“Reed.”
“How angry?”
Ben wet his lips and looked back at his store, and in one sweeping gaze took in the rest of the town. “I shoulda done something… shoulda made those Nole bigwigs pay… something,”
“There’s a lot more I didn’t do, either. A lot more.”
“I don’t want you back there, Reed! Now listen to me… you and I, we can go join Martha and the kids, wait just a little while, and then I’ll go back up there with you.”
“There were a lot of things that didn’t get done. And those things aren’t going to wait.”
Ben looked at the boy, suddenly overwhelmed with love. And pride. And fear. He might lose him; after all this time… he might lose him again. He turned his head, looking up at Big Andy so Reed couldn’t see his tears. He was dizzy for a moment; it looked as if the mountain were leaning forward.
But it was just the shadows spreading out from the trees, the sun dropping unusually fast today, it seemed.
“It’s getting dark, son.”
Hector Pierce gasped once on his bed, shuddering like a beached fish on the pale, shiny sheets. Joe Manors listened from a chair at the foot of the bed. For hours he had been waiting rather self-righteously for some explanation from the old man, and he had received none.
Hector coughed and sat bolt upright in bed, his eyes bulging, his head turned slightly toward the window as if he was listening for something in the distance.
“You’re not going nowhere,” Joe said, walking over to the side of the bed and tucking in the sheets.
The old man looked at him then, clutching the front of the miner’s shirt, still smudged with coal, pulling Joe down to ear level. The pressure on his collar began to choke Joe. In a panic he struggled with the old man’s clenched hands, but for some reason he was unable to break the hold.
“That boy… he might drown… maybe get eat by them terrible, terrible… teeth…” the old man gasped into his ear.
Joe broke the grip and backed away sputtering.
“What boy, you old fool? Ain’t no boy ‘round here!”
“Why that… Reed boy… the one what stayed in the woods…”
“Old fool…” Joe sat down on the edge of the bed and reached for his bottle.
Chapter 29
“We all owe the dead something, Reed. Not just you.”
“The fact is,” Reed said quietly, “I’m not sure I owe them much of anything. I have things to find out for myself, that’s all.”
“Is it worth your life?”
Reed looked at him in surprise. “Life? I’m taking a rifle, uncle. I’ll watch out for the bear.”
“Look in the mirror.”
Reed laughed it off, but when he went up to his room to collect his gear, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the washbasin. At first he thought something had gone wrong with the mirror, something staining the glass.
Shadowy hollows under the eyes, as if his skin were retaining sleep there. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep, just when he needed it most. Dark veins in the whites of his eyes and a coppery cast to the pupils. A tight look to his lips, nostrils thinned out and protruding more than he thought they had before. Membranes beet red inside; he’d become so used to the difficulties in breathing he had stopped noticing them. A general pallor to the skin.
He looked very, very ill. It frightened him to look.
So he decided not to look anymore.
The phone was ringing downstairs. Once… three times… then it stopped.
Reed could hear his uncle moving to the foot of the stairs. “Reed… it’s your wife on the phone.”
Reed looked at himself in the mirror. He was so pale, he hardly recognized himself. His throat convulsed, and he was afraid he’d throw up then and there, and not be able to stop. “Tell her I’m not here right now.”
“But, Reed…”
“I’m not here, Ben!” Then Ben went away. Reed listened hard, and he could just barely hear the phone being returned to its cradle. A click. He closed his eyes, his body suddenly weaving.
Reed spent several hours driving around before heading out to the homesite to begin excavating the stairwell. He just couldn’t face it yet; maybe Ben was getting to him. Maybe he didn’t really know what he was getting into.
He wondered what Carol and the kids were doing right now. He wondered what she was telling Alicia. She might lie to Michael, but somehow Reed knew that Michael would see through the lie. He thought of his son: pale white skin and dark black hair. Piercing, burning eyes. So much like Reed. He always looked slightly feverish. Too intense for comfort.
He had badly wanted to talk to her. But he knew he couldn’t. Not now, maybe not ever. The sense of loss sneaked up on him, and threatened to overwhelm him. He hadn’t realized it before, but that sense of loss had been waiting for him ever since he arrived in Simpson Creeks.
He passed Charlie on the road, walking in the direction of the Nole mine. Reed honked and waved, but Charlie gave no sign that he’d even heard him. Later Reed saw Mr. Emmanuel climbing the hillside behind the mine and wondered why the man wasn’t at work.
He didn’t see Inez Pierce, who was already a good mile into the thickest section of the forest covering the Big Andy Mountain.
When Inez awoke that morning the sun wasn’t up yet, but it cast a silver glow on the trees outside from its hiding place beneath the horizon. She lay in bed for some time, staring at the trees, watching the ghostly illumination come into them, annoyed that she was awake and that daylight hadn’t yet come. The dim glow in the trees made the darkness in their boughs seem somehow more terrible, and she saw faces there: teeth and eyes, a knob on a branch becoming a dark nose damp with perspiration. She pulled herself out of bed, dressed, and climbed up to the attic. She had planned to clean it today anyway… might as well get an early start.
The bulb produced a yellow light that filled much of the room, so that the scene looked very much like a brittle, sepia-tinted photograph. At any moment she expected the walls to crumble, the trunks and discarded furniture and boxes of memorabilia to curl into fragile two-dimensionality. Cobwebs hung like decaying swatches of hair from exposed beams and broken roof sheathing. There was an oppressive mustiness in the air, and she wondered if maybe the roof had been leaking every rainy season, if the things stored in the attic had been soaked and then dried so thoroughly they began to break apart, only to be thoroughly wet again the next rainy spell. It was a terrible smell… as if the flood waters had indeed reached her house that day, leaving something damp and dead here when they finally receded.
She had no idea what had possessed her to clean the attic today, of all times, with everything going on around town, people dying and marriages like the Parkeys’ falling apart, and Doris still gallivanting around. Inez wasn’t even sure if Doris knew about her husband’s death—now there was a pleasant thought.
It was a long time since she’d been up here, maybe five years. Longer than that. The last time she had put something away here… why, it had been the day she put away all of Adam’s old letters to her. Adam had been one of her father’s hired hands—they’d dated, and she even thought she loved him. But he was from Four Corners and he eventually went back, and from there to the Navy. The letters stopped after a while. He’d always promised he’d come back someday and court her, see what might happen between them, but he never had. That had been… why, it couldn’t be… almost twenty years. She hadn’t been courted since then, except by her father’s illness, then by her brother’s craziness. They had taken all her time, all her memories.