The Wishing Garden (11 page)

“We’re just friendly, that’s all,” Eli said. “When Cal comes, what’s he gonna pick us up for? Loitering? We’ll be out in an hour. We’ll pick up Rick and Pippen and come back even stronger.”

Eli walked up to the principal and rested his head on her shoulder. “Principal Harris? You hear about that shooting during homeroom up in Flagstaff? You hear how that boy just snapped?”

The woman was at least thirty years older than Eli, with crusty brown lines fanning out from her eyes, but she leaned back, out of his reach. Behind her back, she crossed and uncrossed her fingers.

Eli laughed, then looked at Emma. He stared at her so hard, Emma had the feeling he was working some kind of magic, taking something from her even though she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Principal Harris must have felt the force of that gaze, too, because she put a hand on her shoulder.

One of the boys held the joint out to the principal,
then laughed when she glared at him. Emma snorted. Big deal. In San Francisco, these guys would have to do a lot worse to get noticed. In a city where almost everything and everyone was accepted, it was frustratingly hard to be bad.

But here, where high-school girls either got scholarships or knocked up, and their brothers went to bed at eight o’clock or not at all, Emma could see right off she definitely had to choose her corner. Raise her standards or raise havoc, but either way decide early, so people would know how to treat her.

Emma squeezed her hands into fists. Though her skin was burning hot, she nevertheless turned toward the principal. She didn’t dare look into Eli Malone’s eyes. She wasn’t the type of girl who suddenly started screwing up her life.

“Remember me?” she said to the principal. “I’m Emma Shaw. It’s my first day.”

“Well, don’t start it with these boys. They were kicked out four years ago, and we haven’t been able to get rid of them since.”

The sheriff drove up then, but instead of scattering, the boys planted their feet. They weren’t total fools, though; when the cop got out of his car, they threw the joint into the ivy.

The sheriff was built like a slab of concrete. He was taller than Eli, and had to weigh twice as much. His hair was cut short and going silver, but it was the lines around his eyes that held Emma’s attention. That was where his color seeped out, a strangely luminous yellow, a surprising color for a man with hands the size of T-bone steaks.

“This is what I’m gonna do,” the sheriff said, putting a hand on his gun. “I’m gonna push this up a notch and call it trespassing. See? Then the school gets a chance to sue. Then we’re talking civil suit, in
addition to criminal. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll get a warrant. I’ll bet I can get each of you for possession right now. That’s a felony, boys. That’s the big house.”

The others all looked at Eli, but he just leaned back on his shiny black boots and smiled. “Jake will never let you book me.”

“Jake’s got no say in this.”

Eli shrugged. “I’ll call your bluff.”

Cal Bentley nodded and slipped a pair of handcuffs out of his back pocket. Eli turned around and held out his hands behind him. He smiled at Emma, and she took a step toward him before she wondered what she was doing.

By the time Cal had the handcuffs fastened, the other boys had scattered. “Looks like you’re on your own,” Cal said.

“What else is new?”

The sheriff led him to the car. The principal, who Emma had forgotten, squeezed her shoulder.

“You stay away from them,” she said, leading her toward the school. “They’re nothing but bad news.”

Emma nodded. But she looked over her shoulder and saw Eli staring at her out of the backseat of the cruiser. His eyes seemed capable of burning holes straight through the glass, not to mention the thin lining around her heart.

The dogs started howling when the car was still a mile away. When Jake came out of his workshop, they leapt into the air and took to snapping at each other. Rufus, the chocolate Lab, went a little crazy chasing his tail, until he finally fell over, winded and dizzy, on the gravel driveway.

Jake walked up the pebble path to the drive. He got all the way to the top before the hair on the back of
his neck stood on end. He’d had some warning, but still when he turned around and looked where the metal roof of his cabin peaked by the chimney, his heart skipped painfully. His hallucinations had taken solid form; his worst nightmare sat smoking a cigarette, his leg draped over the eave, a big black boot tapping against the log post. Jake closed his eyes. When he reopened them, the nightmare was gone. Then he heard a twig snap behind him.

He turned around in time to see a vague form disappearing into the woods. A shadowy man, with black hair and teeth the color of creamed coffee. Jake had had plenty of time to think of something profound to say, and it all came down to this: “Go to hell.”

The wind through the pine needles sounded exactly like laughter.

When Jake had first built his cabin, the apparition had been no more than an occasional glow between the trees. The problem was, Jake had not denied the vision outright. He probably could have put a stop to it immediately, if he’d had the guts to turn away, like the spirit was nothing, not even worth his worry. Instead, he stared at the ghost’s bloodshot eyes too long. He remembered the living man’s black boots and, bam, the ghost was wearing them. He showed some signs of panic, and the ghost got high on his own power, which put a little more meat on his bones.

Give a ghost an inch and he’ll take a mile. Pretty soon, he wouldn’t be afraid to cross Jake’s doorstep or perhaps even sleep in his bed.

“Get out,” Jake called after him. “I mean it. Get fucking lost.” He charged into the woods, but found nothing except a blackened hedge of bitterroot, as if something had burnt the life out of it.

He was being haunted, all right, but sometimes it was difficult to tell if it was by a ghost or his own bad
dreams. For one thing, the ghost had never spoken, not in fifteen years. It was an awesome kind of power, holding back all the things he could say. Silence was as good as a firearm; when it finally broke, it would go off, right between Jake’s eyes.

He started to walk out of the woods. The car he’d heard was closer now. He recognized the deep hum of Cal Bentley’s squad car, just a hundred yards down the winding road.

He was friends with Cal Bentley for two reasons: because the man knew how to be quiet, and because every time he drove up the dangerous road to Jake’s cabin, Jake assumed he had figured out everything. For fifteen years, Jake had been waiting for someone to find him out so he could finally confess. Not to murdering a man—that much was obvious—but to being glad he’d done it.

He was tormented by his own satisfaction. When the nightmares came, he was appalled at himself for waking up smiling. He was abominable, a man he would never want to know, because what he regretted most was not what he’d done, but the things he’d lost—his family, his woman, the certainty that deep down, he was a good man.

Guilt had eaten at him all right, guilt at ruining his own life. So he left out clues for Cal, like the picture of his mother and stepfather on the mantel, the only personal thing in his cabin, a thing he never referred to, not once. And the rifle in the locked gun cabinet, a spattering of blood still on the handle. And when he reached for one of his home-brewed beers, he always reached with his left hand, the one with the scar in the middle, the size of a dime.

If Cal Bentley noticed these things, he gave no sign. He seemed content to let Jake come to him, which despite everything, Jake was never going to do.

He had learned a few things in fifteen years, and probably the worst was this: If given half a chance, even a man who despised himself couldn’t help wanting to survive. Throw a monster into a lake and he’ll sputter to the surface. For some reason Jake could never understand, he got up each morning and started breathing.

When Cal Bentley’s cruiser finally came into view, Rufus and Gabe were on it, leaping onto the trunk and down again, twice even vaulting over the roof, their nails on the metal sending chills down Jake’s spine. Sasha flung herself at the passenger door, leaving scratch marks all down the white paint, which Cal had stopped patching years ago, when Jake first got his Husky.

Cal stopped the car and got out. Sasha snarled at him. “Good afternoon to you too, sweetheart,” Cal said.

He looked at Jake and smiled. “Got a present for you.” He opened the back door and yanked out Eli Malone, still cuffed. Eli looked at him through a part in his long, greasy hair.

“What is it this time?” Jake asked.

“Trespassing. The school might sue.”

Jake said nothing. Cal thought him a fool for hiring Eli, and he was probably right. Jake, though, hadn’t been able to stop himself. Eli was a runaway of a different sort, an escape from his own family, and he was getting ready to snap, anyone could see that. Jake never touched anyone but his dogs, but whenever he got close to Eli, he nearly took the boy in his arms and told him he knew exactly what it felt like to live inside a body you hated, in a world that didn’t want you anyway.

“All right,” Jake said at last. “Uncuff him.”

The boy had thrown back his hair and was doing
his best to look rotten all the way through, but his left leg kept skidding out beneath him. While Cal uncuffed him, Jake walked to the side of the house and picked up the ax.

“Two cords,” he said.

“Ah, fuck.”

“After that, hike to Shafer Peak and find me a three-inch sapling, twelve feet long, for the rock star’s bed. Drag it back without doing any damage and then we’ll see if you’ll have a job in the morning.”

“You’re gonna kill me, man,” Eli said, but he took the ax. Sasha followed him, snapping at his heels as he walked to the woodpile at the side of the cabin.

“He’s not worth saving,” Cal told Jake.

“So he tells me.”

“I found his dad behind Teton’s last night. Wes had so much vodka in his blood, he was pissing it.”

“Eli’s no drunk,” Jake said. “He’s never even tasted my beer.”

“Would you, if Wes was your father?”

They walked into the cabin Jake had built by hand ten years ago. When he had surfaced in Prescott fifteen years ago, he’d taken a job he had never considered in his other life, as a carpenter’s assistant. He had tried to hate the work, but the truth was he took to wood the way he figured a mother took to a child. He wrapped his fingers around a smooth trunk and thought,
Now this has possibilities. This is something I might be able to make right
.

He started making pine furniture on the side, and was so good at it he soon had enough orders for lodgepole beds to go into business himself. He found this property on the back side of Kemper Mountain and, after studying a few log cabins in the area, decided to build one himself.

He was meticulous about the logs he chose, because
he liked them marred—knotted, lightning-struck, shredded by bear claws. He handcrafted every support beam, joist, and table in the house from damaged wood. The floors, loft, ceiling, and walls were all scarred pine, and over the years the floors had gotten even worse, gouged out by the dogs’ toenails. Only five small windows and a sliding door broke up the expanse of bad wood. On cloudy afternoons, he could hardly make his way down the steep stairs from the loft without a flashlight. If he took a deep breath, he got a little woozy breathing in so much natural fiber at once.

From the highway to Jake’s cabin was a forty-five minute drive. He was separated from his nearest neighbor by one air mile, or three hazardous driving miles, where the slightest miscalculation could send a car plummeting down a ravine that appeared to have no end.

Cal and Eli were the only people with the guts to come up here now, and even they must have wondered, more than occasionally, what the hell for. Even they must have smelled the tobacco and spite in the air. Since they’d never seen a ghost, they probably thought it was all coming from Jake.

“You still working on that bench for Doug Dawson?” Cal asked. “How’s he feeling?”

“The man’s dying. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

He walked out onto the back deck, where the air was yellow and thick with pine pollen.

Cal came out behind him. His weight, along with Jake’s, made the large deck sway. “You got anything to say?” Cal asked.

Jake sucked in hard, until his chest burned. Cal asked the same question every time he saw him. He must have smelled the bitter stench that rose out of Jake’s chest, where he’d stuffed down what he’d done and what had been done to him, and let it rot.

What Jake could say was that fifteen years ago, his life went into cardiac arrest. He walked out the door one morning as one person, and could never come home again because sometime before nightfall, he became someone else. He could say it was entirely possible to walk around without a soul, because he’d done it. He was made up of little more than guilt and regret, both of which he wouldn’t wish on anyone, not even his ghost. He could say he’d killed a man out of sheer rage, and lost everything he’d ever wanted.

But all he said was, “Nope.”

Jake picked up one of the many rawhide bones he kept on hand for his dogs and flung it as far as he could. The three of them bounded off the deck, snapping at one another for the lead. Jake sat down in one of his uncomfortable Adirondack chairs, the same kind he sold for four hundred dollars apiece to Montana actors.

“You all right?” Cal asked. There was no sound except a few early-bird crickets and Eli’s curses as he split wood. Jake was not all right; he figured that much was obvious.

“You see that woman?” he asked. “Doug’s daughter?”

“I saw the granddaughter at the high school,” Cal said. “I’d suggest you keep Eli here when you go down to work. He’s no Romeo, but then, when you’re that bad, you don’t have to be.”

Jake nodded. When he’d picked up the paper that morning, he’d seen the ad for the amazing fortuneteller. He never used to believe any of that stuff, but he’d had time to change his mind about everything. It was no longer a stretch of the imagination to think a gypsy might have the key to his future, so he had called her.