The Bird Eater (8 page)

The camcorder scanned the perimeter of distant trees, searching for signs of the kid—the perpetrator, as Officer Helpful would have called him—but there was no one there.

Aaron turned the camera on himself.

“Ghosts?” He squinted against the light. “Bullshit.”

He lowered the camera, staring at the damage to his vehicle, taking deep, steady breaths to keep from losing it completely. He gritted his teeth as he circled the car, searching for additional damage—maybe the vandal had gone out of his way to key his doors and break out his headlights. When Aaron was satisfied that the window was the only new development in his world of car trouble, he sighed and switched off the camera; it was enough documentation for his
file.

He dismissed the idea of taking the car back to Vaughn’s. He wanted to see Cheri again, but if Miles saw him so soon he’d flip his lid. That, and Aaron wasn’t in the mood to drop another hundred bucks on car maintenance. This was a job for the hardware store—nothing a bit of plastic sheeting and duct tape couldn’t fix. And while he was in town picking up more supplies, he’d drop by Officer Helpful’s office and give him an eyeful of the “new occurrence.”

“Goddamnit,” he murmured, pulling his car keys from the pocket of his jeans, patting his back pocket to make sure he had his wallet before setting out for town. Grinding gravel beneath the soles of his shoes, he stepped around the driver’s side of the Toyota once more, but this time his gaze didn’t stop on the shattered window. His heart hitched and stuttered within the cage of his ribs as he stared at the side of the car.

In crooked, childlike lettering, a name was scrawled into the scrim of dirt clinging to the door—a name that hadn’t been there a minute before.

Feeling as though his knees were about to give out, he pressed a hand against the roof and shut his eyes tight, willing the writing away.

But the name was still there when he looked again.

I RYDER
.

His hands trembled.

His eyes went glassy at the sight of it.

That name was plain as day, scribbled across the paint of his driver-side door.

Eight

Hazel Murphy’s attention wavered from the table of flowers ahead of her and across the hardware store’s greenhouse. She recognized the man as soon as she saw him; Edie Holbrook’s nephew was hard to miss. His skin glowed green from across the arboretum, tinted by sun that dappled through the shade tarp stretched tight overhead. Hazel watched him from a distance, not the least bit worried of drawing attention to herself. Men like him didn’t notice old bats like her. She was quite sure that the only time Aaron would regard her in any sense was when he needed a refill on his coffee or to ask for an extra side of toast.

Losing sight of him when he turned the corner into an aisle of peat moss and wood chips, Hazel looked down to the daisies and petunias that stretched out before her like a colorful carpet—red and white, just like the ones she’d planted around the Lumberjack’s feet. She had considered talking to Aaron during his early morning visit to the Blue Ox but had thought better of it. Besides, Harold had been there; she would have had to explain herself. And if she was even the least bit right about that old house at the end of Old Mill Road, keeping her distance from Edie’s boy would serve Hazel well.

Hazel Murphy and Edie Holbrook—Edie Bell before she and Fletcher had tied the knot—had been close as girls. They sat next to each other in class from the first grade all the way through junior high, ate lunch together at the outdoor picnic tables when the weather was nice, and giggled about boys while climbing on the monkey bars. Hazel and Edie spent equal time at each other’s houses, at least before the Bells decided to move into the old relic of a house at the end of Old Mill.

Once that happened, Hazel was forever explaining that she couldn’t visit Edie because it was too far outside of town; her parents didn’t want to make the drive. But distance had nothing to do with it. There was talk about the Bells moving into that old house as soon as they started packing up their things; that was when Hazel’s parents made it clear that she was forbidden to visit her closest friend. Edie was welcome to come over whenever she wanted, but Hazel wouldn’t ever set foot in Edie’s home.

Taking slow, deliberate steps across the greenhouse to where Aaron had disappeared, Hazel paused just shy of a row of fruit saplings. He had a few flowering bushes set on the flat bed of his cart—hydrangeas, which had been Edie’s favorite. Hazel imagined Edie’s inked-up nephew slaving over that cursed house, a house she was sure had been devastated by standing empty for so many years.

After Edie had passed, a few of the women from their congregation had taken it upon themselves to clean the house of any perishables before securing the place against intruders. Hazel and Edie had grown apart by then, but that wasn’t why Hazel hadn’t offered to help clean out her old friend’s home. Even in her mid-thirties, she had remained wary of that house, and after Edie died, she was convinced that her father’s kooky stories about curses and ghosts had been truer than she had thought.

Hazel hadn’t been surprised to learn that, less than a few months after Edie’s death, local kids had broken a window and were wandering inside the place. All the kids believed the house was haunted; only a few of the adults suspected the tales to be true. Hazel Murphy was one of the believers, but she’d never said as much. The last thing she needed was to be known as the batty old superstitious diner waitress.

Regardless of the stories, her heart ached at the thought of keeping her distance from Aaron. The least she could do for Edie was to reach out to him, offer him a homemade meal and a clean place to sleep while he was fixing up the house. But after what happened to Edie, she couldn’t allow herself to get close, couldn’t permit that man anywhere near her home. She had her own family to worry about.

Hazel frowned, not liking the look of his sunken eyes. He seemed jittery, agitated, which was yet another reason she didn’t dare approach. She didn’t like judging books by their covers, but there was something distinctly wrong with the way Aaron appeared. He radiated a fractured sort of dismay, an electric anxiety that reminded her of the way Miranda had been just before she had taken her own life.

Aaron glanced up at her from his cart and she offered him a faint smile, holding a potted daisy plant to her chest. He gave her a half-hearted smile in return and continued loading peat moss and topsoil onto his cart. Hazel quietly turned away and ducked out of the aisle. She was sure she’d see him again; she could only hope that the terrible stories her father had told her as a girl were wrong. For Edie’s sake, she prayed that her father had made up all those crazy stories.

Aaron sat on the front porch step, his arms wound around his knees, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s half-empty at his feet. He had slipped up, tumbled down the rabbit hole, unable to look away from his son’s scribbled name etched into his car door, unable to fathom how it had gotten there, how it was possible.

It’s im-fucking-possible.

He took another swig of alcohol, wiped his mouth against his wrist and squinted through the midday sun, the heat intensifying the spinning inside his head.

He knew it was stupid before he dug his phone out of his pocket, knew it was a mistake before he scrolled through his contacts, stopped on
Evan
for Evangeline, and pressed
SEND
. He knew it was a really bad fucking idea, but he pressed the phone to his ear and waited for the call to connect because he had to tell her.

Evangeline had to know.

“Hello?”

Her voice made his heart lurch. He squeezed his eyes shut, felt ready to burst into a fit of incoherent sobs. He wanted to beg her:
Please stop this. Let’s start over. Let’s be the way we were before any of this happened, before there was anything beyond the two of us.
But that was the problem—that was
his
problem; he couldn’t let go, couldn’t move on. He could beg all he wanted, but when it came down to it, he was the one who was stuck. The name carved into his door proved it. The alcohol that coursed through his veins sealed the deal.

“Aaron?” She sounded unsure of herself.

He was sure she could hear him breathing as he considered hanging up before words had a chance to claw their way from inside his throat, but he simply sat there with the phone glued to his ear, unable to make a decision, unable to move.

“I’m in Arkansas,” he finally told her, his tongue tripping over his home state.

There was a long silence on her end, but she eventually spoke.

“You’re drunk.”

“I know.” He replied quickly, sure she was on the verge of insisting he call her back when he was sober.

Call me when I can’t smell you through the phone, Aaron. Get yourself together. Don’t call me like this again.

“But it’s because there’s this thing…” he said.

Again, a long silence from two thousand miles away.

“A
thing
,” she finally replied.

“Yes,” he said, relieved that she understood. “I just…Ryder’s name, Evan. It’s here.”

“What?” She sounded less than amused.

“On my door. Someone wrote it.”

“Someone wrote Ryder’s name on your door,” she said steadily. “On the house door?”

“The car.”

“Someone wrote his name on the car door.”

“Except it wasn’t there before,” Aaron explained. “I walked around the car and all I saw was the window and I checked twice because of the asshole kid, he won’t leave me alone and he slashed my tire, which cost me like two hundred bucks, so I was sure that maybe he—But that…it isn’t important.”

He shook his head, trying to get his story straight. “It wasn’t there, and then it was there, and people are telling me this house is haunted and I thought that maybe, I don’t know, I just…”

He struggled for words, not sure what he was trying to say, suddenly realizing just how bad an idea calling her had been.

“You hallucinated something—” Evan began.

“No.” Aaron cut her off, but Evan wasn’t swayed.

“You
hallucinated
something,” she repeated, “and then you proceeded to get drunk and call me to, what, suggest Ryder is there with you? Do you know how sick that is, Aaron? Do you know how crazy you sound?”

“But you believe in that stuff,” Aaron reminded her.

He remembered how excited Evangeline would get when her favorite show came on Friday nights—a ghost hunting show that Aaron teased her for watching, making fun of the “hunters” with their bulging gym-rat muscles and their tight bedazzled T-shirts. Evangeline even joined in on the teasing once in a while, mocking the TV screen during the more ridiculous parts. But she never gave it up, faithfully popping her popcorn and pouring herself a glass of red wine ten minutes before the start of the show. When Aaron asked her what she saw in it, why she subjected herself to hours’ worth of guys sneaking through dark hallways and rickety buildings, she’d shrug her shoulders and offer him an abashed sort of smile—a little embarrassed by her guilty pleasure, but not embarrassed enough to give it up. She was a true believer, putting her faith in the idea of an afterlife.

Back then, Aaron had thought her infatuation cute, never stopping to consider “what if.” Now he wondered whether his refusal to believe had to do with Evangeline’s inability to continue loving him. Maybe if he had believed, they would have stayed together; they would have fought through the grief, bonded by the unified hope that their little boy—while gone from this earth—was still out there somewhere, that it was only a matter of time before they were together again.

But now that he had evidence with enough power to convince him, Evan was snorting at him on the other end of the line. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was rolling her eyes, imagined her lips going tight over her teeth.

“What if it
is
him?” Aaron asked after a moment, his voice tapering off. “What if he’s here? I don’t know why he’d be here, but what if he
is
?”

“I don’t think you should call me anymore,” Evangeline finally said.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron murmured. “I’ll call back when I’m…not like this. It was stupid, I just got scared. I needed to tell you.”

“Aaron?”

“Yes?”

Aaron blinked, suddenly scared by her steady tone.

“I don’t think you should call me anymore,” she told him again, but her voice cracked this time.

“What?”

He swallowed the spit that had collected in his mouth. It tasted foul, metallic, like iron or blood.

“But I thought we were going to try to—”

“Stop,” she said, that single word trembling like a tree in autumn wind. “Please just stop. I can’t do this anymore, Aaron. I can’t live like this, okay?”

Aaron fell into what felt like a suffocating silence. He was drowning in it, struggling to find the right words to say so frantically that all they did was choke off his air. His heart somersaulted inside his chest, pinballing against his ribs. He suddenly felt like he was going to throw up and scream all at once.

“But I’m fixing it,” he managed to whisper. “I’ve been doing better, Evan, I just need a little more time.”

He could hear her sniffling on the end of the line.

She was cutting him off just as he was coming into the clear.

She was abandoning him when he’d finally come to terms with the fact that she was right, that he needed help, that he couldn’t continue to live the way he’d been living—with the booze and the grief and the pills and the pain.

“I can’t do this without you,” he said, his words warbling with emotion. “I need you, Evan. Please just give me a few more months; just let me get back to Portland. I’ll keep seeing Doctor Jandreau for as long as you want…
forever
if you want.”

Her lack of response speared him through the heart. He was gripping the phone so viciously, pressing it so hard against his face that his ear was starting to ache.

“Evan?” he whispered. “Say something. Just don’t say you—”

“I have to go.”

He squeezed his eyes shut.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I just can’t.”

When she disconnected the call, he continued to hold it to his ear, praying that she was still there, waiting for her to change her mind. But there was only silence.

Evangeline was gone.

For a moment Aaron felt like he was dying. He doubled over against the pain in his chest, his heart petrifying like a stone. Anxiety washed over him in a crippling rush, the same anxiety that, back in Portland, caused him to nearly dial 911 over a dozen times, sure that his heart was about to explode, that his aorta would give beneath his skyrocketing blood pressure, that it would bisect and he’d bleed out and it would take a week for anyone to find him. Hell, out here it could be
months
, his dead body lying out on the lawn, putrefying in the sun. The fact that he’d seen things like that actually happen didn’t help. The guy with the bisected aorta died in the ambulance on the way to Legacy Good Samaritan. Countless heart attack victims had expired, strapped to a gurney while Aaron and Cooper defibbed and CPR’d. They had walked into an apartment where a woman had passed away in her bed weeks before. They had responded to a call where the body of a suicide had literally liquefied into a lake of carnage; he and Cooper had to stumble out of the bathroom and call for hazmat cleanup.