The Narrows (10 page)

There was a ratcheting sound as Eddie reclined his seat. He took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his khaki uniform, poked it between his lips, but out of respect for Ben’s rule about not smoking in the police cars, he did not light it. “Well, don’t sell that mountain lion business short,” he said, the cigarette bouncing. “Paulie Davenport over in Garrett said they had one been coming into the neighborhoods at night, knocking over trash cans and eating house cats or whatever. A bunch of guys saw it slinking away into the hills one night behind Torry’s Tavern, and one of them took some shots at it with a handgun but missed.”

“Just what I like to hear. A bunch of rogue drunks firing guns out behind a bar.”

“One of the other guys snapped a photo of it on his phone. Can you believe that?”

“Sure.” He knew the Potomac Highlands was no stranger to the creatures, though he had never seen one in person nor heard of them attacking livestock, especially not an entire field of grazing cattle. Not that it was impossible, of course. Recalling the crescent-shaped wounds at the throat of the first cow, Ben could acknowledge that they resembled the type of attack wound generated by a set of claws…

Even if it was a rogue mountain lion,
Ben thought,
that doesn’t explain the state of the carcasses. Mountain lions attack the head, sure…but what mountain lion eats only the brains and leaves the rest of the meat behind?
That part troubled him the most.

“Davenport called someone at Fish and Wildlife, and they told him that it wasn’t unusual for a particular mountain lion to migrate halfway across the country,” Eddie said. “I mean, they said it’s rare, but they’ve seen it happen before.”

“How do they know?”

“They dig through its shit, see where it’s been and what it’s eaten. Also, I heard they do DNA tests on them, too. See, mountain lions out here have slightly different DNA than, say, mountain lions from Arizona or wherever.”

“I don’t think there are mountain lions in Arizona,” Ben said.

“Or wherever they’re from. The son of a bitch could’ve been from Colorado or Montana or the goddamn Pacific Northwest.”

“How do you know so much about mountain lions?”

Absently, Eddie said, “It’s just what I heard from Davenport.”

“This wasn’t a mountain lion,” Ben assured him.

“I’m just saying.” Eddie sucked his tongue along his teeth. “What you were asking Porter back in his barn about having been in an argument with anyone lately?”

“Yeah?”

“You think a
person
could have done that?”

The radio crackled. Ben hit the CB and said, “Go ahead, Shirley.”

“Possible 71 on Full Hill Road, between mile-markers ten and eleven,” Shirley said, her voice laced with static.

Eddie sat up straight. “Well, shit.” A 71 was a pedestrian struck by a vehicle.

Into the transmitter, Ben said, “Go ahead, Shirley.”

“Just got a call from Cal Cordrick. Says Maggie Quedentock was in a car accident over on Full Hill. She told him she hit somebody out in the road but Cal, he says he checked the area but couldn’t see nothing. He thought maybe she was just shaken up.”

“We’re on our way back from Porter Conroy’s farm now,” Ben said. “We can be there in two minutes, Shirley. You call for an ambulance?”

“It’s on the way.”

“Thanks, Shirl.”

“Well, goddamn,” said Eddie, sticking his cigarette behind his ear.

Ben switched on the cruiser’s bar lights, washing the world around them in alternating blue and red. He pressed down on the accelerator and felt the raw power beneath the hood of the cruiser burst to life. Ben executed a graceful U-turn in the middle of the street then continued along in the direction he had come from.

“There,” Eddie said, pointing through the darkness at the turnoff onto Full Hill Road. Not that Ben needed him to do so. Ben Journell could walk the circumference of Stillwater blindfolded and tell you the name of every tree he bumped into along the way.

Ben took the turn at a quick clip, the dark, swampy trees bowing over the roof of the cruiser and closing in around them.

“Who the hell would she hit?” Eddie said. “I mean, who’s out here walking after midnight?”

“There they are.” Ben slowed down as he spotted the headlights up ahead, smoky in the buildup of exhaust fumes that hung in thick clouds above the roadway. A figure moved in front of one pair of headlights, long limbed and slump shouldered. Ben brought the cruiser to a stop at the side of the road. He reached beneath his seat and grabbed his spare Maglite, then quickly stepped out.

Cal Cordrick waved both arms over his head as Ben and Eddie approached.

“Is everyone okay?” Ben asked, already surveying the situation. Cal’s Buick was facing Evan Quedentock’s Pontiac, and one of the Pontiac’s fog lamps was out. He could see that the cheap plastic grille was cracked and there was a nice little ding in the hood. “Where’s Maggie?”

Cal jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “She’s sitting on the side of the road. She wouldn’t get back in her car and she didn’t want to wait in mine.”

“Go check her out,” he said to Eddie, who hustled down the road while lighting a flare. A moment later, a bright spark of purple magnesium illuminated the darkness. The fog seemed to coalesce.

“She seems okay, aside from being pretty well shaken up,” Cal said. He gulped audibly. “She thinks she hit somebody. I walked around but couldn’t—”

“Let’s take a look,” Ben said, handing Cal his spare Maglite.

They walked down the center of the road, the asphalt glowing with an unnatural pink-purple hue from the road flare, their flashlights piercing the heavy foliage of the underbrush at the shoulders of the road. A cursory review of the surrounding area showed no evidence of a struck pedestrian.

“When did you get on the scene?” Ben asked Cal.

“Just after it happened, I guess. Ten minutes ago? I was coming down the road and saw her headlights facing me, so I slowed down—you know how the road narrows and you need to slow down if there’s a car passing, Ben—but when I got closer I could see that her car door was open and that the car was in the middle of the road. Then I saw her standing out there, looking off into the dark.”

“You said you looked around for the pedestrian?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t have a light on me and I just did it real quick, in case there really was someone hurt out here.” The tone of Cal’s voice suggested he did not believe Maggie had hit anyone.

When they’d walked far enough away from the vehicles, Ben paused and looked around. It seemed implausible that someone could be thrown this far. Without saying a word to Cal, he turned around and headed back to the Pontiac. Maggie was perched on a large stone at the shoulder of the road, her skin pale, her hair an unkempt nest of bristling auburn wires. From this distance, and in the poor lighting, her eyes looked like hollow black sockets. Eddie stood above her, asking questions in his soft, placating voice.

Ben bent down and examined the skid marks on the pavement. To even call them “skid marks” was hyperbole; Ben spotted two smudgy exclamations of melted rubber on the surface of the road, hardly noticeable. It meant Maggie Quedentock hadn’t been going all that fast when she’d slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel.

Ben stood up, popping the tendons in his back. Out of nowhere, he felt ridiculously old, despite his thirty-five years. He looked over to Eddie who appeared engrossed in his little notepad, where he was jotting some notes. Ben went over to them.

“Hey, Maggie,” he said. “How’re you doing, hon? You okay?”

“Jesus. Yeah, Ben. Hi. Sorry.” Her voice had the squeaky, broken quality of a badly dented trumpet.

“Nothing to be sorry about.” He looked to Eddie, who shrugged his shoulders. “What happened here, Maggie?”

She told him—she’d been coming down the road when, in a split second, someone jumped out in front of her car. “I think…” She stuttered and quickly averted her eyes. Her whole body trembled. Then she met his eyes again. “Whoever it was just came right out of the woods. I tried to stop, but then the car started spinning.” Her voice hitched. “Did you find anyone out there?”

Ben shook his head. He could hear sirens in the distance. “You have a few drinks tonight?”

“Earlier I had a few.”

“How much earlier?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe around seven o’clock? I was down at Crossroads.”

“Were you alone?”

Her brow furrowed. “At Crossroads?” Her voice was paper thin. She appeared to chew over the answer to his question. “Yes,” she said finally.

“Okay. Any chance what you hit was a deer?”

She looked directly at him then. Those eyeless pits in her skull stared straight through him, chilling his blood to ice water. It was only after he realized she had mascara smeared around her eyes that he released a slow and weary breath.

“It looked like a person,” she said in a low voice then immediately dropped her head again. “I mean, I saw…I
think…
it was a little boy, Ben. I mean, I think it was.”

A wave of heat radiated through Ben’s body. “You think?”

“I’m almost positive…but…”

“But what?”

“No hair,” she said. “The kid didn’t have any hair.”

Without missing a beat, Ben thought about how he had fished a hairless boy out of the cold waters of Wills Creek last week. The boy had been in the water for an unknown period of time, the color leached from his flesh and the hair shorn from his scalp. Thinking about it now made Ben Journell uneasy.

“When the ambulance gets here, have ’em give Maggie a once-over, then have them wait around until I can do a better search of the surrounding woods,” Ben told Eddie.

“You got it,” Eddie said, stuffing his notebook back into the breast pocket of his shirt.

Ben got back into his cruiser just as the whirling lights of the ambulance approached in his rearview mirror. He pulled around the Pontiac then slowly coasted up the shoulder of the road, shining the windshield-mounted searchlight into the trees. He clicked on the high beams too, though all that seemed to accomplish was to give substance to the clouds of exhaust clogging the air. Fat, white moths swirled in the funnel of light. He was looking for anything—busted tree limbs, trampled underbrush, perhaps some blood on the bark of a tree. But he could see nothing.

Eventually he brought the car to a stop and put it in Park. When he stepped out, he first thought that the temperature had dropped another ten degrees, but then realized he had been sweating to death in the cruiser. Beneath his uniform, his Kevlar vest seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

Clicking on his flashlight again, he stepped off the road and into the tangled underbrush at the cusp of the woods. Each exhalation clouded before his face and he could feel the sweat on his forehead and at the back of his neck freezing in the night. He crossed several yards into the trees, the network of bare branches crisscrossing the moon above his head. Beneath his heavy boots, dead leaves and fallen tree limbs crunched like potato chips. He paused, scanning the area with the flashlight’s beam. Everything moved—the trees, the twiggy shrubs, the shadows. The world was alive with the chorus of countless insects.

The longer he stared at a spot of darkness, the more he could convince himself that things were moving within. At one point, Ben thought he could hear a high-pitched keening coming from somewhere far back in the woods—a distant falcon screeching from a branch.

“Ben?” Eddie said, coming up behind him.

“Christ. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“The EMTs want to know what they should do. They checked over Mrs. Quedentock and said she looks fine, she’s just a little freaked out, you know? She doesn’t want to go with them, says she doesn’t need an ambulance and just wants to go home. The EMTs are just sitting there, waiting. What should I tell them?”

“Tell them I got some extra flashlights in the trunk of my car,” Ben said. “They can go home after we check the other side of the road.”

5

They searched the woods off Full Hill Road for nearly two hours but found no evidence of a person having been struck by Maggie Quedentock’s car. The EMTs became quickly annoyed and said they had more important things to do than traipse around the woods for what would probably amount to an injured deer, and they soon left. Ben didn’t blame them. He was just relieved that no victim had been found.

It was after three in the morning when the cruiser pulled into the empty parking lot of the police station. At this hour, even Shirley was gone. Any emergency calls would be rerouted to a dispatcher in Cumberland. With the exception of the floodlight that cast an unwavering beam on the American flag in the front yard, the entire building was dark.

Ben parked in a spot right up front then elbowed Eddie awake. Jerking up awkwardly from where he’d been slouched, snoring, against the passenger window, Eddie La Pointe looked around, temporarily disoriented.

“Go home,” Ben told him.

“You going, too?” Eddie already had the passenger door open. The sound of crickets infiltrated the vehicle.

“In a few minutes.”

“Crazy night, huh?”