‘The one that’s tipping into the river?’
‘Maybe… yes.’
It was the tree Mac had started to approach when Clamp materi-alized out of the trees.
‘What was he doing exactly?’
‘Digging at its roots, I think. He was all muddy. The tree’s dead; it makes no sense.’
‘Powell? Is he honest?’
‘As the day is long,’ she answered. ‘He gets a bad rap.’
‘Call him, Jen. Tell him to get down to that tree. Tell him if he doesn’t hurry, it will all wash away.’
‘Mac, what are you talking-?’
There was no time. He hung up.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
They sped south in Maggie’s old Trans Am, Mac hunched down in the back, hoping to be unrecognizable under one of her tugged-down straw cowboy hats; April grim-faced, riding shotgun; Maggie driving, alternately shrieking and laughing at the craziness of it all. Only Maggie glanced at the state and insurance investigators and the one lone, indifferent Peering County deputy milling about as they sped past the ruin of the Bird’s Nest.
Jen, Powell and two state troopers had beaten them to the riverbank. Gray sky showed through a new gap along the water. The dead elm had toppled into the Royal but its base was still anchored to the bank by a last few large roots and a thick nest of smaller tendrils. The tree bucked wildly from the waters buffeting it. The fallen tree had created a dam, channeling water up onto the bank and washing away the dirt surrounding the uprooted base. The hole was growing. Soon the last of the roots and the nest of tendrils would rip free, sending the tree tumbling downriver.
‘There’s no time!’ Mac shouted above the rain. He dropped to his knees and began pawing into the hole the ripped out base had made.
‘What the hell, Mac?’ Jen asked, dropping to her knees beside him.
April, Maggie, Powell and the two state cops all came closer and bent down.
‘Clamp planted these trees! It’s why he’s so worried!’ Mac yelled, scooping mud backward like a dog gone berserk. His burned skin raged as his bandages clotted up with muck.
They all dropped down to claw the dirt from the hole, as the river raged up and swirled around their hands.
A fat root snapped, loud as a gunshot. The tree shuddered and swung out farther, bucking more wildly. Only two of the large roots now tethered the base of the elm to the bank.
They scooped and pulled at the sodden ground, all of them tight to each other. The base of the tree shuddered from the pounding water; the last of the roots were sure to snap soon.
The base of the tree lifted then, and the bigger of the last two roots rose up out of the water swirling around their hands. Maggie screamed and jerked back, pointing at something in the muddy water. It looked like the tiny top of a softball. And then the water surged, and it was gone.
Mac plunged both hands in after it. His bandages had loosened, entangling his fingers, numbing his feel. He clawed, desperate, to find the round top in the hole.
And then his fingers closed around something hard. He dug deeper, his fingers wide, straining for a better hold. It would not come free; it was entwined tight in the fibrous roots.
The last of the big roots snapped, and the great tree began sliding slowly into the river. The round, hard, slippery thing tore free from his hands, tugged away by the tendrils that still clung to the base of the tree. Mac stabbed after it, and found it again. Powell’s hands joined Mac’s. Together they clung to the small, round thing as the great tree slid away, dragging them onto their bellies and into the water as the tree finally freed itself from the bank. And then, incredibly, the thin fibrous roots tore away and gave it up. The tree pivoted, and with a huge last splash, bobbed downriver.
Both troopers had grabbed Mac and Powell by the ankles and tugged them back onto the bank. A trooper helped Mac to his feet. Powell, hugging the treasure to his chest, scrambled up on his own.
In that same instant, the rain stopped and the sun filtered down in ribbons from the tops of the trees.
‘Wait!’ Jen yelled, standing up. She grabbed her phone from her purse.
They all blinked up into the sudden brightness, and began laughing at the cheesy, B-movie symbolism of it. All but Maggie. She merely nodded, accepting. Jen snapped a cell phone picture, and another. It was a moment out of impossible fiction, a moment due a girl for more than thirty years.
Powell held the last of her tight to his ruined Burberry coat. She was caked with clay, her jaw hanging loose as though to scream. But she would not need to scream anymore. There could be no denying, not ever again.
‘You’ll be careful?’ Mac asked Powell.
‘Like I’m holding a bomb, which,’ he said, a grin splitting his muddy face, ‘I guess I am.’ He took off toward the road, flanked by a state trooper on each side.
Mac pulled off his flapping, sodden bandages and knelt to rinse his burned hands in the shallow pool where the elm had been. ‘What time is it?’ he called up to the women standing around him.
‘One forty-five,’ Maggie said.
April, who knew him best, laughed. ‘Your frickin’ suit trousers are ripped. Your white shirt is ruined, your tie is drenched. You’ve got mud everywhere. And your hair – your hair is burned off.’ She stopped, giggling too hard to say more.
Mac straightened up. Jen Jessup looked back and forth between him and April, not understanding. ‘Surely you’re not thinking…?’ she asked Mac.
But, of course, he was.
SEVENTY-NINE
‘I told you there’d be a crowd,’ Maggie said, slowing in the traffic clogging at the courthouse.
Tugging the straw cowboy hat down another inch, Mac raised up just enough to see out the rear side window. Two hundred people already sat on lawn chairs, and more were streaming in across the sodden lawn.
‘What’s that old line?’ April asked. ‘“Give the people what they want, and they’ll come?”’
‘Toasted mayor,’ Maggie said.
‘Damned right, toasted mayor,’ April agreed.
‘Check out Clamp and Jimmy Bales over by the sheriff’s door,’ Maggie said. ‘Jimmy’s pissed, and he’s busting Clamp’s chops. The mouse is roaring.’
‘He thinks Clamp set the fire,’ Mac said.
‘You can read minds?’ April asked.
‘Mac’s like Abigail Beech,’ Maggie said. ‘He sees things the rest of us can’t.’
‘Clamp’s not paying attention,’ April said. ‘He’s looking up at the sky, worrying it’s going to rain again.’
‘Or praying if it does it will wash away that leaning tree, and her head with it.’ Jen said. She sat in the back, beside Mac.
‘Too late for praying on that,’ Maggie said.
‘Luther’s gone?’ Mac asked Jen.
‘If he’s smart. I told him I was going to come back and shoot him. He tried telling me he had no choice but to hire that arsonist to get Clamp blamed and arrested. He said Clamp was going to kill him like he killed Horace Wiggins, since they were the only two left who knew about Clamp and Betty Jo Dean.’
‘Actually, there are four left, counting Doc and Randy White.’
‘I don’t suppose Doc Farmont will ever come back and by the way Randy seems to have vanished, I’m guessing Luther no longer counts him among the living,’ Jen said.
‘So Luther rationalized torching Mac as justifiable if it saved his own skin?’ April asked.
‘That’s the way thoughts get thunk sometimes, in Grand Point,’ Jen said.
‘Thunk is right,’ Maggie said.
‘Even pointing a gun, you couldn’t get Luther to say anything about Laurel?’ Mac asked.
‘Not a peep,’ Jen said. ‘I think he loved her.’
‘All sorts of folks must have loved her,’ Mac said, thinking of Ridl.
Maggie stopped at the entrance to the sheriff’s parking lot. ‘I’m not liking this, Mac,’ Jen said, looking around and seeing no tele-vision vans. ‘I expected at least that TV crew from the Bird’s Nest to keep Clamp from acting out.’