. It was going to be hard enough for him to see Bill Hapgood’s lifeless body himself, and he knew it was an image he would never forget. There was no reason for Kelly to have to bear the memory of that image. “No,” he said again, his voice much softer now. He cast about for some words that would neither offend Kelly nor upset her more than she already was. “Look,” he finally went on, reaching out and pulling her into his arms, “it’s going to be crazy out there. There’ll be police, and medics, and God only knows how many other people. I wouldn’t even go myself, except Bill’s my best friend, and I have to be there.”

“But Matt’s my boyfriend — ” Kelly began.

Gerry stiffened, then let his arms drop to his sides. “No,” he said one last time. His voice took on a tone that warned Kelly against pressing him further. “And I really don’t want to argue.” But even as he spoke, the hurt in her eyes made him relent slightly. “Let’s just wait until we know what happened, okay?”

As he drove away from the office, though, Gerry found himself wishing that Kelly had not been dating Matt at all, and in the back of his mind he could hear his own father explaining how to judge his friends. “The apple never falls far from the tree, Gerald,” Jerome Conroe had taught him when he was no more than six or seven. “Know the father, and you will know the son. That’s why you must always know who your friend’s families are.”

But no one except Joan Hapgood knew who Matthew Moore’s father really was. So maybe Bill had been wrong.

Maybe Matthew Moore hadn’t been the son he’d always wanted.

Maybe none of them — not even Bill Hapgood — really knew Matthew Moore at all.

* * *

“MATT?”

His name sounded muffled, as if it were coming from somewhere far off in the distance — or perhaps even from underwater — and it wasn’t until he heard it a second time that he slowly looked up to see his mother standing close to him, her eyes anxious, her face pale. She reached out to touch his cheek, but her fingers were like ice and he reflexively pulled away from the chill of her touch.

Joan winced at the rejection of what she’d intended as a gentle caress, but told herself it meant nothing — that he was still in shock from what had happened. “It’s going to be all right,” she told him softly. “Everything’s going to be all right. I’ll take care of you.”

Again Matt barely heard the words. From the moment when he’d looked down from the top of the bluff and seen his stepfather’s body lying in the thicket of brush next to the stream, something had changed. It was as if in that instant a barrier of some kind had fallen between him and the rest of the world.

Everything was different.

He’d seen it first in Eric Holmes’s eyes. They’d all stared down at the broken body in the brush, a terrible silence falling over them. Then, after what seemed an eternity, Eric had spoken. “Jeez, Matt,” he’d breathed. “What happened? What’d you do?”

Matt’s gaze had slowly shifted from his stepfather to Eric, and that’s when he’d seen it. There was something in Eric’s eyes that told him in an instant that everything had changed. Seemingly out of nowhere, a memory rose in his mind. He and Eric were in biology class, dissecting a frog. As he had cut through the skin of the frog’s belly, laying it back in neat flaps, he’d glanced up at Eric. The expression on Eric’s face — and the look in his eyes — as Eric watched him lay open the frog’s abdomen were exactly the same as the look he’d given Matt as he asked what Matt had done.

Revulsion, only slightly tempered with curiosity.

On the bluff above the river, he’d seen Eric turning away from him, just as he turned away from the frog in the lab that day.

From that moment, Matt sensed everyone watching him, and there was no friendliness in their eyes.

Now they were watching him as if he were some kind of specimen, some individual of another species, no longer part of what had been his world only a few hours ago. He’d been squeezed out of it in an instant.

But why?

He hadn’t done anything!

Or had he?

He hadn’t answered Eric’s question when they were standing on the bluff, and even now he had no real answer. Rather, there were just more questions, questions and images, tumbling through his mind in a jumble of confusion.

The deer.

He’d been aiming at the deer! And his stepfather hadn’t been there —

Had he?

Of course not! He’d have seen him!

But even as he tried to reassure himself, he kept seeing another image, just the faintest flash of a memory, of something else in the gun sight, something he’d barely been aware of as the strange aroma filled his nostrils, spreading like a mist over his mind, sending him —

Where?

Even now, long after Eric’s voice had brought him out of the strange reverie he’d fallen into, he had no real idea of what had happened. It wasn’t as if he’d been sick, even though he hadn’t slept very well last night. So what had happened? Had he just passed out? Had it been some kind of fumes he’d smelled, that knocked him out for a while? But if he’d passed out, how come he hadn’t fallen?

So he couldn’t have passed out.

The questions kept churning in his mind.

He had no memory even of following Eric and his father down the bluff, though he knew he must have. And he’d been only vaguely aware of everything that had happened since, of Dan Pullman arriving, and the ambulance, and then more deputies. He vaguely recalled one of the deputies asking him what had happened, and putting him in the backseat of one of the cars, but he’d been no more able to tell the deputy anything than he’d been able to tell Eric.

“I don’t know,” was all he’d said. And now, as he looked up at his mother, he could only repeat the same question the deputy had asked him.

“What happened, Mom?” he said softly. “What happened to Dad?”

Before his mother could answer, Dan Pullman appeared next to her, and as Matt’s gaze shifted to the police chief, he saw the same look in Pullman’s eyes that he’d seen in Eric’s.

“I think you know what happened to your dad,” Pullman said softly. “Do you want to tell us about it?”

“I — ” Matt began, then fell back into silence.

Immediately understanding the implication of Pullman’s words — and seeing the pain they brought to her son’s face — Joan’s anguished eyes fixed on the police chief. “How can you even think that?” she breathed, her voice trembling as she struggled with her roiling emotions. “Matt loved his father! He’d never do anything to hurt — ”

Pullman raised both his hands as if to fend off her outburst. “I never said that, Joan. Whatever happened, I’m sure it was an accident. And Matt was there. Who else can tell us — ”

Joan shook her head as if to throw off the words as a dog sheds water from its coat. “Not now,” she said. She reached out and took Matt’s hand in her own, and this time, at least, he didn’t try to pull away from her. “How can you expect him to say anything now?” she asked. “How can you expect either of us to — ”

“It’s all right, Joan,” Dan cut in. “Nobody has to say anything right now.” He glanced around, then signaled to Tony Petrocelli, in whose squad car Matt was sitting. “Can you drive them home, Tony?”

Knowing from long experience that his boss wasn’t asking a question, Petrocelli nodded. “Right away.”

As his deputy moved around to the driver’s door and Joan Hapgood joined her son in the backseat, Dan Pullman spoke. “It’s going to be all right, Joan,” he said, trying to reassure the woman whose husband’s body was at that moment being loaded into the ambulance to be transported to the coroner. “I’m sure it was an accident.” He shook his head, sighing. “I’ll come by later, okay?” When Joan didn’t respond, he reached through the open window and laid his hand on her shoulder.

Just as her son had pulled away from her own touch a few moments ago, Joan now recoiled from the police chief’s gesture. “I know what you think,” she said, looking directly into Pullman’s eyes. “You think Matt shot Bill. But I’ll never believe that. He couldn’t have. He just couldn’t have.”

Dan watched the car until it disappeared from view, then went back to his examination of the scene of the accident, taking careful notes as both Marty Holmes and Paul Arneson recounted the argument between Matt and his stepfather that morning.

Then, when Gerry Conroe arrived, he heard about the scene that had transpired at the Hapgoods’ last night.

“Go up on the bluff and start searching,” he finally told his deputies. “I want the casings of every bullet Matt fired. And I want the bullets too. But first find the casings. Then at least we’ll know how many bullets we’re looking for.”

“What about the buck?” one of the deputies asked. “Seems like we shouldn’t just let it rot.”

Pullman hesitated. He couldn’t imagine why either Joan or Matt would ever want to see the buck again, but on the other hand, Matt had shot the deer on their property, and the last thing he needed was anyone accusing him of disposing of it without permission. “There’s a shed behind the Hapgoods’ carriage house — that’s where Bill always hung his game. Guess you might as well put it there. Someone call Petrocelli and have him tell Mrs. Hapgood where it’ll be. If they want to get rid of it, they can do it themselves.”

As the deputies set to work, Dan Pullman turned to Gerry Conroe. Like almost everyone in Granite Falls, they had both been born there, had known each other all their lives. “Well?” Pullman asked. “What do you think? Was it an accident?”

Conroe hesitated only a second before shaking his head. “I’d like to say it was,” he replied. “But I can’t. I just can’t.”