Hunter's Moon (25 page)

The first difficulty that presented itself was that he didn’t know the exact day, and unlike modern newspaper records, he couldn’t simply type in Eddie’s name and find the obituary. But he knew the general time period—knew that it had happened within the first month of school that year. Even so, he had to scan images of entire newspaper pages to find what he was looking for.

He started with October 1985, figuring that the death of a boy in a hunting accident—especially one that had happened on Baxter property—would have made the front page in a town like Adelia. So he placed that limit on his search, at least for the time being.

When the first issue came up, CJ felt a hint of nostalgia because he could remember when this paper showed up on their doorstep, how he would go out on the porch in his pajamas and bring it in for his father. The paper was now produced in digital format only, but he swore he could still smell the distinct scent of a fresh newspaper. A quick scan of the front page, photographed with a crease that cut through the far left column, recounting small-town life a quarter century ago, showed no crime more serious than a DUI charge against an Adelia High math teacher. CJ remembered when that happened, although he’d been too young to have Mr. Shaw as a teacher. At the time it was quite the scandal.

He closed the file and moved on to the next. It too lacked any reference to the shooting. It was on his third attempt, and only five minutes into his search, that he found it. He’d carried Eddie’s face in his mind over the years—one of the few clear memories he had. But it was still like looking at a ghost to see the black-and-white photo of the sixteen-year-old boy who had lost his life on property owned by CJ’s family. CJ let his eyes linger on Eddie’s face for a long time before turning his attention to the story. What surprised CJ was how short the account of Eddie’s death was. Even though it was above the fold, it didn’t move on to an interior page.

He took his time reading it, and he didn’t realize until well into it that he was matching what was written with what he’d carried with him. It started with the reveal of the death, then moved on to the particulars, and these were what interested CJ most. According to the
Herald
, the boys had separated during the morning, and Eddie, for some reason, had doubled back toward Graham’s position. The rest was said to be a simple, and tragic, hunting mistake—a rookie mistake, really. A rustling in the brush, an overanxious young hunter.

Before he finished reading, CJ felt sick to his stomach. The account of Eddie’s death on the screen in front of him was a lie. It was as simple as that. He hadn’t expected the revelation to affect him as much as it did, to make him feel his heart beating through a vein in his neck. He tried to get his anger under control, knowing it was counterproductive right now.

He saw the attribution before he read the quote. It was toward the end of the article, an appropriate closer—CJ’s father stating how Eddie’s death had devastated the whole Baxter family, and how his heart reached out to the Montgomery family. And how no one should forget that there was a boy who had just lost his best friend.

CJ almost punched the screen, but at the last second he redirected his anger to the table on which the computer sat. In the quiet of the library, the attack sounded like a gunshot, and it sent Ms. Arlene scurrying to the area.

“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “What was that?”

CJ couldn’t have been more irritated at the interruption, but he’d brought it on himself. Gaining control over his breathing, he said, “Sorry, Ms. Arlene. I banged my elbow on the table.” For good measure, he rubbed his left elbow and affected a wince.

“Oh!” Ms. Arlene said, moving closer, which was the exact opposite reaction to the one CJ wanted. “Are you okay? Do you need anything? An ice pack?”

It took some convincing before the librarian was assured of his continued good health, and when she’d left, he added assaulting furniture to the list of things he would avoid doing in her presence.

Alone with his thoughts again, he reread his father’s statement. It was simple, and might well have been sincere, yet something about it rubbed CJ the wrong way. He just couldn’t put a finger on it. He looked through the rest of the paper for any other stories about the accident, finding only Eddie’s obituary, which he read through. It was remarkable only in its brevity.

He closed the file and opened the next in the series, scouring every page. No further mention of the tragedy. It wasn’t something he’d have noticed then—this absence of information. The only part of the paper he read as a ten-year-old was the comics. Now, as an adult far removed from the event, CJ found it all very odd. Small-town high school students were rarely shot to death by their best friends. One would expect a follow-up article or two.

He followed the paper through November with the same result, the same dearth of information. With a shake of his head, CJ left the computer to head to the restroom, walking past the front desk in the process. He avoided looking in Ms. Arlene’s direction. It was as he was washing his hands that an idea came.

He hurried back to the computer, finding and opening the file that held the paper that came out the week after Eddie’s death. The Baxters were politicians, regardless of the difficulty they’d had capturing and holding positions of power. From birth, a Baxter man was bred for the political arena; it was in the blood. And CJ was convinced that his father had used those skills, along with whatever cachet an influential family had, to make the whole thing go away. It was the only thing that made sense.

It would have had to have been done quickly, before an investigation could build up steam. With new eyes he scanned the pages, not sure what he was looking for. What he was confident of, though, was that few things left no paper trail. He also believed that some of the most suspect deals were done in the light of day.

He’d reached the second to last page before he found it. Two days after Eddie Montgomery’s death, the Baxter family donated two brand-new squad cars to the Adelia Police Department. A grand civic gesture lauded by both the mayor and the chief of police. Not a hint of scandal.

CJ’s smoking gun. The answer to the most important question that had dogged him for a quarter century: how much had his dad known? Apparently he’d known about all of it, and he’d known what to do to keep it quiet—to protect Graham in much the same way as Ms. Arlene thought she was protecting Adelia. What made it worse was that it was the sort of thing that everyone in town would have seen through. CJ suspected there were few in Adelia at the time who did not know what George Baxter had purchased. It seemed the only one who hadn’t known was CJ —except in some subconscious way that kept him from trusting anyone enough to tell them the truth. And he figured that this was a conditioning he’d been carrying with him since that day.

CJ sat there motionless, processing over and over again what he’d learned. The information was so new and so revealing that it jolted him, and he wasn’t sure what to do next. It was a complex question, and he doubted he could consider it properly while stuck in a library.

Chapter 19

He was beginning to think that a bar was the only place where he could think clearly. Since becoming a Christian, he’d wondered if he was supposed to find the sort of focus he found in a good bar in a church instead. He had his doubts, because even though he liked Sunday morning service at his church, and spending time with the guys in his men’s group, he could take the whole thing only in small doses. He and God had communed more than once about how uncomfortable he felt in any church building, and so far he hadn’t felt much in the way of a change in his opinion. He’d joked once or twice with the guys in his group that there was something wrong with him—like maybe the conversion didn’t take or something. Right now, though, he was simply looking to relax, take some time to consider the many problems that had become his bedfellows.

The problem was where to start. Two weeks ago he’d been a semi-successful writer with a crumbling marriage and a potential lawsuit brewing. Since then, things had deteriorated. Now he was also a man who could no longer ignore the murder and conspiracy that had defined most of his life. The one bright spot he could see was that, considered as a whole, he thought he was handling things rather well.

It was Monday, and a light night at Ronny’s. Rick was nowhere in sight. Sam, who usually worked the room while Rick stayed behind the bar, covered both jobs tonight. That meant keeping CJ and three other people happy. And in CJ’s opinion, Sam could pull and deliver a beer as well as Rick, which made him all right in his book.

CJ had hoped to find Dennis here, if for no other reason than for some company. He would also have been content to find Julie, but he realized that was for more than just the company. It bothered him that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, and he hoped this showed growth of some kind. He attended a church with a heavy focus on grace—a reformed congregation that appealed to sinners, and CJ had no delusion that he wasn’t to be counted among the worst of these, as St. Paul had said—but he’d also found the theology lacking when it came to questions of personal responsibility. He supposed a happy medium existed somewhere, or that maybe he’d wake up one morning with the realization that grace did, indeed, trump all else, but for now he thought the poking at his conscience was a good thing.

But growth or not, everything that had hit him was a bit much to handle.

The jukebox sat silent, the TV above the bar turned down, so CJ had heard the low tunes of whatever music was on upstairs in Rick’s apartment, and now he heard the sound of footsteps coming down the flight of narrow stairs that connected the apartment to Rick’s business. CJ turned toward the restrooms, beyond which the stairs led to an equally narrow hallway as well as a large sign that warned patrons that even considering ascending the stairs was a mortal sin punishable by a non-gentle expulsion from the establishment. To properly reinforce this message, Rick had hung a framed photo of the last person who had tried to violate the sanctity of the bar owner’s abode.

Because of this, CJ was surprised to see Dennis come around the corner.

“H-hey,” Dennis said, walking up to the bar.

“Hey back,” CJ said. He looked at Dennis, then beyond him to where the hall disappeared toward the forbidden territory, but he didn’t ask the question he wanted to ask.

“Rick w-wants a bottle of M-Makers,” Dennis said to Sam.

The bartender slid a Seven and Seven in front of a guy sitting at the other end of the bar and then walked over to the liquor bottles and plucked a bottle of Maker’s Mark from its row. After a pause, he opened the cabinet beneath the display and extracted another bottle, both of which he set on the bar in front of Dennis.

“Save you a trip,” Sam explained.

“Thanks,” Dennis said. With both bottles in hand he turned and started off. After a few steps, though, he stopped and looked back at CJ. “Are you c-coming?” he asked.

So CJ slid from the barstool and followed Dennis up to Rick’s apartment. Before they’d reached the top of the stairs, CJ heard the faint music coming from beyond Rick’s door, gaining a clarity it didn’t have downstairs.

“Is that . . . ?”

“Sinatra,” Dennis confirmed.

When CJ stepped into the apartment—in just about every way a domicile that looked as if it belonged above a bar, save for the enormous flat-screen television lining one entire living room wall—he saw a trio of men at a round table in the room beyond, what was probably the dining room.

Dennis led CJ to the action, setting both bottles on the table with satisfying thuds.

“You’re a good man, Rick,” one of the other men said, even as he eyed the newcomer.

“Don’t I know it,” the bar owner agreed. Then to CJ, “Take a load off, CJ.”

“I thought we c-could use another,” Dennis said, almost apologetically as he sat down.

“The more the merrier,” Rick said.

The room was thick with cigar smoke. CJ went and sat down next to Dennis, feeling a hint of a smile tug at the corners of his lips. He’d already let the evening take some of the edge off the day, and now he was surrounded by a combination of quality cigar smoke and Ol’ Blue Eyes. It was enough to make a man giddy.

“CJ, this is Harry Dalton,” Rick said, gesturing to the man on CJ’s left. “Disreputable businessman and scourge of the otherwise lovely town of Winifred.”

Harry was lighting a cigar as Rick spoke. He pulled on it until it caught and held the flame, then leaned back in his chair with a thoughtful expression.

“The scourge of Winifred,” he said. “I like that.”

Harry Dalton was a rail-thin man who appeared made of pale shoe leather. He might have been in his fifties, but he’d ridden those fifty years hard. And yet the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth suggested he’d enjoyed the trip thus far.

“It’s a pleasure,” CJ said.

“Then you are far too easily pleased,” Harry remarked, reaching for the cards.

“And this piece of work is Jake Weidman,” Rick said of the man sitting between him and Dennis.

CJ had taken stock of Jake Weidman the moment he sat down, because it was obvious the man was made of money. He also wore a cowboy hat, which, while common in CJ’s adopted part of the country, was less so here. And he was the only one at the table wearing a tie, although by this point in the evening its knot had been yanked down to somewhere near the third button on his shirt.

CJ thought he did a passable job of keeping his face from changing expressions, even with his having stumbled upon the man whom Ms. Arlene had inadvertently mentioned—the Jake Weidman who had something to do with a proposed prison privatization.

“And what are you the scourge of?” CJ asked.

That prompted a smile from Weidman.

“Miscreants and evildoers of all varieties,” he said with an accent that placed him from somewhere near Boston, rather than from Texas, which was where CJ had been leaning.

“Jake runs all of the prisons in Franklin County,” Rick explained.

CJ nodded and thought about that while Harry began to deal the cards. Then he said, “And what exactly does that entail?”