Bloodstone (4 page)

On the third day following Jeb’s discussion with Ruth, a Friday, the strangers arrived in White Falls. Morton Kane, the high school English teacher, saw them as he was crossing the bridge to go down to Brunswick for his weekly shopping trip. A pale young woman, blond-haired, quite pretty, he thought, and a tall, intense-looking man driving a gray Volkswagen with California plates. He just caught a glimpse of them in passing, but he remembered being oddly shaken by the sight. Maybe they were tourists. He thought,
Little early
for the festival, isn’t it?
And then he continued on, and didn’t think about them again until much later.

Just before they went past the intersection of Indian Road and continued into town, they stopped to ask directions from another local, Barbara Trask, who was out with her dog. Barbara lived near the mouth of Black Pond in a white ranch with a perfect garden and a Saint Bernard named Alaska. She was the town gossip, and so the news of the strangers spread quickly from there. By the time they had reached the town square Barbara was already on the phone with her oldest and dearest friend Myrtle Howard, who then called the doctor at the clinic, Harry Stowe, and so on. White Falls didn’t get much traffic in the off-season, and there was
something about the two strangers that was so odd everybody’s interest was aroused right away.

They stopped in front of the drug store and went in to ask about a place to stay. The druggist, Alan Marshal, knew of only one place currently taking visitors, and that was the Old Mill Inn. He gave the directions and they thanked him and left.
A very strange couple
, was Alan’s first impression. The girl was thin and beautiful but just as quiet as a mouse. The man was tall and gaunt, with black hair and dark eyes. The eyes seemed to drill into your head like two tiny screws. The man hadn’t smiled once the whole time he was in the store.

They drove past the long square and pretty, white-clapboard church and the cemetery with its rain-washed stones against the green grass, and Angel said, “I hate it. It all makes me sick.”

Billy Smith didn’t say anything to that, because he had been thinking the same thing. Soft green hills rose up over this town by the river, and the woods beyond the little houses were dark and thick and beautiful. But the fact that he had never been to White Falls in his life, and yet he knew what he would see here,
had seen it already
, unsettled him. It was as if he had looked at pictures of the town in somebody else’s scrapbook and hadn’t remembered until now.

“We could turn around and go home,” he said. Home. The word felt odd in his mouth. Had he ever truly known a place he would call home? He and his mother had moved around a lot, and after her death he had kept up the tradition. After they had let him out of prison, when he had wandered from place to place getting odd jobs and saving as much money as he could, staying a month here and there before leaving again, he had thought of cities simply as places to sleep. Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco. What had he been looking for? During those two years of rambling he had constantly felt as if he needed to be somewhere, hadn’t he?
All of it tied into his feeling that he was meant for something. Only he didn’t know exactly what, or
where
.

“No, we can’t. You make it seem like we have a choice. If I said let’s turn around here, you’d just handcuff me to the door again. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. He thought he probably wouldn’t have the strength. But he didn’t dare tell her that.

Beyond the square was the local police station, then a red-brick bar on their right, and a grocery store. Past that the road forked. As he turned right Smith could see the new school building on the left up on the hill, with its green playing fields and parking lot full of cars.

Just before they were to cross the river again, they came upon the Old Mill Inn, a three-story, rambling structure overlooking a little lake of dark water. The river quieted in the lake, gathered itself and then spilled over the dam near the old water wheel in a rush, before sliding quietly under the bridge and out of sight.

He looked it over carefully, thinking about the ghosts that must live in a place like this. Such an old building, watching people born, living seventy or eighty years, passing away. He said something to that effect, wanting to sound offhand, but somehow it came out heavy, like he had been rehearsing the lines in his head.

Angel only nodded. “It fits,” she said. “It fits this town just right.”

He parked the Jetta next to the only other car in the lot, a rusting old Dodge with the bumper sticker—
THIS CAR CLIMBEDMT. WASHINGTON
—pasted to its rear end. “Last stop,” he said as the motor died. Silence fell over them. “A lovely spot for a summer vacation.”

“I’d rather be in Paris.”

He looked at her, surprised, and saw that she was smiling at him. He felt another barrier between them break away like driftwood. As they stepped from the car and stretched their aching backs, they could hear the falls
somewhere out of sight below the bridge, and it was a sound they both recognized.

Welcome to my nightmare
, Smith thought, and went inside.

The inside of the inn was pleasant, if a little too cute. The ceilings were low, innards exposed with heavy, dark beams crossing the length of the rooms. It was necessary to walk through the gift shop to get to the lobby, and past that was the dining room. The gift shop was a small room filled with stuffed bears and crocheted wall hangings and bad seascapes on canvas. The stink of potpourri layered itself over something deeper and darker, a smell like old rotten fabric. It reminded him of the smell that sometimes came from the sea flats at low tide after the seaweed and mud had cooked under the hot sun. He remembered the great white stretches of salt in Salt Lake City. Along with that came the loneliness that had hit him then, as he walked behind the vacant stores and row houses, and he tried to shrug it off without success.

Once they passed through the gift shop they were treated to a view of the river and the lake out the dining room windows. The old water wheel sat on the water’s edge, braced by a couple of posts and looking like it might decide to roll in at any moment.

The proprietor of the inn was a tall, handsome man who introduced himself as Bob Rosenberg. “What can I do for you?”

“We’d like a room,” Smith said. “A suite if you have it.”

“I think we can arrange that.” Rosenberg smiled. “Are you vacationing here in town?”

“We’ll be staying a while.”

“I hope you’re planning on sticking around for the festival in May. We put on a pretty good little party.”

“We might be around that long.”

Rosenberg went around to the back of the lobby desk and got out a ledger book. “We’re about empty for the moment, so you’ll have the run of the place. We don’t start reserving
rooms until the end of April, you understand. I’ll put you in our best room. It’s got a great view of the lake.” Rosenberg signed them in, came back around the desk and shook both their hands, and said, “Welcome to White Falls.”

After checking out their rooms (two: one decent-sized, one small, with a connecting door) they wandered down a path that led around the side of the building to the lake. Rosenberg had looked at them strangely when they told him they had no bags, but said nothing. Still, word would get around; Smith had had enough experience with small towns to know that any odd gossip would hit the grapevine, oh, say thirty seconds after it happened.

“What do you think?” he asked, when they reached the water. It was a large and heavy bowl between artificial banks, stretching out back along the river a good distance. The mill wheel loomed above them, cutting a deep swath of shade down the bank to the water’s edge. The patch of shade was so dark it looked painted black, the grass around it an even brighter green. It was cool here, the spring air crisp and moist with a hint of summer.

“The rooms are nice. We’ll have to move the beds.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Angel sighed. She plopped herself down in the grass. “A week ago I was in Miami…” she let her voice trail off. One hand was pulling absently at the grass, then flicking it away.
Tug, tug, flick
. She looked at him, her hand stopping in midair with a fistful of grass. The blades stuck out from between her fingers; he could see the marks at her elbow and his eyes were drawn to them helplessly.

She flicked the grass toward the water. “Look, I want you to know that I don’t accept what you did. But I’m not going to fight you anymore. What you said about the dreams we’ve been having made some crazy kind of sense. I guess I’m crazy, too.”

“Maybe we both are.”

“I mean, it feels so
normal
. That’s the weird thing. I guess I feel like I should be afraid of you. But I’m not.”

“None of this is normal. And you probably should feel afraid. You don’t really know me. It’s going to take time for me to prove myself to you. But I’m going to try.” He hesitated, looking at her arm again, the track marks. “Is it bad?”

But he knew the answer to that one. He knew too well. The ache of need, filling every waking hour, the constant whispering of the mind saying
just one sip, that wouldn’t be
so bad, no big deal, just one
.

She surprised him. “Maybe it’ll hurt like hell pretty soon. But I don’t want it right now. I don’t know why.” She flashed him a cynical smile. “Maybe I’m just lucky.”

They listened to the soft rush of the water as it ran over the dam. A thin, almost invisible crack ran up from the bottom left, all the way to the top right like a dark bolt of lightning. Smith looked at the big water wheel. Close up, he could see thousands of tiny holes bored by carpenter ants. As he watched, a big black ant poked its alien head out of a hole, wriggled its antennae slowly back and forth to test the air, and then scampered down the side of the wood and disappeared into the grass.

“There’s more you should know,” she said, breaking the silence. “Last night after you had fallen asleep, I tried to leave. You didn’t handcuff me. I got up, got dressed, even fished the car keys out of your pocket. It was easy.” She shrugged. “I got as far as the car, even started it up, and then…I just couldn’t go any farther.”

“You thought about what I said?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that I had to go back inside. I had the strangest feeling that if I drove out of that parking lot I would just fall off the face of the earth and disappear.”

They stared at the water. Smith felt that great loneliness welling up inside again. Prisoners, both of them.

“Do you think we’re ever going to figure out exactly why we’re here?” she asked.

“Oh, I think so. Dress rehearsal is over. Time for the first act soon.”

“So what do we do until then?”

He considered how to answer that. What should they do?
How do you prepare yourself when you don’t even know
what’s coming?

“I don’t know,” he admitted finally.

They watched the sun fall in the west, and when the last light had faded from the sky, they went inside.

The next morning, Billy Smith awoke in the hard little antique bed with a headache already beginning to gnaw at him. He glanced past the delicate lace curtains, out the window. The sun was shining brightly, already high in the sky. He could hear the river tumbling over the rocks below his window. Perfect spring day, perfect little inn, perfect little town.

He stood up, bare feet on the cold hardwood floor, and looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. His light blue T-shirt was old and faded; prison issue. He wore it every night to remind himself how sweet it was to wake up without the taste of iron in the back of his throat, without the smell of concrete and industrial cleaner and the sound of the other inmates muttering to themselves in the dark. Ten years of that hadn’t hardened him like he thought it might. Every breath of open, clean air he took into his lungs meant something to him now. Breathing was no longer an involuntary muscle spasm.

And the guilt remained, and that, perhaps, was another reason why he wore the shirt. To remind himself every morning of just who he was, and what he had done.

He took off the shirt and approached the mirror, stopped about three feet in front of it and let one finger trace the long white scar that ran from his right thigh up across his belly to
just below his ribcage. A piece of the doorframe had done that to him during the accident, and just about ended his life in the process. Strange, though, he hadn’t even known he was hurt until the ambulance driver grabbed him by the shoulders and made him look at himself. He felt only a cool wetness. The blood had soaked his pants all the way to his shoes.

He held his own gaze in the mirror for several moments.
Gut-check, William. Yes, you are still alive. And a god
damned handsome man, if I may say so myself
.

Not exactly true. He was too thin for his height, his skin was almost as white as the boxers he wore, and today his eyes were almost hidden inside deep pockets of tired flesh. He needed a shave; the black bristles stood out on his hollow cheeks, giving him a bit of a desperate look. But what the hell. He was right on one point; he was alive. And he felt a great deal better than he had the day before, even with the headache. He had slept through the night without a single nightmare. That was something to celebrate.

How long will it last? How long before you wake up
screaming again?

The tall gaunt man in the mirror did not answer.

After he woke Angel in the other room and they had both showered, they went out in search of something to eat. The dining room downstairs wouldn’t open for lunch for another twenty minutes, and so they walked slowly toward the town square, enjoying the sunshine. The air was still crisp but warm, a slight breeze drying Smith’s damp hair. He had found some aspirin and crunched two of them, and his headache had eased a little. With the shower and the fresh air he felt almost human again. Now all he needed was a razor and a can of shaving cream.

They walked past the clinic and the grocery. Set back behind the grocery was the police station and volunteer fire department. Smith could see the snout of an old-fashioned
pump fire truck through the open doors, candy-apple red. Someone was polishing the truck’s shine with a big green cloth, nothing but the hand visible in the sunshine, sticking out from the darkness of the garage. The hand moved in big, slow circles across the red paint.

On their left was the cemetery with a pretty little iron fence around the perimeter. Long lines of white stones marched down over the hill and out of sight toward the river. The church was next, a box-like white building with a short squat steeple; as they passed it, a bell clanged somewhere inside, ringing out over the quiet road and echoing across the town square.

They found the Johnson Café within the line of storefronts along the square and grabbed a booth near a window. The café was a long, narrow place like a train car with smooth linoleum floors and water-stained wallpaper, a white Formica counter running the length of the inside wall. Quiet country music played through tinny speakers in the ceiling, the sounds of the kitchen drifting out through closed swinging doors. The place was busy, the booths along the walls crowded by couples or families with little children, the six or seven stools along the counter occupied by big men in white t-shirts and baseball caps with the same logo, a green W with a slash of white.

They sat in a booth with a scarred wooden table. Smith’s hands danced across the initials carved in the wood and played restlessly with the stainless steel napkin dispenser. All activity had stopped for a beat when they first entered and though the room was now humming again, he kept catching glances from the other customers as they looked the newcomers up and down. They looked at the menus, and a minute later a middle-aged waitress with a huge orange wave of hair that crested about a foot above her head came waddling over to take their order.

A nametag pinned over her breast read
Martha
. “Busy day,” Smith commented. She frowned at him over large
round glasses. Her face was perfectly round as well and doughy-complexioned.

“Saturday’s our busiest time. People come in before the softball games, then stop by again when they’re done.” She frowned again. “You ain’t from around here.”

“No, ma’am.”

Her frown deepened. “You got folks in town?”

“Nope. Just passing through.”

She directed a finger toward Angel. “This your wife?”

“I’m Billy, and this is Angel.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Angel said smoothly. She extended a hand.

The woman took it after a moment’s hesitation. She withdrew her hand as if she’d touched something unpleasant. “Martha Johnson,” she said. “Me and my husband own this place, such as it is. Don’t mind all these people staring. They’re just curious. We don’t get new people around here too often. Least, not this time of year. Tourists ain’t due for another month or more.”

They ordered two cups of coffee and two plates of eggs and bacon, thanked Martha and she waddled away. The eggs came a few minutes later piled up high and steaming on white diner plates, the coffee in heavy mugs hot enough to burn their throats. They ate for a moment in silence, enjoying the simple food. Smith was surprised at his own appetite; the eggs disappeared quickly, the bacon as well, and he had waved for a refill on his coffee and looked around a bit before he spoke again. Their corner booth was a reasonable distance away from the other customers, and he thought they could talk without being overheard.

“Listen,” he said finally, sitting forward in his seat. “We have to agree once and for all that we’re a team. You know what I’m saying? If any of these people figure out where we really come from, what’s really going on between us, it’ll be all over. We have to work together.”

She dragged a fork through the remains of her eggs, tracing a pattern. “They wouldn’t believe it.”

“There’s more to it than that. Even if they don’t believe all of it, they sure will call the police. I violated my parole— if they catch me, I’ll go back to jail even if you
don’t
press charges for kidnapping.”

“Your parole?”

“I thought you understood I’d been in jail.”

“You’ve told me a lot about your life, but not much about that. I thought it was an accident.”

“I killed three people,” Smith said. He said it quietly, evenly. She would never know how long it had taken him to be able to say it aloud. Such a simple little group of words, words that meant nothing much alone but together were like a five hundred-pound weight around his neck. “I was a drunk and a fool and I got behind the wheel and I killed three innocent people. I did my time and now I’m sober.”

“Did you know them?”

He shook his head. “The husband came and visited me while I was in jail. I thought he would try to get his hands on me, but he didn’t. He just kept asking me questions. Why did I drink that day? Why did I decide to drive home on Lakefront Avenue? Why couldn’t I have gone through that intersection a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later? All the same questions I had asked myself.”

“Did you give him any answers?”

“I don’t know. I think he was more angry at God than anyone else. I tried to give him someone to blame, and maybe that helped, a little. I told him it was my fault. I told him to hate me. I never saw him again.”

“How long were you in jail?”

“Ten years. I wanted it, I guess I would have taken more if the judge had seen fit to give it to me. Penance, or something like that.”

Yes, something like that. When he was just a boy, there
had been a painting hanging in the front hall. You looked at it as you came in the door—had to see it, the way it was hung, center stage. The painting was of a nun. The nun stared out at the world, stern-faced, grim, holding a prayer book in her hands. Oh, how he had hated that painting, the way it stared at him no matter where he was, the eyes seeming to follow as he walked from the front step, through the hall, and up the stairs to his room. The nun had offered her silent judgment on whatever he had done that day;
Playing
in the street again, weren’t you, you awful child, if your
mother only knew. Lied to the teacher today? Well, may you
burn in hell for it
.

He began to enter the house through the back door whenever he could. Still, he could
hear
her calling him, and he could not think straight until he had faced her, and heard what she had to say.
Stole a candy from the Watkin’s cupboard,
didn’t you? Ungrateful child. No wonder your real
parents didn’t want you
.

Finally they had moved to another house halfway across the country, and the painting had been lost in the shuffle. His mother had been angry about it, she had loved that painting, and he acted as if he had, too—but secretly he was glad it was gone.

He began to drink in high school, and it had a terrible effect on him from the start. He would become angry, violent. And he would continue to drink until finally he passed out. But he could not stop. Alcohol grabbed hold of him and wouldn’t let go. Finally he got himself in a fistfight and ended up in jail—this was senior year, a week before graduation—and though they didn’t press charges, they gave him a good scare. As he rode home from the police station he could almost feel the nun in the painting staring at him, though she had been gone now ten years;
you were
lucky this time, Billy, quit while you’re ahead, or you’ll burn
in hell for it
.

He had quit, for a while. But after his mother died he
started again, and by the time he entered college he was drinking almost every night. One DUI hadn’t stopped him, neither had a series of minor fender-benders. He’d always been able to explain them away, telling himself he’d been too tired to see straight, or the road had been wet, or it was the other driver’s fault.

And then the accident. He had paid for it. Even after the jail term had been served he had kept on punishing himself. And he had not had a drop to drink since. But nothing he could do would bring the children back.

Angel had asked him another question, and he had to scramble to catch up.

“I asked you what you did after you got out of prison.”

“Wandered around for a while. Did some odd jobs, made some money. Enough to live on, anyway. I had a little tucked away too. Ended up in San Francisco, you know that part. And then the dreams started.”

“How long ago, exactly?”

“I’m not really sure. I was restless after I left prison, and I guess they were starting even then, in a way. The real strong ones started six months ago, maybe.” He took a sip from his fresh cup of coffee. “So that’s
my
story, or at least most of it. What about you?”

She stiffened. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right,” he said, “that’s fine with me. But I think it’s important for us to know where we both stand. I think it’s important for us to know
why
we’re both here. What drove us to this place? Because I think you would have ended up here eventually on your own, if I hadn’t gotten to you first. You understand? It’s got a hold on you, the same as it does me.”

Angel was silent for a long time. Then she said, in a small voice, “I come from a little town in New York. I ran away to Miami after I graduated high school because I needed a change, and I thought I could get a job singing somewhere. I was pretty good in high school, sang in the choir, even did some solo work at a coffeehouse in town. I thought that if
I could just catch a break…” She shrugged. “Pretty stupid. Same old story, I guess. I ran out of money a year ago and then…” She stopped, then started again, her shoulders straightening, her voice a little stronger. “I did it for the first time about three months ago. There was a man in one of the clubs where I used to hang out, and he was always after me, and he said he’d take care of me. I needed money.”

“Why didn’t you go home?”

“I couldn’t do that. My father would never have taken me back. You have to understand the way he is. He didn’t want me to go to Miami, he wanted me to go to college. Once you defy him it’s like you no longer exist. It’s like you’re dead.”

“So the man took you in.”

“I was in trouble. And he got me drugs. I wasn’t feeling too good about myself and they helped for a while. Then he introduced me to a few friends of his, told me I could earn some really good money. Told me if I didn’t, I’d be out on the street. Pretty soon he had me out looking for more. It seemed like it happened so fast, and I was high all the time. I wasn’t myself. And then…and then you came.” Angel’s shoulders were rigid and she sat absolutely straight in her seat. She took hold of her coffee cup, took a long drink, and set it back down again. “It’s not like I slept around with everybody all my life. It just…happened.”

He watched her struggle with herself and felt helpless to do anything about it. He was in no position to judge anyone. He was not good with people, he thought, and that was the simple truth of it. Someone who was worth a damn would say a word or two to make her feel better about herself, make her feel more at ease. But everything he thought to say sounded cheap or patronizing or downright cruel in a backward sort of way, and so he kept his mouth clamped shut.