He brightened. "After we talk with the judge. I want you there." Then the brightness drained from him. "Without a gun, and without you there, I'm afraid he'd kill me."
TWENTY-SIXTH
– ¦ Stephen told me that he'd found Blakey's rental car at the base of the trail up the front of the mountain. Stephen advised me, however, that the hood was up. I told him that it was an old trick and that I was sure the car would work. Besides, I knew I couldn't go back down to my car the way I'd come up, or even by walking along the perimeter road.
My face was pretty much numb, but my rib was killing me. Stephen cut my ankle bonds, and I found after a while that I could still walk, at least around the room.
I had some canned fruit cocktail and some dry chocolate candy with almonds. Stephen wanted to leave so we could arrive in Meade at approximately 9:30 P.M. I told him that in my condition I wanted to complete the downhill part of the trip while it was still bright outside. He agreed.
We started down. The ladder was the worst part of the ordeal. On the trail, I asked Stephen to help support me a few times, which gave me the opportunity to frisk him unobtrusively. He wasn't carrying any weapons.
We got to Blakey's car just at sunset. I lowered the hood. It started on the second try, and Stephen rewarded me with a smile.
I had to take the dirt road very slowly. Once on the paved road back to the Pike, we stopped at a supermarket. A sign in the window read "Closed all day tomorrow, July Fourth." Stephen went in to buy me some more bread. While he was gone, I did another quick search of his knapsack. Clean.
Stephen got back in, and we continued on to the Pike. I asked him if he thought the judge would be at home, since the next day was a holiday.
"Sure," he said. "He always gives a big speech after the parade. He'll be home tonight, practicing it like every year."
Then we talked about Valerie, camping, and the army. He knew a lot about the service, obviously from reading up on his Uncle Telford and what he had done. I judiciously avoided my visit to Kim Sturdevant's house.
I've never been much for kids. Even when Beth was alive, I was perfectly happy to borrow somebody else's kids when Beth and I acted as free babysitters for the afternoon. Then, having had my fill, I could return them at night, like short-term library books.
Stephen, though, was different. He truly appeared to be a gifted, sensitive boy. I tried to square that with how he had handled Blakey. I decided that his maturity and intelligence might have permitted him to shoot Blakey to save me, but I couldn't account for his disposing of Blakey's body in such a way as to gain leverage over me. He was, I suppose, one of the few individuals, child or adult, who interested me more the more I came to know him.
On the well-maintained roads, I began to forget about my rib. Over two hours later, as we turned in to the Kinnington driveway, however, the lurch onto gravel brought tears to my eyes.
I braked the car to a halt, but not because of my rib cage. There was a heavy double chain stretched across the driveway. The chain was anchored at both ends by short, stout metal poles.
"I don't remember this from my earlier visits," I said.
Stephen was staring at the chain. "That's all right. There's another way. In fact, it's a better way."
I sighed and gingerly shifted to face him. "Stephen, what kind of way is it?"
"It's a path, on the other side of the hill. It leads up to the back of the house."
"Can we drive the car up it?"
Stephen turned to me. "No, but it's shorter than climbing up this driveway." I frowned, but Stephen continued quickly, "No, really! It'll be a lot easier on you, I promise."
I nodded. He said, "Back the car up and keep going down the road like we were."
I followed his instructions. As we drove, I asked Stephen why rich people's driveways weren't paved.
He said the judge felt that paved driveways encouraged passersby to drive up them and that gravel driveways did not. Also, gravel drives were more genteel and therefore more in keeping with the "overall Kinnington environment." It must have been a great environment for the poor kid, I thought.
We slowed about half a mile after the driveway and took a right onto a narrower but still paved road. At Stephen's direction, I pulled to a stop near an old stone fence marker.
"This is it," he said.
I eased out of the driver's side, but Stephen stumbled in the dark and into some bushes as he was swinging open the door.
"You all right?" I whispered.
"Yes," he said. "Just a few scratches."
I could hear him scuffling back up to the car and gently closing the door. We left his knapsack in the car. The crickets were chirping madly, and there was a scent of freshly mowed grass in the warm, heavy night air.
"Come on over here," he said from the other side of the car. "The path is right here."
I moved around to the back of the car and fumbled with Blakey's keys at the trunk as my eyes tried to adjust to what night vision the moon would allow me.
"What are you doing?" asked Stephen.
"I'm checking for a flashlight. Look in the glove compartment, will you?"
"Don't bother. I searched the car at the ranger station. There's no flashlight."
I pocketed the keys and reminded myself that things would probably progress faster if I left the lead to the genius.
I was pretty stiff from our drive as we started up the path. The moon was just bright enough to allow me to see where I was walking. The path was only two feet wide, but some worn spots indicated it used to be wider. Stephen obviously was at ease climbing it, partly youth and partly familiarity.
"Did you clear this path yourself?" I whispered.
"No," he laughed softly, getting a few steps ahead, then waiting for me to catch up. "The men who cleared the underbrush and deadwood from the grounds here used this because it was easier than carrying the stuff up past the house to the driveway. My uncle and my father used to play on it as kids, too."
I stopped and looked around. Even in the weak light, I could see a lot of brush intruding on the trail and deadwood alongside of it. "Looks like it's been a while since the landscapers have been around."
Stephen's voice had no laughter in it now. "It has. The judge and Blakey do… did what there was to be done."
I looked at him quizzically, but in the moonlight I couldn't read his face and he probably couldn't see mine. "Your grandmother told me that you have over seventy-five acres here. Why the hell doesn't your father have someone come to take care of this stuff?"
Stephen turned up the trail. "You'll see," he said flatly as I began after him again.
I tried to go slowly, on the theory that the less frequently I had to breathe, the better my ribs would feel. After about five minutes of climbing, however, the throbbing pain was distracting me and increasing with every step.
I noticed I was focusing my eyes on the ground. Not just the path under me, but the yard or so in front of me as well, my head bobbing slightly. That snapped me back for a moment to Vietnam. When I was there, MP lieutenants were shuttled into infantry platoons if the infantry companies were short of young officers. I hated patrols in the jungle, or "the bush" as the troops called it, and I was terrified of land mines, which killed or maimed so unpredictably that they would have seemed whimsical in a less personal setting. The Cong would stretch thin wire across the trails as trips for the mines. You bobbed your head to vary the moonlight hitting the path ahead of you in the hope that a change in the angle of light and sight would pick up a stretched wire that the point man might have missed. It had been a long time since I had been reminded of that, and I hoped it would be a longer time before the memory surfaced again.