The Cypress House

31

HE WORKED ALONE ALL DAY, measuring and cutting and hammering as the wind died off and the sun rose high and hot, the air so humid it felt like moving through tar, searing and sticky. In the afternoon Rebecca came down and stood on the dock with him.

“You really believe he was going to be killed,” she said.

“I don’t believe it. I know it.” He didn’t turn to look at her.

“So he needed to leave. He had to.”

“That’s right.”

“Couldn’t we have talked him into it?”

“No.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I know him. If I’d gone to him and told him the truth about us, he would have been shattered, but he also would have stayed. I’m certain of that. I had to hurt him. Drive him away.”

“I hate that,” she said. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I hate that we had to-”

“I know.”

She sighed and shook her head. “It won’t be the same. It’s going to feel… empty without him.”

“Yes,” Arlen said.

“Why didn’t you leave with him?”

He turned with a board in his hands and looked at her. “Do you really need to hear that answer?”

“I hope I don’t,” she said softly.

“You don’t.”

She waited a minute and said, “Will you go with us?”

“You and Owen?”

She nodded.

He looked away, out to the mouth of the inlet, where a pair of shrieking gulls circled, looking for a meal.

“There’s no obligation to you,” he said. “I’m staying, and I’ll help. I will do what I can. If you want to take your brother and disappear, though…” He shrugged and left the rest unspoken.

“I want to disappear,” she said, “from Solomon Wade. Not you.”

“You say that firm,” Arlen said, “yet you haven’t known me long.”

“I know you.”

“Yeah?”

“If you don’t believe it,” she said, “then why are you still here?”

“Oh, I believe it. Probably more than you. We’re kindred.”

“Yes.”

“In ways you don’t even understand,” he said, “we are kindred.”

“What do you mean?”

“You see blood on your hands that no one else does.”

She tilted her head and frowned. “And you do, too?”

He was silent.

“Tell me,” she said.

He shook his head. “Another day.”

“I’ll wait. I’ve learned how to wait.”

He wanted to smile, but it wasn’t a day for smiling. He sat back on his heels and stared at the gulls and felt the sweat bead and glide along his skin.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“That I showed up here looking for a ride back to the CCC. That’s all I was looking for. We were supposed to be here an hour.”

“My parents were supposed to be enjoying this place right now. People were supposed to be coming in with hundreds of dollars in their pockets for fishing and drinking and sunshine. I was supposed to be in Savannah.” She shook her head. “ ‘Supposed to be’ doesn’t mean much to me anymore. Everyone in this country was full of plans a few years ago, and how many of them do you think even dare to make plans for the future now? They just get through each day. Times like these, it’s all you can do.”

He nodded and ran his fingertips along the edge of the board, wiping rough sawdust clear from the cut.

“If I’m staying,” he said, “I need to know the plan. I deserve that much.”

She said, “Maine.”

The word shivered through him. Edwin Main. Edwin and his wife, Joy.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing. That’s where you intend to go?”

She nodded.

“You ever been there? You know anybody there?”

“No. That’s why it’s perfect. We’ll be strangers there, far from this place and the people from it.”

She lifted a hand, rubbed at her forehead, brought it back glistening with sweat, and held it out to him as if it were evidence of something.

“As far from this place as possible,” she said. “You don’t know how often I think of Maine. How much time I spend imagining it. Right now it’s moving toward autumn there. There are cold breezes during the day, and at night you pull an extra blanket over yourself and in the morning the grass is crisp and a deep breath chills your lungs instead of choking you. The leaves are going orange and red and brown. It’s not trapped in green, always green. There’s change. In a month or so they’ll have the first snow. Just a tease of what’s to come, but it will snow. There will be a white dusting of it in the morning, maybe, or a few flakes in the air. You know I’ve only seen snow twice in my life?”

She was staring across the inlet as she spoke, into the thick green tangle that grew there, where a few unseen birds shrilled and occasionally something splashed in the water.

“Have you seen many winters?” she said. “Real winters?”

“I’ve seen a few.”

“I’ll see one this year,” she said, a blood vow in her voice. “I’ll see one this year.”

By nightfall the wind had returned, and Arlen was nearing completion of the dock. He figured to have the last board laid by noon the next day, and then he could start on the boathouse, though they’d need more lumber before he could make much headway there. It was a ludicrous endeavor, working so hard to rebuild a place that they’d soon abandon, but he didn’t know what else to do. It kept up the pretense that they’d remain, for one thing, but it also gave him a task to handle. He needed that.

He loved work. Physical labor. It was a strange thing, maybe, but he loved the ache in his muscles at the end of a day, loved the sweat that coursed from his pores, loved the sound of a saw and the feel of a hammer, the clean crack of a well-struck nail.

So many men wandered this country now, looking for so simple a thing as work. It was a bizarre notion when you stopped to think about it, and Arlen figured it was a birth pang of a new world. So much had happened to cause this Depression, so many things he understood and more that he did not, but in the end they all captured a simple idea: you couldn’t depend solely on yourself anymore. Not in the way men once had. You could have skill and strength and desire, but you had to find someone who needed to utilize those things. Was a time when, if you knew how to work metal, you’d set up a blacksmith shop and make enough to support your family. Now, if you knew how to work metal, you’d likely need a job in a factory where the needs of not a town but a state, a nation, a world, had to be met. It was all about size now: the big ran the world on the sweat of the small, and if the big faltered for any reason, the small were the first to go.

The funny damn thing was, Arlen had no desire to be among those in charge. That was the goal, supposedly, the ordained American Dream, to rise from the ranks of the small and become a colossus.

It wasn’t in him, though. The bigger your role, the more people you impacted with your decisions. He didn’t want to have to make those sorts of decisions. All he wanted to do was work. If his day ended when the last nail was driven, it had been a good day. It had been a damned good day.

Or at least it usually was. For once, the standard satisfaction stayed away from him when he gathered his tools and walked back up the trail to the Cypress House. He’d worked, yes, done the pure labor of a man who was small in the eyes of the world but content in his own heart, and even that hadn’t been enough today. Today, he’d felt the weight of decision upon him.

It was the right decision, he knew. It was right.

But, oh, how he’d hated to make it.

The days passed with surprising speed and silence. Solomon Wade didn’t come by, nor did Tolliver, nor anyone else except Thomas Barrett, the delivery man. When he arrived at the end of the week, Arlen asked if they could make a run for some more lumber.

“You’re not sending the boy this time? I enjoyed him.”

“He’s gone.”

Barrett’s freckled face split into a curious frown. “For good?”

“That’s right.”

“Strange. He told me he intended to stay. What put him back on the road?”

“I can’t speak for him,” Arlen said shortly.

“Well, it’s a shame. This is a tough place for a lad like that to be on the road alone. Did he have any money?”

“Let’s go get that wood,” Arlen said.

They went out to the paved road and then south toward High Town. It had been silent since they left, and though Arlen didn’t feel much like talking, he also didn’t want to seem ungracious, so he asked after the name of the town as a means of conversation.

“Where I’m from, the place would be called Flat Town,” he said. “Nary a hill in sight from what I saw.”

“Where are you from?”

“West Virginia.”

Barrett nodded. “Well, it’s plenty different terrain than that. High Town might not look much different to an outsider, but it’s one of the few places around here that’s always been clear of flooding. So, it’s High Town-and Dry Town.”

They turned east at the center of town, and Arlen twisted his head to look back at the jail as they passed. Tolliver’s car was parked in front.

“Didn’t you say you ran for sheriff?” Arlen asked.

“That’s right. Al Tolliver beat me fair and square,” Barrett said dryly.

“You had any policing experience? Or just wanted a piece of it?”

Barrett flicked his eyes over and then back to the road. “No policing. Did my time in the Army and then came back home. I like my home. I didn’t like the people who were taking control of it. That ain’t changed.”

“There anybody around here that could actually make those boys answer for something?”

“If there is somebody,” Barrett said, “I ain’t found him yet.”

Arlen nodded, and they were quiet again for a time, riding with the windows down and the hot air pushing into their faces. The forest had given way to swampy stump fields now, and Arlen looked out across the litter of slashed timber and felt a pang, remembering the way forests of his boyhood had fallen. He’d been at Arlington National Cemetery once after the war, and the first thought he’d had, staring over the columns of stone markers, was of the clear-cut woods that climbed the hills behind his home. They were both fields of death, filled with inadequate reminders of what had been.

“They cut a lot of timber out here,” he said.

“Yes, they did. Sawmill was not far from here. I worked there for three years. Used to hear the band saw in my sleep.”

“When it went under, the town went with it, is what Rebecca told me.”

“That’s right. There were two thousand people in this town not five years ago. Ain’t but a few hundred left, and a lot of stumps. You take a canoe out through the swamps not far from here, and you’ll find stumps nine, ten feet around. Some big boys, they were. The wood lasts, too. Cypress is damn strong.”

“It makes the finest coffins,” Arlen said.

“How in the hell do you know a thing like that?”

“My father told me,” Arlen said. “He paid a lot of mind to such things.”

The memory lingered. Long after he and Barrett had returned with the lumber and carried it down to the dock, Arlen was thinking of his father. He could see the dark eyes above the thick beard, hear the deep, easy voice. He could see the big hands wrapped around a plane or a piece of sandpaper, smoothing the grain of someone’s final home. He spent time on coffins that few would, treated each pauper’s grave as if it were a rich man’s tomb. Even in the summer of the fever, when twenty-nine died in eleven days, he’d taken care with his coffins. Arlen could remember him working through the night that summer, the summer his mother had died. Arlen had been twelve at the time, and she’d gone slow and suffering and with her hand in Isaac’s, who’d looked his son in the eye and told him to have no fear, the earthly being mattered not in the end.

That was twenty-five years ago.

He sorted and stacked the lumber and tried to push it all from his mind, but it would not stay at bay, and that evening when he sat on the porch with Rebecca, he said, “I reckon I’m ready to tell you the story.”

She studied him for a moment and then said, “Why? What changed?”

He thought on that while he slipped a cigarette out and lit it. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could pin down; the world had shifted on him in a way he didn’t fully understand. It had an awful lot to do with her, he knew that much.

“It’s just time to tell the tale,” he said. The tale he had not told anyone, ever.

She didn’t answer. Sat with her hands folded in her lap and waited. He smoked the cigarette down a little bit and watched the waves, and then he told her about the day his father died.

32

IT WAS FIVE YEARS after Arlen’s mother had passed. Isaac had taken to spending more time in his shop, particularly at night, when visitors were unlikely. The shop was located beneath the room where Arlen slept, and the sounds drifted up, barely muffled by the thin floor that separated them. He’d long known the sounds of the tools on the wood-his father’s paying job, other than a bit of small-time farming, was as a furniture maker-and sometimes Arlen could also hear Isaac humming to himself or occasionally speaking bits of German, his mother tongue. The conversations, however, were a new twist.

At first Arlen had thought his father was talking to himself. The words were soft-spoken, and initially it was just background noise, mumbling of which he did not take much heed. It was only after it had persisted for a time that he began to pay attention, and the phrase he heard uttered again and again raised a prickle across his spine.

Tell me, Isaac Wagner would say. Tell me.

The more he listened, the more evident it became that his father was trying to speak to the dead. Not only that-he believed he was. The words that left his mouth were parts of an exchange.

The conversations had gone on for many weeks before Arlen chanced a trip down to the shop to see for himself. What awaited him was chilling: Isaac spoke with his hands on the corpses. Stood above them and placed his palms flat on their chests or on either side of their heads. When he’d talked himself out, he removed his hands and returned to work and fell silent. Always he was silent unless he had his hands pressed against their dead flesh.

He was a different man outside of the shop as well-both with Arlen and with the townspeople. Moody and unpredictable, given to perplexing statements and a constant tendency to dismiss the worries of the living.

It was a few months before Arlen could admit that his father was truly losing his mind.

Rumors swirled through the town but avoided a troublesome pitch until a teary-eyed man came to the shop with a child’s toy in his hand, prepared to ask that it be buried with his wife, and found Isaac in his now-customary pose, standing above the body with his hands on the dead woman’s head like a preacher offering a blessing. The sight had rankled the grieving husband, and while no more than a heated exchange of words took place-with Isaac taking no steps to pacify the man, simply saying that he’d talk aloud in his shop if he was so inclined, to whomever he liked-it added coal to the fires of suspicion already smoldering throughout the town.

What did you do with a father who was insane? The question haunted Arlen through his days and kept him awake through his nights. It was just the two of them now; there was no other family in the town. Isaac had led the way to this place, and Arlen’s mother had been unable to conceive after giving birth to her first and only child. No confidant existed. He listened to his father speak to the dead and thought of what might happen if he sought help for him, if he told anyone in town the truth, and he decided that it would be better to keep silent. There was no harm being done. It was strange, certainly, unsettling and troubling, but it wasn’t harmful. He promised himself that if it ever became so, something would have to be done.

It was a day on the fringe of winter when Joy Main died. Three nights of frost had been followed by a final gasp of Indian summer that burned out behind a cold wind, and no one in the town had passed in six weeks. Isaac was making furniture instead of coffins, and Arlen had been allowed to slip into something close to a peaceful state. At night his sleep was uninterrupted by voices from below, and the dark rings around his father’s eyes had lessened, his strange remarks becoming fewer. Then they brought Joy Main’s body to the shop.

The Mains were the power family in town. Edwin’s father had been a surveyor-and a damn shrewd man. He asked for, and received, acreage instead of wages, and he had a fine eye for land, acquiring large parcels along the New River and through the gorges that bordered it. It was coal and timber country, beautiful land that was soon to become rich land, and by the time Edwin was grown, the mining boom was under way and the property he inherited made him a wealthy man. He stayed in Fayette County and filled his father’s void. He was large and pompous, and charming when he had cause to be. At other times he was harsh and cruel, but the townspeople seemed to believe you could expect that from your leaders.

Joy Hargrove was the most beautiful girl in the county, bright and clever, a gifted piano player and blessed with a haunting, gorgeous voice that turned heads at Sunday services. The marriage was of the arranged sort-Joy’s father was vying for purchase of a promising mine. The courtship was strongly encouraged despite the fact that Edwin was past forty and their daughter just seventeen, and it was only a matter of weeks before Joy Hargrove became Joy Main.

They were married for seven years before her death, and during that time she bore three children and grew increasingly quiet, seeming content to offer formalities and then retreat within herself. She was well known in Fayette County but yet not really known at all.

On that early November evening, when they brought her to the Wagner house just as the burst of warmth from earlier in the day was disappearing with darkness, Joy Main was a week past her twenty-fifth birthday and dead of a fractured skull.

Edwin came with her, tears in his eyes and the sheriff at his side. He explained that Joy came out to the stable to see him and a horse had bucked and thrown a sudden high kick and a rear hoof caught her square in the head.

He’d shot the horse, Edwin explained in a choked voice, and then sent for the sheriff. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do, shooting that horse, but he couldn’t help it. There needed to be blood for blood.

Arlen had heard it all from inside the house, the men standing on the porch with the body at their feet, wrapped in blankets. When Edwin told the story, Isaac Wagner said, “You had the mind to shoot the horse while your wife lay dying?”

The sheriff stepped in then, told Isaac that Edwin was a grieving man, damn it, and there’d be no such questions, who cared a whit about the horse at a time such as this? Isaac had said nothing else, but Edwin Main had watched him with dark eyes, and Arlen, standing at the window, felt the coldness pass through the glass just like the wind that had returned out of the northern hills.

Isaac gathered the body in his arms and prepared to carry Joy Main back to his shop. Edwin spoke up again and told him to make it the finest coffin he’d ever constructed; anything less would be a sin, and how much the box might cost mattered not, he’d pay any price.

Isaac told him that every coffin he made was a fine one.

It wasn’t long after they’d left that Arlen heard the dreaded phrase from his father’s shop: Tell me.

This time he’d crept to the door. Usually he tried to clear himself away from the sound, but there’d been such tension in the air tonight, with his father asking that question about the horse and Edwin Main staring at him ominously.

Not her, Arlen thought, of all the ones in town for you to speak with, not his wife. We’ll be run out of this place if anyone knows.

The talking persisted, though, and it horrified. Isaac Wagner was pretending to hear an explanation of murder.

“He laid hands on the servant? That girl’s no more than fifteen, is she? He intended to violate her? Did she see what happened after? What did he strike you with? Had he beaten you before? Did the children see? Did anyone see?”

Arlen stood at the door and heard it all and felt a trembling deep in his chest that intensified when Isaac said, “I’ll see that it’s dealt with. I’ll see that he has a reckoning. I promise you that; I swear it to you.”

Arlen opened the door and went into the room then and shouted at him to stop, and what he saw was more terrible than he’d imagined. Isaac had lifted the dead woman and placed her hands on his shoulders and was looking into her face. There was still blood in her hair, and her eyelids sagged halfway down, but the hint of blue irises remained and seemed to stare over Isaac’s shoulder and into Arlen’s own eyes.

“She’s telling me what happened,” Isaac said. “Don’t be afraid, son. She’s telling me the truth.”

“She’s not,” Arlen screamed. “She can’t speak, can’t tell you a thing, she’s dead! She’s gone!”

“No,” Isaac said, “the body is gone. She is not.”

Arlen stood at the door and shook his head, tears brimming in his eyes. Isaac lowered the body slowly and very gently, then turned to face his son.

“I have to touch them to hear,” he said. “There are those who don’t, those who can conjure without needing a touch, but I’m not one of them. Maybe in time. It took me many a year to reach them at all.”

“Stop,” Arlen said. “Stop, stop, stop.”

“You don’t believe,” Isaac said. “Those who don’t believe can’t hear. But you’ve got a touch of the gift yourself, boy. I’m sure of it. I see it in you.”

“No more,” Arlen said, backing away through the door. “Don’t say any more.”

“Look past your fear,” Isaac said. “It’s about doing what’s right. This woman was murdered, beaten with an ax handle and killed, Arlen! That demands justice. I’ll see that it’s delivered. I’ve promised her that. And if there’s anything I hold sacred, it’s a promise to the dead.”

Arlen turned and ran.

He spent close to two hours in the wooded hills, stumbling through the underbrush with hot tears in his eyes and terror in his heart. He wondered if his father was still down there with Joy Main or if he’d gone off in search of the promised reckoning. The longer Arlen walked, the more certain he became that he could not allow such a thing to take place.

You’ve got a touch of the gift yourself, boy. I’m sure of it. I see it in you.

It was that statement more than any of the others that drove him out of the woods and back into town. His father was insane-the dead could not speak to the living; they were gone and nothing lingered in their stead-but Arlen was not insane. He was not and he wouldn’t ever be.

Let Isaac Wagner bear his own shame, then, and not put it on his son as well. If Isaac would show the world that he was mad, his son would show himself to be sane.

The sheriff was home, and when Arlen told him the story, he stared with astonished eyes. When it was through, he gathered himself and thanked Arlen for coming down and told him to go on home and wait.

“I’ll come for him shortly,” he said. “And you did the right thing, son. Know that. You did the right thing.”

Arlen went home. He waited. Isaac was back in his shop, silent.

Thirty minutes passed before the sheriff came, and then he wasn’t alone. Edwin Main was with him, wearing a long duster to fight the chill night wind. When Arlen saw them approaching, he felt sick. Why had the sheriff told him anything?

They came through the door without knocking and saw Arlen standing there and asked where his father was. He pointed an unsteady hand at the closed door of the shop.

They went in for him. Arlen stayed outside, heard the exchange, Edwin Main shouting and swearing and Isaac speaking in deep, measured tones. When they emerged again, Isaac was handcuffed.

Isaac looked over and locked eyes with Arlen, and his face was so gentle, so kind.

He said, “You’re going to need to believe. And something you need to know, son? Love lingers.”

They shoved him out the front door then and off the porch and down into the dark dusty street. Arlen trailed behind. Edwin Main was still shouting and offering threats. They’d gone a few hundred feet before Isaac spoke to him.

“You killed her,” he said, “and it will be proved in time. We’ll talk to your house girl and to your children and they’ll tell me what Joy already did.”

Edwin Main went for him then, and the sheriff stepped between them. Edwin was a big man, but Isaac was bigger, and he stood calmly and looked down at the screaming widower and didn’t seem troubled by him.

“You struck her with the ax handle,” he said. “She’d run out of the house to get away from you, and you chased her into the yard and killed her there. Then you dragged her into the stable so there’d be blood in it, and you shot the horse because you believed it would add credence to your tale. That’s what happened. That’s the truth of it.”

Edwin Main shook free of the sheriff’s grasp. The sheriff stumbled and fell to his hands and knees in the road as Edwin reached under his duster and drew a pistol. Arlen cried out and ran for them, and Edwin Main cocked the pistol and pointed it at Isaac’s head from no more than two feet away.

Isaac Wagner smiled. Edwin Main fired. Then Arlen was on his knees in the road and his father’s blood ran into the dust and the wind blew down on them with the promise of coming snow.

33

IT TOOK HIM LONGER to tell it than he expected, and he was strangely nervous recalling the events, went through three cigarettes before he was done. Rebecca just listened. She didn’t interrupt, didn’t even give a murmur or a shake of the head as he spoke, never broke eye contact.

He told her about the way it had looked out there in the street, the wind blowing dust over the blood and Edwin Main with his coat flapping around him like some old-time gunslinger and the sheriff with his hat in his hands, and then he finished his last cigarette and put it out and it was quiet for a moment.

“So what happened then?” she asked eventually. “Who took you in?”

“Nobody took me in. I left.”

“Left?”

He nodded. “Worked in a mine for nearly a year, lived in a boardinghouse. The war was on in Europe, but we hadn’t stepped in yet. I figured I’d try to enlist. I was too young, but I lied about it and they let me in. Wasn’t a hard thing to do. After the mines, I didn’t seem much like a boy anymore.”

“How old were you?”

“Seventeen when I enlisted. I was almost nineteen before we started fighting, though.”

“You’ve never been back?”

“Hell, no. What’s there for me?”

She thought about it for a moment and then said, “This is what you meant when you said we were kindred.”

“Yes.”

“At least I didn’t have to see it happen,” she said. “But somehow that doesn’t seem much comfort.”

“I’d expect not.”

Out in the darkness the waves broke over the sand and insects trilled and there was the sound of something banging in the wind down by the boathouse.

Rebecca said, “How long was it before you realized he was right?”

Arlen frowned. “Pardon?”

“Your father. What he said about you having the gift.”

Arlen shook his head slowly. “He wasn’t right. I can’t speak with the dead, and neither could he. The man was crazy.”

“But you see warnings of death. You have for years.”

“That’s different.”

She pulled her head back. “How?”

“Nobody’s talking to the dead,” he said. “They can’t be talked to. They’re gone, Rebecca. Anyone who says anything else is as crazy as my father was.”

“So you don’t believe what he said about the dead woman.”

“No.”

“Then why would Edwin Main have shot him?”

Arlen felt a swelling of frustrated anger. There were a handful of reasons he’d never told the story, and this was one of them. He didn’t need some outsider telling him the crazy old bastard could have been right. Because if he had been… if he had been…

“Edwin Main was enraged,” Arlen said, “in the way any man might be after hearing the sort of story my father told. He reacted out of rage.”

“Was he arrested for shooting your father?”

“No.”

“But your father was in handcuffs! It was cold-blooded-”

“He was provoked,” Arlen said. “That’s what the sheriff ruled. Nobody argued.”

“I can’t understand how someone who’s had your experiences would be unable to believe in the possibility of what your father claimed,” she said.

“It’s a league of difference. I’ve got an ability with premonition, probably resulting from all the death I’ve seen, far too much of it. I don’t know, I can’t explain that, but it’s only premonition. A sense of what’s about to happen. Talking to the dead, though?” He shook his head. “That’s the belief of old women and children, not sane men.”

“Your father’s last words to you were to say you’d have to learn to believe.”

Actually, his last words had been a promise that love lingered. Spoken so soft, so kind, so damned forgiving, that years later Arlen would still wake in the night almost unable to breathe from the memory of it.

“The only thing I have to believe,” Arlen said, “is that I did the right thing. I’ve got to believe that. And you know something? I do. Always have, always will.”

She paused, then said, “Arlen, if you know that you can see the dead before they’re gone, why can’t you speak to them after they are?”

He got up out of the chair swiftly, ready to go inside and pour a whiskey and get the hell away from this conversation. He ought never have told the story.

“Stop.” She caught his arm, and her hand was soft and cool, and stilled him. “We won’t speak of it anymore.”

He ran a hand over his eyes and leaned against the wall, suddenly exhausted beyond measure.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said, rising with her hand still on his arm.

“It was wrong what was done to him,” Arlen said. “That was wrong. Murder, as you said. But what he’d done was wrong as well. He was out of his mind, Rebecca. Hearing about it is one thing, I suppose. But you didn’t see it. You didn’t see the way he held that poor dead woman and looked into her eyes.”

“I know,” she said.

“He was going to be a problem. He was going to cause harm.”

“Of course he was,” she said in a soft voice. “Of course.”

They didn’t speak of it again in the days that followed. He worked on the boathouse, the walls going up quickly, and there were no visitors. Rebecca’s brother was to be released on the upcoming Tuesday, and she went into Thomas Barrett’s store once to make phone calls and arrange to go out and collect him. Arlen asked if she wanted him to go along, and she said that she didn’t.

“You can meet him when we get back.”

Arlen nodded, but he couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever see her again. If she might pick up her brother and drive off in some unknown direction, and that would be the end of it. He hoped not, but he couldn’t help the thought.

It turned out he didn’t need to worry over it-she never had the chance to make the drive to Raiford. Owen Cady arrived on Monday, the day before his scheduled release, and he arrived in the company of Solomon Wade.

They came around noon, and Arlen and Rebecca were both out on the back porch, having just finished lunch. They heard the car and looked at each other with shared displeasure, fearing it would be Wade. When they walked through the barroom, the gray Ford coupe was visible in the yard, and Rebecca said, “He’s come to make a last round of threats in case I’m thinking about running tomorrow.”

Then the doors on the Ford opened and two men stepped out: Solomon Wade from the driver’s seat, and a tall, rangy kid with blond hair from the passenger’s. Rebecca said, “Owen,” in a whisper, and went onto the porch.

The two men walked toward her, Solomon Wade with a blank face, Owen Cady wearing a wide grin. He crossed to the steps and hugged his sister fiercely.

“I’m home!” he yelled. “Made it home!”

He stepped back from her and laughed, still wearing the easy grin, Rebecca standing there stunned and silent.

“Well, I thought you might be happy,” he said.

“I was supposed to get you,” she said. “Tomorrow. I was supposed to pick you up tomorrow. That’s when they said you’d be getting out.”

She was staring at Wade.

“Solomon here pulled a few strings and got me out a day early,” Owen Cady said. “Figured we’d surprise you.”

“You could pull strings?” she said woodenly, still looking at Wade. “You could do that to get him out a day early? A day?”

“You’re welcome,” Wade said.

“Get off my property,” Rebecca said. “Get away from here. And stay away from him. You stay-”

“Rebecca, what in the hell’s gotten into you?” Owen said, raising both hands in a peacemaking gesture, glancing back at Wade in apology. “Solomon hasn’t done a thing but help.”

Arlen thought that might snap her. Thought she might turn and go running up the stairs and come back with a Smith & Wesson in her hand. Instead she just swiveled to stare at her brother and said, “He didn’t pull strings to keep you out.”

“That isn’t his fault! It’s mine. I don’t know what-”

“It’s fine, son,” Solomon Wade said, his voice awash in generosity. “If your sister wishes this to be a family occasion, a family occasion it shall be. I just wanted to welcome you back to Corridor County myself.”

He gave a little bow, said, “Y’all have a fine afternoon.” Then he turned and walked back to his car and drove away, one hand lifted out the window in a neighborly wave. A dark red flush rose in Rebecca’s face as she watched.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” Owen said. “I wanted to surprise you. Can’t you be happy to see me?”

She looked back at him, blinked, and tried to force some cheer.

“Of course I’m happy.”

Owen looked up into the doorway at Arlen and said, “Who’s this?”

Arlen stepped forward and put out a hand as Rebecca said, “Arlen Wagner. He’s helping me rebuild things after the hurricane. We lost the dock and boathouse and most of the back porch.”

“Good to meet you,” Owen said. He gave Arlen a measuring stare, though, some suspicion in his eyes.

“Likewise,” Arlen said. “Your sister has been eager for your return.”

“Half as eager as me, that’s for sure. Raiford isn’t a fun place to be. Tough fellas in there.” He gave that grin again, and there was a cockiness to his eyes and bearing, as if he considered his prison days a point of pride.

Arlen said, “I’m sure it isn’t fun.”

“Let’s go on inside,” Owen said to Rebecca. “I want to pour a drink, a good one, and then I’ll tell you some stories. Tell you what it was like in there.”

Rebecca frowned, and Arlen understood why. The kid was talking like he’d just returned from a holiday trip. Wanting to tell stories? Shit. It reminded Arlen of men he’d known who always wanted to tell stories about what the war had been like. Inevitably, they were the ones who hadn’t seen any real combat. He had yet to meet a man who’d emerged alive from the Belleau Wood with any desire to tell tales about it.

As Owen Cady swaggered into the barroom, bellowing about how beautiful the liquor bottles looked, Arlen missed Paul with a sudden, deep ache.

He told his stories. They sat around for an hour while Rebecca made him a thick sandwich and brought him a cold beer. Owen ate, and drank, and talked. And talked some more. Everything was designed to impress. He told of how tough the Raiford bulls had been, how quick with their billies and their fists, but he didn’t sound chagrined about it. He told about one man the guards had beaten so badly he’d been taken out with a fractured kneecap and broken ribs, and when he finished that story he laughed and shook his head, as if recalling some moment of horseplay. He bragged about the other inmates as if they were a collection of mythical heroes instead of a cell block full of cruel bastards and swindlers.

“Thing about it is, you got to fall in with the right crowd early, or they’ll eat you for lunch in that place,” he said. “I found some boys who knew those I’d run with, and that was the start. You find somebody to back you when it’s needed and you do the same for them and that’s how you make it. If there’s going to be fighting, you better not be alone.”

Rebecca was listening quietly but unhappily. Owen had turned most of his attention to Arlen, gesturing and pointing with his beer.

“There was a fella who ran with Dillinger,” he said. “Did you know that Jack-that’s what Dillinger was called by them that knew him-came down to Florida for a time when things got hot back in Indiana? It’s the truth.”

“Dillinger was killed last year,” Arlen said.

“I know that. Everybody knows that.”

Arlen shrugged.

“So were Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson,” Owen said. “All in one year. And Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. No, thirty-four was not a good year to be in the rackets.”

“No year is,” Rebecca snapped. “I wish you wouldn’t say that like you think it’s a sad thing. Those people were criminals. They were killers.”

“I know, sister, I know.” But he winked at Arlen as he drank the beer.

After a time he ran out of stories or tired of making them up, and told Rebecca he wanted to go upstairs and get some rest.

“You got no idea how sweet a real bed will feel,” he said. “A beer and a bed in one day? Must be heaven. Now all I need to do is find myself a girl.”

He gave Arlen another wink, and Arlen tried to plaster a grin on his face in response as the kid strutted toward the stairs. Rebecca showed him the bedroom she’d made up. Paul’s old room.

When she came back down the stairs, neither of them spoke at first.

“He’s a good boy,” she said eventually.

“I’m sure he is.”

“All this talk, the way he’s going on, he’s just trying to seem tough. I imagine that’s a skill you learn pretty fast in a place like that.”

Arlen nodded. “I’m glad he made it out, and made it out so quickly. A lot of guys who go into a place like that don’t come out so cocky. Since he did, I’m guessing the months went easier on him than on some of the others.”

“I hope so,” she said.

He didn’t say the other things he was thinking, like there were some men who jailed well because, frankly, they liked the credibility it gave them in certain circles, same as men who valued scars because of what they told the world: I’ve been to rough places and seen rough things, and, buddy, I’m still standing here.

Arlen had his share of scars. He kept them hidden the best he could.

“He’s a good boy,” she repeated. “Just give him a little bit of time.”

“Sure. Can I ask you something, though? When do you intend to lay out your plan with him? About leaving this place and heading to Maine.”

“A few days,” she said. “I want him to adjust, settle down. I want Solomon to see that we haven’t run yet. I want everyone to relax.”

“All right.”

“In the meantime… be patient with him. I know the way he sounds right now, but it’s not him. It’s not really him.”

“Hell, he can talk however he wants,” Arlen said. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“I know, it’s just that I… I want you to like him.”

He saw the sincerity in her eyes and said, “I like him, Rebecca.”

It was one of the easiest lies he’d ever told.

34

OWEN WAS BACK AT it that night, telling more of his stories, speaking of Karpis and Barker and Dillinger, any number of other well-known gangsters he’d certainly never met but wanted Arlen to believe he had. He spoke of bank robbers and killers and hustlers, spoke of them with a voice of adoration. He was twenty years old now, a big, good-looking kid, with deep blue eyes and a smooth smile that no doubt would draw in plenty of women. Rebecca, clearly growing more frustrated by the minute, didn’t wait as long as she’d suggested before explaining that they’d be leaving the Cypress House.

“Now that you’re back,” she said in the midst of one of his tales, “we need to find some time to talk things over. Doesn’t have to be tonight, but soon.”

“Talk about what?” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“Where we’re going. What comes next.”

He frowned. “Going? I don’t need to go anywhere. Hell, I just got home.”

“This isn’t home,” she said. “There’s nothing in this place for you except trouble. The same trouble you got into last time.”

He gave her a grin and a dismissive wave. “Aw, I’m fine.”

“No, Owen. You’re not fine. And this isn’t home.”

“The hell it isn’t,” he said, dropping the chair legs back to the floor and looking at her with a hard stare. “I’m not going to Savannah.”

“Not Savannah, just… somewhere else. There’s no money here, Owen. No one ever comes except the people Solomon Wade sends. You can imagine what sort of people those are.”

Owen flicked his eyes over to Arlen, frowned, and said, “We don’t need to be saying harsh words about Judge Wade.”

Rebecca stared at him. There was a tremor in her jaw. “I’ll say what I feel, and that man is a plague. He’s evil.”

“He’s the only man who kept Daddy and me afloat in hard times.”

Now it was Rebecca’s turn to look at Arlen. She had a desperate quality in her eyes, and Owen followed the look.

“What’s he doing down here anyhow?” he said. “Talk like this is family talk. We don’t need your hired man involved.”

“He’s more than a hired man. He’s a friend, and I trust him. He’ll stay.”

Arlen was expecting resistance to that, but Owen just gave him a dark, knowing look.

“We’ll discuss this another time,” he said. “But I’ve got no desire to leave. There’s money to be made here, you just don’t see it.”

“Money to be made in the same way you were making it last time?” she snapped. “The same way you ended up at Raiford? Yes, I’m sure there is. Trust me, I’m well aware of the money. I’ve been asked to keep count of it while you were gone! That’s what Judge Wade has provided in your absence.”

“Well, thank Providence that he did,” Owen answered curtly. “Otherwise, you’d have been busted. Ever think about that?”

Rebecca’s mouth worked, and a wet shine took over her eyes. She laid one hand on the table as if to steady herself even though she was seated, and then she stood abruptly and walked to the steps and left them. Arlen rose, but Owen Cady waved him down.

“Let the women bed down early while the men stay up and drink, that’s what I’ve always said.”

That’s what you’ve always said? Arlen thought. What are you, twenty years old now? Yeah, I bet you’ve been saying that for a mighty long time.

But he sat down. It was her story to tell, and he would respect that. If anyone in this world understood such a burden, it was Arlen Wagner. He accepted the bottle. Owen had switched from beer to whiskey an hour or so earlier, and the change was showing, his eyes unfocused and his cheeks flushed.

“Damn, that tastes good,” he said when Arlen poured a drink and passed it back. “Been a long time, let me tell you. Sure, we had hooch, but it ain’t the same as real whiskey, I can promise you that. You ever been in prison?”

“No.”

“Jail?”

“Yes.”

Owen nodded sagely. “I knew it. You got a look about you.”

“Do I?”

“Sure. You know, one that says you’ve seen some things. You been around, same as me.”

Same as you? Arlen thought. You took a six-month fall for running dope. You haven’t seen shit, boy.

“I didn’t like jail,” Arlen said. “I don’t intend to return.”

Owen threw his head back and laughed as if that had been a joke, but when he dropped his face again, his eyes had narrowed, gone cold.

“You sleeping with my sister?”

Arlen took a drink. “Seems to me she’s sleeping alone right now. Unless she’s got somebody else hid up there.”

The kid stared at him, then said, “If you are, fine. Doesn’t have a thing to do with me. But something you best understand-I’m the one runs the show at this place. Not her, and sure as shit not you. My father left this place to me.”

He tapped his chest with an index finger, in case Arlen had any confusion.

“Fair enough,” Arlen said. “I just swing a hammer.”

“Better remember that.”

“I’ve not forgotten it yet.”

For a moment Owen stared at him as if those had been fighting words, but then he burst into another of his too-loud laughs.

“I like you,” he said, lifting the whiskey bottle and drinking straight from it. An unnecessary flourish considering his glass was still full.

“Glad to hear it.”

Owen dropped the bottle and leaned across the table. “You want to make some money? Some real money?”

“Depends how it’s made.”

Owen grinned. “Shit, don’t matter how it’s made, matters that it is made. I’ll tell you something you probably don’t know, old-timer-that judge who brought me down here from Raiford? He as good as runs this state. And I’m in solid with that boy. You want a piece of it, I could get it for you.”

“Don’t know that you could,” Arlen said. “Solomon Wade isn’t as sweet on me as he is on you.”

“Nah, I could get you in on some cash deals, no problem.” Owen leaned back, confident of his position in the hierarchy of Wade’s outfit.

“Thanks,” Arlen said, “but that isn’t for me. I’ll stick to carpentry.”

“Stick to being broke, you mean.”

Arlen shrugged.

“Have it your way,” Owen said.

Arlen took a drink. “You know, your sister doesn’t want Wade anywhere near here.”

“I give a shit? Tell you this-Rebecca ought to be back in Savannah. This place isn’t for her. I don’t know what in the hell she thinks she’s doing.”

Arlen looked at him and then away. “Might be she came here for you.”

“Me?”

“And your father. To help you.”

“Well, Daddy’s dead, and I don’t need any help.”

Arlen didn’t answer.

“Listen,” Owen said, “I’m not intending to spend my life cuttin’ boards or haulin’ feed sacks or pickin’ oranges or whatever it is you think I ought to do. I’m going to make a mark, old-timer, and I know the right folks to help me do it.”

“Solomon Wade.”

“Among others.” He nodded. “I know plenty of men.”

“Gangsters. Hoods.”

Owen grinned. “Call us what you like.”

Us. It took all Arlen had just to listen to this chucklehead. He tossed the rest of the drink back and stood.

“Rebecca wants out of this place,” he said. “She’s done some suffering, waiting on you.”

Owen gave another drunken wave of his hand, and Arlen felt his fingers start to curl up into fists at his sides. He looked at the kid for a moment, his jaw working, thinking of all the things that should be said. Wasn’t his place to say them, though.

“Welcome back,” he said, and then he turned and walked up the steps and went to his bedroom alone.

35

THEY’D SLEPT IN THE SAME BED since Paul left, but that night they did not, and she didn’t come down to his room in the darkness the way she once had. He tried not to let her brother’s presence rankle him, but it was hard not to. Her idea was that they were all going to run off to Maine together like some happy damn family? Arlen couldn’t see it.

He also couldn’t see leaving her, though. Ever.

When he awoke it was to the sound of loud, angry voices. He got out of bed and pulled on some clothes and went downstairs, feeling a vague, hungover sort of angry, as he often did in the mornings after sleepless nights. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, another voice had joined Rebecca and Owen’s chorus, though, and this one pushed away the mental fog. It was Solomon Wade.

“I told you to leave him alone,” Rebecca was saying. “I mean it, too. You stay away from this place!”

“I’m trying to help the lad get back on his feet,” Wade said in that drawl of his, a voice carefully designed to show no reaction, to create a constant sense of control. “I shouldn’t think you’d object to that.”

“You stay away from him.”

“Rebecca, quit hollering,” Owen said as Arlen stepped into the room. “The man’s trying to help, he comes here to give us a-”

“We don’t need gifts from him.”

“It’s not a gift, it’s a loaner,” Owen said. “Something to drive, is all.”

Arlen looked out the window and saw that there were two cars beside Rebecca’s old truck: Solomon Wade’s gray Ford coupe and a blue convertible with whitewall tires.

“To drive for what?” Rebecca said.

“I’ve found the boy some work,” Wade said.

“No.” She shook her head. “No, he will not work for you.”

“Now, Rebecca. Times are hard, and I’ve found Owen an opportunity. Him fresh out of prison? I’d think you’d be more appreciative. Why, you’ve done some work for me yourself, have you not?”

She didn’t speak.

Solomon Wade said, “I’ll leave y’all to sort this out. Owen, you be in touch, hear? I need you, and there’s dollars in it. Stacks of them.”

He walked through the door and out to his car. Tate McGrath was waiting in the passenger seat; evidently he’d driven the convertible down.

“I don’t understand you,” Owen said to Rebecca. “I don’t understand you a bit.”

“Owen, you’re not to work for him. I won’t allow it.”

“You won’t?” He had a challenge to his voice, his eyebrows raised.

“That’s right. That man is-”

“Is the only person in this county who sees anybody gets paid,” Owen said. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but there’s a Depression on, Rebecca. And Judge Wade sees that people get paid. What’s he ever done to you?”

“What’s he done?” she echoed. “What’s he done?”

“That’s what I asked.”

Her whole body was trembling. “He’s a criminal. He hurts people and he steals from them and-”

“No worse than most of the world.”

“And he kills them. He’s a murderer.”

Owen laughed. “Oh boy. You been hearing some tall ones. Who’s telling them? This guy?” He pointed at Arlen.

Rebecca stood there and stared at her brother, who gave a mocking smile in response, and she didn’t say a word.

“I’m going for a drive,” Owen said. He walked past Arlen and through the door, and a minute later the convertible was roaring away.

“Why won’t you tell him?” Arlen said. “Damn it, he needs to know.”

She wouldn’t look at him. “I will. It’s just… not the right time.”

“Well, it better be the right time soon,” Arlen said. “Because I’ll tell you something-that brother of yours isn’t some confused kid who got himself into trouble. He thinks he’s going to be a gangster, and he likes the idea.”

“That’s not true!”

“No?” Arlen said, and they exchanged an unpleasant stare.

“Listen,” he said after the pause had gone on awhile, “I thought you were waiting here until he got released. I thought the only reason you were staying at this place was to keep Wade happy until your brother got released.”

“That’s exactly why I stayed.”

“Well, Rebecca, he’s been released. And he says he’s going to stay.”

“He won’t. He’ll leave.”

“Going to take some convincing to get him to do that. I talked to the boy last night. He thinks he’s the next Al Capone.”

“That’s just talk.”

“Hell, yes, it’s just talk. What isn’t talk, though, is the idea that it’s what he wants to be. He thinks Wade is aces. So if you want him to be hitting the road with you, you’re going to need to tell him the truth of it. Your father didn’t drown; he had his throat cut. That kid needs to know.”

She nodded. “I’m going to tell him. I don’t want to do it here, though.”

“What do you mean you don’t want to do it here?”

“Owen is… rash,” she said carefully. “Foolish at times. He’s so young.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I can’t tell him the truth when he is around Solomon Wade and Tate McGrath,” she said. “Don’t you understand that? He won’t want to leave; he’ll want to settle scores. He doesn’t know enough to see that you can’t settle scores with men like that. I’ll tell him once we’re gone from this place. First, though, I need to get him away from here.”

“You’re trying to protect him from Wade,” Arlen said, “and from himself. You might be able to do one. I can guarantee you’ll never be able to do the other. The kid’s going to chart his own course. Seems like he’s already well under way.”

“I just need to get him away from here.”

“Well, why aren’t we going, then? Every day we linger is another day he falls in deeper with Wade.”

“I can’t… I’m waiting on something.”

“Waiting on something?”

She looked away.

“This is how it goes,” he said bitterly. “I’m trusted only so far. You still keep your secrets, though. The ones that matter most.”

“Arlen, it’s not an issue of trust. It’s not. And I’ll talk to Owen. You’ll see-as soon as he comes back, I’ll talk to him.”

He didn’t come back that day, though. When the knock on the door came just after sunset, they both assumed it would be Owen. It wasn’t.

It was Paul Brickhill.

36

HE LOOKED TIRED AND THIN, with a face streaked by road dust and sweat. His shoes were caked with mud and split on one side from miles of walking. Rebecca held the door open and stared at him and didn’t move. Arlen was sitting at the bar and he could see over her shoulder to the boy, who looked back at him without a word or a change of expression.

“Maybe I could step inside?” he said at last, addressing Rebecca.

“Yes, come on, get in here.”

She moved aside and let him pass, and he dropped his bags to the floor and walked over to the bar and looked at Arlen. Neither of them spoke. Arlen’s first thought, the one that had cut right through him at the sight of the kid, was relief. He was glad to see him again. Then he remembered the smoke he’d seen in Paul’s eyes, remembered the purpose for the whole damn terrible thing, and thought, No. You weren’t supposed to come back.

Paul gave him that steady gaze and then went around the bar and pulled a bottle of gin off the shelf. He poured a glass of it, took a sip, and then came back and sat on a bar stool a few down from Arlen. He looked up at the clock.

“Still working,” he said. There was no note of pride in his voice. Not like there had been with the generator.

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Thank you so much for that. Paul, let me get you something to eat. You look like you need it.”

“I could stand to eat.”

“I’ll fix something right away.” She’d walked over to him and laid her hand on his shoulder, and he turned his head and stared down at it and then lifted his eyes to hers, cold eyes, and she removed her hand.

“Right away,” she murmured again, and then she left.

It was quiet, nothing but the sound of the kitchen door swinging slower and slower until it came to a stop, and then all that could be heard was the ticking of the clock.

Arlen said, “You all right?”

“You care?” Paul lifted the glass and drank a little more of the gin.

“Of course I do,” Arlen said. “And you know that.”

Paul shook his head wearily. “Sure, Arlen. Sure.”

“Look, son, the way it happened-”

“I don’t want to hear it. Not ever again. Just don’t speak of it.”

Arlen went silent. They could hear Rebecca moving around in the kitchen, laying a pan on the stove and sparking the burner.

“Where you been?” Arlen said. “Where’d you go?”

“I went to Hillsborough County. The CCC camp down there. Ones that are working on the park, where you wanted us to go after we got off the train?”

Arlen nodded. “I remember it.”

“Yeah? Well, if I wanted to have a chance with the CCC again, I should’ve gone down earlier.” He turned the gin glass in his hands, his face dark and sullen.

“They wouldn’t let you re-up?”

“No. Want to know why? Because they’d heard about the trouble I got into up here. That’s what I was told. Evidently Solomon Wade called down there. Him or the sheriff.”

“When did he call? Day we were jailed?”

“I’m not sure. But somebody from up here called and spoke to them and warned them we might show up looking for work. Told them we weren’t wanted in Florida, so they should send us packing if we did show.”

Arlen felt the squeeze of anger in the back of his neck. That was the best job the boy could have found, and Wade had shut it down.

“I thought about trying to get back to Flagg,” Paul said, “but my company left in the summer anyhow. Besides, Wade called up there, too, checking on our story. I doubt they’d be any happier to see me.”

Arlen didn’t say anything. He would have liked to argue, say that the supervisors back at Flagg knew Paul too well to believe that sort of shit, but he knew it probably wasn’t true. The only supervisor who’d really gotten to know him well was Arlen.

“I stayed around Hillsborough for a few days. Hitched a ride into St. Petersburg. There’s this fancy hotel there called the Vinoy, right on the bay. Heard they were hiring porters, but I couldn’t catch on. So I headed back.” Paul finished the gin and added, “I don’t want to be here. Hope you understand that. I don’t want to be here, but I got nowhere else to go.”

Right then the front door banged open and Owen Cady stood before them. He was wearing a suit and polished shoes.

“How y’all doing?” Owen said. “We got ourselves a guest, eh? I hope he’s paying for that liquor.”

“He’s not paying for it.” Rebecca had stepped back out from the kitchen at the sound of her brother returning. “He’s my guest. Where have you been?”

“Seeing the free world again. Don’t you think I deserve that?” He crossed the room and put his hand out to Paul. “I’m Owen Cady. I own the place.”

“Paul Brickhill.” Paul shook his hand and passed a curious glance at Rebecca. “This your brother?”

She nodded.

“You’ve heard of me?” Owen said, retrieving a cigar from his jacket pocket and clipping the end.

“I worked here for a time,” Paul said. “Came down with Arlen.”

“Yeah? Why’d you leave?”

Paul looked at Arlen and then Rebecca and said, “I was hoping to catch some work down near Tampa. It didn’t go well.”

“Ain’t that the way anymore?” Owen lit the cigar and took a puff. “Well, welcome back to the Cypress House, Paul Brickhill. Stay as long as you’d like. We’re not busy, as you’ve probably noticed.”

“He’s not staying,” Arlen said.

Everyone gave him a hard look at that.

“Actually,” Paul said, “I think I will be until I get things straightened out.”

Arlen shook his head. “It isn’t safe for you here. It-”

“I told you that I don’t want to hear any more about that. It’s a pack of damned lies, and I won’t listen to it ever again. I’m not intending on staying here long, trust me. But I need a bed for a few days while I figure it out. You’d refuse me that?”

He stared at Arlen with challenging eyes.

Owen said, “What in the hell are you all talking about?”

Nobody answered.

“Listen here,” Owen said, tapping some ash free from his cigar, “I’ll not have anyone else laying out the rules for who stays here and how long. Rebecca’s not the owner. I am. When our daddy died, he left it to me. And I’m damn sure”-he pointed at Arlen with the cigar-“that he didn’t leave it to you.”

He waited for somebody to object. When no one did, he smiled, satisfied, and said, “So, Paul Brickhill, you stay as long as you’d like.”

“Thank you.”

Arlen said, “You keep the hell away from Solomon Wade while you’re here. Understand me? You keep the hell away from him.”

“Oh shit, my sister’s got you singing her song, does she?” Owen said, giving a theatrical groan as he walked around the bar in pursuit of booze.

Arlen ignored him, looking hard at Paul. The boy turned away from the stare.

That night Paul sat up with Owen Cady and listened to the latest round of gangster stories. Rebecca had gone upstairs in a cold silence, and Arlen went outside and circled back to the front porch, where he was beside an open window and could hear what they were saying. He slid down until he was sitting on the porch floor with his back against the wall, then put a cigarette in his mouth and listened.

Owen Cady was singing the praises of Solomon Wade.

“Man doesn’t look like much, and doesn’t sound like it either. Just a judge in a backwater town nobody’s ever heard of, right? Well, I’ll tell you this: you go around the country, you’ll find men who know the name. New Orleans, Miami, New York. They’ve heard of him, and they respect him.”

Arlen waited on one of two things: Paul’s rebuttal, or his silence. What he heard was Paul’s encouragement for Owen Cady to keep running his mouth.

“You been working with him for long?” Paul asked.

“Few years, ever since I was old enough to be worth a damn to him. See, he and my father used to run liquor through here, back in Prohibition days. Bring boats into the inlet or keep them off the coast and go out and meet with them.”

“Rebecca was around for this?”

“No, she was in Georgia. She never understood my father anyhow. He was a good man, but he was also a smart one. Knew what had to be done to make it in this world. Rebecca’s never gotten that. Be better for me if she left again.”

“You want to stay here?”

“Hell, no, but I need to for the time being. Solomon Wade, he’s holding my ticket for wherever it is I want to go, understand? I can make more money in a month of working with him than I could in two years doing anything else. I’ll build my nest egg and then head out of this place.”

“Where would you go?”

“New York, maybe. Chicago? Hell, I don’t know. Someplace where there’s always things going on. It’s a big world, brother, and I intend to see it.”

“I’d like to myself,” Paul said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Where you from?”

“Jersey. Be damned if I’ll go back there, though. But I can’t get back into the CCC, and I’ve got no money. It’s why I came back.”

“How’d you boys end up here anyhow?”

“Arlen’s out of his mind, that’s how,” Paul said. “I’m not fooling either. He’s crazy. We were on a train headed down to the Keys, and he pulled us off because he thought he saw dead men aboard.”

“You’re lying.”

“Not a bit. He pulled us off that train, and we got into a car with a guy named Walter Sorenson.”

“I know Walt.”

On they went, Paul narrating the events that had led him to the Cypress House, cursing Arlen at every turn, and Owen Cady offering grunts of disbelief. Arlen still hadn’t lit his cigarette. It dangled from his lip, going soft as he listened.

“I want to get out of here,” Paul said. “Go someplace brand-new, start over. But I don’t have a dime to my name.”

Tell him why not, Arlen thought. Tell him what contribution the great Solomon Wade has made to your fortune.

But Paul said, “Any chance you could find me some work? Maybe I could help out, make a few dollars.”

Arlen almost came up off the porch and went through the door. He wanted to grab the kid by the neck and slam him around, slap him in the mouth and ask him what in the hell had gotten into him, how stupid could a person be? He held his place on the porch floor, though. He knew what had gotten into the kid-Arlen and Rebecca. He was different now than he had been before, sullen and bitter, hardened. It was no mystery what had made him that way.

I thought it was the right decision. I thought it was the only way.

Inside, Owen said, “You said you run across Wade in the jail?”

“That’s right, but I haven’t done a thing to cause him trouble since.”

He’s caused you trouble, though, Arlen thought. He put smoke in your eyes, Paul. That man will be your death.

He jerked the cigarette out of his mouth and crushed it in his palm and flung it into the yard.

“Let me talk to him,” Owen said. “I’ll put in the good word. I bet he goes along with it. I’m going to need a hand with this thing we’ve got coming in.”

“What is it?” Paul said.

Owen Cady laughed. “Not yet, Paulie. Not yet. You ain’t cleared.”

“Well, get me cleared,” Paul said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make some money. I want to get out of this place, and I don’t want to do it walking down the highway. Not again.”

“You get in with Wade, and you’ll leave this place in a Cadillac.”

They went on for another hour at least. Arlen sat where he was the whole time, listening to them and shaking his head, thinking that Paul sounded like an entirely different kid. Like someone Arlen had never met. He was trying to act hard, for one thing, and for another he was buying into Owen Cady’s bullshit. It didn’t seem like the same kid who’d been so hellfire determined to repair the generator and the clock, didn’t seem like the same kid who’d charged Tate McGrath in that barroom and nearly gotten killed.

That was on Arlen, though. Paul wasn’t the same kid, damn it. He’d left the Cypress House a different person, and his time on the road had done nothing to help, just allowed him to soak in his bitterness.

All I wanted was for you to leave, Arlen thought, because I knew what staying would mean. Why can’t you see that it was the truth?

He didn’t see it, though, and now he was back and planning to partner up with whatever Owen Cady had to offer. Arlen thought of the way Paul’s eyes had swirled to smoke during that handshake with Wade, the way it had vanished as soon as the man released his grip, and he knew what had to be done.

He was going to have to kill Solomon Wade.

37

OWEN ROSE EARLY and took off in the convertible, and Paul went with him. They didn’t leave word of where they were going or when they’d be back.

When Tate McGrath arrived, Arlen somehow had a feeling he’d known that it would be just Arlen and Rebecca at the inn. The old truck clattered into the yard, and Arlen took one look and then went upstairs and found the pistol he’d left under the bed. He checked the load and snapped the cylinder shut and then held the gun close to his leg as he walked down the steps. He stopped halfway down when he heard Rebecca at the door.

“Solomon wanted y’all to have this” was all McGrath said. Then the door swung shut and Arlen heard his boots slap across the porch. Arlen came down the steps and looked outside in time to see him getting into the truck.

“What are you doing with that?” Rebecca said, looking at the gun. She was holding a sealed envelope.

“I don’t like that son of a bitch. I’d rather have a gun in hand anytime he pays a visit.” He nodded at the envelope. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know.” She tore the envelope open and slid a folded piece of paper out. As she unfolded it, Arlen saw it was a newspaper clipping. He set the gun on the bar and came to her side, studied the picture with her. The face was familiar-it was the man who drove the black Plymouth.

The article was from the Orlando newspaper, detailing the discovery of two bodies dragged from a swamp in a desolate stretch outside the village of Cassadaga. Both bodies were male, both were homicide victims, but only one had been identified: David A. Franklin, a Tampa native and known underworld figure. The second victim’s identity was unconfirmed, police said, due to the fact that both of his hands were missing. Anonymous sources suggested that the corpse was Walter H. Sorenson, also from Tampa, and a close associate of Franklin’s.

“Sorenson?” Arlen said. “That’s whose hands we have? That can’t be.”

Rebecca slid slowly away, almost soundlessly, dropped until she was sitting on the floor and her back was against the bar. Her eyes were distant.

“I didn’t… I thought it was the other man,” she said. “Franklin. I didn’t understand what they wanted me to know.”

“Those can’t be Sorenson’s hands. He burned…” Arlen’s voice faded and he turned his head and looked out the window at the spot in the yard where Sorenson’s Auburn had exploded. He thought of how quickly the body had gone up, how the flesh had already been singed beyond recognition when Arlen reached the car.

I would have seen it coming, he thought. I would have seen smoke in his eyes, would have known before he stepped out this door.

“That wasn’t him in the Auburn,” Arlen said.

Rebecca shook her head.

“I thought the man in the Plymouth killed him,” Arlen said. “That man was David Franklin, probably. But he didn’t kill him. If he had, I’d have seen the signs. No, Sorenson had a chance when he left this place. He had a chance, and they tracked him down, and they took that chance away.”

Rebecca didn’t answer.

“Franklin drove that Plymouth down here to help him,” Arlen said. “Is that it? He came down to pick him up and set fire to that car so we’d be left thinking the man was dead.”

“Yes.”

He stared at her. “You knew this. You’ve always known it.”

“No. But I’ve wondered.”

Arlen got slowly to his feet. He left her sitting there on the floor and walked around the bar and poured himself a drink, though it was not yet nine in the morning. When he spoke again, he couldn’t even see her.

“I want to hear it,” he said. “I want to hear it all.”

For the first time since the hurricane, she drank with him. They sat at a table beside the fireplace and drank, and she told him about Walter Sorenson.

Sorenson was intrigued by Rebecca. He didn’t understand why she’d stayed at the Cypress House after her father’s death, and he didn’t buy the drowning story that had been offered. He inquired about it often.

“He was here about twice a month,” she said. “It would vary depending on whether there was money to collect. The way it worked was that he’d come by to pick up what was owed to Solomon. If you didn’t have the right amount, it wouldn’t be Walter who came back for you. It would be Tate McGrath and his sons.”

At first she resented him in the way she did everyone else affiliated with Solomon Wade. But over time, as he confided in her, as he told her how badly he wanted out of the enterprise he’d joined, she began to trust him.

“I told him the truth in July,” she said. “Told him what had really happened to my father and why I was still here, that I was waiting on Owen.”

Sorenson had been sympathetic but not shocked. He’d expected as much since Rebecca first replaced her father at the inn. He inquired about her plan to leave once Owen was free, and was unimpressed.

“All I knew was that I’d take Owen and we’d go,” she said. “That seemed like enough to me. He said we’d need money. That if we tried to leave without money, we’d end up seeking help from my family, and if we did that, Solomon would find us. So it was the breadline, he said. That was where we were headed. I told him that trying to steal money would only make Solomon search for us harder, and he disagreed. He said Solomon would do it anyhow, and that we couldn’t hide without money.”

“It won’t be easy for you if you’re broke,” Arlen admitted.

“That’s what Walter said. He told me that my father’s plan was almost right, just missing a few touches: money and witnesses.”

“Witnesses,” Arlen echoed.

She nodded.

“That’s why he picked Paul and me up,” Arlen said. “We served a role. So did you. We’d all tell the story in the same way.”

“I think you’re right,” she said. “But he also called you a good-luck charm. Apparently he stopped to speak with David Franklin’s girl in Cassadaga, and she offered him some sort of advice. You even said that yourself; I remember you told it to Tolliver. That she’d told him to watch for hitchhikers.”

“For travelers in need,” Arlen said. He thought about that conversation, the bolita game, the way Sorenson had let Paul drive the Auburn. His mood had changed dramatically when they arrived at the Cypress House, when the next step of his attempt at escape loomed large.

“I wish he’d made it,” he said, and he was surprised at the sadness in his voice for a man he’d hardly known. “I wish the son of a bitch had made it.”

“Me, too.”

He looked at her. “You didn’t know this. You truly did not?”

“No. I’m making guesses, and that’s all. But I think they’re good guesses. I didn’t recognize the hands, though. Wade must have thought I would.”

“He also must have suspected you were involved.”

“I know that he did. They confronted me about it, Solomon and Tolliver and McGrath. I think the only reason they believed me in the end was that you and Paul were telling the same story.”

“So we were good-luck charms,” Arlen said, “but not for Sorenson.”

“They asked me a lot of questions about David Franklin,” she said. “Whether he’d ever been around with Walter, things like that. I’d never seen him. Had no idea who he was. Not until the night… the night they brought him here.”

“Gwen, the one from Cassadaga, she was Franklin’s girl,” Arlen said. “They used her to get to Franklin, and Franklin to get to Sorenson. But who in the hell burned in that car? If it wasn’t Sorenson, who was it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, they didn’t just find a body. Someone was killed. Who?”

“I just said that I have no idea. But Walter… he wasn’t a murderer. He wouldn’t have killed anyone.”

“Well, it wasn’t a mannequin that burned in that car.”

“He wouldn’t have killed anyone,” she repeated stubbornly.

Arlen lifted the newspaper article. “Why’d they bring this to you? Why today?”

“Reminder,” she said. “Solomon likes me to be refreshed, time to time, on what happens to those who cross him. Now that Owen’s out, he can’t hold that one over me. So he’s turning to other things.”

She lifted her hands to her face as if shielding her eyes from a bright light. “Poor Walter. He was the best of them. Not a bad man at his core. Just a man who’d made too many concessions for money.”

“If you’re right, then he didn’t make the concession he needed most,” Arlen said. “He was a thief but not a killer. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, to get away from Solomon Wade, he needed to be the latter.”

She lowered her hands and looked at him.

“He has to die,” Arlen said simply. “There’s no running from him. All this is simply more proof of that. We can’t afford to leave him behind.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“Yes,” he answered. “I’m going to do it, Rebecca. It’s the only chance you’ve got. You aren’t going to walk away from him.”

“You can’t kill him. I can’t let you do that. Not for me, not for Paul, not for anyone.”

“It’s not a matter of what you can let me do,” he said, “it’s a matter of what needs to be done. What has to be done. You want out of this mess? This is the way you’ll get out. I don’t believe there’s any other.”

“We’re not killing anyone. No matter how evil they are, we’re not going to do murder ourselves.”

“Then he’ll find us,” Arlen said, “and he will settle the score. I wonder who will get your hands as a reminder? Mine? Your brother’s?”

They shared a long stare, and then she broke it and turned away.

“It’s not just him, though,” she said. “Solomon Wade is valuable to people we’ve never even heard of, dangerous people. He’s part of a chain, and if we remove that part, don’t you think those other men will want to retaliate?”

“I don’t intend to leave a calling card saying it was me that killed him,” Arlen said. “And if he’s in as deep as you say, then they’ll have plenty of other people to worry about. We’re nothing to them.”

“Arlen, no.”

“The way to leave this place without having to look over your shoulder every day for the rest of your life,” Arlen said, “is by leaving with Wade dead. You know too much about what he does. You’re a danger to him. The things you could tell the law, they’re things that put him at risk. He’ll find a way to keep you under his control, just as he always has. Last time it was with your brother. This time he may have to give up on any such patient technique.”

They were both quiet. She had tears in her eyes, but they didn’t spill over.

“I wanted it to be as easy as it could be,” she said. “I just wanted to take Owen and go. To run away and hide and let time pass. I thought that we could do that. But he won’t let us, will he? He’ll never let us.”

“No,” Arlen said. “He won’t. And you’re going to need to tell Owen the truth now. You’re going to need to trust him. Because I can assure you of two things: one, he isn’t going to leave of his own accord. And, two, we’re going to need him.”

38

IT WAS NEARING SUNDOWN when they finally returned. Paul walked up to the porch in stride with Owen, head high and shoulders back.

“Been a long day,” Arlen said. “What were you doing, Paul?”

“He was agreeing to do the right kind of work for the right kind of money, old-timer,” Owen said. “Going to carve himself a piece out of this world.”

“You want this piece?” Arlen said, still looking at Paul. “This swamp county, this seems big-time to you? You bothered to ask yourself what in the hell must go on in a place like this that it’s worth a damn to anybody?”

“I need your opinion like I need another hole in my head,” Paul said.

Owen laughed. “Damn straight, Paulie. Why don’t you mind your own, old-timer?”

“I’ll mind what I like,” Arlen said. “And you call me old-timer one more time, I’ll have you spitting teeth, you shit-brained little bastard.”

Owen’s face darkened and he stepped toward Arlen, only to be cut off by Rebecca. Arlen wished she hadn’t been there, wished the little shit would step on up and get his blockhead knocked right off his shoulders.

“Owen,” Rebecca said, her hand on her brother’s chest, “we’re going to talk.”

“Isn’t talking I want to do with this son of a bitch,” Owen said, pointing at Arlen.

“Talking is what you’re going to do with him, and with me,” she said. “I waited in this place for six months for you, and you’re going to listen to me for once! You are going to listen!”

Her voice had risen to a shout, and it seemed to surprise everyone. Owen stared down at her but didn’t put forth an argument.

Rebecca said, “Paul, I’d like you to go inside. This is a family matter.”

“What’s he staying for, then?” Paul said, nodding at Arlen.

Rebecca put her eyes on him and said, “I’m asking you, please.”

Paul wanted to object. Arlen could see that. He wanted to tell her to get lost, he’d do what he pleased, and to hell with her, the one who’d broken his heart. He didn’t have it in him, though. Not when her eyes were on him like that. For everything else that had changed in him, one thing had not: he cared for her. He wanted to please her.

In the end he went inside as he’d been asked, shoved past Arlen and stomped indoors like a sullen child.

“All right,” Owen said, “I’ve got strong patience for you, Rebecca, because you’re my sister and I love you. But I don’t need a mother.”

No, Arlen thought, what you need is a swift kick in the ass.

“I’m not trying to be your mother,” Rebecca said. “I’m trying to be the one who keeps you from behaving like a fool any longer.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Owen said, stepping toward the door.

“You’re going to hear it,” she said, cutting him off. “I’ve got some things you better hear. Like how your father died. My father. Our father.”

He stopped and tilted his head and stared at her. Then he flicked his eyes over to Arlen, a suspicious look, and stepped back.

“What are you talking about?”

“He didn’t drown,” Rebecca said. “He was murdered. His throat was cut. And Solomon Wade did it, or had it done.”

Owen gaped at her. He looked at Arlen again and forced a laugh, as if maybe Arlen could join him in appreciating this ludicrous situation.

“You are so full of shit,” he said.

She was calm. Even-keeled, the way she was so often. She’d grown remarkably good at holding her emotions at arm’s length. Arlen wondered if that was a healthy thing.

“He was trying to run away,” she said. “To fake his own death. He owed Solomon money, lots of it, and he was tired of the way he had to pay it off. Tired of the way his life had infected yours, tired of what you were becoming. I was supposed to get him off the boat that day, and we were going to sink it, and he was going to disappear. I’d stay long enough to sell the idea that he had drowned. Then I would take you and leave, and we’d find him again.”

Owen shook his head. Not believing it, not wanting to hear it.

“I saw him,” she said. “I saw him lying on the deck of that boat, I saw his blood drying in the sun, I saw his eyes, Owen, I saw it all!”

Her voice was trembling, and he was still shaking his head.

“You don’t want me working for Wade, fine, say your piece, but don’t you dare tell a story like that.”

“Look at me.”

He shook his head and stared away.

“Look at me.”

This time he met her gaze. There was a wet sheen to her eyes, but no tears fell and she stared at him and did not speak. Arlen could see the resistance dying in him. His bravado and bluster couldn’t hold off the truth that was in that look.

“I want you to read something,” she said. “Then you tell me I’m lying.”

She took a piece of paper from the pocket of her dress. It was a sleeveless dress, and though the day was warm Arlen could see a prickle along the flesh of her arms. She unfolded the paper and passed it to her brother.

Arlen knew what it said by now. She’d shown it to him while they waited for Owen and Paul to return. It was a letter that had been mailed from Corridor County more than a year earlier, when Rebecca’s father was still alive and she was still in Savannah, a two-page lament of the life Owen was falling into. I don’t believe he has a dark heart, David Cady had written, but I fear he has a dark mind. I fear he can rationalize so much evil away, and perhaps I’ve put that in him… surely I have. But if we can get away from this terrible place and these terrible people, Rebecca, I know that he is not lost.

Owen took his time reading. He didn’t say anything, but Arlen could see his jaw tightening as he read, and when he finally folded the letter and passed it back to her, his movements were very slow, controlled.

“Neither of you ever told me a thing,” he said. His voice had gone huskier.

“He thought that was safest. We would tell you when we were away.”

Before you could get them into trouble, Arlen thought, and it’s the same damn plan she had this time around. I’m the one who talked her into this change, who talked her into this trust. So don’t let me down. Don’t you let me down.

“Was likely McGrath that did it,” Owen said eventually, his eyes vacant. “Or one of his boys. I never did think they could be trusted.”

“Whoever did it,” Rebecca said, “did it at Solomon Wade’s instructions.”

He shook his head. “I’ve worked with Wade many a time, Rebecca. He’s not what you believe.”

Her eyes went wide. “Not what I believe? He’s what I’ve lived with for the last six months! Don’t tell me it’s about what I believe. Do you know why I’m still here? Why I’ve not gone back to Savannah or somewhere, anywhere, else?”

Owen didn’t answer.

“Because I’d been told he would have you killed if I did,” she said. “He explained it to me very clearly, told me all of the power he had at Raiford and that he could make your stay as easy or as painful as he wanted. That was up to me. It depended on whether I continued to help him. While you were in prison, I was here. I was watching drugs and fugitives pass through my doors, I was counting the drugs and the money and providing the records to Solomon Wade. He won’t get his hands dirty; if anyone ran into trouble with the law, it would have been me. I played our father’s role for him because our father had left an unsettled debt. That’s what Wade told me. So I paid his debt, and they kept me here paying it by promising me what would happen to you if I didn’t. That is Solomon Wade.”

Owen said, “He wouldn’t have done that. Not to someone in my own family. Solomon respects me. Likes me and respects me. He wouldn’t have-”

Rebecca turned to Arlen and said, “Go get the shovel, please. I’d like to see the box you buried.”

He led them to the dead tree along the shore, walked off the paces, and began to dig. It didn’t take long to find the box. Owen spoke once, asking what the hell they were looking for, and Rebecca just told him to be quiet and wait. When Arlen had found the box, she said, “Owen can open it.”

Owen took the shovel. There was a vague unpleasant smell coming from the box, but it was nothing like that of the body in the creek.

“This is what Solomon Wade delivered to me,” Rebecca said. “In person. This is the sort of care Solomon Wade showed me while you were away. Now open it.”

Owen wet his lips and turned back to the box and used the shovel blade to pry the lid off. He gave it a final toss and flipped the lid away entirely, and what he saw made him stumble backward and lift a hand to his mouth. He kept his body turned sideways when he looked again, as if he couldn’t face it directly.

“Solomon Wade brought that to me,” Rebecca repeated. “Those hands belonged to Walter Sorenson. You remember Walter?”

Owen nodded, still staring at the box, still with his hand at his mouth.

“I thought you would. He was a nice man. Kind. Wrong sort of man for this sort of business, just like Daddy was. Just like you are.”

Arlen took the shovel from Owen’s hand and knocked the box and the lid back into the hole and began to cover it with sand.

“You’ve known this for so long,” Owen said, looking at Rebecca.

“What was I supposed to do, write you a letter and say it? Tell you on one of my visits to Raiford, the ones that you ordered me to stop making?”

“You could have told me.”

She shook her head. “Not while you were in that place. I couldn’t tell you until you were out. And then you got out, and you wanted to go right back to the life you’d led before, Owen. You rode in here with Solomon Wade, told me what a great man he was. Can you imagine how that made me feel?”

Owen stared out at the sea. There was a good breeze blowing, and the waves were hitting hard, pounding the beach as if angered by its existence. The sun was a smudge on the western horizon, and shadows lay all around them.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said. His voice was cold. “I’m going to slit the son of a bitch’s throat.” He tightened his hands into fists and said, “I’m going to make him bleed, Rebecca. I’ll take him slow. I’ll take-”

“No, you won’t,” she said. “This is exactly why I was waiting to tell you the truth. I can’t allow you to make the situation worse than it already is.”

“So what’s your idea?” Owen said. “Call the sheriff? Think Tolliver’s going to arrest him?” He gave a disgusted laugh and shook his head.

This time, Arlen spoke for her.

“We’re going to kill him,” he said. “But we’re going to do it right. You need to be a part of it, and you need to have your damn head on straight when it’s done. You go off half-cocked, and you’ll end up dead yourself and probably take your sister with you. Don’t shake your head at me; that’s the damn truth of it. You better understand that.”

Owen stood and glared at him. Arlen finished tamping down the sand and then leaned on the shovel and looked him in the eye.

“You want him dead? You want to settle up?”

“Bet your ass I do. I’m going to see that it happens, too.”

“Good,” Arlen said. “Then let’s you and I climb in that fancy car he gave you and take a ride. We got some things to discuss.”

Owen looked from his sister back to Arlen and nodded. Rebecca was staring out at the ocean, her face grave. She didn’t like the idea. Didn’t want them to be discussing such things. She’d have to deal with it, though. The only thing in all this mess that Arlen was certain of had been told to him by the hands he’d just buried for the second time.

You couldn’t run from Solomon Wade. Not successfully.

39

PAUL WAS OUT ON the back porch when they returned. He watched them with a frown, and Arlen saw he had a glass of gin in his hand again.

“Family meeting finished?” he said.

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “I’m going to make us some food.”

Arlen set the shovel down beside the porch and then started around the side of the house and toward the car with Owen.

“Where are you going?” Paul called after them.

“Taking a ride,” Arlen said. “I want to see this silly buggy move.”

“I’ll go along.”

“You’ll stay.”

“That isn’t your decision to make.”

“It’s mine,” Owen said. “We’ll just be gone a bit.” His voice was soft and weary. Everything about him spoke of a sudden fatigue. He kicked along through the sand with his shoulders slumped and his hands jammed in his pockets, and he never even bothered to look at Paul. Paul didn’t argue, but when he sat back down his face was dark with anger.

“First thing you need to understand,” Arlen said when he’d slid into the passenger seat beside Owen, “is that we’re going to keep that boy out of this. Completely. You got that?”

Owen nodded. He’d put the car in gear, and now he looked at Arlen and said, “Where am I going?”

“Just take it down the road,” Arlen said. “You drive, and you talk. Tell me about Wade’s work. Tell me the things your sister doesn’t know. Tell me how you think he should be killed. Could be killed. And one more thing: tell me how we can lighten his pockets before we kill him.”

Owen stared at him, surprised.

“Make no mistake,” Arlen said, “people will likely give chase. We’ll need money to run. On that score, Walter Sorenson was right.”

Owen pulled out of the yard and onto the rutted road, the headlights capturing ghostly shadows from the Spanish moss that dangled just above the car.

“It’s going to be hard,” he said. “He’ll have a lot of men around for this next deal. Men like Tate McGrath.”

“I figured on that,” Arlen said. “Now let’s hear the whole scenario.”

It would be the sort of transaction that took place often at the Cypress House, but never while Wade was present. He kept his distance from the actual cargoes. The McGraths and the Cadys handled that task. Owen had started his work for Solomon Wade as a driver, taking truckloads of orange crates out of Corridor County and on to Memphis, New Orleans, and Kansas City. The crates contained heroin smuggled in from Cuba.

The money would come from Wade and be given to Owen a day before a group from Cuba was to arrive. They’d bring a boat up to the waters off the beach from the Cypress House and wait for a light signal that showed them it was safe to put in. Then they’d come all the way into the inlet, and the unloading would commence immediately. Tate McGrath and his sons would handle the unloading. The cargo would be crates and crates of oranges. Some of the crates would be marked with a single hole drilled in a side slat. Inside those marked crates were thin false bottoms, the grains of heroin packaged beneath. Owen didn’t know how much of the drug would come in, but it had to be plenty-the orange crates, once unloaded, were taken in trucks. Owen was expected to drive one truck, and he’d told Wade that Paul would be riding with him. It was supposed to be a sort of test for both of them, giving Wade an opportunity to determine that nothing about the prison stay had tainted Owen’s loyalty, giving him an opportunity to assess Paul’s loyalty for the first time.

Arlen asked for more details about the money. Owen said he knew that Wade paid thirty dollars for an ounce, and the next person in line probably paid sixty or seventy per ounce at least.

“How much money will he give you, though?” Arlen asked. “What are you going to pay these guys who bring it in?”

Owen said he couldn’t be certain because he had no way of knowing the exact size of the load, but if it held the pattern he’d seen before he was jailed, then they’d be bringing in at least three hundred ounces.

“Then he’ll be giving you nine thousand dollars,” Arlen said. The sum overwhelmed him. They were going to carry that much money down to a bunch of Cubans in a boat and hand it off in exchange for orange crates?

“That’s probably close to it,” Owen said. They were out on the paved road now, screaming along at close to seventy miles an hour, and with the wind whipping in the car it was hard to hear. Arlen didn’t want to tell him to slow down, though. He figured the kid needed to be in motion right now, needed to have his foot heavy on the gas.

“He just hands you that much money? He trusts you with that?”

“Well, everybody’s awful careful about their counting,” Owen said. “Come up a few dollars short, and it’s bad news, buddy.”

They were going to come up many dollars short this time around, if Arlen had any say in it. Tough for a dead man to miss the cash, though.

“You’re in charge of the cash? Not McGrath?”

Owen nodded. “Tate and his boys stay back in the inlet. They handle the unloading, but they never go out to meet the Cubans. I take our boat out and meet them before they bring it in. I give them half the money then, while they’re still on open water. They get the second half after everything’s been unloaded. Tate will have all his boys down there, with three or four trucks, and they go through the crates pretty quick. Time it gets finished, I hand over the rest of the money, and everybody heads in a different direction.”

“How much is your cut?”

“He said I’d get a hundred dollars for this one.”

A hundred dollars was a good month’s work for most men, but it also didn’t seem too hefty a cut when you considered the likelihood of a long prison stretch if you were caught. Arlen figured Wade had a carefully constructed alibi if anyone ever did take a bust and try to point back to him as the source of the money. He also figured the fool who tried to do such a thing would have a mighty short prison stay and wouldn’t be walking out of the cell when he left.

“You’ll have this money a full day ahead of time?” Arlen asked.

“That’s right. He doesn’t want to see me the day of the delivery. He won’t see anyone the day of the delivery.”

That was good, though. It gave them some hours to work with, made this thing a hell of a lot easier than it would be if McGrath himself handled the money and they had to go through him and his pack of thug sons to get it. Having Owen serve as the money handler made things much simpler. They’d have the cash in hand from the start. All that remained to be done was to kill Wade.

Shadows loomed in the headlights, and Owen slowed as they approached a group of black men and women walking along the road. They were barefoot, their eyes white in the headlights. One of the women was holding a child in her arms.

Looking for work, Arlen thought. They’re out here wandering in the night, walking barefoot, looking for any form of work they can get. And Solomon Wade is waiting to put nine thousand dollars in a case and send it out to some Cubans on a boat in exchange for a drug that hides your pain-mental or physical varieties. This world.

They roared on past the walking family, two white men in a convertible out here in the backwoods. He wondered what they thought of that. If they took one look and knew that crooked money had bought the car.

“What’ll he do on that day?” Arlen asked. “Wade, I mean.”

“I’ve got no idea. Keep his distance, like I said.”

“Well, I’m going to need to find him. You know where he lives, where he works, that sort of thing?”

Owen gave a nervous nod. He looked over at Arlen, his face pale in the darkness, and said, “You’re really going to kill him.”

Arlen looked away. “I can’t let your sister end up like your father. I can’t let her stay here either.”

“You ever killed anyone before?”

“Killed plenty. Were days in the war I killed quite a few in just an hour.”

“What about away from the war?”

Arlen shook his head.

“Well, I expect it’s awfully different.”

Arlen said, “I don’t.”

“What?”

“It’s taking a life. Any time, and any way, it is always about ending someone’s life. There aren’t a whole lot of degrees to it. Not that I can see at least. People who haven’t done it, they can imagine all these differences. I might agree that the circumstances and defenses for the act shift around a good deal. But that act itself? It doesn’t change.”

“You’re going to kill him,” Owen repeated, as if all the rest of the words had slid past him without impact.

“Yes,” Arlen said. “I’ll kill him, and you’ll take your sister and get the hell away from this place. With the money.”

Owen was silent. They drove along for a while, and then he pulled off the road and set to turning the car around, ready to head back.

“What do you know about the men Wade’s connected to?” Arlen asked.

“Not much. They’re in New Orleans.”

“They the sort that’ll give chase over nine thousand dollars?”

“If they know who to chase.”

Arlen nodded. He expected they’d be looked for, at least in the early days, but with Wade removed he didn’t imagine the hoods in New Orleans would be willing to waste much time on the endeavor. They’d need to install somebody else to take his place, that was all.

“Paul’s getting some of the money,” Arlen said. “Before we do a damn thing, he’s getting some of the money, and he’s getting on a train.”

Owen said, “He thinks he’s going to be here for it. Helping.”

“Well, he won’t be.”

Owen nodded. “How much you figuring on giving him?”

“Enough,” Arlen said. “Enough.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do with the Cubans?”

“Let them sit,” Arlen said. “They never see the lights that signal them that it’s all clear, then they think there’s a problem, and they go on back, right?”

“That’s the point of the signal, I figure.”

“Exactly. So they won’t know what happened, but they’ll know something went wrong. And they’ll be right about that.”

“We’ll need to be gone before nightfall, then,” Owen said. “McGrath and his sons will come down about sunset. They’ll be set up in the inlet, waiting to unload. They’ll be watching everything. That old bastard doesn’t miss much.”

“By the time he gets there, the place will be empty. So, sure, he’ll know something’s up, and what’ll he do? Go looking for Wade. And find his body.”

“Then shit’ll get going fast,” Owen said, taking one hand off the steering wheel and rubbing it over his chin, a nervous gesture.

“What’s to get going? They’ll come looking for us. We’ll be gone.”

“Yeah, we better be. Just where in the hell is it you think we’re going?”

“Does McGrath have a boat that can handle open water?”

“No.”

“All right. You and Rebecca will leave in the boat that day, then. That way if McGrath or one of his sons is keeping an eye on you, they won’t be able to follow anyhow. You know a port town you can get to easy enough where I can pick you up in the car once Wade’s been dealt with?”

“There’s Yankeetown.”

“That’s what we’ll do, then. You take the boat there and wait on me. We’ll use this car at first, but we’re going to have to switch it up fast. All that time you spent at Raiford talking to big-shot cons, you actually learn how to steal a car?”

“I can steal one, sure.”

“Good,” Arlen said. “You’ll need to steal a couple before it’s done.”

Owen didn’t answer.

“You having second thoughts?” Arlen said.

Silence.

“If you are,” Arlen said, “you might think about that box we dug out of the sand again. And you might think about your father.”

This time Owen turned to look at him, and his eyes were steady. “I’m not having any second thoughts.”

“All right.” Arlen turned and let the wind blow into his face and said, “You know where Solomon Wade lives?”

“Yes.”

“Take me there now.”

“Why?”

“I can’t just drive up and kill him,” Arlen said. “It’s going to require the right opportunity. I expect I’ll have to spend a good bit of the day following him. He live alone?”

“He’s got a girl. I don’t know how much she’s there, though.”

“We’ll need to know,” Arlen said. “I’m not hurting anyone else. He’ll need to be alone when I come for him.”

He had a sudden vision of the sheriff of Fayette County and Edwin Main approaching in the night, Arlen standing there at the window watching them come, waiting on them.

“Yes,” he said, “he’ll need to be alone when I come.”

40

THE HOUSE WAS A sprawling plantation-style place about a mile outside of High Town, resting at the end of a long drive bordered with cypress trees. Lights glowed inside a broad expanse of glass that made up one side of the front of the home. Behind it was a carriage house, Wade’s Ford coupe parked in front, along with another car. Arlen didn’t see the second vehicle clearly at first, but then Owen Cady said, “Sheriff is here,” and he remembered it well, remembered sitting in the back with handcuffs around his wrists and a notion that all he needed to do was weather a little bit of a knockabout and he’d be back on the road to Flagg Mountain soon enough.

It was a memory so strong and so strange it seemed the property of another man. Arlen would never see Flagg Mountain again. What had seemed reasonable once was gone now, taken from him by circumstances far from his control. He wondered if Wallace O’Connell and the other men from that train had felt similarly when they realized the hurricane was upon them. He wondered if any of them had remembered him, remembered that night at the station platform when he’d urged them to get off, assured them that danger lay ahead.

They’d all been heading toward powerful storms, he realized. His had just been longer coming, that was all.

“I don’t like sitting here,” Owen said. “They know this car; hell, it’s his car. One of them sees it out here, what are they going to think?”

They were parked in the darkness a good quarter mile from the house, nobody was going to see them, but Arlen had no reason to hold him here either, so he told him to go ahead and drive away.

“Awful lot of house,” he said as they cruised by for the final time, Owen keeping the headlights off.

“Was the owner of the timber company that built it. He was the richest man around for miles in his time. Now Wade is.”

So it went. Legitimate work disappeared and what stepped in its place were the likes of Solomon Wade. Arlen wondered what the locals thought when they passed by the place. Probably felt broken, helpless, the way Thomas Barrett seemed to. Arlen wondered what they’d think when Wade was dead. Would any good come from it here, or would another like him simply fill the void?

“He have servants at the place?” Arlen asked.

“None that stay there. People come and go during the day, but he doesn’t like anyone living on the property.”

That would help. Now that he’d had a look at the house, Arlen was figuring it was the best spot he’d have, and dawn the best time. He’d done some killing in dawns of days past, had left men to bleed out as the sun showed faint in the east. He could do it again. As he’d told Owen earlier, all that changed was the circumstances, not the act. He’d never wanted a circumstance like this, but hell, he hadn’t wanted a war either. A man never did get as much say in this life as he wanted to have, as he’d expected he would when he was young. No, you took what was offered and you handled it best as you could.

“How will you get the money?” he asked.

“Sheriff will bring it.”

“The sheriff?” It was all he could do not to laugh. Some law they had in Corridor County.

“That’s right. He’ll drive it down Thursday evening.”

“But the boat’s not coming in till Friday night.”

“They like to have their distance,” Owen said. “And they have Tate McGrath watching. Tate’ll be watching the whole time. Basically from the moment Tolliver delivers the money, Tate will be around, watching. Who was it you think killed my father? It was Tate, I’d just about guarantee it. And my father went out on the boat just the same as you want us to.”

His voice was rising, and the speed of the car right along with it, his foot pushing harder at the gas as his nerves took hold. Arlen said, “Ease up, son,” and Owen slowed the car but shook his head, still unhappy.

“It’s a shit plan,” he said. “You’re sending us out just like my father went and somehow expecting it to go better.”

Arlen didn’t have an answer for that. Hell, the kid was right. All he knew was that he wanted Rebecca gone by the time he moved on Wade, just in case anything went wrong. He wanted the two of them to be under way and prepared to keep going. Tate McGrath, the damned watchdog, was going to be a problem.

“The boat’s a bad idea,” he admitted. “You leave in the boat any time ahead of when you should, they’ll not like it. Better idea is you and Rebecca climb into her truck in the middle of the afternoon, nothing packed. Make as if you’re just heading up the road to Barrett’s store. Be so damn obvious about it that he won’t imagine you’ve got any other plans.”

“Doesn’t leave as much time, though.”

“No, it doesn’t. But any time is better than none, and I think you’re right-we try to get too crafty while McGrath’s watching, it’ll go sour fast. The way to handle it is for you and Rebecca to drive off in that truck of hers like it’s just another afternoon, and I’ll stick right where I always am, down at the boathouse swinging a hammer. Long as we all don’t leave together, I imagine he’ll give it some time at least. Won’t expect something’s wrong right away.”

“So we take off that afternoon,” Owen said, “and you wait to kill Wade until evening?”

“What time do the Cubans get in?”

“Long after dark.”

“All right. Then I got a bit of time. Hell, I’ll have a word with Tate before I leave. Tell him you gave me instructions to clear out, that I wasn’t to be around the place. He’ll believe that; it’ll sound proper to him. He doesn’t trust me and he wouldn’t expect you to.”

“So you’ll talk to Tate,” Owen said, “and then you’ll-”

“Get in this car and drive up the road and kill Solomon Wade.”

It would change the timing of things. He wouldn’t be able to wait on Wade as the sun rose, the way he’d imagined. No, he’d have to venture into town in daylight and find him and follow him and take the first opportunity that was there. He’d have to do it fast, too. Rebecca and Owen would have a few hours of head start, but by the time evening settled in and they still weren’t back, Tate McGrath would grow suspicious.

When Owen spoke again, it took Arlen by surprise. Things had been that quiet.

“It should be me,” he said.

“What?”

“That kills him. Shouldn’t be you. Ain’t nothing personal between you and him. Me and him, though? That’s plenty personal. Should be me that pulls the trigger.”

Arlen said, “You realize you helped cause all of this?”

Owen turned and gave him a confused look. “What?”

“You read that letter from your father. You know what you’d gotten into with Wade. Sure, your old man might’ve led the way, but it was you who helped put the knife to his neck. Don’t forget that. You want to blame Wade, go on and blame him. Don’t forget your own decisions, though.”

“You got some brass, saying a thing like that. Just because I did some work for the man doesn’t mean-”

“You did more than work for the man,” Arlen said. “You wanted to be him. Wanted to run around in fancy cars with a gun in your belt and a pocketful of money, dirty money, blood money, just so you could feel like you got some power. Feel like you’re a big shot. Came swaggering in the day you got out of Raiford and never so much as thought about your sister, what she’s been through waiting on your worthless ass. No, all you wanted to do was tell tales about the thugs and hoods you knew. Except you don’t even know them. You got any idea how sad that is, boy? You’re pretending to be Solomon Wade. That’s what you want out of this life. To be just like the man who had your daddy’s throat cut.”

Owen’s jaw had gone rigid, and his hands were tight on the steering wheel.

“I’ve been places where words like that would get a man killed,” he said.

“Son,” Arlen said, “you ain’t been anywhere. You don’t have so much as a rumor of what this world’s really like. You’re getting a taste now, and it’s your first. All that tough-boy bullshit aside, this is your first taste, and you know it.”

Owen didn’t answer.

“Look me in the eye and tell me if I’m wrong,” Arlen said.

Silence.

“There’s only one thing that you need to do now,” Arlen said, “and that’s take care of your sister. Try to make up for the mistakes you made and your father made that got you all into this fix. I’ll do your bloody work. You just be a man for a change.”

That night he sat awake with Rebecca on the back porch, and they listened to the waves break and roll back and break again, and neither of them spoke much for a long time. Owen had climbed the stairs as soon as they got back and shut the door to his room, never appearing again. There was a lot going on in his mind. Let him have his time, so long as he didn’t set the fool’s temper to work again.

Paul had been in the barroom until Arlen entered, and then he stood and walked past him without a word and went up the steps as well. Arlen let him go. How he wished Paul had never come back. He had to make sure that he’d be gone soon, long before anything went into motion with Solomon Wade. That would require waiting on the money, though, and that would give Arlen only about twenty-four hours to convince Paul to hit the road… and only about twenty-four hours of distance between the boy and Corridor County. Arlen didn’t figure they’d pursue him, but there was a chance. Paul would need to travel smart, travel with a plan, and that would require a conversation between the two of them. Right now, the boy wouldn’t even speak to him.

Rebecca laid her hand out in the darkness and put it on his arm, and the mere touch of her skin on his own broke some of the blackness loose inside him. He closed his eyes and felt the points of warmth where her fingertips lay, tried to focus on that and nothing else for just a few seconds.

“You shouldn’t have to do this,” she said softly. “Shouldn’t have to be any part of it.”

“Stop,” he said.

“Well, it’s true.” She squeezed his arm once and then removed her hand and said, “I told Paul about your father.”

He opened his eyes again. “What?”

“He holds such anger toward you, Arlen, and I can’t stand to see it. I tried to talk with him about it, tried to apologize for what happened and the way that it happened and explain what you were trying to do. That you believed so deeply he was in danger that you would drive him away from this place at any cost.”

“Let me guess,” Arlen said, “he wasn’t buying it.”

“No. I told him that I believed you. He didn’t care for that either. He wanted to know how I could possibly believe you.”

“So you told him.”

“Yes. I hope you’re not angry. I knew it wasn’t a story you shared, but, Arlen… I wanted him to know.”

He supposed he should be angry. He wasn’t, though. Just couldn’t muster it, not with her, and not over this.

“I won’t see that boy die,” he said. “I won’t let it happen. It isn’t this place that threatens him, it’s Wade. I’ll put an end to Wade.”

“We could just leave,” she said. “I still think we could just-”

“No,” he said. “You will leave. You and your brother and Paul. And I expect to catch up with you at some point. I fully intend on doing that. But not while Solomon Wade remains to follow.”

41

TIME WAS SHORT, and moving fast. Tolliver was to bring the money down that evening, and on the next the Cubans would arrive with their boat packed with orange crates. They would, if everything went without a hitch, sit out on the Gulf and wait for lights that never came and then they’d turn around and return to their own country, still with the orange crates on board. Paul would be on a train, perhaps, and Rebecca and Owen driving north, and Solomon Wade would be dead.

All of this had to be done in less than forty-eight hours.

Arlen went down to the boathouse that morning and cut boards and sanded them down same as he would on any other day, thinking that if McGrath or Wade happened by it would be best for them to see things as they always were, no indication of a change in plans.

He spent most of the morning considering what he’d say to Paul. He wanted to prepare him for what was to come but didn’t think the boy would hear him out. He would have to wait until Owen had the money, break off a portion of it for Paul, and drive him to a train station. If Paul wouldn’t listen to Arlen, he’d listen to the money. He was looking for a way out. They’d give it to him.

That was what was in Arlen’s mind when he walked back up from the boathouse shortly before noon and discovered that Paul was gone.

“Said he was walking into town,” Rebecca told Arlen. “Owen offered him a ride, but he said no, he wanted to be alone and wanted to walk.”

Arlen didn’t care for that.

“What in the hell does he want in town? He doesn’t have a dime to his name. What’s he going to do?”

Rebecca spread her hands. “I don’t know, Arlen. He wasn’t holding discussions over it. He just left.”

He thought about borrowing Rebecca’s truck and going after him but decided against it. He was probably the reason Paul had wanted to get out of here; it would serve no purpose to chase him down.

The day dragged by, and Paul didn’t return. The heat had gone unbroken for a full week, but there were thin, swift-moving clouds skidding over the sun today, and Arlen thought there was the promise of rain in the air. The sea was riding stronger swells than normal, the Gulf carrying a green tint, the gulls shrieking and fighting the wind currents above him. All the things that had become standard to Arlen now, the smell of the salt breeze and the feel of that intense, near-tropical sun on his neck and arms, the rustle of palm fronds. It should have been a beautiful place. Was a beautiful place, were it not for the men who’d invaded it. Reminded Arlen of the Belleau Wood, once he got to thinking about it. That had been a pretty parcel of land in its own right, field and forest. Damned gorgeous spot until the wrong men came across it, and then it was tangled with bodies and barbwire and the cries of the wounded.

By four Paul had still not returned, and the clouds had thickened and begun to move slower, like troops massing for an advance. When the first fat drops began to fall and the woods around the inlet took to swaying and rattling in the wind, Arlen gathered his tools and retreated to the house. It was really starting to come down by the time he got inside, and he joined Rebecca and Owen at the back window and watched the rain lash down and pelt a gray, tossing sea.

The rain fell different here than in other places Arlen had been, thicker and faster, turning the yard into an ankle-deep pond in a matter of minutes. The beach drank it in easier for a time, but then it began to form puddles even on the sand, and the waves raced up and chased the rain as if they intended to work together and turn the whole world to water.

It had been raining this way, Arlen recalled, the day they’d returned from the jail. He remembered how he and Paul had broken into a run on their way up to the porch, laughing like children, bursting through the door feeling like they’d just stepped out of the worst of it in more ways than one.

That seemed a mighty long time ago.

He was lost in that memory when he realized Rebecca and Owen had turned and gone to the front windows, were looking out at a car parked at the top of the hill, its headlights glowing against the gray gloom of the storm. The sheriff’s car. Tolliver was parked up there in the exact place where he’d let Arlen and Paul out that day before the hurricane.

He’s come with bad news, Arlen thought, a sudden certain clench going through his gut, images of Paul stretched out in the back of that car with a white sheet over his body. He’s come to tell us-

But right then Owen said, “He’s here for me. He’s here with the money.”

They all turned and looked at one another as a gust of wind shook the inn and lightning sparked almost on top of them, filling the dim barroom with one blinding flash. Thunder crackled, an angry, aggressive sound.

Arlen said, “You best go get it, then.”

There was another silent pause, all of them realizing this was it, the starting point. The moment that money passed from Tolliver’s palm into Owen’s, the plan was under way, no longer about ideas and possibilities and only about execution. They’d need to do it as they’d planned, and do it right. Most of that burden rested with Arlen and the Smith & Wesson upstairs under his bed.

Owen blew out a breath and started for the door. Arlen called, “Hey,” and brought him up short, his hand on the doorknob.

“You got to look relaxed,” he said. “Same as any other day. You ain’t doing anything but helping. The sheriff up there, he’s your buddy, and so is Wade. Don’t show them anything else.”

Owen nodded.

“The rain’ll help,” Arlen said. “Sheriff will be in a hurry. He doesn’t like driving in the storm.”

Owen gave another nod and then pulled open the door. The wind was blowing hard out of the south, and it caught the door and wrenched it from his grasp and banged it off the wall. A spray of rain showered in and soaked the floorboards before he got his hand on the door again and slammed it, and then both Arlen and Rebecca moved closer to the bar so they could watch him.

He ran across the yard with his shoulders hunched. Watching him go, Arlen had the bad feeling again, dark images flickering through his mind-gunfire opening up from inside the car and dropping Owen out there in the mud and the rain; the window sliding down as Owen approached and a knife blade glinting ever so swiftly as it snaked toward his throat.

I wish I’d checked his eyes closer, Arlen thought. I didn’t see anything, he was looking me full in the face and I didn’t see anything, but maybe I didn’t look hard enough…

Nothing happened, though. The door to the sheriff’s car swung open and then Owen had a black case in his hand, same sort of case that Walter Sorenson had carried. He stood beside the car, head ducked against the rain, and said a few words. Arlen couldn’t see Tolliver from behind the door, but Owen looked relaxed enough. The rain was a help. Made any tension on his part easier to explain, as if he just wanted to get the hell back inside and out of the downpour.

It wasn’t but thirty seconds before Tolliver slammed the door and Owen turned and began running back toward the house. Rebecca let out a breath, and Arlen looked over his shoulder at her and realized she’d been sharing his dark thoughts. He managed to get a grin on his face.

“We’re good,” he said. “All right? Wade thinks your brother is in league with him, and he thinks he’s got you owned by fear. They aren’t waiting on trouble. Not from us.”

She nodded, but her face was pale and she couldn’t match his smile.

The door swung open, and then Owen was back inside and dripping rain all over the place, his blond hair turned dark with water and plastered over his forehead and down into his eyes. He gave them a stare and lifted the case high.

“Here we go,” he said.

Arlen nodded. “Here we go.”

They counted the money back in the kitchen, hidden from windows. Arlen saw the stacks of bills inside and thought of the money he’d worked so hard and saved so long to gather, those 367 stolen dollars. He wondered if they were included in this pile.

Rebecca did the counting. She fingered the bills swiftly and familiarly and didn’t say a word as she riffled through the stacks, kept a silent count in her head until the last bill had touched the edge of her thumb. Then she turned to them and said, “Ten thousand.”

“Ten thousand dollars?” Arlen echoed. He’d been watching her count it, had seen the bills with his own eyes, but he still wasn’t sure he believed the number. The CCC paid thirty dollars a month. There were more than twenty-five years of work sitting in that simple black case.

“Yes,” she said, and then, for the first time, she smiled. “He’s not going to like losing it.”

“Hell,” Arlen said, “he’s going to lose something else he’ll like even less.”

Somehow that got them all to laughing. It wasn’t a healthy kind of laughter. More the sort born out of fear, jangling through nerves strung tight as bowstrings, but it felt good all the same. They had their laugh together, and then a particularly strong racket of thunder struck and shook the walls of the inn and they all fell silent again.

“Paul gets his cut,” Arlen said. “I’ll give it to him, and I’ll take him to a train station and see that he gets on one headed far from here.”

“How much are you intending to give him?” Owen said.

“Half.” He said it flatly. Owen rocked his head back and stared with wide eyes.

“Bullshit, he gets half. He’ll be gone ’fore anything even starts to happen! He ain’t playing a role in this, ain’t helping, ain’t-”

“He gets half,” Arlen said, and there was a challenge in his voice that shut Owen’s mouth for once. He went tight-lipped and angry and stared at Arlen with distaste, but when he spoke again his tone was softer.

“There’s four of us here,” he said. “Fair split would be twenty-five hundred. That’s more than fair.”

“That boy’s got a mother was counting on CCC checks,” Arlen said. “He’s got to look after her and himself. He gets half.”

Owen started to shake his head again, but Rebecca cut in.

“That’s fine,” she said. “That’s right.”

She counted out half the money and placed it in a burlap bag and handed it to Arlen. He put it on a high shelf behind a sack of flour and then he and Owen both watched as Rebecca replaced the rest of the money in the black case and fastened the latches and set it beneath the table.

“One day left,” she said.

42

PAUL RETURNED AT THE height of the storm. The rain had lessened just a touch, but the lightning and thunder were gathering energy, the walls and windows of the inn trembling consistently, wind howling in off the Gulf. It wasn’t yet sundown but might as well have been; no sun would shine on this day again. The three of them had returned to the barroom, ostensibly to discuss the plan, break down each movement and time it out to the last second. Nobody had much to say, though. It was as if the delivery of the money, that first squeeze on a trigger nobody else even saw, had somehow silenced them.

Instead they sat and listened to the storm and drank. Arlen and Owen passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth, and even Rebecca had a short one. Her eyes moved from the beach to the fireplace to the clock, flicking from place to place as if taking inventory.

“What’s on your mind?” Arlen said.

“I was thinking that it really isn’t such a bad place.”

It was the same notion he’d had that morning, working on the boathouse.

“I came to hate it, you know,” she said. “To almost blame the physical location for everything that was happening here, for everything that had happened. But you know what? My parents were right. It’s a gorgeous spot. It will be special someday. Someone will probably make a nice living doing just what my father always hoped to do here. They will be different people, though, and it will be a different time. Right now, it’s as if this place is infected. The sickness will pass. But no time soon. No time soon.”

Arlen nodded. She wasn’t alone in those thoughts, and they weren’t limited to this place. It was an infected world right now. He remembered reading newspaper pieces about the black dust that had risen in the plains and driven farmers to take shelter in the ground, dust clouds so mighty that they’d drifted all the way across the country and darkened the skies above New York. It was a hell of a thing. Grasshoppers had descended over the same farms like a biblical plague, picking crops to shreds and ruining any hope of a cash harvest. At the same time banks were going under and women and children standing in breadlines, and young men like Owen Cady and Paul Brickhill were willing to throw in their lots with the Solomon Wades of the world because they saw no other way to climb out of the trenches in which they lay.

It would pass, though. Arlen believed that, had to believe it. You kept your head down and you weathered what this life brought you and believed it would pass. He looked at Rebecca now and thought, You are all that I need. She was, too. Through all the hell that might come to pass in a few short hours, he had no qualms about staying around to endure it. Just the chance to be with her, it was enough. It was something the likes of which he’d never hoped to find.

A memory caught him then, Paul in the darkness on the dock while Tolliver and Tate McGrath prepared to kill in this very room. Paul saying, I feel like I’ve been traveling through time to get here, Arlen, just to find her.

Damn it, why did it have to afflict them both? Why couldn’t love be parceled out evenly and easily?

It was then that a sheet of white light filled the room, and for a moment nobody reacted because they’d grown so used to the steady, brilliant flashes of lightning. This one held, though, and Arlen turned and looked through the window, and, as a snarling, raging clatter of thunder shook the sky, he saw Thomas Barrett’s delivery van parked at the top of the hill, its headlight beams cutting across the yard. The passenger door swung open, and Paul burst out and ran through the rain. Barrett gave the horn a little double tap and turned the van around and headed back up the road.

When Paul broke through the door and stood before them in a sopping mess, everyone stared at him in silence. He had a paper sack clutched to his chest.

“Some storm,” he said.

“Where in the hell you been?” Arlen said.

“Went up to the store, if it’s any of your business. Which it isn’t.”

“That store’s every bit of five miles away.”

“Felt about like that,” Paul said, flip and indifferent. “Once it commenced to storming, Mr. Barrett said he’d give me a ride back or I’d be waiting till morning. He thinks this one isn’t blowing off quick.”

“Come on over here and get dried off,” Rebecca said, rising and pulling a towel off the bar. “Maybe we should start a fire. It’s warm, but on a night like this it just might be-”

Paul had been crossing to her, and everyone stopped short when Arlen reached out and grabbed the paper sack from his hands.

“Hey!” Paul cried, and reached for it, but Arlen turned his shoulder and blocked the grab long enough to open the sack and see the contents. There were some penny candies and a few packs of cigarettes.

“Give me that,” Paul said, and this time Arlen let him take it. “What’s the matter with you? Got to steal everything from me, is that it?”

“I haven’t stolen a thing from you in the past,” Arlen said. “Never took a damn thing that was yours.”

Paul gave him cold eyes and didn’t answer.

“You don’t smoke cigarettes,” Arlen said.

“What?”

“You got cigarettes in that sack, smart guy. Why?”

“Because I wanted a few, that’s why.”

“I’ll say it again,” Arlen said, “you don’t smoke.”

Paul drew his shoulders back and looked Arlen in the eye. “They’re for Owen. I figured he’d appreciate them. You probably would have, too, but I’m not of a mind to give you anything.”

“Hey, thanks,” Owen said, and Arlen wanted to backhand the fool right through the window.

“So all you got is candy,” Arlen said. “You walked five miles up the road to fetch yourself some candy?”

“That’s right.”

“Arlen, what does it matter?” Rebecca asked softly, passing Paul the towel. He took to drying his face and neck, and Arlen looked at Rebecca in silence. He didn’t have an answer, really. All he knew was that he didn’t like this. It didn’t feel right, Paul taking a walk that long in this kind of heat just to get some damn candy.

“You happen across Solomon Wade in your travels?” he said.

“No. Didn’t happen across a soul but Mr. Barrett and his wife. What it matters to you, I have no idea. It’s none of your concern what I do.”

“How’d you pay for it?”

Paul stopped with the towel over one side of his face. “What?”

“This shit you went hiking for. Cigarettes and candy. How’d you pay for it? I was under the impression you were busted-ass broke.”

Paul switched the towel to the other side of his face and dried it slowly. He seemed to be thinking.

“Mr. Barrett let me have it on credit,” he said.

“Credit,” Arlen echoed. “Son, this is a Depression. That man don’t know you from Adam. Why in the hell’s he giving you anything on credit?”

“I told him I’d be coming into some money shortly,” Paul said. “Owen here set me up with a bit of work.”

“Let me fix us something to eat,” Rebecca said, nervous, bothered by the tension in the air. “We’ll all sit in here where it’s dry and have some food.”

Arlen and Paul held a long stare, and then Paul turned away and tossed the cigarettes to Owen.

“There.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. We still got our job tomorrow night?”

Owen looked at Arlen, uneasy, but nodded. “Yeah. We got our job.”

“Good,” Paul said. “I could use the money. No offense to you, Owen, but I’ve had my fill of this place.”

Arlen went to the bar and poured a drink but didn’t take a sip of it. He was watching Paul and remembering him the way he’d looked that day when he corrected Arlen’s mistake on the pitch of the roof at Flagg Mountain, the good-natured, deep-rooted interest he took in every joint and every hinge. The way he’d taken that generator apart and scattered its pieces over the porch and set to work putting it back together again without a doubt in his head, sure it could be done. He remembered those times, and the night they’d taken the boat out, and he looked at this thin young man with the permanent scowl who stood before him now and thought, I did this. I was only trying to help, but I did this.

“What are you staring at?” Paul said.

“Nothing,” Arlen said, voice soft. “Nothing at all.”

He took a drink, but he had no taste for it, and then he slid the glass away from him and went through the swinging door into the kitchen.

Rebecca had a slice of ham frying in a skillet on the stove, and she turned to him as if to speak but instead she just stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him and put her face to his neck. He wrapped his own around her, and they held each other in silence for a long time. Her face was warm on his neck, and he could feel her breathing and for some reason he had to close his eyes and hold that moment in darkness.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“For it all. This isn’t something you should be a part of. I wish I could-”

“Stop,” he said, voice gentle. “We’re going to handle this. All right? It’s not but a day left, Rebecca. By the time the sun goes down out there on the water tomorrow, you’ll be gone from this place. Going north, to Maine, just the way you hoped. I’ll see that it happens.”

He pushed her back and lifted her chin and kissed her. Soft and slow. When he broke the kiss, he said, “Is there a train that could be taken yet tonight?”

She frowned. “One more before the end of the night, but it’s an hour’s drive. What are you asking for?”

“I’d like to give Paul his share and put him on it.”

She stepped back and looked at him in surprise. “Already?”

He nodded. “I want him clear of this, Rebecca. Make no mistake-I intend to see it through just as we’ve planned, but I want him clear of it. He’s ready to leave this place. We’ve soured him on it, on us, on damn near everything. I can’t change that. But I can put money in his pocket and get him aboard a train and hope for the best for him.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and said, “I love you.”

All he could get out was “Yeah.” They both laughed then, and he took her close and said, “I love you, too. And I don’t give a damn what’s happened since I got here, or what’s left to come-I found my way to you. Any price that must be paid in exchange for that is a small one.”

She kissed him again, and this time he could feel a tear gliding off her skin and onto his own, and then she took the burlap sack with the five thousand dollars down from the shelf and handed it to him. He left her there in the kitchen and went for Paul.

43

PAUL WAS DRINKING WITH OWEN. Trying to engage him in some of the usual tales, asking about Dillinger and Handsome Harry Pierpont, the one they electrocuted up in Ohio, inquiring about them as if he thought Owen had ridden at their sides. Even Owen wasn’t having it tonight, though. He looked worn, and all he said was “Ah, those boys didn’t hardly spend any time in Florida at all. A few months when they was hiding out once, but that was all.”

Arlen said, “Paul?”

He turned and looked at Arlen with that usual expression of distaste, a glass of liquor in his hand. “What?”

“Give me a minute, would you? Step out on the porch.”

“I’m having a conversation.”

Arlen said, “Paul,” one more time, no change of tone at all. He got a sigh of annoyance and the slap of the glass smacking down hard on the table before the boy rose and followed him out onto the back porch. It was still raining, but the wind had shifted direction and lessened enough so that it didn’t spray under the porch roof and soak them. They stood out there in the dark, and Paul folded his arms across his chest and stared at Arlen.

“Whatever you got to say, it’s probably not worth the time. I don’t need to go through it again. I don’t need to hear your stories or your warnings or your-”

“Open that up and take a look inside,” Arlen said, passing him the sack. He watched as Paul took it warily, opened it, and went slack-jawed. He reached inside gingerly, as if he were going to frighten the money right out of the bag by moving sudden, and fanned his thumb over the edges of the bills.

“Where’d you get all this?”

“The same man you were hoping to earn it from.”

Paul looked up. “Wade?”

“That’s right. There’s five thousand dollars in that bag.”

“Five thousand-”

“And it’s yours,” Arlen said. “Provided you get your gear together right now and ride with me to the train station. You go wherever you like from there. I’m not going to tell you another thing, not going to give you another bit of advice. You don’t want to hear it, and I don’t deserve to say it. Not anymore. But regardless of what you think or what you believe, I want you to know this: you better get your ass out of this state, and fast.”

Paul was still staring at the bag.

“We got an agreement?” Arlen said.

“How’d you get this?”

“Don’t worry about that. It’s my concern. The money, though, is yours. And it’s enough to take you far from here and put you up for a time. Be smart with it, though. Use it to get yourself set in a way…” He stopped then and shook his head. “Hell, I just said I was done telling you what you ought to do, and here I go again. I’ll shut my mouth now. But you take that money and tuck it down in your bags and let’s go. You ready to do that?”

Paul nodded. He seemed to have gone pale at the sight of the money. When he swallowed, it looked like it took some effort.

“Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

Arlen hung back and sat with Owen while Paul got his bags together, moving slowly, as if his limbs had gone numb. Rebecca came back out of the kitchen and watched him ready his gear.

“You can’t even stay for a meal?” she said. She was speaking to Arlen.

He shook his head. “Faster we move, the better. Aren’t going to be trains going through if we let it get much later.”

“Long drive to the station, too,” she murmured. She’d already given him instructions on how to get there. With no train station left in Corridor County, it would take some time. Might be longer than an hour, with rain like this.

Paul straightened and looked around as if he had no idea what to say or do next. He knew there was something playing out in the room that he wasn’t privy to, but in the end he decided not to ask. He just said, “You all take care.”

Rebecca crossed the room and hugged him. He bristled for an instant, as if he wanted to resist, but then he returned the embrace, and Arlen saw him, for just an instant, close his eyes exactly as Arlen had done back in the kitchen.

“Take care,” Paul repeated, and then he stepped away.

They went outside and splashed through the yard and climbed into the truck. There was another band of storms passing over now, and the thunder was so loud and close that for a moment Arlen didn’t even realize the truck’s motor had caught. Once he had it in gear, he cast a backward glance at the Cypress House, the top half dark, the bottom lit, Rebecca’s silhouette in the window, watching them. He saw her lift a hand, and he lifted his own, though he knew she could not see it.

The road was a washout of gleaming silver rainwater, and the truck’s tires spun once in the wet mud and threatened to bog down before finding enough purchase to push ahead. It was the hardest rain Arlen had seen since the hurricane they’d come in with. Seemed fitting to take Paul out in the same weather.

Paul was quiet until they got to the paved road. Then he said, “You going to steal that money or earn it by working for him on some crooked thing?”

Arlen didn’t look at him, didn’t answer.

Paul said, “Arlen, if I’m traveling with those dollars in my pocket, I ought to know how they were gained.”

“You know damn well. They belong to Wade. You think they came to him honest?”

“But how did you get them?”

“Don’t trouble yourself none over that. Just take them and go on. You have an idea of where you might go?”

“Not really.”

“Could try that Carnegie school you’ve talked of,” Arlen said. “Don’t know how much money would be needed for such a thing, but I imagine that’s a hell of a start.”

“It is.” Paul’s tone had changed, the sharp edge dulling as they drove farther into the swamp woods. “Arlen, what are you going to do?”

He stayed silent, wondering whether any harm could come from the boy knowing the plan. If they caught up with him, Tate McGrath or somebody else entirely, would ignorance help? Arlen didn’t figure it would. Not at that point.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said finally. They’d just passed their first car, the road fading back to darkness as soon as its headlights went by.

“Wade?”

Arlen nodded.

“Are you crazy? What do you mean, you’re going to kill him?”

Rebecca had said it was an hour’s drive to the train station. That was time to tell it. Arlen figured it might as well be told.

“You remember the day McGrath came at you with that chair leg?”

“Of course.”

“You remember the box Wade brought with them that day?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Arlen said. “Let me tell you what was inside. It’s as good a place to start as any I know.”

They drove along through the darkness and the rain and Arlen explained it all, starting with the night he’d retrieved the box containing Walter Sorenson’s hands from the sea. He explained about Rebecca and Owen’s father and the threats that had been made to Rebecca while her brother was in prison.

“There’s plenty of evidence as to what happens when a man tries to run from Solomon Wade,” Arlen said. “More than enough evidence for me. I’m not going to leave him behind to chase her. I can’t.”

“When are you going to do it?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“That’s when the Cubans are coming in,” Arlen said. “It’ll have to be done then or he’ll miss his money. We’ll need that money to have a chance.”

Paul dropped his eyes to the bag on his lap. “How much is there? Total.”

“Ten.”

“You gave me half?”

“That’s right.”

“Why? I’m not doing a thing. You’re giving me half that money and setting me out a day before anything’s to happen?”

“Hell, yes, I am,” Arlen said. “I don’t give a damn what you care to believe, because I know that it is true: you’ll die at that man’s hand if you stay in this place. All your words of argument aren’t going to change the truth of it.”

But Paul didn’t offer any words of argument. Instead he said, “Rebecca told me about your father,” in a soft voice.

“I heard that.”

Paul looked up. “Is it true?”

“It’s true.”

“She told me about France, too,” he said. “The things you claimed you saw…”

“Claimed” you saw. Still not believing.

“Tell you something about that,” Arlen said. “The worst things I saw there were the real ones. A man with smoke-eyes, he could still be saved, time to time. The others, though? The fields I walked through stacked with corpses? Those men’s chances had passed, Paul.”

Paul didn’t say anything. Arlen knew he didn’t believe it, and that was fine. He’d long ago lost the hope of convincing people to believe him. Some might for a time-Paul had once, Rebecca seemed to now-but most wouldn’t or couldn’t, and he’d made peace with the realization that all he could do was provide help. Tonight was more of that.

You’re going to need to believe.

His father’s words floated across the years to him now, the sight of his bearded face and those eyes that had looked so soft, so gentle in the moment that he’d uttered his final sentences to his son.

He told you that, Arlen thought, and you’ve spent the rest of your days trying to convince others to believe you, but you still won’t believe him. That’s what Rebecca doesn’t understand. How come you can’t believe him?

It was a question with an easy answer, but Arlen had avoided facing that answer head-on for years and would continue to do so. If his father had been telling the truth, then his death out there in the cold wind and the dust, well, it had been at Arlen’s hand every bit as much as Edwin Main’s. Arlen had gone and brought that death home, had sought it out and betrayed his own family and…

He was crazy, Arlen thought with so much vehemence that he nearly said it aloud. What he believed, no man should. You can’t speak to the dead. Those who try are fools, and those who claim to… well, they’re a shade darker.

They came to a crossroads unmarked by signs, but Rebecca had described it and he knew to turn left, north. They were probably twenty minutes from the next town now, from the train station. The rain was slackening, but the lightning had picked back up, illuminating the countryside in ghoulish flashes.

“You might put some of those dollars in an envelope and send them to your mother,” Arlen said. “If you need it all, fine. But she was used to your CCC checks. Don’t forget your family, no matter how they seem to you.”

Paul didn’t answer. Arlen knew his days of influence with the young man were past, but he couldn’t help himself, not now that more cars were passing and the woods were broken here and there by clusters of homes, making it clear that they were nearing the town. This would be the last he’d see of him, and he couldn’t hold back from offering advice even when he knew he should not.

“You keep a sharp eye out for a time to come,” he said. “I expect you’ll never be looked for, never be connected to what we do. But there’s a chance, and you better be ready for it. Get far from this place and live quiet for a time. Keep your head up and your eyes open. If they send somebody, you’ll need help, and you’ll need it fast. I hope they don’t send anybody.”

His voice went a little unsteady at that, and he cleared his throat loudly and blinked at another flash of lightning.

“I want you to know,” he said, “I didn’t plan on her.”

Paul turned and looked at him, didn’t say a word.

“It wasn’t a decision I made,” Arlen said. “What I did to get you to leave was, and maybe it was the wrong one. She always thought it was. I just thought… I needed you to leave. But I didn’t plan on her. All right?”

Silence.

Arlen nodded as if Paul had offered some response, and drove on through the dark.

“We’ve got the money,” Paul said eventually. “Maybe you left half of it back there, but I’ve got five thousand in this bag. We could get on a train together. Isn’t any reason you’d have to kill him. We could head out together, same as we came in.”

All the bristle that he’d carried since his return was gone. He sounded, once again, like the boy Arlen had met at Flagg Mountain, the boy who’d conceived of the concrete chute that saved them who knew how much money and time. It made something in Arlen loosen and sag a little, knowing that the old Paul was still in there. It was a hell of a thing, the way a simple change in tone of voice could hit you. The idea that he’d be willing to leave this place at Arlen’s side, after everything that had happened, stilled the words in Arlen’s throat.

“I appreciate that,” he said finally. It was an odd thing to say. Awkward, formal.

“But you won’t do it.”

“When I leave here,” Arlen said softly, “it’s going to be with her. It’ll have to be with her. I can’t go any other way.”

Paul went silent. Arlen thought again of the night they’d spent sleeping on the broken boards of the boathouse, the way the boy had told him he couldn’t leave her behind, and he felt hot shame spread throughout his body.

I can’t help it, he wanted to say. You’d think we’re supposed to be matched up one by one, and the matching would be easy. You’d know her for certain when you saw her, and she’d know you. That’s how easy it should be. It isn’t, though. It isn’t, and I’m sorry.

They’d crossed into the outskirts of the town now, and train tracks had appeared parallel to the road. Up ahead the lights of the station were visible. There was a locomotive spitting easy, gentle smoke from its stack. Warming, ready to take to the rails and head north. Last train for the night.

Paul said, “You can’t kill Solomon Wade tomorrow.”

“Don’t you worry on it,” Arlen said. “I’ll do what needs to be done. You just look out for yourself. I’m sorry for the way it’s come to pass, sorry for a hell of a lot of things, but-”

“No,” Paul said, shaking his head. “You can’t kill him tomorrow, Arlen. You’ll be jailed if you try. You’ll likely be jailed anyhow.”

“The least of my concerns is the law,” Arlen said. He was bringing the truck in close to the station, slowing. “The good sheriff of Corridor County is a threat, but not the jailing kind of threat.”

“It won’t be the sheriff,” Paul said. “It’ll be a team of treasury agents from Miami and Tampa.”

Arlen brought the truck to a stop as the train whistle blew. He turned and looked at Paul and didn’t speak. The boy’s face was pale.

“There will be two boats on the water and more than a dozen men on land, watching every step you take,” Paul said.

“What are you talking about?”

Paul lifted his head and met Arlen’s eyes. “I wanted to hurt you,” he said. “And her. How I wanted to hurt her.”

“What in the hell are you-”

“I didn’t come back because I had nowhere else to go,” Paul said. “I came back because I thought I could see you put in jail.”

44

THE TRAIN LEFT while he told it. They both watched it pull away and chug north, and neither of them commented.

He’d made it to Hillsborough County’s CCC camp. That part was true enough. The rest of it had been a lie-had he desired to stay on at the camp, he could have. And would have. At least until his third day there, when a pair of unfamiliar men in suits showed up with a visitor from Corridor County: Thomas Barrett.

“The shopkeep?” Arlen said.

“Yes. He’s been working with them for nearly a year.”

“Working with who?”

“Federal Bureau of Narcotics,” Paul said. “That’s what they told me at least. I guess they approached him because he was at odds with Tolliver.”

He surely was-had run against him for sheriff. Arlen thought back on the drive he’d made to the lumberyard with Barrett, and he could see it easy enough. If they’d wanted to enlist a local to help, Barrett made plenty of sense.

“At first all they wanted to do was talk to me,” Paul said. “Find out what I’d seen and heard. But I kept asking questions, said I wouldn’t tell them a thing unless I knew the situation, and once they told me…”

“You saw it was a chance to hurt us. Just like we’d hurt you.”

Paul didn’t say anything, but he nodded.

“Why in the hell haven’t they gone to Rebecca?” Arlen said. “She’d have helped.”

“Barrett doesn’t trust her. Said her father was close with Wade, and her brother was, too, and that she’d just come on down and fallen right in with them.”

She had done that. At least from an outsider’s view.

“It was her brother,” Arlen said. “Damn it, they were as good as holding him hostage even though he was in prison.”

“That’s not how the agents saw it,” Paul said. “What Barrett and the others told me was she’s as bad as any of them.”

“You actually believed it?”

Paul looked away. “Wanted to at least.”

“So what’s about to come down on us?” Arlen said. “What have you done?”

Paul winced at that, then said, “They’ll be watching tomorrow night for the boat coming in. Barrett already told them Wade wouldn’t be there himself. That he keeps his distance. So they’ll arrest everyone else and lock them up and push the charges hard, hoping they can get more information, more evidence.”

“You were to have been there,” Arlen said.

Paul nodded.

“You’d have watched us go off in handcuffs.”

Paul couldn’t look at him now, and Arlen gave a slow shake of his head and then cranked the window down and lit a cigarette. The rain was still falling but without the wind to push it, and the air was cooler now.

“I guess we had you pretty well soured if you could do a thing like that.”

“It’s why I told you,” Paul said softly, head down.

“You were mighty close to letting us run right into that hornet’s nest,” Arlen said. “Why didn’t you?”

Paul looked up at him. “Because you said you couldn’t leave her behind. Not even with all this. That made it… I don’t know. It meant something, that’s all. It meant something.”

Arlen nodded and smoked and thought. After a time he said, “When you hiked up the road today, you went to report in with Barrett.”

“Yes.”

“So they know exactly what the plan is. They know, and they’ll be watching.”

“Yes.”

“If we were to leave,” Arlen said, “all of us, leave tonight, there wouldn’t be anybody left for them to arrest but McGrath and the Cubans.”

“I suppose not.”

“But that wouldn’t give them much. Because the Cubans won’t come in without the light signal, and McGrath and his boys won’t be holding a damn thing that’s of value-no money, no dope.”

Paul didn’t answer.

“And then they’d all be looking for us,” Arlen said. “These government agents who are counting on you, for one. Solomon Wade, for another. By then he’ll know exactly what was set up, and he’ll know who did it.”

“So what do we do?” Paul said.

Arlen raised his eyebrows and blew smoke and held his hands up, palms raised. “That’s the question, Brickhill. And I’ll be damned if I have a good answer. We go ahead with what we had planned, we’ll all end the day in jail. We could go to Barrett and tell him we want to help. Or we could warn Wade of what’s about to commence, gain his trust, and hold the fight till another day.”

“They think Owen and Wade are awful close,” Paul said. “That’s why they held me off coming back as long as they did. They wanted Owen to be there. Wanted me to try and get in good with him.”

“They were close,” Arlen said, “until Owen found out Wade had been using him against Rebecca. Until he found out the son of a bitch had his father killed.”

“So what do we do?” Paul repeated.

Arlen smashed the cigarette out on the door frame and tossed it into the street and started the truck again.

“We go back,” he said. “And let everyone have their say.”

It was more a case of letting everyone have their silence than their say, though. When he showed up with Paul still in tow, Rebecca and Owen were surprised, to say the least. When he let the kid tell what he’d been helping to arrange, they went from surprised to stunned. Even Owen didn’t mouth off much. Just shook his head like he didn’t believe it and poured himself a glass of whiskey, which he let sit untouched.

“I swear,” he said, “it was an easier fix I had at Raiford.”

“From the sound of it,” Arlen said, “your return there can be arranged easily enough.”

Rebecca gave him a sharp look, and he shrugged. She got up from her chair and went to the window and stared out into the darkness as if the agents were already circling through the woods, watching. Hell, maybe they were.

“We can leave now,” she said. “We’ve got the money. We can leave now, and then they can all tangle together tomorrow and forget we ever existed.”

“I don’t reckon they’ll forget,” Arlen said. “Not a one of them, on either side. They’ll be at our heels by sundown. And when it comes to that, we’d best hope for the law to catch us first.”

“You go, then. You and Paul. You’ve done nothing wrong. This trouble belongs to no one but Cadys.”

Arlen said, “No.” Quiet but firm. She turned to look at him, and Owen did the same, and he looked from one to the other and shook his head.

“All right,” Owen said, “then what in the hell do you propose?”

He’d been thinking on that for the whole hour’s silent drive back from the train station. None of the options was appealing, but only one made any real sense to him.

“We’ve got to go to Barrett,” he said, “and offer to help.”

“According to Paul, we’re the ones he’s intending to arrest,” she said.

“That might be the case right now. But he’s not entirely ignorant-it’s Wade he’s really after. He thinks removing the two of you might help him get to Wade. We’ll have to convince him you don’t need to be jailed to do that. In fact, you’re a hell of a lot more help to him out of jail than in it.”

Rebecca looked at Owen, uncertain.

“I’ve helped them,” she said. “I’ve handled his money and allowed my property to be used for any number of horrible things, and I’ve not said a word.”

“Because you feared for your brother,” Arlen said.

“You understand that,” she said. “Will they?”

“I expect they might.”

“So then we end up working for them against him.”

“That’s right.”

She didn’t answer.

“You don’t think they’re good enough, do you?” Arlen said.

“They’re not,” Owen said. He’d been listening with a distant stare and that untouched glass of whiskey near his hand.

“You can’t say that for sure.”

“The hell I can’t. You know how long Solomon’s been running this part of the state? You don’t think the law’s taken some shots at him before this? Taken some shots at the Italians he’s in with down in Tampa, and at the boys in New Orleans? Shit, that’s all they do, take shots at men like that. And year after year some of them go under. Wade, though? Wade gets stronger.”

“Well, maybe,” Arlen said, “this is his year.”

They were all quiet again. The rain had finally ceased altogether, and the wind was flat and all that could be heard was the ticking of the mantelpiece clock and, very soft, the breakers out on the beach.

“He’ll listen,” Paul said.

They all turned to look at him.

“Barrett,” he said. “He’ll listen to you. He’ll understand.”

“You haven’t been around long enough to guess at who can be trusted and who can’t,” Owen said.

“I think I have. And I can tell you this: Arlen was right. Barrett and those that he’s working for, they want Solomon Wade. All you and Rebecca are to them is a chance to work toward him. They’d do most anything to arrest him, I think. The way Barrett told it to me, Wade’s near impossible to get at because of the way he isolates himself. Both by living in a place like this and by having people like…” He hesitated, then finished, “… people like you do his dirty work.”

“You know that’s true,” Arlen said. “That’s the way he runs his show, sure enough. And if they understand that much, then they ought to be able to believe what we have to say. Hell, they may have seen it before.”

Owen blew out a held breath and leaned over and picked up the whiskey glass for the first time, drank until it was half gone.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s give it hell, then.”

Arlen nodded. “We’ll go in the morning. First thing.”

“To Barrett?”

He nodded again.

Rebecca said, “Owen should wait. I’ll go alone.”

Arlen cocked his head and frowned. “I expect they’re going to want to talk with him, too. You can’t do his bidding for him.”

“I don’t intend to. But by tomorrow, the police might not be the only ones watching. The two of us go into Barrett’s store and stay there long enough, or go off to wherever he’ll take us next, we’ll be seen. And on a day like tomorrow, that’s not something we want. Not all of us. Wade’s placed his trust in Owen, and he knows that I won’t do anything to jeopardize my brother. So as long as Owen stays here, we’ll keep them at ease.”

Owen said, “She’s right,” but Arlen was already nodding.

“Okay,” he said. “But I’ll go with you. We’ll see Barrett together. First thing in the morning.”

“First thing in the morning,” she echoed, and with that Owen raised his glass and drained the rest of the whiskey. He didn’t say a word, but his face was the color of the stones that lined the fireplace behind him.

45

DAWN BROKE WITH A gorgeous crimson sunrise. No trace of the night’s rains remained, but all that red in the east was a warning sky. They ate a quiet breakfast as the sun cleared the treetops and filled the yard with warm light, and then Arlen said, “Well, we best be to it, don’t you think?”

Rebecca nodded. “You’ll both stay here?” she said to Owen and Paul.

“Sure,” Owen said. “Just another day.” But then he cleared his throat and said, without looking at her, “How are we fixed in the way of guns?”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Why on earth-”

“It’s a good question,” Arlen interrupted, “and a good idea. Leave him one of the pistols. We’ll take the other. There are rifles on the boat.”

She didn’t seem to like it, but she went upstairs and returned with the Smith & Wesson revolvers. Owen accepted one, and Arlen took the other.

“All right,” Arlen said. “Y’all keep a weather eye out till we’re back. Could be we’re coming back alone, could be with a few police.”

Owen said, “Best not do that.”

Arlen frowned. “I expect they’ll see it the other way.”

“Maybe so,” Owen said, “but anybody who sets foot on this property today will be seen. You make them aware of that.”

Rebecca said, “We should take the money with us.”

“Why?” Arlen asked.

“Show of good faith to Barrett. He’s not going to just believe us out of the good nature of his heart. We have to have something that backs up our story.”

“What if someone comes looking for the money?” Owen said. “What if Solomon sends Tolliver or Tate to check on me? What in the hell am I supposed to tell them?”

It wasn’t a bad point. Arlen thought about it, then said, “Okay, we leave half here, in that case Tolliver brought it down in. It doesn’t seem likely that they’ll actually count it. They trust you.”

He hoped.

There was nothing else to be said then, nothing else to be done except for Arlen and Rebecca to drive down the road and put this day in motion. Arlen turned to Paul, who looked up and met his eyes. He felt as if he should say something, offer some word of caution or advice, but none came to mind, so he settled for another nod, which Paul returned. Then he and Rebecca went out into the yard-Arlen tucking the pistol into his belt and guarding it with his arm, conscious of what Owen had said about watchers-and got into the truck. The golden light of the morning sun picked up Rebecca’s hair and made it shimmer as she sat behind the wheel and cast him an exhausted gaze.

“This will help?” she said. “Won’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. Then she started the truck and they were off.

They didn’t say much as they rode, but once, she reached out for his hand across the cab. Her jaw was set and her face calm. She had firm bracings within her, he knew. After watching her deal with the hurricane and Wade and the delivery of that damned cigar box, he knew that awfully well. They’d hold today, just as they’d held before. He wasn’t worried about her.

Owen was more of a question. He didn’t seem enamored with the plan, no doubt had a con’s natural disfavor of anything that involved cooperation with the law. So long as he stayed put at the inn and nobody came looking for him, though, there shouldn’t be trouble. Arlen wished Paul had left already, boarded that final train of the night, but after the revelation he’d shared just before its departure, that had hardly been an option.

The roads were empty. Arlen watched the mirrors for a following car but saw none. He tended to agree with Owen, though; McGrath and his sons were keeping an eye on the activity at the Cypress House.

The garage doors were up at Barrett’s service station, his day already begun. Rebecca parked in front, and they opened the door and saw the pretty Indian girl behind the counter again. The inside of the shop smelled of tobacco and molasses, already thick with humidity.

Barrett’s wife nodded a hello to them, but before Rebecca could say a word the door from the garage opened and Barrett stepped inside. He’d seen them come in, Arlen could tell that from the way he entered, and for just a second something flickered in his face, a quick look of unease. Then he folded it beneath one of those grins of his and said, “Mornin’. What has y’all up so early?”

“Is there someplace we could talk in private?” Rebecca said.

He frowned. “Something the matter?”

“Should anyone else happen by,” she said, “I doubt you’ll want this conversation overheard.”

He gave up the game right then. Arlen expected he’d drag it out a bit, but instead he just nodded like he’d been expecting this and said, “The boy talked.”

“Because he needed to,” Arlen said. “He might’ve saved some lives, Barrett. You got no idea what sort of operation you’re putting into action tonight.”

“No?” Barrett’s jaw worked, anger showing in his eyes, and then he said, “Okay, follow me.”

He walked across the warped floorboards and back through the door into the garage. His wife didn’t say a word as they passed, but she looked noticeably tense, her eyes on the road as if she expected to see someone at their heels already. Arlen cast a look back at her as he went through the door and saw that there was a small revolver on a shelf beneath the cash register.

Barrett tugged the overhead garage doors down, sealing them in the dank, musty room. He put a stool in front of Rebecca and then sat on a stack of tires by the far wall. Arlen stood.

“I could have y’all arrested right now,” Barrett said. “And maybe I still will. But I’ll hear it first.”

“It’s her story,” Arlen said, “so I’ll let her do the telling. But let’s make something clear at the start-you want Wade. Not Rebecca, not Owen, not McGrath. You’re after Wade and Tolliver.”

“I want to clean the trash out of this county, and I’ll do that one at a time if I need to.”

Arlen said, “Really?”

Barrett held his eyes for a long time and then said, “I want Wade.”

“Okay,” Arlen said. “Well, we’re the best chance you’ve got of getting him. And a damn sight less useful in jail than out.”

“I could reach a different conclusion.”

“You won’t,” Arlen said, and then he nodded to Rebecca. “Tell it.”

She told it. Started with her father and wound through the past six months and the threats that had been levied at her brother. When she got to the part about Wade delivering Sorenson’s hands, Barrett’s face darkened, and he said, “You let that pass? You took evidence and tossed it into the sea? That’s the level of cooperation you care to show?”

“Cooperation with whom?” she shot back. “Was I supposed to call Tolliver? All you were to me was another local. And, I thought, a friend. Back then I didn’t know you were waiting to lock me up.”

He scowled and put a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. “Go on.”

She went on. Up through Owen’s return and Paul’s last-minute disclosure. Then she showed him the bag with the five thousand dollars. Barrett accepted the money in the way Paul had-as if too harsh a touch would cause it to vanish. He studied the bills, and then he put them back into the bag and returned them to her.

“Stealing from Wade isn’t a real bright idea,” he said. “You been around here long enough to know that.”

“Well,” Arlen said, “you see, I intended to kill him. Today.”

Barrett stared at him.

“Yes,” Arlen said. “Believe it. We didn’t see any other way to get out of this. Now we’re hoping you’re the way.”

Barrett took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and blew out a long breath, then rubbed a hand over his face.

“There are fifteen agents coming in tonight,” he said. “Two boats on the water, five cars on the roads. We had it set.”

“What you’d have gotten,” Arlen said, “was Owen for money-handling, and the McGraths for dope-handling. Maybe you could have thrown something at Rebecca. I’m sure you would have. And, if your boys had been paying enough attention, you’d have had me for murder.”

Barrett looked at him in silence.

“You could run the operation tonight,” Arlen said, “and get the same things. Except don’t count on me to kill Wade now. It wouldn’t seem prudent.”

That actually raised a smile, however faint.

“We could still get the McGraths,” Barrett said. “If I can convince the boys from Tampa to trust you, then we’ll still come away with the McGraths.”

“Is that enough?” Arlen said.

“They’re damned dangerous men. And important to Wade.”

“But will they help you? Will they tell you anything that can help? I don’t see Tate McGrath rolling on Wade.”

Barrett’s silence confirmed that he didn’t see it either.

“You can help, though,” he said eventually. “Rebecca can help. You’ve got plenty to tell. And are Sorenson’s hands still around?”

“They are,” Rebecca said.

“Well, that’s something.”

“Is it?” Arlen said. “Seems to me he could lawyer his way out. You got two witnesses who say he brought them in. He’ll find at least one, McGrath, who will say that box was filled with chocolates when he dropped it off for Rebecca.”

“Yeah,” Barrett said softly.

“You’ve got to get him with something solid,” Arlen said. “Get him with his hand actually in the jar. And it doesn’t sound like he reaches in too often. Not with his own hand.”

“You’re saying we let it go off without a hitch?” Barrett said. “Let them bring in their dope and take it out in trucks, without saying a word? It ain’t going to happen. Trust me on that. The badges in Tampa aren’t going to let it happen.”

“Look,” Arlen said, “what it boils down to is this: without us, nothing happens tonight. You don’t get a damned thing, except for maybe the Cubans. Maybe. You don’t get anybody in Corridor County, that’s for sure. With us, you can get the McGraths. That leaves Wade, though, and it also leaves him knowing damn well who set him up. So what do we do then? Shake your hand and go on our way and wait for him to cut our throats?”

Barrett sighed and got to his feet, setting the cigarette down carefully on the edge of the tire.

“Let me call Tampa,” he said. “I’m not authorized to decide such a thing.”

He went back inside the shop, and they could hear him speaking in low tones to his wife. Then it went quiet. Arlen put his hand on Rebecca’s shoulder. She touched it briefly with her own but didn’t look at him.

They’d been in the garage with Barrett for maybe an hour, and already the morning sun had faded beneath gray clouds. It would rain again today. Barrett was gone for about twenty minutes before he stepped back inside. He closed the door and leaned against it and studied them.

“Tampa’s ready to grant you immunity,” he said, “provided you keep the exchange in motion tonight. If you derail it-if anything derails it-they’ll come at you with charges.”

“That’s a hell of a fair thing,” Arlen said. “More of tonight is out of our control than is in it.”

Barrett shrugged. “They aren’t impressed with your story.”

“Aren’t impressed with it?” Rebecca said. “They aren’t impressed with the idea that this man, this judge, murdered my father, murdered Walter Sorenson, threatened my brother, threatened me? They aren’t-”

Arlen put his hand on her shoulder again, and she stopped and shook her head, her mouth tight with anger.

“Look,” Barrett said, “I think it’s a square deal. All you’ve got to do is make sure things get off as they’re supposed to. That’s on your brother more than you. He’s the one running the show, right?”

Rebecca nodded.

“Well, make sure he runs it right,” Barrett said, “and then you’re good. You can watch in shock and surprise when the McGraths are arrested.”

“That’ll be awfully convincing,” Arlen said, “when they’re arrested and we’re not.”

“Oh, you will be.”

Rebecca said, “What?” but Arlen finally began to get it, and he nodded.

“This is how you remove us from Wade,” he said. “Anything else, and he smells the truth. If we all go down, he can’t be sure who the leak is.”

“That’s right. And you’ll be jailed out of county. You and the McGraths.”

“We’ll be jailed?” Rebecca said.

“Only on paper,” Barrett said. “It all works right, we’ll get you out of here and to someplace safe. But you’ve got to testify against him when it comes time.”

She looked at Arlen, and he turned his palms up. “I don’t like it either,” he said. “But I don’t see another way.”

Barrett nodded. “Your man’s right. There ain’t no other way. Not at this point.”

There’d been another way, and it was the way Arlen had been planning on until Paul’s disclosure. He wasn’t convinced yet that it hadn’t been a better plan either. A man like Wade was easier to kill than he was to convict.

“So we just go home now?” Rebecca said. “That’s the plan?”

“Not just yet,” Barrett said. “First we wait on Tampa. There are a few men coming up who’d like to meet you. I think they’ll have some paperwork.”

“And what will that say?”

“That you’re protected,” Barrett said, “provided tonight’s little game plays out like it was supposed to.”

46

THEY SAT AROUND THE GARAGE as the heat seared in and choked the air and Barrett continued to ask questions. The longer he went at it, the more Arlen thought that he would probably make a damned fine lawman. He played all the right notes. The harder his edge, the more he was bluffing you; the more casual he got, the more focused his interest. Rebecca answered everything he had for her. Told him details of her time at the Cypress House down to the last ounce of morphine. She hid nothing.

“Let me ask you something, Barrett,” Arlen said after nearly an hour had passed. “You didn’t so much as blink when Rebecca told you that she had Walt Sorenson’s hands in a cigar box.”

“Didn’t surprise me at all. Wade’s men have done worse than that.”

“Surely they have. But it doesn’t seem like you believed Sorenson died in that Auburn of his.”

Barrett didn’t answer.

“There was a body inside that car,” Arlen said. “Whose was it?”

Barrett studied him for a long moment, then said, “George McGrath. Tate’s oldest son.”

Arlen looked at Rebecca and saw dim recognition on her face.

“You knew him?” he said to her.

“I’ve seen him. He used to come around with Tate. Most of the time, in fact. Lately, it was just Tate. Except for the night…”

“When he brought the whole family,” Arlen said, thinking of the girl from Cassadaga who’d waited in Tolliver’s car with handcuffs around her wrists. “That’s why they all came, even the young ones. It was a family matter.”

He turned to Barrett. “Who killed George McGrath? Sorenson or David Franklin?”

“I couldn’t say, Wagner.”

“Bullshit.”

Barrett sighed. “Look, I don’t know. George McGrath was, like his daddy, muscle for Solomon Wade. A thug, a killer. When someone steals from Wade, the McGraths make them accountable. Walt Sorenson had been stealing from Wade. Skimming. We know that. The rest… we’re fairly certain of the rest.”

“Wade sent the McGrath boy,” Arlen said, “and Sorenson got the best of him. That’s how you see it.”

“That’s how I’m guessing it, yes. George McGrath disappeared a full day ahead of Sorenson. A body burned in Sorenson’s car, but it wasn’t Sorenson’s.”

“So Franklin hauled the body down there,” Arlen said. “And Rebecca, Paul, and I were all supposed to tell them it was Sorenson inside. That was his escape plan. Make them think he was dead, and make them uncertain of what had happened to the McGrath boy.”

“That’s how we figure it, yes. Problem was, they knew who they’d sent George to kill. That kept them from believing it was Sorenson inside the car. And Sorenson…” Barrett’s face went grim. “He needed them to believe that was him inside the car.”

Arlen sat in silence for a minute, trying to piece it together.

“He was out driving the countryside after he’d killed the boy?” he said. “Why in the hell would he have done that? Why’d he keep making his rounds?”

“Cash,” Barrett said simply. “When they went for him, he knew he’d have to run mighty far. He needed the money to do it. That last round of collections was to go right into his pockets. His, and Franklin’s.”

“You know all of this,” Arlen said, “and yet nobody’s been arrested. Nobody’s been-”

“There’s a powerful difference between what we know happened and what we can prove happened!” Barrett snapped. “Corridor County’s full of whispers and bare of witnesses.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to fix,” Rebecca said. “Isn’t it? They need a local man’s help.”

Barrett nodded. “They came to me almost a year ago. I was more than happy to help. Somebody round here has to.”

“Many people would,” Rebecca said, “if they weren’t so scared of the results. And I don’t know if they picked the right man for the job-you told them I was working with Wade, doing it happily. Some judge of character.”

“I didn’t know much about you,” he said evenly, “but I knew plenty about your daddy, Rebecca, and every bone in that man’s body ran crooked.”

She stared at him in furious silence. Arlen watched her eyes and thought, He’s right, and she knows it. It was her old man got them into this, and he did it with a grin on his face until he saw his son arrested. By then it was too late.

“It is not,” she said, “an inherent family trait.”

“I hope you’re right,” Barrett said.

The phone rang then, and a moment later Barrett’s wife called for him. He rose and went inside to take the call. He wasn’t gone long.

“That was Tampa,” he said. “It’s been decided that you’re to go back.”

“Go back?” Rebecca echoed. “I thought they wanted to see us.”

“That’s what they said. But the man in charge is down in Miami, a fella named Cooper, and he says it’s not worth the risk of having strangers up here until the show starts. He figures the longer you’re gone from your place, the more likely Wade gets edgy and calls it off. He doesn’t want it called off.”

It made a bit of sense, but it also left the group at the Cypress House operating on the promise of immunity granted by a shopkeep turned undercover agent. Barrett seemed to be a good man and a sharp operator, but his clout with the agency that had brought him in was minimal at best. Arlen said, “What about the papers, Barrett? The immunity?”

“You’ll have to take my word.”

Arlen shook his head. “I’d like some writing with that. No offense.”

Barrett said, “Ain’t going to be any writing, Wagner. So you’ll have to make a decision. Take my word, or don’t.”

Arlen looked at Rebecca, who gave him a nod, deferring to him. He didn’t like the situation, but he also didn’t know what else he could say.

“It better be worth something,” he said. “Your word.”

“It always has been, and always will be.”

Arlen nodded and got to his feet, and Rebecca followed. They stepped outside the store and into a thick breeze fragrant with the smell of coming rain.

“Just see that it goes off as planned,” Barrett said. “All you got to do is see that…”

His voice trailed off, and when Arlen looked up, he saw that Barrett was staring up the road. Tolliver’s sheriff’s car was approaching from the north. It went by slow, and Barrett lifted a hand, gave a friendly wave that wasn’t returned. The car carried on down the road and then turned left. Away from the jail. Toward Solomon Wade’s house.

“Just see that it goes off as planned,” Barrett said again, but his voice was softer now. “And watch your asses, hear?”

He went back inside without waiting for a response.

47

I DON’T LIKE IT,” Rebecca said as soon as they were in the truck again. “I don’t feel good about this, Arlen. Owen and Paul out on that boat… what if there’s trouble? What if people start shooting?”

“The way it was told, they’re going to wait until the orange crates have been unloaded before they move,” he said. “Owen and Paul should be back inside the inn by then, and we’ll all stick together and out of the way until whatever trouble there is dies down.”

She shook her head, unconvinced. The bagful of money was on the seat between them. Five thousand damn dollars, just sitting there. Arlen wondered how much it really meant to those nameless, faceless men in New Orleans who ran this whole show. He knew how much it would mean to most people in the world, but men like those? He really couldn’t figure.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t like it either. But what else can we do?”

She was quiet for a mile or two, then said, “He was right, you know.”

“Barrett? About what?”

“My father,” she said. “I don’t blame Barrett for looking at Owen and me the way he does. My father would have done anything for the right amount of money. He would have done just about anything.”

“Well, you’ve kept your brother from being the same,” Arlen said. “You see that, don’t you? You’ve shown him the truth, and he’s changed.”

“I hope so,” she said.

They drove west under a strange sky, dark clouds massed to the south and then split on an almost perfectly even line with clearer skies showing to the north. It was the way fronts often developed here, blowing in fast and shifting in ways that were tough for a native of the mountains like Arlen to follow. A few stray raindrops speckled the windshield, but the wind was puffing in unenthusiastic gusts, the storm front sliding away to the south this time, leaving them clear.

It seemed that way until they were a mile from the inn at least, and then the wind swung around fast and sudden and drove the clouds up over them, and the sun was hidden again and the path to the Cypress House was bathed in shadow. An armadillo waddled along the dirt road, indifferent to the truck that nearly ended its life. They broke out of the trees and the inn came into view, the sea beyond it caught between light and dark beneath the shifting cloud front. Owen’s convertible was parked where it had been when they left, and there was no sign of visitors. Everything looked calm.

“What time is it?” Rebecca asked.

“Nearly noon.”

“And the boat’s supposed to come in after dark. Around nine is what Owen said.”

“Right.”

“So we’ve got one afternoon left,” she said as they stepped out of the truck and faced the inn. “That may be it. That may truly be the last time I spend here.”

She stood on the hill and looked down at the inn as the sky continued to darken and the wind pushed the Cypress House sign back and forth on creaking hinges. A pair of gulls shrieked as they flew over the roof and then vanished down toward the beach, where a large wave blew in with a cloud of spray and an angry snarl.

“I won’t miss it,” she said. “Not one bit.”

“We’ll get you to Maine,” Arlen said. “I promise.”

She smiled faintly and took his hand and squeezed it, and then they walked down to the inn together. Up the front steps as the sign continued its rhythmic creaking, like a porch swing on a hazy summer afternoon in some sleepy, happy town, and then they were through the door and into the barroom. Arlen was carrying the money bag. The lights were off and it was dark with the sudden cloud cover, and Rebecca called, “Owen? Paul?” as they came in. Arlen closed the door behind them. The latch had just clicked when she screamed.

He’d had his eyes down, but now he raised them. Looked across the room and through the windows to the back porch. Saw Owen Cady’s body dangling in the wind, upside down, a wide dark gash torn through the center of his throat.

48

THERE WAS A ROPE knotted around his ankles, holding his feet together, secured to someplace on the roof. Probably the widow’s walk. His hair hung straight down, matted here and there with blood. There were also streaks of blood tracing his jaw and lining his face. Either the wound had been very fresh when they’d hung him up or they’d cut his throat with him in that position.

Rebecca screamed again, calling out his name this time in an anguished howl, and then she ran for the porch. Arlen grabbed at her arm and missed, and then he dropped the bag of cash and followed as she burst through the back door. The wind pushed her brother’s corpse closer to her before his weight swung it away again, a gentle pendulum motion. She said Owen, this time so soft it could scarcely be heard, and then dropped to her knees on the porch.

Arlen knelt and held her in silence, thinking, Paul, where is Paul? as the body swung back and forth and Owen Cady’s blood dried in his hair, an occasional drip still plinking off the floorboards, where a pool of it had gathered.

“Get inside,” he said, looking away from the corpse and out to the open beach and realizing for the first time how exposed they were. “Come on.”

She was unresponsive but didn’t fight him. He tugged her inside and let her go again, and she slumped back to the floor. He let her drop, looking around the room and seeing now what he hadn’t at first, when the body occupied all of his focus-a single chair turned over, a broken glass, two gashes in the front wall surely left by bullets.

The gun was still in the truck. He said, “Wait here, Rebecca, please wait,” and then ran across the room and through the door and out to the truck. When he had the gun in his hand, he closed the door and straightened slowly, took a long, panning gaze around him. It was a different sort of look than he’d given in many years, a battlefield survey, everything significant now and everything potentially threatening. All around the Cypress House, it was quiet but for the wind and the gulls and the creaking of the sign.

He shouted, “Paul!”

Silence.

“Paul!”

Silence.

“Damn them,” he said, and his voice shook a little now. “Damn them.”

He went back through the yard and inside the house. Rebecca was still on the floor, but now she’d lifted her hands to cover her face. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

“What?” Arlen said.

“Get him down,” she said, and this time he heard it through the sobs. “Please get him down.”

He laid his hand on her back. “Rebecca, we’ve got to get out of-”

“Get him down!”

He straightened. “All right.” Logic screamed at him to get her the hell away from here immediately, back to Barrett before the bastards who’d done this showed up again, but instinct told him they were gone now and wouldn’t be coming back. Where was Paul, though?

“We can’t leave him like that,” Rebecca said, not looking up, her voice heavy with tears. “We can’t.”

“I’m going for him,” Arlen said.

He stepped out onto the porch and gave the beach another one of those slow, panning stares, saw nothing but sand and shells and water. Just as it always had been. There were no indentations in the beach where a boat had been put in. Anyone coming from the water would have used the inlet.

He stepped over to the dangling corpse, taking care to avoid the blood, and dragged a porch chair behind him. Then he climbed onto it and took hold of Owen’s legs, making sure to keep his eyes on the shoes and not look down into the poor dead kid’s face.

I didn’t see it in you, he thought. I’m sorry. It wasn’t there this morning. Something changed after we left. I couldn’t have warned you. I wish I could have, but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.

He was thinking this as he took a firm hold of Owen’s legs and drew his pocketknife out. At the touch of the dead body, he thought of Paul Brickhill and said, in a whisper, “I’m coming for you, Paul. I don’t know if there’s time left, but I’m coming for you.”

He lifted the knife to the rope as he said the words, and when the response came he nearly sawed through his own finger.

There’s time.

Two words, spoken right in his ear, right inside his damned head. He stumbled and fell from the chair, upending it. The gun was on the porch rail, and he snatched it up.

Nothing but silence now. Those two words only a memory. He turned and pointed the gun in first one direction and then the other, still backing away from the body, and saw nothing, heard nothing.

It had been Owen’s voice.

“No,” Arlen said softly. “No, it wasn’t.”

But it was.

For a moment he was frozen there, but then the sound of Rebecca’s sobbing from inside shook him loose, and he stepped up to the body again. This time he didn’t touch Owen’s legs but reached higher on the rope. He grasped the lower portion of the cord with his left hand and sawed away above it with his right, and eventually the rope parted and the body was deadweight tugging his arm down. He let him go as gently as he could, laid him on the porch in his own blood. Then he picked up the gun again and went back inside.

“He’s down,” he said gently, kneeling beside Rebecca and lifting her face so he could see her eyes. He regretted it as soon as he got a glimpse of the terrible pain trapped in them. “He’s resting easy now, okay? But I’ve got to go have a look around. I’ve got to see…”

“Paul,” she said.

“Yeah.” He got to his feet again and flicked open the cylinder on the gun, checked the load, then spun it shut and walked to the stairs. It was very dark inside now, lights off and the clouds thickening, and he went up the steps in the gloom with the gun held out in front of him. Five rooms upstairs, five checks, five views of undisturbed furniture.

Back downstairs, he saw Rebecca crawling out onto the porch. He frowned, not wanting her to see that sight again. It was her brother, though, and if she was going to insist on seeing him, he wouldn’t stop her. He followed her onto the porch and pressed the gun into her hand and said, “Here. Use it if anyone comes. I’m going down to check the boathouse for Paul. Then we have to leave.”

She didn’t answer. He dropped her hand and she held on to the gun and stared out at the ocean. He watched for a few seconds and then told himself that there was nothing to be done for her right now, left the porch and jogged down to the boathouse.

It was incomplete, no roof on it yet, the smell of sawdust mingling with the brine of the sea and decaying fish. He checked the boathouse and walked the length of the dock and stared into the water and saw nothing. The boat was where it had been. He looked at it for a minute, hesitating. He didn’t want to take the time to go out to it, but he remembered that it was where Rebecca’s father had been left six months earlier, and maybe the act had been repeated with Paul.

He dragged the rowboat into the water, splashing out in a hurry, thinking that they’d been here for far too long already, and then he rowed out to the fishing boat and climbed aboard. Empty. Before he left he took the two rifles from the gun rack and tossed them down into the boat. They were loaded, but he didn’t see any additional shells and couldn’t take the time for a thorough search. When he reached the beach again, he carried a rifle in each hand as he jogged up the path to the Cypress House. Even the gulls were gone now; nothing could be heard but the waves. Any trace of that clear sky had vanished.

When he got back to the porch, he saw she was standing and was glad of that until she turned to him and said, “Why didn’t you know?”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to know!” she shouted, her face streaked with tears but her blue eyes alight with anger. “You’re supposed to see it coming! To be able to warn, to be able to stop it, why couldn’t you stop it!”

She’d rushed toward him with her hands raised as if she were going to strike him but fell into him instead and began to sob.

“Why couldn’t you stop it?”

“I didn’t see anything,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Rebecca. There was nothing there this morning. Something changed. Whatever happened… whoever came for him… they weren’t coming when we left this morning. Death wasn’t close to him then.”

The truth of that caught him, and he realized what it meant.

Someone had told Wade recently. Had they been coming to kill this morning, he should have been able to look into Owen’s eyes and see the promise of death there. But he hadn’t, and he thought now of the long delay Barrett’s federal contact had put them through, all of them sitting around the garage waiting for an arrival that never came, and understood the source of the leak. It wasn’t Barrett; it was someone in Tampa or Miami. The man who’d sent them back. What was his name? Cooper.

Rebecca was still crying against his chest and he wanted to hold her, but he had a rifle in each hand.

“Find out who did it,” she said.

For a moment he didn’t respond, just stood there numbly. Then he dropped the rifles and wrapped his arms around her and said, “I will. I promise. But right now we need to-”

“No,” she said, her lips moving against his neck, which was now wet with her tears, “find out now. Talk to him.”

“Rebecca… what are you-”

“You can speak to him,” she cried, pushing away from Arlen to look into his eyes. “You know you can, you can do it just like your father did.”

He shook his head, reaching for her again, but she stepped away.

“That’s not real,” he said. “I’m sorry, but that isn’t real, it can’t be done.”

“Yes, it can!” she shouted.

He wanted to argue, but those two words-There’s time-were trapped in his brain and with them the certainty that it was true, always had been true, his father’s gift was real and it was also his own.

“Owen’s dead,” he said in an unsteady voice. “He’s gone.”

“I know that. But you can hear him.”

She began to cry again then, and he held her for a while. He did not let her go on long, though. There wasn’t time. He pushed her back from him and said, “Come on.”

“What about Owen?”

“There’s nothing to be done.”

“We can’t just leave him here. We can’t-”

“I’ll see to him,” he said. “But you’re leaving.”

She shook her head, and he said, “Yes. You’re leaving. You have to.”

He took her unresponsive fingers and tugged her down off the porch and into the inn, retrieved the bag of money from where it lay on the floor, and then led her all the way up to the truck. She wore a face he’d seen often during the war after the shells had stopped, and he knew that her mind was not entirely her own anymore. That would pass, and when it did the real agony would sink its teeth into her. For now, though, it was better that she be this way.

He opened the door to the truck and helped her inside. She didn’t say a word, just followed his guidance, and then, when she was behind the wheel, turned and looked at him with questioning eyes, as if she didn’t understand.

“I’ve got to go for him,” Arlen said. “For Paul. I can’t leave him behind.”

“Don’t make me go on alone,” she said, and for a moment his resolve nearly evaporated. He looked back at the house and the dark clouds blowing in off the sea and thought of Paul Brickhill and shook his head.

“I can’t leave him.”

“I’ll stay with you.”

“No.” He leaned into the truck and put the bag in her lap. Then he took her face gently in his hands and forced her to meet his eyes. “You’ve got five thousand dollars. You can get to Maine easy. But drive fast and drive steady. You need to get far from here.”

“What? I can’t-”

“What’s left here?” he said. “They’ve killed him, Rebecca. Your brother is gone. They’ll come for you next.”

She was silent, her lips parted, eyes hazy.

“Was there a town in Maine?” he said.

“What?”

“Where you wanted to go. Was there a specific town?”

She blinked at him, as if she no longer recognized his face, and then said, “Camden. I wanted to go to Camden.”

“Then go,” he said. “Find your way there. Drive careful and keep the pistol at hand. If anyone tries to stop you, use it.”

“I can’t. Don’t send me on my own. I can’t go alone.”

“It’s not done yet,” he said. “When it is, I’ll join you. But I’m not running out on that boy, Rebecca. He’s with them. With the same men who murdered Owen.”

At the sound of her brother’s name, she winced.

“I’ll go to Barrett,” she said.

“It was going to Barrett,” Arlen said, “that led to this. Maybe it wasn’t him directly, but it was damn sure the men he’s working with. You can’t go to him. You need to leave, and you need to leave now.”

She didn’t answer.

“Drive north,” Arlen said, and then he stepped back from her. “I’ll find you. I’ll catch up soon enough.”

“Arlen, no.”

But he’d closed the door, and now he held it shut and looked through the window and into her eyes and said, “Rebecca, you have to go.”

She was silent, staring at him through the glass. He said, “I’ll settle up for him. Believe that. I’ll put an end to it. To them. Then I will find you.”

She started the engine. He let go of the door and stepped back and lifted his hand in a parting wave. Then he turned and walked down to the house and her brother’s body to make good on his promise.

49

BY THE TIME the sound of the truck’s engine was gone, he stood above the corpse as a freshening sea breeze pushed the salt smell toward him and rustled the portions of Owen’s blond hair that were not held down by dried blood.

“All right,” Arlen said in a whisper, his throat thick with tension. “Let’s give it a try.”

He’d merely had to touch Owen’s legs the first time. He could try that much again.

He knelt on the porch beside the body and reached out and laid his right hand against Owen Cady’s calf. He felt no warmth through the pant leg. Just stiff, unresponsive flesh.

Let me hear you again, he thought. Speak again. Let’s see if I can hear it.

He heard nothing, felt nothing.

All right, speak aloud, then. He wet his lips and said, very softly, “Owen?”

Nothing. This was the height of insanity, so damned foolish it was-

You’re going to need to try harder.

It was Owen’s voice again, reaching Arlen like a piece of ice laid gently on the back of his neck. He sat there on the porch with his hand on the boy’s leg and didn’t move, didn’t speak.

“What do you mean, try harder?” he said finally. His voice was a whisper.

I’m farther from you now.

Arlen took his hand away and sat back on his heels and wiped his hand over his forehead. It came back slick with cold sweat. He had an idea. Or a memory, really. He moved forward, laid a hand on each of Owen’s shoulders, and looked down into his face. The gray, blood-streaked flesh showed nothing. He hesitated for a moment and then reached out and, very gently, used his thumbs to lift Owen’s eyelids. They rose just a touch, a trace of blue showing, and at the sight Arlen’s chest tightened, making the simple act of breathing difficult. He forced himself to look into the eyes, his hands still on Owen’s shoulders, and then he spoke again. A little louder this time, a little more forceful. As if he believed.

“All right,” he said. “I’m trying. Come back to me, damn it. Come back.”

I’m here.

It was beyond eerie, that voice. Beyond anything Arlen had ever heard or even imagined. It floated up from within his own brain, but it was so clear, the voice so recognizable. His mouth was dry and his words croaked. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Tell me,” he said, and the familiar old phrase sent an electric shiver over his skin. “Tell me what happened.”

They knew.

“Knew what?” he said. “That we were setting them up?”

Yes.

The wind gusted hard and with a strange touch of cool to it as a loud wave broke on the beach, and Arlen wanted nothing more than to remove his hands and get the hell off this porch, join Rebecca and drive and drive until they were far from this terrible place. He took a moment to will the urge down, and then he asked his next question.

“Who did it? Who came for you?”

He didn’t get a response this time. It felt as if a whisper slid through his brain, but it came too quick and too soft, and then he saw that Owen’s eyelids had fallen shut again, and he reached out and opened them. Peeled them back farther this time, saw more of the blue, felt something cold and sickly melt through his stomach at the sight.

“Who came for you?” he asked again.

McGraths. Tate and one of his sons. They came up the inlet by boat, and Tolliver came in by car. I went out to talk to Tolliver. While I was doing that, the McGraths snuck around from the inlet. I heard Paul shout.

The voice stopped then, and Arlen squeezed the boy’s shoulders and said, “Tell me. Keep telling me.”

I pulled the gun and ran back. Tolliver drew his, but he didn’t shoot, he just chased me, and I came back inside and they had Paul and I fired twice. I didn’t hit anything. I had a bead on Tate, I was ready to kill him, but Tolliver got to me first. Tackled me. Then Tate was on me. I think Tolliver intended to take me alive, but I’d fired at Tate, and so when he came, he came with the knife.

The voice was fading, like a radio signal going steadily weaker, and Arlen leaned closer to the dead boy’s face and squeezed his shoulders.

“What happened to Paul?” he said. “Please tell me.”

They took him.

“Is he dead?” Arlen’s voice was louder now, but he couldn’t help it. The moment had taken on the feel of a fever dream. A sudden, terrible headache had sprung to life in his skull, and his face was bathed in cold sweat. The world was unsteady around him. It was hard, holding the line open. It was damn hard.

Not yet.

“Where is he?”

With the McGraths.

“Why haven’t they killed him?”

They need to find out who he talked to. Who’s involved. They’ll wait for Wade. He’ll want to be there for the questioning.

“Who told them?” Arlen said. “Was it Barrett?”

Don’t know.

The voice was so damn faint, so hard to hear. He squeezed Owen’s shoulders and realized he was now hanging directly over the body. A drop of sweat fell from his chin and onto the dead boy’s face.

“Tell me what to do,” he said. “Can he be saved?”

I don’t know. You have to get my sister away. They’ll come for her next. For you, and for her. They’ll come for you all. He won’t let anyone stand now. Not after this.

“She’s gone. I’ve sent her away. She’s driving north.”

Arlen’s breath was coming fast and ragged now. The physical toll was something he didn’t understand, but it was fierce, his body responding as if he were pushing through a long, arduous march. His muscles ached and his head throbbed and that chilled sweat ran from every pore.

Good, Owen said. She can’t stay here. Neither can you.

“But Paul…”

I don’t know. Maybe. There’s still time. But there’s also more death to come. More than mine. If you stay, death stays with you. I’m certain of it. Follow my sister. Go with her now, and go fast.

Arlen thought about that as the waves broke and the wind pushed off the Gulf in puffs and put a crisp skim over the pool of blood beneath him.

“Paul is with the McGraths?” he said.

Yes.

“And he is alive?”

Right now. But there’s so much death around him.

“Can you get me to them?” Arlen said. “Can you guide me?” He was speaking with his lips almost at the boy’s ear now, could smell the coppery scent of blood. Each time Owen spoke, the voice was fainter.

I can.

The headache flared with a sudden, unbearable agony, and he had to release his hold and lean away from the body. The pain relented then, but he was awash in perspiration and felt a trembling exhaustion through every muscle, an odd dizzy sensation on top of it all, as if he’d gone too long with too little air.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning forward and grasping the boy’s shoulders one more time. “I’m so sorry.”

I know. A whisper now, scarcely audible.

“I’ll set it right,” Arlen said. The wind rose in another sweeping gust and sprinkled a few raindrops across the porch, and suddenly he felt alone and was aware, for the first time in several minutes, that he was staring into a dead man’s eyes. The reality of that had just vanished for a time; he hadn’t been seeing much at all, really, just hearing it. It was like entering a trance, but now something had pushed him away from it, back into reality.

“You’re slipping from me,” he said.

I can’t hold here long, Owen Cady’s voice whispered from somewhere outside of time and place. You don’t know how to keep me here.

“I’m trying.”

Yes. But you can’t do it yet.

So soft. Almost gone. Arlen said, “You take care. Wherever it is you’re bound, ride easy.”

That was all. Arlen could feel it when he left. The sweating stopped, dried quickly on his skin, and the sounds of the real world returned, the calls of the gulls and the rustle of the palm fronds and the creak of the shifting house.

His father could hold the dead with him longer. Could find them easier. How had he done it?

You could have asked him, Arlen thought, but you didn’t. You refused to believe a word of his tales, and now what guidance you might have had is gone. You’ve got his parting words-an instruction that you have to believe, and a promise that love lingers. That’s all. You’d best make it enough.

Paul was still alive. Temporarily at least. They’d taken him, but they’d taken him alive. He might still die today. But if Paul went, Arlen would see that he didn’t go alone.

He straightened up from the body. He didn’t want to leave Owen here untended but saw no other choice. He went inside the inn, thinking he’d fetch a blanket and cover him with it. The smallest of token gestures, but it was something. He had taken maybe ten steps through the dark room before he glanced at his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar and came to a stop.

The man looking back at him from the glass was a skeleton. He stared at it, motionless, and then he slowly lifted his hand to test the image. The man in the mirror moved with him, bone fingers fluttering in the glass. Arlen wet lips that had suddenly gone dry, and when he did it, the man in the mirror flicked a black tongue out and ran it over bare, unprotected teeth.

If you stay, death stays with you, Owen had said. I’m certain of it.

He turned from the mirror and looked out the window, to the drive from where Rebecca had left not long ago.

Follow my sister, Owen had told him.

But he’d also said that Paul was still alive.

Arlen kept his eyes away from the mirrors as he crossed the room and found the keys for the convertible. Kept his eyes away from the mirrors as he went upstairs and retrieved a blanket. Kept his eyes away from the mirrors when he came back down and went outside. He knelt at Owen’s side and closed his eyelids one final time, then draped the blanket over him and wrapped it so that the wind would not tug it free. When he was finished, he rose and gathered both rifles and looked them over. Springfield M1903 model. Twin guns. Rebecca and Owen’s father had probably purchased a pair of them at the same time he’d bought the two pistols. They were good weapons. They’d ended plenty of lives over the years. Such was the standard of good weapons.

He tugged open the bolts and made sure each rifle was already loaded with five.30-caliber shells. The guns could bury those bullets a foot deep into the trunk of a pine tree from six hundred yards away. The last time Arlen had held one, it had a bayonet fixed to the barrel.

He slammed the bolts closed and hefted a rifle in each hand and gave a final look down at the covered corpse near his feet. Then he walked off the porch and around the house and out to the convertible. The clouds were dark and ponderous overhead, but no rain fell. He laid the guns in the backseat and got behind the wheel and started the engine. It was a powerful motor, would be a fast car. He didn’t know where he was going, but Owen had said he could guide him, and he believed that. He saw no reason for a dead man to lie.

Before he put the car into gear, he moved his eyes to the rearview mirror. The light was strange and shifting under the clouds, but his eyes looked like they had a skim of frost over them. He took a matchbook from his pocket and lit a match and held it up to his face, leaned closer to the mirror.

His eyes were filled with white smoke. It drifted out of the sockets and mingled with the smoke from the match and swirled up into the sky and the storm clouds above. He took a long look at his own eyes, and then he blew out the match and dropped the car into gear and pressed firmly on the gas.