They even talked about the murders.
They’d never done that.
It pleased him that she hadn’t brought up the subject of his getting in touch with Billy again. Maybe they were finally beyond that now.
She’d driven his father up from Pinewood one afternoon to visit him in the hospital. The old man wanted to know everything that had happened that night and listened without interrupting once and when it was over he said, You did fine, son. I just didn’t know you had that damn hard a head, that’s all.
She stayed at his house three more days until she’d pleased herself that Ludlow was capable of taking care of himself, despite the pins and the metal rod that held one of his ribs together. He told her to get on back to her husband. He could tell that she wanted to as much as she was reluctant to leave him. He drove her to the airport in the rental car he was keeping until he got the truck replaced. They hugged at the gate and Ludlow thought how like Mary’s hair his daughter’s smelled.
He called the hospital the night she left to see how the McCormack boy was doing. The attending nurse said he was finally out of danger. Sam Berry had told him they were going to charge the boy with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon. Sam said he’d have to testify against him.
He didn’t mind if he did.
Ludlow felt bad about the woman though, about his mother. The woman had lost everything. He didn’t know her history or how it all had come down to that for her but he doubted much of it was her fault, other than marrying wrong. She’d raised one son who’d seemed to be working his way towards decency.
She’d helped him. Probably saved his life.
And she’d covered Red.
He hoped the maid with the withered hand was sticking by her.
In the month that followed he had his hands full, what with buying himself a new truck, arranging with contractors to rebuild the store and arranging deals with his suppliers. He and Bill Prine were going into business as co-owners this time because Ludlow thought he needed a younger man in there, what with all the doctors had told him. Plus it was time he gave Bill his due. So there were lawyers to talk to and papers to approve and sign. He had therapy three times a week for the broken rib.
One cool clear night in the first week of September just after he’d finished dinner he heard a knock at the door and, when he opened it, there was Carrie Donnel. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a tight green sweater and held a bottle of Moet in either hand.
‘Miss Donnel,’ he said smiling.
She laughed. ‘Carrie, remember?’
‘Won’t you come in?’
‘Why, thank you.’
She walked past him the way she always had, like she belonged there, and set one bottle on the table and put the other in the refrigerator.
‘You’re looking good,’ she said.
‘So are you.’
‘How’d you like the broadcast?’
‘The broadcast? Carrie, the broadcast was over a month ago. Hell, I thought you’d never ask.’
‘Sorry. It’s just been busy as hell down there. Staff cuts all over the place. I didn’t even know if you’d actually seen it. You were in the hospital. I didn’t know if you’d be up to watching television.’
She pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table.
‘I heard you had your daughter here with you.’
‘I could hardly get her to leave.’
‘Good. That’s good, Av.’
He sat across from her.
‘But you did get to see it, right?’ she said.
He nodded.
‘So? What’d you think?’
‘You were good. You were fair. You didn’t make me out to be some kind of damned hero. I think I’d be ashamed to show my face around here if you had. You didn’t make me out to be a lunatic either. No, you did a fine job, Carrie. Just what I’d expect of you. Are you going to be covering the boy’s trial?’
When she looked at him her eyes were sad. He knew what her answer would be.
‘I got a job back in the city, Av. A really good job. A network station.’
‘New York? But I thought you hated it there.’
She shook her head. ‘No, Boston.’
‘When?’
‘Starting next month. I leave a week from Saturday. I have to find an apartment, settle in. You know.’
He heard what she was saying. That there’d be a lot she’d have to do before then in Portland.
This was the last time she’d be coming through his door.
Like she owned the place.
‘Well, hell then,’ he said. ‘Pop the damn champagne, will you? Sounds like we should be doing some celebrating.’
‘I think that’s really the reason I didn’t call, Av. You know. The fact that I was leaving.’
He nodded. ‘I figured.’
‘You did?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You hate me, Av?’
He squinted at her.
‘Now who’s talking like a young fool, Carrie.’
He got up and walked over and put his hands on her shoulders and then leaned down and kissed her cheek and her forehead and then he kissed her mouth.
‘I couldn’t hate you if you got it into your head to smash me with that bottle,’ he said. ‘To me you’ve been nothing but a blessing. Going away isn’t going to change that. See, I’ve got this crazy old man’s feeling that you love me a little. You suppose that could be true?’
She nodded and began to cry. ‘Yes, goddamnit. Of course I do.’
‘And I think that’s amazing. You sit here asking, Do I hate you? Some observer you are. Shame on you.’
She smiled.
‘Now do me a favor and open up that champagne.’
When she left him in the morning he watched her through the kitchen window. She waved to him once and smiled before stepping into the car and he saluted back to her with his steaming mug of coffee.
In that instant he memorized her.
There had been talk the night before of his taking a trip to Boston one day to visit his daughter, that perhaps they’d see one another when he did. But he knew it would never happen. She would disappear deep into her own life and he into his. Now he froze her, car, bright morning and all, so that if she never came back to him again at least her image would.
He hadn’t told her about the slow quiet war going on in his bloodstream, the one he’d inevitably lose. The one he’d somehow sensed that night, battered and shot, alone on the trail with Red.
He couldn’t see any reason to do so.
He thought about what the doctors had said, that lymphoma could take years to kill you. He was figuring to make it do exactly that.
He could see no reason for Allie to know either. She was busy making a baby inside. He’d made the doctors promise not to say.
He’d do it himself, when the time came.
Ludlow sipped his coffee and watched the car drive down over the hill and disappear. He walked through the kitchen and out the back door to the wooden porch and closed the door behind him. In the waving field of goldenrod that rose gently from the porch up the hill to where Red lay, he was able to imagine that he could see the rolling sea, that he stood on the deck of a schooner in a fine steady wind, alone but for a crew of ghosts forever silent.
He busied himself with papers, with purchase orders and medical bills, and in the waning of the day heard a truck pull up beside his own.
He looked out the window and saw that it was Emma Siddons. She was holding her bright red sweater tight together with both hands and walking with a purpose toward the door, which was Emma’s way. He thought she looked older than when last he’d seen her. He guessed that probably so did he.
He opened the door for her and the russet scruffy dark-eyed head of the dog peering out from beneath her sweater was the first damn thing he saw.
He laughed and put out his hand and the dog sniffed it and began licking, squirming in her arms with excitement.
br />
‘My god. Is this who I think it is?’ he said.
Emma grinned. ‘You’re darned right it is.’ She shook her head. ‘That old dog of yours, up to no good to the very end. Evangeline had herself a litter of four. Two of them black like her and two of ’em red. Dropped the three females and then, finally, this guy here.’
She opened the sweater and handed the dog to Ludlow. The dog licked his face and then went back to his fingers again.
‘What is he, six weeks?’
‘Uh-huh. And high time I got him off my hands.’
‘What? You’re giving him to me?’
‘No, Avery Ludlow. I drove over here just to show you what a pain in the butt your dog turned out to be. Of course I’m giving him to you. Who else in the world should have him?’
‘Emma, I hadn’t planned—’
‘I don’t give a damn what you planned. Just look at him.’
The dog had stopped squirming. He lay content and quiet, folded in Ludlow’s arms, and slowly licked his fingers.
Red had always watched his hands.
As though the hands and what the hands could do were what made them different, creature to creature, and that was all.
‘Look at him. This little dog knows you. I think he knew you the minute we stepped in through the door.’
He put the dog down and petted him and he and Emma sat and talked a while and Ludlow watched the dog go off to explore his surroundings. The kitchen, the bedrooms, the living room, the stairs. He heard the dog’s toenails on the wooden floor. After a while the dog returned and sighed and lay down at Ludlow’s feet.
Emma laughed.
‘I guess you just got your plans changed for you,’ she said.
He told her about the lymphoma. That he could very well be dead soon. It seemed important that she understand that for him, taking on an animal was a pact that time and illness could easily break.
‘Anything happens to you, Av, I’ll make sure he’s treated just as you’d want him treated. You have my word on that. But you can’t think about things that way or else there’s nothing in life you can have that’s anywhere near worth having. You give him what you can and give him what time you can. He’ll do the same. And you’ll both do just fine.’
She left him with some food for the dog from out of her car and Ludlow fed him and played with him and found himself smiling, his heart opening to the dog so rapidly it astonished him. When he went to bed that night the dog followed him, crying out to get on the bed with him, so Ludlow lifted him up. The dog curled at his belly and slept. Ludlow stroked his smooth shiny fur for a very long time until he was suddenly assaulted by tears, not for Red this time or for Mary or for any of his lost loved ghosts but for this new life granted him, for the world of souls that went on and on and of which he and the dog were a part.
‘What’ll we call you?’ he whispered.
Embraced by him, the dog slept on.
THE PASSENGER
by Jack Ketchum
The Passenger
by Jack Ketchum
It wasn’t the best of days even before her car died.
She’d fallen asleep the night before at her desk in the study and awakened from a dream of Micah Harpe, all three-hundred-plus pounds of him, crashing through the picture window and spraying her with shards of glass, slamming up against her desk and scattering papers and cigarette butts everywhere and then laughing, leering up at her, saying, troubles, counselor? and she rode that sudden wakefulness for a moment like a bucking steer.
Then Alan walks in from his shower wrapped in a towel, carrying a manila file folder, drops the folder on the end table and asks her not to let him forget these briefs tomorrow, please. Sure, Alan, thanks, no problem. It took him a full two minutes to really see her there, pale as chalk, and yet another to ask what was wrong.
“Dream,” she said.
He glanced at the desk littered with paperwork.
“You been down here all night?”
She yawned, nodded.
“So? How’d it go?”
“So I think I’m screwed without Micah Harpe, that’s what it comes down to.”
“I could have told you that.”
“All I can do is argue insufficient evidence.”
She watched him throw the towel over his shoulder and turn and walk toward the kitchen.
“Uh-huh. You want some coffee? I need some coffee.”
“I want some sleep. I want a case I can win, goddammit.”
He said, “Settle for the coffee.”
Then later she and Milton Wendt, the prosecutor, before the bench and Judge Irma Foster—another stunning excuse for a conversation.
“We’re not arguing,” she said, “that my client wasn’t at the Willis home that day, your Honor. They were old friends and he had every reason to be there. The prosecution has placed my client in the house and we allow that he was, in fact, present. But Big was there too and there is nothing . . .”
“Big?” Judge Foster squinted at her.
“Micah Harpe, your Honor, the defendant’s older brother.”
The judge looked past her to Arthur “Little” Harpe at the defense table. Arthur was looking pretty good today, Janet thought, all told. As good as he could look, anyway. A new suit and tie off the rack at Burton’s and a shoeshine in the courthouse lobby. But Janet still knew what the judge was seeing—a chubby pasty-faced country-ass snake watching them through idiot eyes. She just hoped he wasn’t using the eraser end of the pencil to clean out his earwax again.
“Big and Little?” she said.
“Yes, your Honor.”
“Good God.”
She tried to move on.
“The prosecution has presented no physical evidence whatever to suggest that it was my client and not, as we contend, my client’s brother, who was responsible—without my client’s knowledge or cooperation—for the murders of these two people. I move to dismiss.”
“He confessed, Counselor.” Wendt sighed.
“He’s since recanted and implicated Micah as the shooter. That confession was taken under duress and you know it. The police went at him for over twenty-two hours. All because they couldn’t find his brother.”
“They still can’t.”
“That’s simply not true, your Honor.”
Then the judge sighed too. “Let’s take this into chambers,” she said.
In chambers she fared no better than expected. The trial was set for Monday morning. She had the weekend to prepare. But to prepare what? She certainly wasn’t putting that little weasel on the stand. The best she could hope for was to shake the detectives who’d handled the interrogation, or to pull off a miracle in summation. It wasn’t very promising. Harpe had confessed to the shotgun murders of Joseph and Lilian Willis over a drug deal gone bad and that was probably that. In the hallway she gave it one last try with Wendt, though.
“It should have been postponed,” she said. “It should never have come to trial.”
“Come on, Janet. We don’t know Big’s even in there.”
“And you don’t know he isn’t.”
“Nobody’s placed him there. Not even his brother has definitively placed him there. What do you want the cops to do? Remember probable cause, for god’s sake? We’ve gone onto that estate half a dozen times. The place is an armed camp—safe house for half the psychos in the state. But every gun in the place is registered to its owner. You know what the locals call it.”
“I know. Hole-in-the-Wall.”
“That’s right. We’re talking Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid right here in quiet old Adderton County. But it’s still private property. These guys have influence. They’ve got bucks. Big bucks. With a cleanup crew to dispose of their disposables as good as any in the U.S.A. And we don’t have probable cause.”
“He’s in there. And he did the crime.”
She stopped and opened her briefcase and pulled out the folder second from the top. She handed it to Wendt.
“Look at this.”
“Big’s rap sheet. I’ve read it.”
“Read it again. Arrests for arson, rape, armed robbery, another rape—this one a man, sodomy—murder, attempted murder, assault . . .”
She was aware that her voice was rising, echoing through the nearly empty halls, turning a head or two. She didn’t give a damn.
“You can do something, Milton. You can send them in there after him.”
Wendt shook his head. “Wish I could. Look, nobody’s saying Big’s a sweetheart, Janet. I’ll even grant you that they could have done it together. But the point is we’ve already got your boy. So I think I’ll go right ahead and fry him if that’s okay with you.”
The Turtle Brook Inn was all amber lights and dark wood paneling and tables and chairs upholstered in burgundy—a steak joint with romantic aspirations. Seven-thirty on a Friday night and not half the tables full, nor even half the bar, a testament to northern New York State’s fundamental lack of any real trickle-down prosperity. She was halfway through her second glass of wine when Alan finally made his appearance. There was no point scolding him. Alan was late. Fact of life.
“So?” he said.
So again. She took a sip of wine.
“Alan, you can be boring as spit sometimes. You know that?”
“It didn’t go well.”
“No, it didn’t.”
He reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. His own hand was warm and dry and despite herself she always found comfort in his touch.
“I love you, honey,” he said.
“Alan, you damn well cheat on me.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Don’t worry about the case. You’ll think of something. Listen, I’m staying at the apartment in town tonight. I have to take a deposition first thing in the morning. You mind?”
“No, that’s okay.”
Behind him their young pretty blond waitress was approaching.
“I do,” he said. “I mind. I may be boring as spit sometimes but I know one or two sex crimes we haven’t committed yet that I’d rather try tonight.”
The waitress froze.
“It’s all right,” Janet told her. “He’s an officer of the court.”