Rise the Dark (3 page)

O
n the day he visited Cassadaga to see the place where his wife had died, Mark began by taking the same run she had made on the last morning of her life.

Lauren's route through St. Petersburg's bay front took him down Fifth Avenue and past Straub Park, facing Tampa Bay. There he angled left and ran alongside the seawall as it curved toward the bridge between Old Northeast and Snell Isle. At the bridge he stopped running and then walked back, letting his breathing settle. Once, during an early run here, he'd seen a shadow in the water and loudly announced the presence of a shark. It was actually a dolphin. Lauren, born and bred on the Gulf Coast, a scuba diver from the age most kids learn to ride bikes, laughed so hard that she couldn't breathe. Mark thought of that moment often—Lauren in running shorts and tank top, soaked with sweat, looking fit and impossibly young, doubled over and gasping with laughter she didn't have the air for, her ponytail bobbing as if to count off the wheezes of her silent laughs.

“I know you're from the mountains,” she'd said when she could finally speak, “but I have never heard anyone yell ‘Shark!' like that in my life. Outside of the movie
Jaws,
that is. It tells me things about you, babe—you see Flipper and you scream ‘Shark!' That tells me things.”

He told her that he hadn't
screamed
anything, he'd just
announced
what he thought he'd seen. Announced it a little loudly, maybe, for clarity's sake. That only made her laugh harder. She'd ended up on her butt on the sidewalk, arms wrapped around her knees and tears in her eyes, fighting for air.

Following today's run he stopped for a cup of coffee at Kahwa, the little coffee shop on his building's ground floor, then went upstairs, entered his condo, and walked out onto the deck. There he sipped the coffee, shook a single cigarette loose from a pack of American Spirits, and lit it. This was the last part of the routine, and the one he liked least. He had hated his wife's cigarette habit. It was the only consistent fight they ever had—he told her it was selfish to those who loved her because it could take her from them young.

Funny, the things you could be so strident about. So convicted of.

When she died and left a pack behind, he couldn't bring himself to throw them out. He smoked them instead, like a Catholic lighting candles for the dead. Then he bought another pack, continuing the one-a-day ritual. There in the morning on the deck, in the smell of sweat and cigarettes, he could close his eyes and, for an instant, feel as if she were at his side.

Today he stubbed out the cigarette early and headed for the shower. He had a drive to make, and he'd been waiting too long on it already.

Lauren's car had been returned to Mark nine weeks after she was buried. The title was in both of their names, so he was the rightful owner and the police couldn't claim it was a crime scene any longer. No evidence was in the car.

Their condo building in St. Petersburg had been designed to feel spacious despite the constraints of reality, and the garage featured an admirable attempt to fit two cars into a single parking space. Hydraulic lifts hoisted one vehicle in the air so another could be parked below it. A seamless system—provided that you and your spouse worked in strict military shifts or were indifferent to which car you drove. Lauren was not indifferent. She loved the Infiniti, its look, speed, and handling. It was her car. Mark's old Jeep—filled with empty coffee cups and notepads and the gym clothes he inevitably forgot to bring up and put in the laundry—was not an acceptable substitute. When she wanted to go somewhere, she was going to go in her own car.

He parked on the street. Problem solved.

Neither of them ever used the lift, but when the police returned the car to Mark, he put it up there. Lauren's pearl-white Infiniti coupe had been sitting on the top of the lift, untouched, for nearly two years when he turned the key that operated the hydraulics. The system hummed and groaned and then lowered the car slowly, like pallbearers easing a casket into the ground. The tires were low, and the battery was dead. He used a portable generator to air up the tires, pulled his Jeep in the garage long enough to jump the battery, and then got behind the wheel, closed the door, and waited for the profound wash of memories.

He wanted to be able to smell her, feel her, taste her. He had a million memories of the car, and Lauren was in all of them, and he felt as if the vehicle should have held on to some of her. Instead, all he smelled was warm dust and all he felt was heat blasting from the air vents. It had been a warm day when she'd died but a cold one when he'd driven the car back onto the lift.

After he had listened to the engine purr for a few seconds, he backed out of the garage and drove toward Cassadaga.

Mark had never known anyone who was more emphatically opposed to capital punishment than his wife. For many years, as they lived and worked together, Mark had shared her beliefs. He preached them, and he practiced them. When Lauren was killed, he continued to do so—publicly.

He wasn't sure exactly when he parted with them in his soul.

Maybe her funeral. Maybe when he saw the crime scene photographs. Maybe the very moment the sheriff's deputy arrived to tell him the news.

It was hard to be sure of a thing like that.

The thing he was sure of now? The game was over. It had ended with Garland Webb's parting words. And it was time to be honest—he'd never really believed in it like Lauren did. He'd wanted to, and maybe even convinced himself that he did, because it was the ideology of the woman he loved. He often assured her of his understanding of the world: No man should kill another, no matter the circumstances, no matter the sins. He'd meant it then, and he thought that was important—he'd meant the words when he'd said them.

Back then, he had a wife he was deeply in love with, a job that fulfilled him, and no reason to wish death on anyone.

Things change.

In the three months that had passed since Mark resigned from Innocence Incorporated, the death penalty–defense firm where he'd worked as an investigator and where Lauren had worked as an attorney, he'd been focused on only two things: regaining his health after injuries he'd suffered during a brutal case in Indiana, and replacing the rumors about Garland Webb with hard evidence.

He'd come along a lot better with the first task than the second. He felt as good physically as he had in a long time. As for Webb's guilt, Mark had succeeded only in producing evidence that he
could
have been in Cassadaga, Florida, on the day that Lauren was killed there.

Evidence of any kind in Lauren's murder had been hard to come by. She'd been working a case that—on the surface—didn't appear to threaten anyone who lived within five hundred miles of Cassadaga, and her final notes supported that. There was no fresh information, no new names, nothing unexplained save for a three-word phrase she'd scrawled in the notebook that she'd left in the passenger seat of her car. Those words,
rise the dark,
had intrigued detectives initially, but nobody, Mark included, had ever been able to make any sense of them. As for Garland Webb, who'd allegedly claimed her killing, all Mark had was possibility. He didn't yet have any proof that Webb had been there when Lauren pulled her car to the side of a lonely country road, stepped out, and began to walk along a trail lined with tall oaks and thick stands of bamboo. She was shot twice in the head sometime after that. The person who found her could say only that the car's hood was still warm. The coroner said that Lauren was too. Dead, but still warm.

Whatever happened, happened fast.

Nobody knew why she'd stepped out of the car. A threat, maybe. Trust, perhaps. That's how close the police were to ascertaining the truth of her murder: somewhere between trust and threat.

The last indisputable fact of Lauren's life was where it had ended.

Mark had stayed away from that place for a long time. Too long.

W
hile never allowing himself to see the actual spot, limiting his exposure to her death scene to the study of photographs and maps because he believed to see it would be too powerful, too devastating, Mark felt like he knew it well. Felt like he could give guided tours, in fact, of the strange little town that he'd never seen.

Turn your heads to the right, ladies and gentlemen, and you'll see the Colby Memorial Temple. In New York in 1888, a Spiritualist named George Colby claimed he had been given a directive from a spirit guide named Seneca: Colby was to move south and start his own Spiritualist colony. So it had been decreed. Colby moved.

He settled in Volusia County, Florida. And the colony lasted. More than a hundred years later, the residents of the Cassadaga camp maintain the Spiritualist faith, and most are registered mediums…

There he would begin to struggle, because there he would be confronted with all that he hated about the place. His mother had been a con artist in the West, and pretending to have access to the dead was one of her go-to moves for extra dollars. The idea of an entire group endorsing such behavior, of a town filled with “registered” mediums, seers of the past and future, repulsed him.

He parked in front of the Cassadaga Hotel, a Spanish-looking stone structure where people could make appointments with many of the area's mediums, including the woman who was the last known person to see his wife alive and who had once rented a room to a man named Garland Webb.

The hotel operated as sort of a central dispatch for the mediums. Some worked in the hotel, covering hours in shifts, while others met clients in their homes. The psychic Lauren had come to see was named Dixie Witte, and Lauren had gone to the hotel first, so that was how Mark approached it.

He had a gun on under a light soft-shell jacket. He usually carried a nine-millimeter, but today he had a .38-caliber revolver. That was the caliber of gun that had killed Lauren, and Mark wanted to return the favor accurately. He also had a small digital recorder in one pocket and a tactical flashlight in the other.

Once he was inside the hotel, though, the idea of needing any of these things seemed laughable. It was an open, charming place with a wine bar and a coffee shop. A sign indicated that appointments with mediums could be made inside the gift shop, which was tended by a woman in her fifties dressed in a swirl of loose fabric, everything flowing and brightly patterned and billowing around her. She told him cheerfully that of course she could set up an appointment with Dixie. Bracelets with heavy stones adorned her left wrist; he saw she wore rings on every finger when she dialed the phone. The little gift shop sold the kind of cheap trinkets that did not seem likely to promote anyone's belief in the legitimacy of the camp, making it feel more like a tourist trap than a place of heightened communication. He listened to the woman's side of the conversation, and then she put the phone to her chest and said, “Are there any special issues you'd like to discuss? She'll spend some time channeling the proper energy if she knows what to be open for.”

Mark nodded as if that made perfect sense, thought about it for a moment, and then said, “Tenants.”

The cheerful woman frowned. “Tenants?”

“Yes. I have some questions about tenants.”

“Can you specify an emotional connection you have to this question about tenants?”

“Rage.”

Her eyes narrowed and she seemed about to ask him something, but she held off, lifted the phone again, and said, “Mr. Novak has questions about…um, tenants, and he has issues with anger.” She listened for a few seconds, then said, “Good,” and hung up.

“Dixie will see you this evening at seven.”

“That's great.”

She took out a map and drew a circle and a square on it. “The square is us, and you're headed to the circle. It's easy to find, but there are two houses on the property. You'll want forty-nine A, not forty-nine B.”

Garland Webb had rented 49B once. Fortunately for Garland, Dixie Witte didn't like record-keeping, and she dealt in cash. She'd never been able to recall whether he was present on the day in question. She also hadn't volunteered his existence as a tenant until after the prison snitch turned up with his report.

“I'm sure I'll find the right place,” Mark said. “I assume the neighbors all have an uncanny sense of direction.”

It was his first slip, the sarcasm bubbling forth already when he'd promised himself to contain it, promised himself that he would take them seriously, as Lauren had. Five minutes in town, and he was losing his footing.

“This is a place of healing, Mr. Novak,” the woman said. “It's not the place you think it is, which I can see in your eyes. You have much scorn for us. That's fine, but it won't help you. If you wish to open yourself to possibility here, you'll be rewarded.”

“I've seen some of this town's rewards,” Mark said.

“If that were true, you wouldn't be a skeptic. But the reading will help, whether you're open or closed to it. A skeptic walks out of a reading with doubt intact, but also with echoes.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” Mark said, and then he left the gift shop and walked through the hotel lobby and back into the humid day, glad to be out of the place. The breezes were gone and the sky was a flat gray and when a truck passed by, the dust it lifted fell swiftly back to earth.

The woman in the hotel had felt too familiar to him, had stirred old angers. She was the sort who peddled bullshit statements that people could easily mold to fit their own situations. The crime of it, Mark thought, was that those people believed they'd been granted insight, not a fortune cookie. Mark's mother had been good enough at that. Her favorite role was Snow Creek Maiden of the Nez Perce, a white woman passing herself off as an American Indian because so many white people believed that Indians were more spiritually in tune, never sensing the inherent racism there. She would dye her hair and skin and don traditional garb. The tourists would look into her eyes—they were blue but shielded with dark contacts—and nod with amazement because whatever generality she tossed at them connected with something in their pasts. They made the connections themselves, but they credited her for it. And paid for the joke.

It was this experience that had left Mark with scorn for the people who practiced their games in a place like this, and it was that scorn that led his wife to take an assignment that had been headed for his desk and claim it as her own. The interview with Dixie Witte had been Mark's job. Lauren didn't think he'd be able to approach it with sincerity, thought that he was biased against anyone who claimed psychic gifts, and so she'd interceded and come to Cassadaga herself.

Never left.

Thunder, long and loud, chased Mark as he walked away from the hotel and through the camp. The air was thick with humidity and scented with jasmine and honeysuckle. There was only one paved street, the road that ran through the center of the camp, and the rest of the homes were built off narrow lanes of crushed stone and hard-packed earth. The lanes were framed by tall oaks that were cobwebbed with Spanish moss.

It was a strange little place. Some of the homes were neat and well kept, recently restored in a few cases, and others looked like they'd been built by someone using the wrong end of the hammer. Mark walked by a man who was doing clean and jerks with a barbell and a pair of forty-five-pound plates in the middle of his front yard. He was shirtless and had a thick mat of black hair across his chest and stomach, shining with sweat, and he called out the reps in a grunting voice as he powered the weights up. Who needs a gym when you've got a front yard? Or a shirt when you could grow your own? Ten feet to his side, chickens clucked and scratched their way around a coop that had been made out of an old truck's camper shell. The local power-lifter seemed to be of the waste-not, want-not mind-set.

Each street sign included a bold white 911 inside a green circle. Mark had never seen anything like it. The idea probably had something to do with giving emergency services a firm address on roads that had previously been unmarked or unnamed, but the effect was disconcerting, seeming to cry out that a disaster waited down each winding lane.

Mr. Novak? I'm afraid I have some difficult news to share. It's about your wife.

The deputy who'd come for him that night, who'd found Mark waiting at the Siesta Key beach house where he and Lauren were supposed to have a romantic weekend escape, had never heard of Cassadaga. That night, Mark had heard of it only from his wife.

Since then, he'd spent much of his time in the place, in mind if not in body.

Mr. Novak? I'm afraid I have some difficult news to share. It's about your wife.

The day after their engagement, Lauren's father had invited Mark over for a beer, just the two of them. Mark was expecting the typical “Now, you take good care of my baby girl” speech, and while he received a version of it, he wasn't prepared for the depth of pain in the other man's eyes. It was the first time he'd understood the fear that lived like a heartbeat within a parent. A good parent, at least.

“Having a child,” Lauren's father had said, “is to spend your life swimming with sharks. You think I'm joking, but it's only because you don't know yet. You haven't seen one grow up and walk off into the world, and when you do, you'll think about all the things that could be waiting out there; you'll think of car accidents and cancer and kidnappings and all the other horrors in a way you didn't before you had a child. You always knew they were out there, but you didn't
care
in the same way. Then you have a daughter, and…well, then you see the sharks. They'll start circling in your mind, and they'll never leave. You'll just pray they keep circling forever. You understand what I'm saying?”

“I'm not a shark,” Mark had said, and then he'd smiled, because he had no children and so he didn't understand what the water here was like. Lauren's father hadn't returned the smile. He'd searched Mark's eyes for a long time before he nodded. They drank their beers and talked football, boats, and movies, everything lighthearted and casual, but Mark was uneasy the rest of the night, because what he'd seen in the other man's eyes was something he'd never known himself. It had been many years since he'd last wondered who his own father was, but that night he did. He wondered whether that man had ever thought of the sharks. Even once.

More thunder. A stillness to the western edge of town, as if the trees were lying low, trying not to attract the attention of the oncoming bullying clouds.

Though Mark hadn't been in the town before, he knew exactly how to find Dixie Witte's home. He'd spent plenty of time looking at it on maps. The second story of the house leaned away from the foundation like a drunk trying to balance on one leg; the front-porch windows were cracked or had plastic where glass belonged; the ferns in the yard had grown so high they were nearly to the roof of a rusted-out Ford Taurus. The undergrowth was thick, so Mark couldn't tell for sure, but he would have laid a high-dollar bet that the car no longer had wheels. Might not even have an engine. A shed beside the house had a caved-in roof, and the blue plastic tarp that had been pulled across the hole was bowed with trapped rainwater. It was the sort of place that made you think you might catch a viral disease if you stood downwind of it.

Mark had lived in a lot of shitholes in his childhood, and in a truck for a time, but even his mother wouldn't have considered moving into this house.

This was where Garland Webb had lived for a two-month period before he moved on to Daytona Beach and was finally arrested for sexual assault.

There was a truck in the drive. A red Dodge lifted high on an aftermarket suspension with knobby terrain tires that were probably worth as much as the house. The truck was freshly washed and the red paint shone even in the gloom. Mark had met a few people who cared more about their trucks than their homes. It usually didn't suggest good things. He walked around the main house, and a guesthouse at the rear of the property came into view. A small but well-kept little home painted blue with clean white trim. It was an incongruous pairing—the large home gone to hell, the small one lovingly maintained. The flowering bushes that bordered it were neatly clipped, and a stepladder stood beside an orange tree just in front of the house. A barefoot blond boy in overalls, no shirt underneath, was picking oranges. He couldn't have been much more than seven years old, and he wobbled precariously as he reached for one.

“Careful,” Mark said, stepping to brace the ladder.

The boy plucked the orange free, set it in a basket that was balanced on the top step of the ladder, and turned to Mark. He was incredibly pale for Florida, with bright blue eyes.

“Hiya.”

“Hiya. Don't lose your balance up there.”

“Don't lose your balance down there.”

Mark grinned. “Fair enough. Is Dixie around?”

The boy shrugged. “She hasn't paid me yet. When I'm done she'll pay me. Fifty cents if I do the whole tree.”

“You need to adjust for inflation, kid. You're getting taken.”

Another shrug.

Mark said, “You know most people in this town?”

“I know everybody.”

“You had the look of a connected man. Ever hear of a guy named Garland?”

“Nope.”

“What about a Mr. Webb? That mean anything to you?”

The boy shook his head. “They come and they go, though.”

“Who does?”

“People in the big house.” The boy pointed at the decrepit structure behind Mark. “They don't stay long, and they don't talk much.”

“What kind of people are they, would you say?”

“People like you.”

“Like me? What's that mean?”

“Angry people,” the boy said, and Mark's grin wavered. The clouds were shifting fast, and Mark was in shadow now, but the boy was in sunlight, his white skin bright beneath the grimy overalls. Only his bare feet, covered in dust, were dulled.