“You’re slipping from me,” he said.
I can’t hold here long, Owen Cady’s voice whispered from somewhere outside of time and place. You don’t know how to keep me here.
“I’m trying.”
Yes. But you can’t do it yet.
So soft. Almost gone. Arlen said, “You take care. Wherever it is you’re bound, ride easy.”
That was all. Arlen could feel it when he left. The sweating stopped, dried quickly on his skin, and the sounds of the real world returned, the calls of the gulls and the rustle of the palm fronds and the creak of the shifting house.
His father could hold the dead with him longer. Could find them easier. How had he done it?
You could have asked him, Arlen thought, but you didn’t. You refused to believe a word of his tales, and now what guidance you might have had is gone. You’ve got his parting words-an instruction that you have to believe, and a promise that love lingers. That’s all. You’d best make it enough.
Paul was still alive. Temporarily at least. They’d taken him, but they’d taken him alive. He might still die today. But if Paul went, Arlen would see that he didn’t go alone.
He straightened up from the body. He didn’t want to leave Owen here untended but saw no other choice. He went inside the inn, thinking he’d fetch a blanket and cover him with it. The smallest of token gestures, but it was something. He had taken maybe ten steps through the dark room before he glanced at his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar and came to a stop.
The man looking back at him from the glass was a skeleton. He stared at it, motionless, and then he slowly lifted his hand to test the image. The man in the mirror moved with him, bone fingers fluttering in the glass. Arlen wet lips that had suddenly gone dry, and when he did it, the man in the mirror flicked a black tongue out and ran it over bare, unprotected teeth.
If you stay, death stays with you, Owen had said. I’m certain of it.
He turned from the mirror and looked out the window, to the drive from where Rebecca had left not long ago.
Follow my sister, Owen had told him.
But he’d also said that Paul was still alive.
Arlen kept his eyes away from the mirrors as he crossed the room and found the keys for the convertible. Kept his eyes away from the mirrors as he went upstairs and retrieved a blanket. Kept his eyes away from the mirrors when he came back down and went outside. He knelt at Owen’s side and closed his eyelids one final time, then draped the blanket over him and wrapped it so that the wind would not tug it free. When he was finished, he rose and gathered both rifles and looked them over. Springfield M1903 model. Twin guns. Rebecca and Owen’s father had probably purchased a pair of them at the same time he’d bought the two pistols. They were good weapons. They’d ended plenty of lives over the years. Such was the standard of good weapons.
He tugged open the bolts and made sure each rifle was already loaded with five.30-caliber shells. The guns could bury those bullets a foot deep into the trunk of a pine tree from six hundred yards away. The last time Arlen had held one, it had a bayonet fixed to the barrel.
He slammed the bolts closed and hefted a rifle in each hand and gave a final look down at the covered corpse near his feet. Then he walked off the porch and around the house and out to the convertible. The clouds were dark and ponderous overhead, but no rain fell. He laid the guns in the backseat and got behind the wheel and started the engine. It was a powerful motor, would be a fast car. He didn’t know where he was going, but Owen had said he could guide him, and he believed that. He saw no reason for a dead man to lie.
Before he put the car into gear, he moved his eyes to the rearview mirror. The light was strange and shifting under the clouds, but his eyes looked like they had a skim of frost over them. He took a matchbook from his pocket and lit a match and held it up to his face, leaned closer to the mirror.
His eyes were filled with white smoke. It drifted out of the sockets and mingled with the smoke from the match and swirled up into the sky and the storm clouds above. He took a long look at his own eyes, and then he blew out the match and dropped the car into gear and pressed firmly on the gas.
Part Four: DEAD MAN’S ERRANDS
50
THE CLOUDS THICKENED and continued to hide the sun, but the rain held off. It was as if the storm were being kept at bay, and angry about it. The skies contained menace that hadn’t been able to break through, just bathed the world below in shadow and trapped the heat and humidity close to the ground. Arlen took the dirt road all the way to the end, came out at the T-intersection with the paved road and thought, What now?
He turned left. There was no conscious decision, no reason for going left instead of right, he just looked in each direction and felt his foot leave the brake and return to the gas when his eyes locked on the windswept gray moss that dangled from cypress trees ahead to the north.
He’s guiding me, he thought. Owen’s guiding me.
He didn’t know how, but he felt confident in it, had a strange assurance that this was the right route, that it would lead him to Paul.
The wind picked up as he drove under the cypress grove, and a piece of Spanish moss drifted down in a lazy arc and landed in the passenger seat beside him. It was just past one now but so dark it felt like dusk. The arrival of the Cuban boat was still eight hours away. If it showed up at all. He had a feeling it would not, that word would have been passed somehow, and everything Barrett and the others waited for would not transpire.
Rebecca was on this same road, somewhere well ahead of him. She would have a few hours at least before they began to look for the truck.
And then I’ll catch up with her, he tried to think, but a single glance in the rearview mirror revealed the smoke in his eyes.
He would not see her again.
It was an agonizing thought. He’d never feared death. Had, at times in his life, longed for it. But those were in days past, days before her.
It was right for him to bear such a loss, though. It was needed. He thought of how he’d laid his hands on Owen Cady’s shoulders and looked into his dead eyes and heard his voice so clearly, heard the truth from him, and he remembered his boyhood trip down to the Fayette County sheriff and the way his father’s blood had pooled in the dust, and he knew that all things circled back in time. You paid for your sins, and he would pay for his today.
As he drove down the road, he reached into the backseat and moved one of the rifles up front with him, braced it against his leg with the barrel pointed down and the stock and trigger close at hand.
The car drove beautifully; Solomon Wade had a fine taste in machines. Arlen was holding it close to seventy. Twice he passed other cars moving at half that speed, saw drivers lift hands in annoyance and surprise, and blew by them and continued on. He’d gone at least five miles headed due north, passing two intersections without much pause, certain somehow that they held no significance, before he reached a four-way and again found himself turning left without thought or reason. The pavement soon disappeared and he banged onto a dirt road. The water from the previous night’s rains had not drained well here, and he splashed through deep puddles and spun the tires through soft mud. Thunder rippled to the south, but there was no lightning and the wind was still. He tried to keep the speed up, but the road was deeply pocked and rutted, and he was afraid he’d rattle the wheels right off the car. He felt one solitary raindrop find his forehead as the road narrowed into what looked like a thin green tunnel. The strange bird-of-paradise plants pressed close, their wide green fronds stretching toward the sky in search of sunlight.