GRAVEWORM (28 page)

Wilkes smiled. “It’ll be tough, but I’ll try.”

What he didn’t tell the kid was that he was getting one of those cop feelings himself. An old lady disappears. Strange. Then a guy is gunned down at a cemetery. Double strange. Neither of these things were the sort of activity you’d expect in a quiet little burg like Bitter Lake, population eight thousand. A teenager or two might drop from the radar now and again, runaways, or a hunter might get gunned down out in the woods… but this didn’t wash. He knew he was crazy trying to connect the dots between these two incidents, yet he couldn’t seem to help himself.

When they were sitting in the state car, he said, “Ever get anything on that Coombes woman? She still bothers me and I rightly don’t know why.”

Fingerman nodded. “Tara Coombes. Ran her sheet and there’s nothing. No priors. Not even a parking ticket.”

Wilkes nodded. “I figured as much.”

“You gonna go have another talk with her?”

“
Maybe tomorrow. I’ll sleep on it. Hell, that girl’s been through a lot. Anybody can see that. But is that because she’s running herself ragged trying to give her kid sister a decent home life or is there another reason?”

Fingerman was quiet for a time. “I can’t stop thinking about her eyes.”

Wilkes couldn’t either and that was the thing that was keeping him up at night. Every time he closed his eyes he could see them looking at him. And why was that? He did not know. But it had almost been like there was something hiding in them, something crouching in the darkness, something almost feral and almost inhuman as if the mind behind them had become unhinged and she was putting forth a great effort to conceal that very fact. He wanted to believe her story. He wanted that very much because, knowing her history, he respected her for what she was doing and he wanted to go easy on her… but those goddamn eyes kept watching him, peering out from the shadows of his mind, electric and cutting.

As they drove out of Hillside, Wilkes studied the changing colors in the trees. Just starting, but how pretty it all was. How fresh was the air and how lonely did the tombstones look all leaning, white and weathered, holding down what was beneath them. Funny how graveyards could make you feel: small, insignificant, your own mortality slowly winding down day by day.

You got something happening inside you and you know it. You got the mother of all gut feelings about Bitter Lake only you won’t admit it to yourself.

That was true enough, but he didn’t dare mention it to the kid because the kid would make too much of it just as he himself was making far too little of it.

52

Although he couldn’t bring himself to eat, Bud Stapleton knew he had to keep the kitchen clean, so he dunked all the coffee cups into the sudsy water and slowly, meticulously, washed them, liking the feel of the hot water as it chased the cricks and numbness from his old knuckles which were more than a little swollen with arthritis. Some mornings it was bad and he had all he could do to make a fist and on others, his fingers were just stiff and clumsy. The hot water felt good and the very act of doing something—even if it was just washing half a dozen coffee cups—distracted him somewhat.

At least he wasn’t listening.

For the phone to ring.

For the footsteps of cops on the front porch bearing bad news. But really, by that point the news could not be good. He would be seventy-four next year and Margaret was only a year younger than he. If her mind had drifted off and she had wandered somewhere, well, she wouldn’t survive the exposure. Not after this long. It had been nearly forty-eight hours.
Oh Marge, where in the Christ did you go and what happened to you and if you were in trouble why didn’t you call?

A sob built in his chest and moved up into his throat but he would not allow it. He set the cups in the dry rack and wondered just what it was he was going to do now that he had to face the very real possibility that his partner of fifty-one years would never come home again and he would be alone, so very alone.

Drying his hands, he hung the towel with the yellow mushrooms on the stove rail the way his wife would approve of—carefully folded, mushrooms right-side up and not upside down—and moved down the hallway, passing the antique copper-framed mirror that Margaret just had to have at that auction in Clintonville. That had been a nice fall day like this one, warm with just a hint of chill in the air, a slight blush beginning to touch the leaves overhead. He saw himself in the mirror—a stoop-shouldered old man in a wrinkled flannel shirt and green work pants, white hair receding, facial lines deepening and beginning to look craggy—and did not like the image presented. Old now, everything going to hell. He looked like a threadbare old rag that had wiped up too many spills and polished too many countertops and was ready for the ragbag. Death was coming and he could feel its shadow moving closer by the day. He did not welcome it. Old people often said they weren’t afraid of death, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Maybe you understood it better than you did in your thirties and forties, but you did not welcome it with open arms and measure yourself for a shroud.

You fought it.

You evaded it.

Maybe Death would win in the end (of course it would) but you did not make the chase easy on that bastard. You made him work for every inch of it.

He looked over at the phone, wishing it would ring and wishing it would remain silent for an eternity. The kids had been calling, of course—Katherine and Peggy from Oregon, Elena from California, and Ronny from Mexico City. He could only tell them the same thing again and again.
We just don’t know. Your mother went out and just didn’t come back. I’ll keep you posted.
How empty that sounded. How weak. By the weekend, they’d start flying in and he did not look forward to it. They would remind him too much of Marge and, honestly, he was afraid to look them in the eyes.

You did nothing wrong, old man. Nothing at all. You have nothing to feel guilty about.

Yet he did and that guilt was deep and cutting.

He went out onto the porch and sat in his camp chair, easing himself down so his back did not protest too much. Sitting there, it amazed him how quickly youth faded, how bitter was its passing. If there was a God above then Bud hoped in His infinite wisdom he would grant him his remaining years as a younger man. Forty would be about right. Your brain worked when you were forty and so did your body; you were mellowed by time like a fine bottle of merlot but you hadn’t lost too much zip. The grapes of life had not yet begun to sour and still tasted sweet.

Listen to yourself, you old fool. Going on about being young again and thinking God’s going to grant you wishes of all crazy stupid things.

Feeling the sun on his arms, he figured he would spend whatever days were left to him wishing that when Marge had left he had paid more attention to what it was she had said. For, truth be told, he could not be sure… but he was almost certain that he heard her voice call out as it did most weekdays.
See ya later, Bud. Be home late like usual.
But was that it or was his old brain just telling him that because that’s what she said just about every day as he puttered about in the garage?

Margaret.

Oh Jesus… Marge.

Seeing her face in his mind, hearing her voice chiding him about this and that, he smiled and remembered once, some years back, just before he’d retired off the force, when on a whim, filled with a love for his wife he had not felt in twenty years, he’d stopped and bought her roses. When he came in the door with them, her face went wet with tears, and her voice bright with forgotten youth.
“Oh, Bud,”
she had said.
“Oh you dear, wonderful man.”
The memory of that day and the look on her face had kept him going for many weeks.

But now, the smile fading from his lips, his weary eyes graying with sadness, the memory only brought to him a feeling of suffocation for things he had known and would never know again. He knew he had tears on his cheeks and he had not cried openly since he was a child but he could not stop for all he could see was his wife’s face and the more he concentrated on her image the more it began to blur until it was no more, like maybe it had never been.
Oh good God, Marge, where the hell have you gone and what could have happened to you?

And it was at that moment that he knew, despite his years, that he could not sit and do nothing. He could not suffer himself that slow, agonizing death. No, that would not do at all. He had to find Margaret. He owed himself that much and her that much for only he could make it right.

With that firmly in mind, he started thinking about Tara Coombes.

53

Waiting for the night because it was now her natural element, Tara lay naked on her bed shivering in shallow sleep, her face and breasts and thighs hot with a sickly-smelling fever sweat. She dreamed she saw Lisa skipping down the sidewalk as she had always skipped as a little girl, except she was no little girl but seventeen. Tara tried to catch up to her, but the faster she ran the faster Lisa skipped away into the filmy yellow sunshine. Then Lisa was skipping through the gates of a cemetery, down a path, threading through the stones and wet grass like some jubilant, mischievous specter that had arisen for a day of play amongst the tombs and markers. She darted in and out of the shadows of trees, seeming to glide over a carpet of pine needles and heavy loam. She would appear behind a stone cross or a weathered headstone, then disappear again. Tara gave chase, her feet unnaturally heavy and lumbering. Then, just ahead, Lisa went down like she was submerging in a lake, sinking away, and Tara saw the open grave that had claimed her. Lisa was trying to dig deeper into it and Tara herself dove in there and took hold of her sister and it was at that moment that Lisa dissolved into a swarm of bloated, crawling graveyard rats.

54

Steve Crews did not go to work that day for several reasons. One of them was the ugly welt on his cheek and another was the awful hangover that was running rampant in his belly and in his head. But those were minor, insignificant reasons. The big one was Tara Coombes because he was haunted by her and not in a good way. He and his new friend Frank Duvall—Frank, of all people—had decided they needed to stage some sort of intervention with her, but as to how to go about that they just did not know. Steve had crashed on Frank’s couch and had woken about nine to the smell of coffee. It should have been very uncomfortable, but it was not. They drank coffee and chatted.

“I’m going to need your help with her,” Steve finally said.

“
You got it. Trust me, the way things are going, I don’t have any jobs anyway.”

“No work?”

Frank shook his head. “She’s pretty dry of late.”

Steve thought about it. “We’re doing a big expansion down at the office, putting a new wing on. Why don’t you handle it?”

“You’re kidding.”

“
Hell, Frank. You’re a contractor, you need the work. We need somebody to handle it, see it gets done. I think you’re that man. We haven’t taken any bids yet, but I know my partners would be more than happy not to have to go through that process. It’s yours if you want it.”

Frank kept looking at him like he was expecting a joke in the offing, but seeing none, his eyes softened and he gripped Steve’s arm firmly—too firmly, guy didn’t know his own strength—and the bond between them was solid.

“You just saved my bacon, Steve.”

“Now maybe together we can save Tara’s.”

After Steve got home and took a shower, he called Rich Corby at the office and told him he had their contractor and Rich sounded enormously relieved that they wouldn’t have to be taking time out of their busy days to hem and haw over bids. When that was done he went over to Tara’s just on the crazy off-chance that he had exaggerated the entire thing and misread the signals he was getting from her and maybe blown it all up in his mind into something it was not. He stood on her porch knocking for twenty minutes off and on. There was no answer. The doors were locked. Tara’s Stratus was in the garage. Nothing looked out of the ordinary save that the mailbox was bulging with letters and flyers. It looked as if Tara hadn’t bothered checking it in days.

That didn’t necessarily mean anything… did it?

Next he went over to the Teamsters Hall just off Elm and found Jan Gerlich at her desk, chatting on the phone. When she saw him come in, she did not smile or roll her eyes as she usually did to indicate that whomever she was talking to was going on and on. Steve grabbed a chair and waited about five minutes.