Firefly Rain (9 page)

The fact that she made me walk back to the house angered me as well. Whatever the good law enforcement officers back in town might think, I wasn’t some spoiled city boy who expected the police to drop everything to ferry me back home. I had not expected Officer Hanratty to give me a ride back to the farm, even though it would have been the work of minutes for her
to do so. But the unrestrained glee when she’d told me I’d be walking, well, that was something else again. The woman could have at least called me a cab, assuming there were any cabs to be had, or sent me out with an officer who could at least pretend to look at the site. Maybe she, too, was trying to teach me something about the town I’d come back to. If so, she’d done a piss-poor job. All I knew was what the sights along one particular road looked like these days. Hell, I hadn’t even bothered to walk around town.

Still, some aspects of the conversation did cheer me slightly. If this was just Carl—or one of Carl’s friends—trying to put me in my place, then I had every reason to believe that the car would reappear soon. I didn’t hold out much hope for recovering the contents, but they were all insured. So was the car, and I chuckled to think about Carl trying to provide cash for
that
particular transaction. The image of the old man walking up to my porch with another envelope stuffed with twenties was enough to make me laugh out loud, and it sped my steps as I headed back down that dusty stretch.

My knees ached and my feet burned by the time I made the turn from the road to my driveway. I’d belonged to a gym in Boston—I’d gotten more business done there than at the office—but there’s a world of difference between running on a treadmill and walking down a country road. For one thing, on the treadmill you know you’re doing it to yourself. If you want it to stop, all you have to do is hit the switch and walk away. The only thing keeping you on there is pride. Well, pride and the fear of doing less time than the man on the treadmill next to you. Out here, though, deciding that I’d had enough just wasn’t an option. If I didn’t want to walk anymore, that was fine, but I’d be sitting on the side of the road until I felt like walking again.

Therefore, it was with visions of a cool bath to soak my feet
in and a tall glass of lemonade that I turned my face toward the house. The driveway was empty, which I expected. Even if Hanratty had decided the joke had gone far enough, and called whoever had stolen the car to return it, there was no way they could have driven it past me to get it to the house. More likely it would take a few days to let Hanratty save face and make it look like she was working on things.

My heart skipped a beat, though, when I saw there was a package on the porch. From where I stood at the end of the drive, I couldn’t make out many details. Brown paper, yes, and about the size of a loaf of bread. That was all I could see at a first glance.

“Just a package,” I said out loud, daring someone to contradict me. Silence was my response. I felt a fool being suddenly uptight over a box, but with all that had gone on, anything out of the ordinary was enough to get my pulse racing. I hadn’t ordered anything, nor did I have any friends or family who were likely to send me something unannounced. That left suspicion and fear to argue it out over where that package might have come from, and neither of them had any answers I liked.

On the other hand, I was tired and my feet hurt, enough so that I didn’t really give a good goddamn. I looked around to see if anyone was there, and I didn’t see anything else out of the ordinary. No windows were broken, no doors were left ajar, and no one had done any fool thing like paint a warning on the side of the house. Nope, it was just a box in brown paper, sitting on the porch like it was the most natural thing in the world. Which, in hindsight, I had to admit it was.

One last glance over my shoulder told me that there was no dust plume on the road, and no Carl coming up behind me. “Well, screw it,” I told myself, and walked forward. It was only a box. That was all. It probably had mail-order fruit or AOL discs or something equally worthless inside.

But my breath still caught in my throat when I went up those porch steps, and my hand shook when I knelt down to pick up the box. It sat there, unadorned with any stamps or postage. There was no return address on it, just my name scrawled in big black letters. Magic Marker, it looked like, and poor handwriting to boot. The box was wrapped in brown paper and tied off with string. Ragged bits of tape sealed the ends and folded over onto themselves. It looked harmless enough, and I nearly opened it right then and there.

My hand was halfway to the box when I reconsidered and pulled myself back. It was probably nothing. I knew that. It was just a box. I knew that, too. But something made me leave it there on the porch and go into the house instead. It took a minute’s hunting on the kitchen table, but I found myself a pencil and brought it back out with me. Slowly, I slid the pencil, eraser-end first, under the string. Just as slow, I lifted it up, dangling it ever so delicately as I stepped off the porch and backed into the kitchen. I could see the pencil bending under the strain; that box was heavy for its size. My wrist ached to hold it, and my steps got a bit faster. A turn to the left and I was facing the sink. That’s where I put the package, thankful that the sink basin was dry.

The whole time I was moving it, the box failed to rattle, buzz, or explode. For that, I was deeply grateful, but I knew better than to push my luck. I briefly considered running tap water over the thing, like I’d seen in a movie. That notion only lasted a moment, though. The odds of it being paper or something else that would get soggy were a lot better than the odds of it being something dangerous. Instead, I went to the kitchen counter and got out a good, sharp knife from the block. Knife in hand, I turned to the sink and addressed my problem.

The string was humped up in the place where the pencil had
been. Gingerly, I sliced through that spot. Nothing happened, except the twine broke neatly into two pieces.

“You’re a paranoid dumbass,” I informed myself, and I tugged the string away. It slithered out from under the box and dangled from my finger. Nothing but package string, the same as you’d get at a butcher or use for flying a homemade kite. It was clean and new. There was no dirt or fraying to it, and no smell. In other words, it told me nothing, except that whoever had wrapped the package had done it not too long ago. Nodding at my own perceptiveness, I put the string down on the counter and turned my attention to the box itself.

I stared at it for a minute. Then I tucked the point of the knife under one of the corners where the tape came up. A little shove and the knife went through the paper. Then, carefully, I sawed along the line of the box edge, cutting the paper as I went. When I’d made it all the way across the top, I turned it and did the same down the short side. The knife caught in a couple of places on particularly thick layers of tape, but a moment’s patient back-and-forth with the edge cut through even that easy enough.

With half the paper on the top flapping free, I put the knife down and lifted the corner up. Underneath was an old cardboard box. It smelled musty and looked frail, and I found myself reluctant to tear away the rest of the paper for fear the whole thing would just fall apart.

I settled for pulling the stuff on the sides away, then sliding the rest out from under the bottom. Whoever had wrapped the box hadn’t been too interested in being neat. They’d just swaddled that thing in paper and tape as best they’d been able, probably to keep it from spilling its cardboard guts when they’d set it down.

The top of the box was a flap that ran lengthwise. An old
piece of Scotch Tape, long since gone yellow, held it shut. The knife took care of that. That left opening the lid.

I looked around. Most of the day had gone, and shadows crept across the kitchen. Outside, birds made their evening calls, getting ready to bed down for the night.

Night. I definitely did not want the mystery of what the box had in it gnawing at me all night. Sleep was hard enough to come by, without adding another round of “what-ifs” to keep me restless and pondering. Bare-handed, I leaned forward and flipped the lid open.

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I’d seen too many bad movies. Even as that lid came up, I thought I might see, I don’t know, maybe a dead animal. Maybe some kind of threat, or a piece of my Audi someone had hacked off. Maybe a body part from someone I knew, though I wasn’t sure what good that might have done.

Instead, there were toy soldiers. They were the good kind, too—molded lead with broad, flat bases and the sorts of guns that someone would call a “choking hazard” today. Their paint jobs were chipped, scarred, and dented from a thousand hours of play, but I still recognized them. Red for Wellington’s British, blue for Napoleon’s French—I’d seen these before. Slowly and with reverence, I took the first one out of the box and turned it over.

There, on the bottom, someone had carved three letters.

J. J. L. So small you could hardly read them, but still there. Still telling the world who these had belonged to, once upon a time.

Joshua Jeremiah Logan. Father. And after him, they’d belonged to me.

I’d spent more hours than I could count fighting old wars in the backyard. I’d sent the French advancing past Mother’s roses, or lined up the British to guard the edge of the driveway. I’d built
and smashed a hundred dirt forts, buried a thousand toy casualties and dug them right back up again. They’d been my companions and friends through some long summer days, and when I thought about my childhood, I often thought of them.

Father took them away from me when I was nine when there was a fight with one of my playmates from school over one of our pretend battles, and a couple of the precious soldiers got thrown. None of them hit anyone and nobody got hurt, but that was enough for Father. He came storming out of the house like the wrath of God, his eyes shooting lightning and face dark as thunderclouds. “If you cannot treat these properly,” he said in a voice just this side of a shout, “you cannot have them to play with. Do I make myself understood?” Without another word, he scooped them all up, even the ones we’d thrown at each other in anger, then took them all inside. I stood there, tears leaking down my cheeks, and stared into the house. Mother didn’t come and help me, though. As for my friend—one of the Jericho boys from in town, if the memory doesn’t lie—he just watched the whole thing with his mouth curled into a big wide O.

He made his excuses and called his momma for a ride home not long after that, I recall.

As for the soldiers, Father put them in a big, long cardboard box and carried them off to the attic. That’s where they went and that’s where they stayed, and he never did get around to bringing them back down again.

All except one.

As Father stomped his way around the yard, I moved my foot to cover one of the fallen men. I stood there stock-still, hoping he wouldn’t count. There were twenty men on each side, just enough for a good battle, and just enough that a missing soldier could go unnoticed.

I held my ground there in the yard as Father packed the rest
of them away and carried them off to the attic. I prayed I hadn’t broken him, or bent the tip of his gun. And when Father was at last out of sight, I bent down and, quick as a cat, scooped my lone soldier into my pocket. I didn’t let him out until I got to my room and slammed the door, then I hid him on the floor of my closet, behind a big pile of comic books that both Mother and Father knew not to touch. He was my talisman, my good luck charm, and for years I carried him with me whenever I could. Even in high school, sometimes, I’d tuck him in a pocket. My lone British soldier, come along for luck.

I held the soldier from the box up to the fading light and admired it. Stamped lead it might have been, but there was a craftsmanship to it, an attention to detail that caught the breath in my throat. No wonder Father had been so protective. They’d meant as much to him as to me.

And just as suddenly as that realization came, a dark suspicion flew in on its heels. Forty soldiers. Twenty on a side. And one gone with me to Boston.

I grabbed the box from the sink and hauled it over to the kitchen table. It hit the Formica with a dull jingle, as the soldiers jostled against one another. Father would have been mighty steamed, but I didn’t care. There was something I had to know.

One French soldier was in my hand. I set it down on the table. That was one. I reached into the box and pulled out a fistful of his comrades. They spilled out of my hand and I separated them by allegiance—three red, two blue.

Six.

Another fistful; five more Brits this time.

Eleven.

The next handful caught only two, one of each.

Thirteen. Unlucky number. I winced and took out a double handful to make up for it.

Eleven more. It brought the tally up to twenty-four, and the box was still about half full.

Four in the next handful—all French. One had a big strip of missing paint down the center of his back, and I promised myself that if I found time, I’d do something about it. Not now, though.

Twenty-eight.

Five more soldiers spilled out. Thirty-three. The box was getting empty. The table, on the other hand, was getting crowded. I reached into the box, more careful this time.

Three more. Two French, one English. I set them down carefully with their respective sides. My hand went into the box again. I didn’t dare look.

Three more again, but this time with their sides switched.

Thirty-nine. Twenty on the French side, nineteen on the British.

One was missing, like it ought to be.

One soldier had been my good luck charm. I’d taken it with me to Boston to serve as my luck there. When I’d gotten a car, I’d looped string around it and hung it from the rearview. Every time I’d traded in or traded up, I’d taken that soldier with me.

The last time I’d seen it, it had been hanging from the rearview in the Audi.

I took a deep breath.

Put my hand in the box. Felt around.

My fingers closed on a toy soldier.