KIN (38 page)

"I am too," the coyote said.

*

The gunshot echoing about the valley was as good as a declaration of war, and Aaron flinched. In battle he imagined it would have been the signal for troops to start charging, but nothing so dramatic would happen here. Holding his position, he slowly turned his head away from the trunk of the pine tree. In the woods around the clearing, the darkness was thickest and that suited him, but he knew better than to make any sudden movements. The sound of a twig breaking or a sharp breath could be enough to bring about his doom. His eyes strayed to the source of the shot, where he saw a tall shadow, visible only as a darker shade of night against the backdrop of the stars, rising for one brief moment before vanishing down the other side of the mountain.

They got Joshua
, Aaron thought, fire in his chest that made him want to tear strips of bark from the tree with his nails and scream aloud his plans for the Men of the World. But instead he did nothing, and this was well advised, for not thirty feet away stood one of
them
, hunkered down in the tall grass just inside the protective circle of the trees, a gun in his hand, a pair of binoculars held to his eyes. It was torture resisting the urge to run at him like one of the old Indian warriors Momma-In-Bed had liked to tell him about, but he knew well the folly of such a rash move. The coyote would cut him down before he made it clear of the trees. So he waited, as still as the trees, and watched.

Soon the man would move, and when he did, Aaron would be ready.

-34-

Pete stared out at the night, afraid to look at Claire for too long in case she snapped at him as she had already done more than once during the long drive. The journey had taken them nine hours, but it felt like an eternity, each one of those miles chipping away another part of the illusion he had held in his head for so long about the girl he thought he loved. He was at a loss to understand what had happened to her. Had she been like this since the hospital, or had she reserved her hostility only for him? If so, he couldn't imagine what he had done to deserve it.

"Slow down," she told him, and immediately he eased his foot off the gas.

Outside, there was nothing but endless fields to see, but Pete knew them better than he knew anyplace in the world. He had driven these roads a thousand times, and suspected the reason Claire wanted to stop now was because she recognized it too.

Surreptitiously, he watched her. She had rolled the window down and was leaning out, her hair blowing crazily around her face. The night breeze was cold around her, and Pete shivered.

She looked back at him. "Stop," she said and he did.

"This is where Pa and me found you," he said quietly.

"Yeah, I know." She opened the door and stepped out. He waited for his cue to follow, but it didn't come. Instead she just stood staring at the barbed wire that separated the field of cotton from the road. At length, she turned. "Do you have a flashlight?"

He nodded slowly. For Claire, he knew it was a simple request, but the small slim object, no bigger than a pencil, that he slid free of his jeans pocket came with a story she hadn't given him the opportunity to share.

He had driven a shard of glass into the eye of its previous owner, and couldn't remember taking it before he and Louise had left the apartment, but as soon as he'd sat down on the park bench, he'd felt it digging into his thigh and realized that at some point, despite the circumstances, his curiosity had gotten the better of him.

Afraid Claire might be able to read the story from the lines of guilt on his face the longer he withheld it, he gave it to her and looked away, studying the road, where his father had made a decision to save a life and end his own.

Maybe it was a mistake
, Pete thought, and was startled by the venom that accompanied it. Then he decided that it was justified. Saving Claire had cost Pa his life and turned Pete's upside-down, and for what? He glanced back at the girl, who was now leaning on the barbed wire, lowering it so she could climb over. He knew he should help, but staying where he was made him feel better. She was not the girl they'd rescued. Not the girl Pa and Doc Wellman, even Louise, had been willing to die for. She was a stranger, and perhaps
he
was the fool at the back of it all. Who was to say this wasn't the real Claire? He hadn't known her before the men tried to kill her and yet he'd invested his hope and his weak heart in her before they'd ever exchanged a word. Why should he be surprised that she was like all the other girls he'd fallen for over the years? He'd first seen her as a battered broken thing and his empathy had quickly become desire. She would wake, he'd believed, and she would need him.

But it was clear now that she needed no one. He suspected if he hadn't agreed to take her to Elkwood with him, she'd have hurt him and taken the truck herself.

Well, you got her here
, he told himself.
Nothin' to stop you drivin' away now. She looks well enough to fight if she runs into trouble.

But that wasn't true, and though he was angry, he made no move toward the keys, just slumped over the wheel, his hands resting atop it, eyes watching the road for lights or any sign that trouble was bearing down on them.

The simple elemental fact of it was that no matter how cold or dismissive she was, she was all he had left in the world, and he still loved her. Had to. If he gave up on her, the loneliness would crush him.

*

The cotton whispered against Claire's legs, the thorny twigs on which they seemed merely suspended scratching the material of her jeans as she stood motionless, surveying the field for a glimpse of what she knew was there. When it failed to resolve itself from the dark, she began to walk, the flashlight in hand but not yet switched on. For now, she preferred to rely on her memories of this place to lead her. The ground was uneven beneath the cotton, making traversing it treacherous, and the last thing she needed was to fall and twist an ankle, so she carefully made her way along them. A bird rose from the field and took off, flying low. Night creatures scurried away from the unwelcome intrusion of her feet.

At last, she stopped, out of breath from the exertion, damp with sweat despite the chill. It had been a long time since she had pushed herself, or in truth, tried exercise of any kind, and it proved only how out of shape and unhealthy she was. But that didn't matter. She looked ahead and up, at the spindly branches of a tree so large it blocked out the stars, and turned on the flashlight.

A twisted, bone white trunk rose before her, its surface gnarled and ancient and rotten in places where industrious insects had attended to it. Some of the roots were above ground, tangled together in a chaotic jumble that seemed to Claire to symbolize confusion and anguish, their inability to find the earth from which they wished to draw nourishment, prevented from doing so by nothing more sinister than their own brethren.

She raised the flashlight, aimed the beam upward.

Shadows fled. An explosion of limbs radiated out from the tapering trunk, the branches themselves seemingly heavy enough to force the tree to bend toward her, like a Victorian woman bowing beneath her umbrella, or a jellyfish pushing upward, the weight of the sea forcing its tentacles down and around itself.

Tentatively, she reached out to touch the trunk, almost expecting to feel an electrical charge or a rush of memory as she did so. But when her fingers brushed the dried wood, she felt nothing. Whatever the tree had represented on the day she had stood bloodied and bruised staring at it, eluded her now.

With a sigh, she reached into the pocket of her jeans and retrieved a small penknife, then slowly, painfully got down on her knees and dug the point of the blade into the bark. It sounded hollow, as if she were carving into the last layer of its protective skin before the elements and the insects ground it to dust, erasing it from existence forever.

In the trunk, she etched out:

K.K.

D.F.

S.C.

And underneath:

Then she stood and studied her dead friends' initials, each one filled with shadow thicker than oil as the breeze made the branches tremble, the wood creaking as the tree swayed.

She turned her back on it, felt as hollow as the tree and wished she could recall why it had meant so much to her. For one fleeting moment it had seemed like the only thing in the world to her, a savior.

I was out of my mind
, she thought.
In shock
.

The breeze grew stronger.

She stopped.

All around her flecks of cotton rose from the field like fireflies, caught in the beam of her flashlight as it carved a channel in the dark. Her hair fluttered around her face, her senses filled with the smell of earth and smoke, and without knowing why, she smiled as the million specks of cotton rose ever upward like souls released to the Heavens to join the stars. It was over in a moment, and to anyone else, it might have seemed a perfectly ordinary thing, something visible on any day of the week.

But to Claire, the significance she'd sought from the tree was there in the cotton, and with it, came the answer to the riddle of what she'd thought she'd seen in the field that day.

There is something else
, she thought.
Something afterward. Life ends and something follows
. In all her years, she had never been asked about her faith, nor had her family ever assumed a denomination. If forced, however, they would have claimed agnosticism as the closest representation. But with that lack of faith came a great fear of death. Without proof of an afterlife, they were intimately aware of their mortality and the limitations of it. The passing of her father and what Claire had endured here eleven weeks ago only reinforced that fear.
Nothing follows
, they'd thought.
You die and you turn to dust
.

Standing naked and wounded on the road outside this field, she had known she was going to die. Not of old age, not of some unforeseen event waiting to claim her in a few decades time, but right there and then, bleed to death from wounds inflicted on her by maniacs. The terror had been as potent as the pain and she had looked to the tree, looked to anything that could, to her shocked mind, be compared to a figure of salvation. And she had seen her mother. The tree had held out its arms, beckoning to her, promising a reprieve from the pain in its maternal embrace, and she had tried, wept as the barbed-wire kept her at bay like the restrictions imposed on her by her own lack of faith.

She began to walk.
There is something afterward
, she repeated in her head.
Katy, Daniel and Stu are somewhere else, at peace
. It was not yet a conviction, and barring proof of some kind beyond what she had seen here tonight, she doubted she would ever fully believe it. But it was a start, a step forward from pessimism. All that remained was for her to find the same succor.

*

"What the hell did you do?" Stella asked her husband, daubing the cuts around his broken nose with antiseptic that made him feel as if she were applying it with a heated needle.

"Already told you," McKindrey said. "I weren't catchin' nothin' down at the creek so I headed up to the far side where the river's wider. Tried to climb up that steep edge where those Pike boys got themselves drowned few summer's back, and I fell. Did a real job on my foot."

"How come you ain't scratched no place else? That place is full of thorn bushes and stickers."

McKindrey shook his head, irritated. Not only was Stella being a pain in the ass with her questions, but she was also blocking his view of the TV, so he couldn't even have that as a distraction. She had bandaged up his foot so heavily he couldn't fit his boot over it, so instead he'd had her wrap strips of an old shirt around it. It would do for a while and at least he wouldn't have to be stuck in the house listening to her for God knows how long. He took a long draw of whiskey, felt it numb him and fill his nose with fumes that took the edge off the pain. He was mad as hell, but had reined it in for now. Wouldn't do to be trying to explain to Stella why he was filled with murderous rage over his own stupidity.

"Oh, damn it to hell anyway," Stella said now and backed away from him as if afraid he was going to hit her.

He took another sip of whiskey, winced and looked at her. "What's the matter?"

"You got a call while you was out."

"So?"

"It were the state police guy from Mason City. Marshall Todd."

"What did he want?"

"Said he got a call from the sister of that poor girl got herself in trouble down here few months back."

With great effort, McKindrey sat up, his bandaged foot resting on an old ottoman. "And?"

"And she told him the girl's on her way back down here. Should already be here as a matter of fact if she's comin' at all. Asked if you'd keep an eye out, and bring her in if you can. They'll have someone here in the mornin' to help you out. But I can call him and let him know—"