Rose got up to give her girls a hug. They accepted it begrudgingly as Ariel had captured their attention once again.
“You girls mind what your Auntie Angelica says,” Rose said to the ears in the living room deaf to all sounds not from The Little Mermaid.
Angelica walked with Rose out to the car.
“Looks like the fog’s about burned off,” Rose said to Angelica at the car door, and reached her arms around her sister. Angelica closed her eyes and hugged Rose’s middle as she normally did when Rose draped her arms around Angelica’s neck. As she did, Angelica opened her eyes as...she felt something deep inside. She concentrated on the feeling and looked around to see if something around her was out of place or was wrong. It wasn’t. It was coming from within, from Rose. Angelica grew uneasy, but felt it must be silly. But still...something didn’t feel right to her.
She pushed back from Rose and looked into her eyes.
“Rose,” Angelica began, “be careful.”
Rose smiled. “Don’t worry, silly. We’ll be careful and we’ll see you in about ten days. Just have a great time with the girls!” Rose got in the car, buckled her seat belt and put the Honda Odyssey into reverse. She looked through the windshield at Angelica, waved goodbye, and left.
Angelica stood for a moment trying to put her finger on what she had felt. She turned to go in and get the girls, but had the most troubling feeling in her gut. A feeling she hadn’t had since the last time she saw her parents alive.
Chapter 19
Blake sat in his truck in the parking lot of The Federal, paralyzed by fear. All of his worst thoughts and fears raced round and round, crashing into one another inside his head like unruly kids in bumper cars.
Slow down. Think!
He tried to calm himself the way he had done in college football when opposing fans would stomp their feet and scream, trying to make so much noise that Blake would be forced into a mistake. A hurried snap, an errant throw. But Blake had mastered those fans, those sweaty palms, time and time again.
Think! What could happen? What are you afraid of? He asked himself silently. Money. Money was the first worry that popped into Blake’s head because it was what Nick had just mentioned. No...he had threatened it. Threatened to reveal that he had paid Blake a lot of money and that maybe someone should review Blake’s tax filings. Nick knew that Blake hadn’t reported that income, that he had cashed those checks instead of depositing them. There was no doubt that Nick had looked at Blake’s signature on the checks, that he had kept them stowed away just in case he ever needed them.
So? What would happen if Nick did report me? Blake thought.
Tax evasion! He felt his body shrivel like an overripe blueberry as he thought about the real trouble he could be in. He didn’t believe that Nick would really report him, but that wasn’t what bothered him. What scared him, what infuriated him, was that Nick knew! He flat out could report it, as he had made painfully clear. Nick could do that today, a year from now, or hold it over Blake’s head for years. The threat would just linger and follow Blake, keeping him awake at night, causing him to look over his shoulder in public. Causing him to dread going to the mailbox, to shudder anytime the phone rang. If Nick ever did report it then Blake would have to explain to an IRS criminal investigator what had happened to the money and why it wasn’t reported. At a minimum, they’d slap a seventy-five percent penalty on him and he’d have to pay that, plus interest, from the first day he should have filed his return. He knew this because he had curiously looked it up when he cashed Nick’s first five thousand dollar check a year and a half before. Since then he had cashed almost thirty of them and still had over ninety thousand dollars in cash tucked away at home that no one knew about, that he couldn’t invest or deposit because then there would be an audit trail. Cash that he couldn’t tell Angelica about, because how would he explain such an obscene amount of cash to her?
Sitting in the parking lot, Blake began adding and multiplying the best he could. If Nick ever reported him then Blake would have to explain, when all was said and done, about a quarter million dollars in income. Tax on that figure at thirty percent, would have been seventy-five grand. Add a seventy-five percent penalty to that and Blake figured that was well over a hundred thousand dollars due before the interest charges were added. But that’s if the IRS found out now. The penalties would become more severe with each passing day.
If Nick reported that, years from now I’d be screwed, Blake concluded. They’d take the house, everything. I might even get jail time! Shit! The thought of jail time reminded Blake of the visit from the sheriff. The sheriff’s vehicle trailing him out of Rabun County. Maybe that was just a coincidence, Blake thought. Maybe they weren’t trailing me.
He didn’t believe that. No, that would have been too much of a coincidence. A visit from the sheriff himself in the morning, and then less than a half hour later followed all the way out of the county by a separate patrol car? No, it couldn’t have been a coincidence. But what have I done?
Blake thought about it, momentarily relieved that, he believed, he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Even if them boys are found and they’re dead, heads ripped clean off their bodies, what does that have to do with me? Even if the sheriff finds out they may have done some work for me, I didn’t kill ’em. I didn’t send them off.
Blake started making his argument to the judge, to the jury, the way he had seen so many times on television.
Your Honor, what happened to those boys was tragic. An awful tragedy for the community to have to cope with. But, Your Honor, it was an accident. Those boys got lost in the woods on their own and couldn’t find their way out because they was stupid. My client, Blake Savage, is as distraught about this as the rest of the community, your honor, but he is guilty of no crime. So just leave him the fuck alone! Case dismissed!
Blake exhaled after listening to his lawyer’s well-reasoned defense. He didn’t believe that he had done anything. So why was the sheriff after him? What had the sheriff said?
Do you know anything? Do you know them boys?
That’s what the sheriff had asked and Blake had lied. That realization is what made the hair on Blake’s arms stand up, the fact that, just that morning he had lied not once, but twice to the sheriff. If the sheriff found out he had lied about that then he would be under suspicion for...Blake didn’t know. But for something else.
What if the sheriff gets to Terry? What if Terry blabs his mouth at a pool hall or something and the sheriff’s men pick up on it, question him and come back to me?
Blake gripped the steering wheel with both hands, ringing the leather like he was ringing out a chamois cloth.
Crap! Blake tensed as he realized that he had forgotten what he had done with Jesse’s jacket that he had found over a month before. Holy crap! How could I not know where I put that? THINK! Where is it?
He couldn’t remember. If they find that, can they link me to Jesse somehow? Is there a way to know that’s Jesse’s jacket? And it had blood on it! Crap! They’ll think I killed him!
Every thought led to a more sinister thought, like a series of opening doors leading Blake deeper into a snake pit. Maybe I should go look for them? Maybe they’re still alive, Blake thought hopefully, but his optimism faded quickly. It’s been six weeks or so. Ain’t no way them boys are alive in those woods. Ain’t no way.