One of Us (4 page)

I have my phone with me and instinctively think of calling Rafe. I have his number but lose my nerve. I don’t know what I’d say after all this time. I dial 911 instead and tell the dispatcher I’ve found a body.

three

T
HE TWO YOUNG COPS
introduce themselves. The first is Billy Smalls, and I have to say he’s aptly named. I’m sure he took a lot of abuse about this fact when he was a child, which I assume wasn’t all that long ago. Short and slight, ginger haired, with big ears and a smooth, wide-eyed baby face, he seems too young to do this job or any job other than sell lemonade.

The other is Troy Razzano. He’s a dark-haired, dark-eyed, good-looking kid, but is already starting to get thick around the middle from the doughnuts, drive-thrus, and 2 a.m. Denny’s Grand Slam breakfasts of a small-town law enforcement diet. If I had to pick one reason why he became a police officer, I’d say it’s because he likes how he looks in the uniform. Even if he lives to be as old as Tommy, I’m sure he’ll want to be buried in it. I picture Billy being buried in SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas. The kind with feet.

“Sheridan Doyle?” Billy repeats my name. “Your name sounds familiar.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of you, too,” Troy muses.

“I grew up here. I’m visiting my grandfather. But you might know me from my books or TV appearances on the news, talk shows, crime documentaries . . .”

Recognition fails to register on their faces.

“I’m a forensic psychologist,” I explain further. “I’ve been involved
in some fairly well-known cases. The Wishbone Killer, the Scranton Bomber, the Dolly Decker kidnapping . . . I’m
Dr.
Sheridan Doyle—”

“Hey, that’s it,” Troy cuts me off. “Rafe knows you. He’s got one of your books.”

“Yeah,” Billy chimes in. “Rafe knows you.”

A thrill of childish pride rushes through me as if I’ve just been picked first for any type of team. I don’t know why I think I’d have the slightest idea how that feels, but for a moment, I’m sure I do.

“So he’s still working?”

They both smile and nod.

“Oh, yeah,” they say in unison.

“He’s a detective now,” Troy provides. “The first one we’ve ever had. Everyone jokes the chief made up the position for him because he knew Rafe could never handle not wearing a uniform and having to pick out his own clothes so he’d be forced to retire, but it didn’t work.”

They fall silent. I wait for them to walk over to the body, but neither one seems eager to look at it. I imagine the Creekside Township police rarely deal with suspicious deaths, but even so, there’s nothing gory about this one. I already took a look at him. I don’t know why they’re keeping their distance.

I start toward the man. They fall in beside me.

“You’re an old-timer,” Billy says to me. “You probably know a lot about the town’s history. Is this the first guy to ever be killed here? I mean other than the original guys who were killed here.”

“I’m forty-three,” I state irately. “That hardly makes me an old-timer.”

“Sorry.”

“Why are you assuming he was killed?” I ask. “You haven’t even seen him. It could be natural causes.”

“How about that?” Billy says, crouching down near the body. “It’s Simon Husk. I thought I saw his car over there.”

“What do you think did it?” Troy asks me, tentatively.

“Don’t you mean,
who
did it? Not
what
?” I reply.

He doesn’t say anything.

“I don’t think anyone did anything to him,” I go on. “There’s no blood. No sign of trauma on the body. Heart attack, maybe.”

I glance at the boys. They look skeptical.

“He was an older man, overweight,” I explain. “Smells like a smoker. Looks like a drinker. A diabetic.”

“How do you know he was a diabetic?” Troy asks me.

“He’s wearing a MedicAlert bracelet.”

Billy barks a laugh.

“You’re a regular Sherlock freakin’ Holmes, Razzano.”

Troy shifts around and hitches up his utility belt hung with twenty pounds of equipment featuring a huge flashlight, which is the most formidable object on it. In this well-armed community of hunters, veterans, and Second Amendment–loving patriots, his holstered Glock carries the intimidation factor of a squirt gun.

“Yeah, you’re probably right about the heart attack,” he concedes.

“Do you have an alternative theory?” I ask them.

“Isn’t it true you can be scared to death?” Troy wonders. “I mean, can’t something scare you so bad it gives you a heart attack?”

“What are you saying?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Billy jumps in.

“They could be zombies,” Troy says to him in a private aside that leads me to believe this isn’t the first time they’ve had this discussion.

“What are you two talking about?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

“The Nellies . . .”

“We don’t believe in them,” Troy adds quickly. “But what if Simon here believed in them . . . ?”

He leaves the idea hanging in the air for all of us to consider.

Simon Husk certainly wouldn’t be the first person to have ever allegedly seen a ghost at the gallows, or lingering in the jail, or roaming morosely through the field where the Nellies were buried without so much as a rock a child might use to mark a pet’s grave to commemorate their final resting place.

The town has been the continual darling of ghost-hunting societies and research foundations for as long as I can remember. They show up
periodically with their cameras, recorders, thermometers, and gadgets to gauge electromagnetic disturbances. Believers and skeptics alike have reported sightings of glowing orbs of light and faint bluish mists accompanied by sudden drafts of cold and suffocating feelings of dread. Every Halloween someone sees and hears Prosperity trudging along a road with his dinner pail swinging by his side whistling “Yankee Doodle.”

“Husk just sold the gallows and the jail to Walker Dawes, and he’s going to tear it all down and drill for gas,” Billy informs me.

“The gallows are being torn down?”

I can’t believe Tommy didn’t tell me this.

The young cops nod in unison.

“Why now? Why after all this time?”

They both shrug.

“The Nellies could be mad at Simon for selling the gallows, so they killed him,” Troy continues theorizing.

It’s obvious from their expressions that they believe it’s a possibility, but they laugh and shake their heads when they notice me staring at them.

“We’re just messing with you,” Billy says, squaring his slim shoulders.

We’re interrupted by the sound of a car door slamming and one side of a heated conversation ringing out clearly in the cold white dawn silence.

A man in rumpled gray pants, a pair of Caterpillar boots with bright yellow laces, a strobing red-and-blue-striped tie, and an olive green corduroy blazer all topped off with a camouflage hunting jacket comes tromping toward us, taking a slight detour in order to kick a Pepsi can across the prison yard.

They were right about him not being able to pick out his own clothes.

“I don’t care,” Rafe shouts into his phone. “It’s not my car anymore. I don’t own it. I don’t drive it. And I’m sure as hell not going to pay to replace its timing belt.”

He pockets his phone but continues his tirade.

“When we were married she’d go for days, weeks, without talking to
me. Now we’re divorced, she wants to talk to me all the time. What are you looking at?” he snaps at Billy, who flinches at the edge in his voice.

Rafe stares him down with a surly blue squint, then flashes one of his disarming smiles that somehow manages to be both angelic and menacing at the same time, set in the fine-featured, booze-ravaged face.

He turns to me.

I wait breathlessly for some kind of sentimental greeting. Will he embrace me? Shake my hand and pat me on the back? It’s been twelve years and I’ve accomplished a lot during this time; will he be too choked up to speak?

“What the hell are you wearing?” he asks me.

I glance down at my running attire: Sugoi RSR running tights, a North Face Apex ClimateBlock zip jacket, neon-orange reflective Saucony gloves, and a waterproof Asics beanie. I’ve come a long way from the wrestling team’s hand-me-down shapeless gray sweats, tube socks for gloves, and Steelers knit cap topped with a big yellow pom-pom of my youth, but I doubt if he considers this an improvement.

Before I can come up with a response, he digs out a pink Jolly Rancher from his coat pocket and strips off the plastic wrap.

I remember he only likes the watermelon ones.

“Are you still trying to quit smoking?” I ask.

“Once a year.”

He pops the candy into his mouth. I listen to the clicks and clacks of it hitting his teeth as he moves it around his mouth.

“How’re you doing, Danno?”

His words whisk me back to the day we first met and he sat with me in the kitchen where I would one day get to know my father’s feet while the other police officers took away my mother in handcuffs and the remains of my infant sister in a body bag no bigger than a backpack and he pushed a Tootsie Roll across the tabletop and asked me the same question.

I automatically started to say okay, my conditioned response, then I looked up and met his stare full of anger and concern but no pity or blame, and
for the first time in my young life I felt I could be honest.

“Not very good,” I told him that day.

“I’m great,” I tell him today. “How are you?”

“Still kicking, which is more than I can say for old Simon here.”

He kneels next to the body. We wait for his appraisal. Rafe’s the only one here well acquainted with the sight of death. He only ever mentioned Vietnam once to me during all the time I’ve known him. I don’t know any details about what he saw or did there, but I’ve always assumed it was bad for him. I’ve spent a few nights at the Red Rabbit with him years ago watching him drink with a mechanical purpose I know has to be motivated by something more torturous than life in a used-up coal town and four divorces.

“He’s dead all right,” he announces. “What was he doing here?”

“We don’t know,” Billy answers. “His car’s parked on the street. Looks like he drove himself here.”

“I thought he sold this land to Dawes.”

“He did.”

“I’m going to go talk to the wife,” he tells the boys. “You two wait for the coroner.”

“But . . .” Troy sputters.

“What’s with them?” Rafe asks me.

“They’re spooked,” I tell him.

“I’m not spooked,” Billy insists roughly.

Rafe grins. He opens his eyes wide and makes ghostly moans while fluttering his fingers at them.

“What do you think? Old Prosperity and Footloose are finally getting their revenge? Souvenir sales are going to skyrocket for the NONS,” he whoops.

He abruptly turns and begins walking back to his car and I happily trail after him, instinctively falling into the puppy dog role of my youth.

He looks back at me over his shoulder.

“You gonna tell me why you’re here?”

“I was out for a run.”

“I can see that. You run all the way from Philly? I mean, why are you in town?”

“I came to take care of Tommy.”

“Make sure he doesn’t hear you say that,” he snorts. “Tommy’s the
last guy who will let someone take care of him. He’s out of the hospital. He’s doing fine as far as I know.”

He stops and watches me, clicking his candy against his teeth, waiting for me to explain why I’m really here. For once in my life, I can’t put something into words, except to say I need to see my grandpa in the flesh.

“Why don’t you come with me?” he suggests. “We can catch up.”

“Come with you on an interrogation?”

“Interrogation, hell. I’m gonna go tell Bethany Husk her husband’s dead. We can get a beer after.”

“Aren’t you on duty?”

“On duty,” he snorts again.

He reaches into his pocket and holds out a piece of candy to me.

“I’ll go off for an hour or two. No one will miss me.”

four

A
FTER MEETING FOR THE
first time on the day of my mother’s arrest, Rafe continued to keep an eye on me. He’d stop by occasionally with a candy bar or baseball cards. Eventually he started taking me on ride-alongs in his police car.

I was eager to go but soon discovered there was nothing exciting about his kind of police work. It consisted for the most part of driving around and sometimes sitting in the gravel lot behind the beer distributor’s waiting for someone to break the speed limit on Jenner’s Pike. Everyone did, and since it wouldn’t have been fair for him to only ticket people he personally disliked, he devised a sort of game for us to play where I’d pick a number and we’d count the cars that went past until we reached it and then went after the unlucky one. He never rejected my choice of a number whether it was two or twenty-two. Once I picked 116. We spent several hours playing checkers on the board he set up between us in the front seat, but only thirty cars passed during that time so no one got a ticket that day.

When something out of the ordinary did happen, it never involved a car chase or a shoot-out or any kind of confrontation with a criminal or evildoer like police work did on TV. From what I could see, Rafe’s job consisted of cleaning up the messes of ordinary people and then directing them—sometimes with the help of handcuffs—toward others who could help them find ways to cope with their mistakes and disappoint
ments. Saving them from the bad guys turned out to be nothing more than saving them from themselves.

The giant Husk house sits alone on a hillside, a reproduction of an antebellum mansion constructed without any of the craftsmanship or natural building materials used in the Old South. It’s a testament to how much square footage can be encased in vinyl siding and covered in stain-resistant carpeting.

Rafe pounds at the front door with the flat of his fist, ignoring the faux-brass knocker. A woman in her sixties wearing gold jewelry and a purple velour jogging suit answers.

“Mrs. Husk?” he asks.

“Yes?” she asks, crinkling her brow uncertainly.

He shows her his credentials.

“I’m—”

“Rafe,” she suddenly gushes before he can finish introducing himself.

A sentimental smile lights up her face and I’m not surprised. Every woman in the county between the ages of thirty and seventy has had some sort of intimate dealings with Rafe, whether real or imaginary.

“We went to school together,” Mrs. Husk explains to me while never taking her eyes off Rafe. “Do you remember—?”

Rafe nods and pops two Jolly Ranchers into his mouth in rapid-fire succession.

“Mrs. Husk,” he cuts her off.

“Bethany,” she offers.

“I’m here to talk to you about your husband.”

Her smile and the misty softness in her eyes vanishes.

“Simon?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“Oh my God!”

She slaps a hand covered in chunky rings like small brightly colored ice cubes to her mouth.

“What happened?”

“It looks like he died of natural causes, but we won’t know for sure until we get the coroner’s report.”

“I don’t understand. Where? How?”

“We found him at the gallows.”

Her eyes brimming with tears grow comically large.

“The gallows?” she repeats in a fearful whisper.

“That’s what I’d like to talk to you about if you feel up to answering a few questions.”

She gestures inside the house at an enormous green living room with cathedral ceilings, gold carpeting, and a huge coffee table inlaid with green and yellow pieces of the kind of rippled plastic seen in cheap church window reproductions.

Rafe follows her and takes a seat on the edge of a green-and-gold-striped couch and I’m immediately reminded of a farm machinery salesman waiting for an airport shuttle in the lobby of a Midwest Comfort Inn. Bethany Husk practically disappears inside a barrel-shaped suede chair that looks like a big moldy marshmallow.

I decide to remain outside and stretch. Cavernous, color-coordinated houses make me nervous; along with traditional claustrophobia, I also suffer from a reverse type where I feel trapped by too much useless space.

The view from here would be beautiful on a sparkling October afternoon when the trees are a splash of enameled colors, but in January it’s a vista of depressing shadows. Bundles of sooty bedsheet clouds sit heavily on the tops of the distant hills. Down in the valley through a black screen of bare tree branches is the gray stream from which the town took its name, meandering sluggishly among patches of snow like a vein on the underside of a wrist.

I can almost make out the town from here. There was a time when Lost Creek Coal & Oil owned every part of it: the rows of houses, the brass and marble bank where footsteps echoed like gunshots, the square, squat brown brick post office, the all-important company store, the jail, and eventually a school with a cafeteria that would also serve as a gymnasium and a place for town meetings and the laying out of bodies after a mine disaster. The only things Walker Dawes didn’t own were the Red Rabbit and the two churches. For some reason he decided to let someone else profit from a miner’s need to drink and his wife and mother’s need to pray.

After the Nellies were executed, the gallows were never used again, but Walker made sure they weren’t torn down. He claimed he left them up as a reminder of what happened to men who broke the law, but the miners knew the real message behind them was that he was the law.

Unlike his father, Walker Dawes II, or Deuce as he was better known, was a superstitious man. He never liked the fact that the gallows had remained standing, but even after his father passed away and the land was his, he was too frightened to destroy them. He wanted to sell the place but no one wanted to buy it until Warren Husk, a prosperous farmer with a morbid streak, showed up. Warren knew how badly Deuce wanted to get rid of the jail and the gallows, and he used it as leverage to put together a deal where he was able to buy up hundreds of acres of the surrounding land as well at a bargain price.

I never answered Billy Smalls, but to my knowledge no one’s ever been seriously hurt there, aside from the men who were put to death, which is nothing short of amazing considering the amount of kids who have climbed up the gibbet over the years in response to dares or as part of macabre midnight games.

As children we were surrounded by irresistible life-threatening hazards: water-filled quarries, railroad tracks, abandoned mine shafts, mountainous bony piles that were the site of legendary dirt bike accidents, but none were as appealing as the gallows. We were too young to have a sense of mortality. We couldn’t comprehend the horror of facing our own deaths or watching a friend jerk like a hooked fish from the end of a hangman’s rope, but we were already well acquainted with the concepts of cruelty, treachery, and the dark art of survival. Whether pretending to be a miner or one of Walker Dawes’ hired thugs, we understood what happened to the Nellies and we loved and feared their story the same way we did the one that belonged to our fathers.

“Simon’s greed was greater than his fear,” Rafe announces as he joins me again, stuffing a brownie into his mouth.

He hands me one. I shake my head. He eats that one, too.

“Everyone knows he was obsessed with the gallows. He’s been
afraid of them ever since he was a little kid and thought he saw the ghost of Prosperity McNab.”

“Seriously?”

“He saw a ghost outside his bedroom window and the next morning someone had written ‘Fi’ in blood on the bathroom mirror.”

“In blood?” I repeat.

“Well, not exactly blood. It turned out to be his mom’s lipstick.”

“Prosperity’s ghost was running around with a lipstick?”

He nods and grins with a mouthful of chocolate-coated teeth.

“It was obviously some stunt someone played on him, but Simon never stopped believing. He’s always been too superstitious to get rid of the gallows. He thought if he tore them down the Nellies would come back and kill him. But apparently Walker Dawes offered him a sum of money he couldn’t pass up.”

He finishes his brownies and brushes the crumbs from his hands.

“It’s been big news around here. There are some people who think the same way Simon did. They believe if the gallows fall, the Nellies will rise.”

He makes the same googly eyes he made at Troy and Billy earlier.

“That’s ludicrous.”

“His wife said he’s been going to the gallows a lot lately. That’s the part that doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was scared of them.”

“Maybe he finally wanted to confront his fears at the source before the gallows were no longer his,” I offer.

“And one of the times he’s over there, he drops dead. You have a problem with that?”

“None at all,” I reply.

“Me neither. But just to be safe you think I should question Prosperity? You think he’s gone back to his grave? Or he could be sitting over at the Union Hall with a beer and no one would even notice him. Just one more living corpse with a Miller Lite and a bad cough.”

“Well, I’m glad everything makes sense and I’m glad you were able
to escape. I was starting to get worried. The widow seemed awfully fond of you.”

He doesn’t respond. I know from experience he won’t talk about his Lothario past, although I do remember him telling me once that he was amazed he got through high school without getting a girl pregnant. He was drafted right after graduation, then within six months of returning from Vietnam, and spending all of them drunk, stoned, and brawling, he did exactly that.

On the night he was packing his Firebird getting ready to skip town, his future first father-in-law, Trooper Stan Zilner, stopped by his trailer, sat him down in the kitchen, laid his service revolver on the table between them, and explained to Rafe that he knew a few extreme guys like him, guys who’d been in Nam, guys who teetered on the edge of good and evil. A push in one direction and they’d end up toppling into the dark abyss of criminality, a push in the other direction and they’d find themselves on the solid ground of law enforcement. Stan gave him the choice of becoming a cop, marrying his daughter, and raising his grandchild, or being pulled over by a state trooper who would discover a large amount of illegal narcotics in his possession and might possibly have to shoot him if he resisted arrest.

Rafe chose the first option. Ironically, out of the three elements comprising the scenario, the one he had the most misgivings about—being a police officer—turned out to be the only one he was good at.

He gets a call. He walks away from me to take it then returns frowning.

“I found Tommy for you,” he says.

“Is he okay?”

“Oh, yeah, he’s fine. But the manager at Carelli’s Furniture isn’t doing so good. She wants him out of there.”

“Why is he in a furniture store?”

“You’d be amazed where he pops up. Let’s go get him.”

He bends down, scoops up a handful of snow, and swallows it: a country boy’s method of cleansing his palate. He takes another piece of candy out of his pocket.

“Why don’t you get a patch?” I wonder.

“That would be cheating.”

“There are no rules for breaking an addiction.”

He makes a slow turn, taking a final inventory, noticing things I’m sure I don’t, reminding me of an old hunting dog grown white around the muzzle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he raised his nose to sniff the air. Instead he bares his teeth and tells me, “There are rules for everything, Danno.”