Why would a young man choose this?
How normal could he possibly be?
“There’s your body.”
Johnny stopped at the edge of the glade and put a spear of light on the remains of William Boyd. Black wings rustled above the shape. Yellow eyes winked in the light.
“Dear God.”
A deputy crossed himself as more lights found the body and those things that fed on it. The sheriff called out: “Go on! Get!” He waved his arms, and though a few birds took flight, none of the coyote moved away. They showed yellow teeth, bloody snouts. One of them kept eating. The sheriff drew his revolver and put three rounds into a mud bank twenty feet away. The coyote broke for cover, and the sheriff sighed deeply. “Okay, gentlemen. Let’s see just how ruined this poor bastard really is.”
Turns out he was pretty ruined. Two of the deputies got sick. Even the medical examiner covered his mouth. “Everybody settle down,” the sheriff said. “Let’s get some more lights over here, and do our jobs. Hankins. Martinez. Come on, boys.” They got more lights on the body, and the sheriff squatted beside it. Some of the face was gone, but not all of it. “It’s Boyd, all right. Mr. Merrimon, is this how you found him? Forget the scavengers. I’m talking about location, clothing, position. Is there anything different?”
“I moved him,” Johnny said.
“You what?”
“His legs were in the water when I found him. The blood would have drawn more scavengers. Moving him seemed like the decent thing to do.”
“That’s twice you’ve disturbed my crime scene.”
“It’s twice I’ve done the right thing. Three times if you count calling you in the first place.”
“I tell you what.” The sheriff stood, trying to use weight and height to intimidate. “Why don’t you stand over there, and stay out of my way.”
“Are you finished with me?”
“Son, I’m not even close.”
“You have the body. You can find your way out.”
“I still have questions.”
“I don’t have answers.”
“Stand over there and wait.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“There! Now!”
Everyone was watching, so Johnny kept the anger off his face. He walked to the edge of the scene, and when Clyde joined him, he asked the only question that mattered. “Am I under arrest or not?”
“No, Johnny, you’re not, but don’t antagonize him. I’ll do what I can to make this easy.”
He meant well, but Johnny knew what would make things easy. That was peace and silence, his thumb on the pulse of the Hush. He gave it a moment for Clyde’s sake, then slipped like a ghost into the night.
He was a mile away before anyone noticed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In a tall building in a large city, Cree dreamed of the swamp. There was no bed or bedroom or plywood door, no lights from a city beyond the glass. She was in the dark in a small space, unmoving in air that smelled of earth and death and rotting wood. If she moved, the space constricted. Open her mouth, and earth filled it. She cried out in her sleep, but it was not in the nature of a dream to hold its shape. She heard rain from a distant place; felt heat rise and fall as seasons blurred and the world turned. She was in the earth, and of it; and in the dream, she rose above.
From a height, she looked down and saw the swamp, but not just as it was. She saw it before the slaves were hanged, and after the fires were lit. She saw the people who’d lived and died and been buried there, the men with broad backs, the wide-hipped women and their strong, yowling babies. She saw the hardships and the joys, the gardens and the hunts, the fears and failures and the old women who kept the secret ways. Cree saw it all, but it was like a taste that burst bright, then faded to leave her alone and empty and wanting more. But the dream was no kind of giver. It swept her through the trees and over black water; and as she drifted, the fear welled up to move inside her, penetrant and physical and vile. She cried out again and, in the horror of that moment, heard words in the darkness beyond.
Pain has always been the price.…
“Grandmother.”
She opened her mouth, and tasted earth.
This is history. This is life.
“Not this,” she said. “Never this.”
But she’d experienced it before, a thousand dreams on a thousand nights. Then, as now, the fear moved deeper and Cree, again, cried out in her sleep. She heard it in the dream, and such was her life, asleep: the present and the past, things imagined and unseen. Choking on the fear, she looked down to see men in the swamp. It was dark, but she knew police by the way they stood; knew the body by its stillness. A man was dead, and he’d not died easily. She dreamed of twisted bones and screams, but not all the dream was bad. She saw a man, separate from the others, and knew the man was Johnny Merrimon. A mile away and moving east, he hummed quietly as he walked, and a soft light walked with him.
* * *
The image stayed with Cree as her eyes opened and she blinked against the sunlight. She was in her room, and the world smelled of traffic. She heard the engines, the horns. Her head ached, but it always hurt after dreams of the swamp.
“Mom,” she called out, but not eagerly. The dream was already receding, and the fear with it. Soon, the images would fade like old print, another page in the scrapbook of messed-up dreams. That’s how she thought of it. She didn’t want the dreams. Didn’t ask to be buried alive, terrified, stripped bare. The only good to come from dreams were those rare times she heard her grandmother’s voice. So many years had passed since they’d spoken or touched or shared the simplest joys. Cree feared she might forget the look of her and the feel, the smell of dry skin, like cinnamon and bark and sunbaked grass.
Swinging her legs from under the sheets, Cree pulled on jeans and a shirt, and used a metal pin to pull back her hair. In the mirror, her face looked odd, the nose flatter, the eyes darker and harder and more deeply set. For that moment, she had two faces, one atop the other; but the sensation passed. Too much of the dream, she thought. Too much strangeness.
Moving into the hall, Cree heard a television in the kitchen. The volume was low, the picture grainy. Her mother sat unmoving at a small table covered with chipped Formica. She wore old slippers and a housecoat, worn thin. The cigarette in her hand carried two inches of ash. A bottle of vodka sat half-empty beside her.
“It’s over.” She spoke softly when she saw her daughter, flicking the ash at last, and taking a drag on the cigarette. “He’s dead. It’s over.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cree sat, and her mother pointed at the television. “William Boyd is dead. It’s been on the news all morning.”
Cree looked at the television, saw a commercial about waffles. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Not much. What’s the point?”
“There are other ways—”
“What other ways?” her mother snapped. “Our appeal is based on policy! No lawyer will take that on contingency. You know that. We’ve tried every firm in the city. They laughed at us. You were there. You remember.”
“We can raise the money ourselves.”
“For lawyers at five hundred dollars an hour. No.” She laughed sadly. “It’s over. We lost.”
“Are you okay?”
“We were this close.”
She held up a thumb and forefinger, a half inch apart. Had they won the case, Boyd would have paid millions for the land. Many millions. Cree’s mother had dreamed of that money. She wanted to leave this thin-walled apartment in a dirty needle of a building. She wanted a house with a yard, and for her daughter to go to college. They were normal dreams, free of avarice, and Cree had wanted her to have those things, but only later. She wanted time in the Hush first, years if that’s what it took. She had questions from childhood, the memories of lessons painfully taught. Such things should make sense. Why else the dreams, the visions of old women that haunted, still?
“Will you talk about it now?”
“That place?” The mother showed a bloodshot eye. “Those crazy old women? No. I’m not going to talk about it.”
“It’s my history, too. I have a right to know.”
“About what? Life in the mud? Why I left? Haven’t I apologized enough for sending you there? Best thing you can do now is move on.”
“To where? A bottle? Four different husbands?”
“I’ve said all along that place is money for us, and nothing else. You’re too young to judge.”
“But there’s something special there. I feel it.”
“No, child.” The mother stubbed out the cigarette, and a hundred pale scars showed on the skin of her arms. “There’s not a thing that’s special.”
* * *
When Johnny woke, he felt the search: a dozen men and even more resentment. They were angry about the mud, the heat, the biting flies. Mostly they were upset about the night before. They’d had Johnny and let him walk away. Now they had an angry sheriff, a hundred questions, and a billionaire, still dead.
None of it bothered Johnny.
He made a smokeless fire and cooked breakfast. When he was finished, he doused the coals and focused on the search.
They were lost.
Four men had blundered two miles east, following a track that filtered into a peat bog and left them there, thigh-deep. Another three had been walking a circle since dawn. The sheriff and four others were closest, but even they were bogged down and pointed in the wrong direction.
The helicopter appeared midmorning. It worked a grid east to west, but Johnny had built his cabin under the trees and kept his footprint small. Maybe they’d spot a woodpile or an edge of a skiff, but Johnny doubted it. What wasn’t water was forest, and the forest hid its secrets well.
Of course, Johnny wasn’t fooled about the outcome. Boyd was rich and powerful, and people like that didn’t die without ripples. Johnny would have to talk to the sheriff sooner or later; it wouldn’t be fun.
But this was.
Johnny tracked the sheriff’s group for three hours. He watched them struggle and sweat, and if they turned his way, Johnny ghosted. He was in the trees, a flicker. They never saw him.
Jack arrived at noon, and Johnny felt it ten seconds before the sheriff’s radio squawked. “Sheriff, it’s Clark. We got Jack Cross here, like you asked.”
The sheriff palmed sweat, muttered a quiet about damn time, then keyed the radio. “Hold him there. We’re coming to you.”
* * *
For Jack, it was a nightmare: the newspaper and the cops, the worry as they’d walked him to a car, then dumped him beside the old church and told him to wait.
“For what?” Jack asked.
They didn’t answer, so he swatted mosquitoes and watched cops circle a table covered with maps and radios. It took the sheriff another hour to get there, and he looked like a bite of food the swamp had found distasteful enough to spit out. Black mud stained the uniform and caked his shoes. His face was swollen from bug bites and brambles and heat. “Show me where to find him.” He took Jack by the arm and propelled him toward the map-strewn table. “I know you come here. I know you know.”
Jack caught his balance, unsurprised at the level of hostility. He was a lawyer and Johnny’s friend, the son of a dirty cop. “What, exactly, is happening here, Sheriff?”
“You know about William Boyd, dead on your friend’s land?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Johnny’s the one who found him.”
“And you want him for questioning?”
“I had him for questioning last night. He ran before I could finish.”
Jack studied the men in the clearing. They were angry. The anger landed on Jack. “Is Johnny a suspect?”
“He and Boyd had a violent history.”
“That seems circumstantial, at best.”
“Will you help me or not?”
Jack thought about it and took his time. He was new in the law, but had been a son of law enforcement for a long time, and knew how sideways things could get when cops took things personally.
This looked personal.
All of it.
“Where’s Johnny’s stepfather?”
“This is a county matter. Clyde Hunt is neither welcome nor invited.”
“Is he aware of the search?”
“I’ll ask you one last time, Mr. Cross, and then I’m going to get truly, biblically angry.”
“If you want my help, there are things I need.”
The sheriff turned so red, he was purple. “What?”
“First of all, I go in alone.”
“No.”
“Second of all…”
* * *
The negotiation took ten minutes, and in the end, Jack went after Johnny alone. At the edge of the clearing, he faced the sheriff and hammered the high points one more time. “If he says no, I won’t force him.”
“Then I’ll find him myself, and drag him out by the feet. His choice.”
“If you follow me, I walk out.”
“You have two hours. No one will follow you.”
“If I bring him out, you’re gentle—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No force, no cuffs. He’s a cooperating witness.”
“Fine. Yes.”
Jack turned for the swamp, but stopped. “One last thing,” he said. “I’m going in there as his lawyer, not his friend. Anything he tells me is privileged.”
“Goddamn lawyers…”
“So long as we understand each other.”
“Just go,” the sheriff said again. “Get out of here before I change my mind.”
Jack gave it a beat, not for the sheriff’s sake but for his own. Even as a trained attorney, he disliked confrontation. More than that, he hated the swamp. The feeling was new, but even here, on the soft edge of it, the wilderness felt hostile. Jack peered beneath the trees, trying to pinpoint why it felt so different than it ever had. The colors were just as vivid, the shadows equally deep. It was knowledge, Jack decided, the awareness of Johnny’s behavior and strange healing, of dream walks and terrors and midnight cold. On the brightest day, that would be enough, but there was death in the Hush, too, and not just any death. The newspapers were vague about what, exactly, killed William Boyd; but Jack knew damn well it wasn’t Johnny.
What did that leave?
The question followed him under the trees and away from the ruins of the old settlement. So dense was the forest that he lost all sight of people after two minutes’ walk. Ten minutes in, things looked wrong. The trail bent when it should have run straight; water flickered where none had been before. After twenty minutes, Jack stopped, and turned a circle. He’d been to Johnny’s cabin a hundred times, at least. He’d walked the same trail, touched the same trees. Everything, now, was different.
“I’ve never seen this place.”
He turned another circle, but the disorientation was so strong, it made breathing difficult. There was too much water in the air, too much weight. Digging deep, he picked a direction that felt almost right, and kept walking. Four minutes became another ten. There was no trail left, and a voice inside spoke bitter truth: This is wrong, so wrong. But Johnny was still out there, as was the pressure, the weight, whatever killed William Boyd. Jack scrubbed at his face, ducked beneath another branch. When something small and hard struck him in the back, he flinched, and almost screamed. Then he saw a pebble, lying pale on the damp earth.
“Goddamn.”
Jack slumped to the ground and buried his face in his hands. He could be weeping; he wasn’t sure. There was so much relief, so much sudden anger.
“You scared me, Johnny. Jesus.”
Johnny stepped from the trees, bouncing a second pebble on his palm. “Ah, don’t be dramatic.”
“Really, man. Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look around, dude. I’m lost.”
“Don’t be
stupid.”
Jack kept his eyes down and shook his head. He was embarrassed by the fear, the dampness on his cheeks.
“Jack, come on. Look at me.” Johnny knelt at Jack’s side. He pulled leaves from his friend’s hair, brushed dirt from his clothes. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I didn’t mean to. You’re okay, man. I promise. Just look at me.”
Jack didn’t want to, but it was the same Johnny, the J-man, the same friend.
“It’s easy to get turned around in here. It can happen to anyone.” Johnny took Jack’s hand and pulled him up. “See. No problems. You’ve been here a million times.”
“You’re not listening.”
“Same trail, same view.”
Johnny gestured across an expanse of water, and in the distance was a hillside, a hint of stone. Jack’s stomach sank; he felt sick. “That’s not possible.”
“You’re not lost.”
“It wasn’t like this…”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Don’t judge me, man. You have no idea!”
More frightened than ever, Jack stalked away and sat against a birch whose bark was loose and peeling and dusty red.
What the hell is happening?
Jack knew where the cabin was. He could almost see it.
“I swear I was lost.”
“You were on the trail the whole time.”
“How can you know that?”
“You’re here, aren’t you? Can’t get here unless the trail brings you.”
Jack opened his mouth, but Johnny was right. He was here. He knew the place.
“Tell me about the cops,” Johnny said.
“What?”
“The cops.” Johnny leaned against a second tree. “Are they pissed off? What about the sheriff? Did you see all that sweat? Priceless.”
“How do you know about the sheriff’s sweat?”
“I’ve been watching him all morning. You should have seen him, Jack. Hip deep in mud. Poking at sticks he thought were snakes.”
“You followed him?”
“It was hilarious.”
“Do you think this is some kind of game?” For a moment, Jack forgot his fears. He came off the tree, furious. “William Boyd is dead. The sheriff is fifty–fifty you did it. Why make him angry?”