The Uninvited (33 page)

C
RAMER SAT ON THE BANK
of the river catching his breath and watching Stooley Peters’s old Plymouth long-bed go down. The river was deep here, and there was a roiling turbulence in this stretch, though not enough to suck the heavy old vehicle downstream. He’d left the windows open. She’d go down quick enough. He would enjoy every minute.

He was aware of the fact that this was the second vehicle he had sunk in less than twenty-four hours.
How about the Taurus as well?
he thought.
Maybe this is my calling, sinking things!
But no, it wasn’t like that, really. In Peters’s case, he was just paying the old man back, an eye for an eye. What he’d done to Waylin Pitney’s truck filled with stolen merchandise was something more. It was like saying good-bye.

He hadn’t been able to manhandle the barrier out of the way, so he’d had to back the Plymouth up and crash through it. There was just enough cracked and weed-choked macadam beyond the barrier for him to stop from going over and ending up in the drink. He hadn’t counted on the brakes being so soft, the tires so bald. For one brain-numbing moment, he thought he was done for. But the old dame stopped with one front wheel over the lip of the crumbling hillside and Cramer jumped free. The rest was grunt work.

Peters was swearing enough to turn the air around him blue. Mimi worked hard at not smiling. She kept her distance from him, but, judging from the language, it was as if he didn’t know she was there. He ran out of fuel and stopped cursing eventually. Then he got this strained look on his face as if he was thinking and it was hard work.

“You got that little phone on you?” he said, holding his hand up to his ear, with his pinkie extended for a mouthpiece, in case she didn’t know what a phone was.

“It’s back at the house,” she said.

“Well, go get it,” he said, and started marching back down the driveway. But she ran ahead of him and stopped in his path.

“I’ll go make the call for you. You can wait right here.”

He looked as if he might argue the point, but something, probably the determination on her face, made him change his mind.

“Call the cops,” he said.

“Okay. Hey, and I can even tell them the license plate number.”

“You remember it?”

She shook her head. “Not the number, exactly, but I did notice it was issued in 1976. That ought to make it easy to find.”

She hadn’t noticed much in the way of irony in Peters’s conversation so far, but he picked up on hers quickly enough. And he raised his hand as if he wanted to give her the back of it, except that she was a good healthy ten feet ahead of him.

“Around here, missy, it’s against the law to steal somebody’s vehicle.” Then he swiped the air with his large mitt of a hand, as if he’d said all he wanted to say to her, and stomped back out to the road and on toward Paradise.

But what Mimi was thinking was that the Upper Valentine ended in the direction that Cramer was heading. She had run there often enough to know. It was about three miles, she guessed. She could make it in under twenty minutes.

As she changed into her jogging gear, she wondered if it had been Cramer. They had not caught sight, through the dust the truck kicked up, of who was behind the wheel. But considering Peters had scuppered his canoe, as he put it, she had a feeling the old man was right. And if it was Cramer, there was no use waiting around here for him to show.

It was three o’clock when she hit the road, but it looked more like eight. The sky was low and black and heavy with rain. She was glad she’d put on long pants for the run; there was quite a wind. It was 3:25 when she got to the busted barrier.

She stared down the steep hill to the river. She could just make out the right front end of the truck, tilted upward like some black and rusty boulder just under the surface. Even as she watched, it sank from view. Then she looked east and west, her eyes scouring the hillside. The slope was steeper to the west, the brush more dense. If he was still here, that’s where he’d be, she thought. There was no other way out of here.

“I’m not sure if you are here, Cramer,” she shouted to the hillside. “But I’m going to pretend you are and hope maybe you’ll come out of hiding and talk to me.”

She looked around. Nothing. The wind was loud in the trees; the storm was close.

“Cramer?”

The sweat was drying on her, chilling her face and arms. She pushed the hair out of her eyes.

“I don’t know if you got the letter we left at your place,” she said. “We want to talk to you.
I
want to talk to you.” Oh, this was ridiculous! For the second time in two days, she was talking to an invisible man. A man in the trees, a man up a hill. He had to be there. She could
feel
he was there.

“I’m not sure what you’ve been playing at,” she said, “but I want to hear your side of the story. Like maybe it was Stooley Peters who was poking around, and you were keeping an eye on him. Or maybe you were spying, but there was a reason. Cramer?”

She turned in a long slow circle.

“Do you like me, Cramer? Because I feel this connection. Do you feel it, Cramer? And I guess what I want to know is why you would steal Jay’s guitars. Why? That’s what I can’t figure out. I can’t see you doing that.”

She stared at the steep hillside and then looked up because she had felt a drop of rain. And then suddenly she looked back down the road because a car was coming.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I
T WAS PETERS IN A CAR
of about the same vintage as his truck, but with a more recent license plate. Mimi watched with despair as he pulled up to within a few yards of where she stood. He got out and with only a nasty glance her way went to the edge of the precipice and looked down. He turned to her.

“Did you see anything?”

She nodded. “It’s gone,” she said.

He swore, looked around, and then looked back at her. “What about the boy?”

She shrugged.
A good question,
she thought.
What about the boy?
But then Peters turned to look up, through the rain, at the hillside with which she had been having her one-sided conversation or soliloquy or whatever it was.

“He up there?”

“Do I look like I know?”

Peters was standing near enough to her that she could smell whatever gunk he’d put in his hair when he’d come a-calling. But she wasn’t frightened of him at all. His attention was on the hillside. He was chewing away at his lower lip, scanning the brush, as she had done, but, from the stormy expression on his face, it was pretty clear they did not have the same motives. And in the next moment, it became clearer still. He walked over to his car, opened the back door, and took out a rifle.

“You see this, Cramer Lee? You come out right now and I’ll hold my fire. You stay hid and I start peppering the bush with this thing—see how you like that!”

He had been ready to go to her. He had been that close to standing up, making his way down the hill, and coming clean. He even knew near enough what he would say, or at least the first thing he would say.
I am not a thief,
he would declare to her, his hand on his heart. He would not be tongue-tied. There would be a lot of explaining to do, but everything depended on her believing that he had not stolen Jay’s guitars, although he had a sinking feeling he knew who had. He would explain to her about who Jackson Page was to him and who he was to Jackson Page. That’s how he would start.

And then—Cramer’s luck being what it was—Peters arrived and he had a gun. A shotgun, twelve-gauge, by the look of it. And he might have started shooting, but the storm came instead, and it didn’t take but a moment before there were sheets of rain pounding down on the road, and Peters was running for the shelter of his car. And it still might have worked out, because Mimi wouldn’t accept the old man’s offer of a ride. She backed away from him, yelling at him, though Cramer couldn’t hear through the rain what it was she was saying. But then there was an almighty flash of lightning and a thunderclap, so loud and close that Cramer covered his head with his arms as if the whole roof of the sky was caving in. And when he looked up again, through the gray veils of rain, Peters was dragging Mimi to the car and pushing her in. And they drove off.

Jay stood on the screened-in porch looking out at the storm. The river looked like an ocean, wild with whitecaps. It was lucky he hadn’t kayaked down from the snye or he would never get back. He checked his watch. Where was the Internet guy? He should never have done this. Never let Mimi talk him into letting her stay up there alone. How did she do it? She was four years younger than him, for Christ’s sake! Chutzpah—that was it. Guts. He was gutless. That was what was wrong with him. It was what was wrong with his music. Who cared what was right, what was serious, what was befitting? He had gotten by so far on clever. He had gotten by so far on pitch-perfect. He had gotten by so far on following the rules. But what he hadn’t done was anything remotely gutsy. If he wanted electric guitars in his goddamned piece, then he should just use electric guitars! Of course, he didn’t
have
an electric guitar anymore. And he couldn’t help thinking that it was his gutlessness that had led to this impasse.

Thunder crashed, not far away. He phoned Mimi again. He had tried a couple of times without any luck. He tried to tell himself the storm was responsible. He hoped she was okay. If anything happened to her…

“Hello?”

“Thank God!” he said. “Where are you?”

“Mr. Peters is driving me home,” she said. “Aren’t you, Mr. Peters?”

“From where?”

“It’s a long story.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’m fine. But I can hardly hear you.” She was shouting now. “I’ll tell you all about it, when you get back out here.”

“Okay,” he said.

“But, Jay? Stay on the line, okay? Did you get that?”

“Yeah. Sure. What’s up?”

“Just in case Mr. Peters accidentally forgets to stop and let me off.”

“Is he kidnapping you?”

“No. But better safe than sorry, right?” Thunder boomed again, louder on the phone than outside Jay’s place. The storm must be centered up that way. “Are you still there?” she asked.

“I’m still here,” he said. “I won’t leave.”

“I know it,” she said, and he marveled at her confidence in him.

“Ah, here we are, now. Hold on.”

“I’m holding.”

Jay listened, heard the sound of the car slowing down, muffled by the rain. Then the car door opened. After that he couldn’t hear anything but the rain pelting down and the car door slamming shut.

“Home free!” Mimi shouted above the clamor into her phone. “Thanks, bro!”

And she hung up.

Cramer wanted to go straight to her, straight to the house on the snye. He didn’t trust Peters, but it wasn’t just that. He had held too much inside for too long. That was part of what had gotten him in this mess. Somewhere along the line, he had let holding himself together get confused with holding back anything that he might really want. Maybe he could even put that into words for Mimi. He had this crazy feeling that he could say anything to her, and the thought of it pushed him on through the storm. But there was something he had to do first, en route. And soon enough he saw ahead, the mailbox, hanging on its chains from the cedar pole, bouncing around in the wind like a piece of flotsam on choppy water.

He looked inside. There was no letter there. So he ran up the steep drive, the gulley down its middle churning with brown runoff, and across the windswept yard to the house. The screen door was flapping, slapping back against the wall with each gust. The inner door was wide open, the doorstep and linoleum floor sopping wet.

The house had been turned upside down. There wasn’t a drawer that hadn’t been opened, its guts spilled out on the floor. Every cupboard had been raided, the studio torn apart. Upstairs was the same.

Cramer hadn’t known what he would find, but this mess did not fall outside of his expectations. He stood looking coolly around, realizing that this was something he could not clean up. This was the kind of disaster that would have happened ages ago if he hadn’t been there to stop it from happening. Why was this only clear to him now?