“I think I like the Devil better.”
“You shouldn’t say shit like that, man.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“No it’s not.”
Bernard shrugged. “At least with him you know where you stand.”
“Oh yeah?” I elbowed him, doing my best to lighten the mood. “You been talking to him lately?”
“Sometimes I think I hear him talking to me.”
“Shut up!” I chased away a chill with another forced laugh. “Fucking whacko.”
Bernard offered a glimmer of a smile and pushed himself to his feet. “It’s gonna storm.”
I stood up, brushed the dirt from the seat of my pants.
“You think when you die you get to see other people who died first?” he asked.
“I think you do, yeah.”
“How about animals?”
“Sure. God made them the same as people, why wouldn’t they have a soul too?”
Bernard thought about what I’d said for a moment, his eyes again focused on the fresh dirt in the field. “I think you’re right.”
“I’ll bet you anything Curly’s running around in Heaven right now, knocking over garbage cans and eating everybody’s trash.”
“Maybe we got it all backwards,” he said softly. “Maybe none of us really start living… until we’re dead.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
As we left, a gentle rain began to fall.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ventured to that part of the tracks, and now, all these years later I sat in my car across the street from the animal burial ground and watched the goings on up to and beyond the yellow police tape. On the seat next to me was the newspaper from the evening before, the headline of which described the grisly discovery a town worker had made in the early morning hours. A body—nude, mutilated and partially decomposed—had been left amidst the field containing the bones of generations of animals in a shallow grave that had given way with the change of season. The worker had noticed something he could not immediately identify protruding from the earth, and upon closer inspection, realized it was the foot and calf of a human being. The article and subsequent television reports revealed that the body was that of a young woman who had been dead for a number of weeks, but her identity had not yet been established. State police investigators, who were scouring the field and surrounding areas, had joined the local police force, and a flood of media people had converged on Potter’s Cove to cover the event.
There had only been three murders in town in the last two decades. A teenager had shot his former best friend with his father’s handgun. A woman who had endured years of physical abuse took a hammer to her husband’s head one night after he’d passed out drunk, and a man known by police to be a drug dealer had been executed gangland style in an alley downtown. Those had been the most infamous killings Potter’s Cove had ever seen, until now, and those cases were cut and dry, easy to close. This was different.
And it was only the beginning.
Although the body had already been removed, a throng of people still filled the surrounding streets, milling about behind the police tape like fans huddled near a stage door awaiting a glimpse of a rock star. At the far end of one group, standing near the curb, arms folded and brow knit, stood Donald. In the past two weeks I hadn’t seen much of him or Rick, had only spoken to them on the phone a few times, in fact, as being apart was somehow easier for the time being.
Even though a few capsules remained on the anti-anxiety prescription, I’d stopped taking the pills several days before, and my head felt clearer, my senses sharper. Toni had retreated into a distant mode, and I honestly couldn’t blame her, as I’d not even attempted to look for work and had refused to discuss counseling or anything that had happened that night. Lately, I’d spent most of my waking hours thinking, remembering; searching my mind for anything that might lead me in the right direction. And I spent a lot of time driving aimlessly around town, as if hoping to find answers on the side of the road. Now I wondered how many times in the last few weeks I’d driven within a few dozen yards of where the body had been found. Cruel, really, the irony.
The frequency of the recurring nightmare had decreased somewhat, but the dark thoughts and strobe-like memory flashes of the night in the abandoned factory continued to haunt me with vicious consistency. I got out of the car, leaned against the side of the hood and stared at Donald until he noticed me. He was dressed for work, in a suit, but his tie was undone and hung loosely, giving him an unusually tousled look. The moment he saw me he walked across the street to my car.
“How are you?” he asked.
“How are you?”
It was a clear and pleasant day, but not terribly sunny. Donald removed his sunglasses long enough to paw at the dark bags under his eyes, then replaced them, concealing himself behind black lenses. “I got up, shaved, took a shower, got dressed for work as usual then called in sick and came here instead. I don’t even know why, exactly.”
“Sure you do.”
He joined me against the side of the car, pulled cigarettes and a lighter from his shirt pocket. “They haven’t released much about the victim yet.”
“Only that it’s a young woman.”
He rolled a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, left it there and returned the pack to his pocket. “Yes.” Cupping the flame, he lit the cigarette then snapped shut the lighter, his actions emphasized. “And that she’s been dead for weeks.”
“Are you still having the nightmare?” I asked.
His nod was barely detectable. “You?”
“Not as often as before.”
“Heard from Rick?” he asked.
“Not in a while.”
“He wants to get together at Brannigan’s later this afternoon. Four o’clock.”
I wished I could see his eyes. “I’ll be there.”
He took a few drags before he spoke again, the smoke slowly releasing through his nostrils. “Things are going to get worse, Alan.”
“Of course they are,” I said. “We’re damned.”
Face expressionless, he flicked his cigarette away. “Think so?”
“Don’t you?”
Without answering, Donald gave my arm a reassuring pat, moved back across the street and faded into the crowd.
CHAPTER 11
I drove down Main Street, left the festivities behind and turned onto Sycamore Way, a quiet tree-lined street that acted as a kind of palisade between Potter’s Cove’s largely commercially zoned working-class downtown and the beginnings of the middle and upper-class, exclusively residential neighborhoods to the north. The buildings on either side of the street were original town structures—historical landmarks all—restored but constructed in colonial times not long after the town itself was founded. Only a few were residences, the rest housed the town’s historical society, an art center and several small medical and law offices. Unlike the area I lived in, this part of town was clean and manicured and quaint. Here, Potter’s Cove was still more a small town than the burgeoning city it had become in the less affluent districts.
At the end of Sycamore I turned right onto Bridge Street and followed it slowly, reducing my speed to a creeping roll. Like everything else, the street had changed over time. Some new inexpensive homes had been built where small sections of woods had once resided, and many of the houses had been renovated, but for the most part it looked basically the same as it had years before when I’d grown up here. Bridge Street, named for the small wooden bridge built above a stream that cut across the very end of the road, was still a relatively poor neighborhood abutting the beginnings of more exclusive parts of town. The last outpost, the last street where houses weren’t quite as big, where cars weren’t quite as new and where people weren’t quite as well dressed, even after all these years, good bad or indifferent, Bridge Street summoned true feelings of home. Yet at the same time I felt strangely uncomfortable here as well. Familiarity, in this case, did not exclusively breed warmth and solace. I studied first the stretch of sidewalk where my mother had taught me to ride a bicycle, then the ancient stone wall where I’d had many a crash and where years later my friends and I congregated and spent hours talking, smoking cigarettes and hanging out. Despite these and a wealth of other landmarks that invoked fond childhood reminiscences, this hallowed ground also brought forth a great sense of uneasiness in me. Good and bad, even here, even amidst the perceived simplicity of the past, had melded into a single enigmatic entity.