"Yeah, maybe," said Lou Tremons, "but here’s the thing, Spoonsie, there were no skid marks and my cousin Davy heard Sheriff Crow say that it didn't look like a high speed crash."
"Well hell, son," said Scotty, "you can't kill that many people in a low speed crash."
They all agreed that the sheriff, who used to be a drunk a long time ago, was probably drinking again and didn't know his ass from his elbow.
The conversation turned to sports.
But the deaths kept happening.
A mailman ran his truck into a drainage ditch and went halfway through the windshield in the process. Aaron Schmidt's son flipped his motorcycle.
Like that.
All violent accidents. Every single body torn up.
Lots of blood on the blacktop.
Except...
Lou's cousin Davy heard Sheriff Crow tell his deputy that there didn't seem to be enough blood. In each case there was less than you'd expect.
When Francisco dropped that little tidbit the conversation at the bar stalled. Nobody talked sports that night. Nobody said much of anything that night. Even Francisco kept his thoughts to himself and watched the foam on his beer disappear, one bubble at a time.
The following summer was when the fires started. Everyone blamed it on the constant high temperatures, on global warming. But this was Pennsylvania not Wyoming. There was a lot of water in the state, and even with the heat there was plenty of rain. Francisco found it hard to buy that a drought killed all those people.
And a lot of people burned up, too.
Three of the Carter family went up while they slept. Only Jolene survived because she was in the Navy.
The guys all talked about that, throwing out different theories. Bud Tuckerman suggested that it was most likely bad wiring because Holly Carter always had the air conditioners going full blast, and it had been a lot of summers since her husband had bought a new unit. The other guys mumbled agreement, but nothing sounded like enthusiastic support for that theory to Francisco.
The other fires? Five dead at the Hendrickson farm when the barn went up and cooked some kids from the horse camp.
The wiring at the camp was inspected twice a year. Scotty said so because that's what he did for a living and he'd swear on a stack of fucking bibles that everything was up to code. Better than code, he said.
A lot of beers got drunk in thoughtful silence that night.
The weeks of summer burned away, and by fall there were four more fires. Two business, one hotel, one house.
That last one was a ball-buster. That's where it hit home to the guys at the Scarecrow. It was Lou Tremons who got fried.
After the funeral the guys met at the tavern in a missing man formation, with Lou's seat left empty and a glass of lager poured for him. The conversation was lively for most of the night as they all told lies about Lou. Tall tales, funny stories, some tearful memories. Francisco talked about the time he and Lou drove down to Philly to play cards with the Donatella cousins. Francisco described how Lou nearly busted a nut trying not to laugh at what everyone called the cousins. They were both named Danny, and as cousins they looked a lot alike, almost like twins, except that one of the Dannys—the one from Two Street—was really short, maybe five-seven, and the other Danny, the one who lived near Gino's Steaks, was a moose, six-seven. They looked like the same guy seen up close and far away, and long ago the Don had nicknamed the big one Near Danny and the little one Far Danny.
Francisco warned Lou ahead of time not to laugh about it to their faces. Near Danny would break his arm off and beat Lou to death with it; and Far Danny carried a Glock nine and a straight razor and he was a bad mamba-jamba. They worked the protection racket and they were a pair of guys with whom you absolutely did not want to fuck. No sir, no way.
Francisco had a private motive for inviting Lou to the game. The Donatellas always called him Frankie Spoons, and he hoped Lou would pick it up and spread it to Pine Deep. But it didn't happen.
They had fun though. Francisco caught the laughter in Lou's eyes all through the night, but Lou kept a plug in it until they were back in the car on I-95 heading north toward home.
"Then he totally lost his shit," said Francisco, and everybody had a good long laugh. Then they toasted Lou and tapped their glasses to his and drank. More than a couple of them had tears in their eyes.
Mike said, "Hey, Spoonsie, I saw a big bunch of flowers from the Donatella family. Was that the Dannys?"
"Yeah,” said Francisco.
"Nice of 'em."
"Yeah. They're standup. They liked Lou."
The guys nodded. Everyone liked Lou. What wasn't to like?
“Far Danny called me,” added Francisco. “After Lou…you know.”
Everyone nodded.
“He said that he heard a lot of people been dying here in town.”
More nods. Nobody said anything.
“Then he asks me if I thought there was anything hinky with Lou’s death.”
“Hinky,” said Mike. Not a question, just keeping the word out there.
“Hinky,” agreed Francisco.
“Why’d he want to know that, Spoonsie?” asked the bartender, Joey, who was leaning on the bar, listening like he usually did.
“Like I said, he and Near Danny both thought Lou was okay. They told me they thought he was standup.”
Nods.
“I thought you said those boys were wiseguys,” said Joey.
Francisco shrugged. “Yeah, well…they’re not bad guys.”
Which was bullshit and they all knew it, but they were Francisco’s cousins and when you’re related to criminals—unless they were pedophiles or like that—then whatever they did wasn’t so bad. Or as bad. Or something. None of them really looked too close at it.
“If it was something hinky, then maybe they’d have come up here, looked into it. They’re like that. Lou was my friend and he didn’t shark them at cards, and they laughed at his jokes. So, I guess…you know.”
They nodded. They knew.
“But I told them it was just an accident,” said Francisco. “Just a string of bad luck.”
They nodded at that, too, but no one met his eyes.
The only one there who was nearly silent all evening was Scotty and eventually Francisco noticed.
"What's wrong, man?" he asked. Scotty was friends with Lou, but only here at the bar. They weren't really tight.
“I don’t know, Spoonsie,” Scotty began, fiddling with a book of matches. He’d pulled each match off and distractedly chipped off the sulfur with his thumbnail and peeled the paper apart layer by layer. He stopped and stared down at the pile of debris on the bar as if surprised that it was there.
“What is it?” asked Lucky Harris.
“It’s just that…” Scotty began, faltered and tried it again. “It’s just that I’m beginning to wonder if your cousin Far Danny is right.”
“About what?” asked Francisco.
“About there being something hinky.”
“About Lou’s death?”
“That…and everything else that’s going on in town. You know…since the Trouble.”
Everyone was looking at him now, and the intensity of their attention formed a little cone of silence around that end of the bar. Francisco was dimly aware of other people, other conversations, music, the Flyers on the flatscreen, but suddenly it all belonged to another world.
“What are you saying?” asked Mike.
“I don’t know what I’m saying,” Scotty said in a way that said he did know what he was saying. Everyone waited. He took a breath and let it out. “I was watching that show again. You know the one.” They nodded. “And sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—I wonder if it’s all bullshit or if maybe, y’know, there’s something there.”
He suddenly looked around, trying to catch everyone’s eyes, looking for someone laughing at him. Francisco followed his gaze, looking for the same thing. But nobody was laughing. Nobody was smiling. Most of the guys did nothing fo
r a few moments, then one by one they nodded.
That killed the conversation.
And it nearly stopped Francisco’s heart from beating.
He saw Scotty say something completely under his breath. Francisco read his lips, though.
Scotty said, “Jesus Christ.”
-3-
Over the next few months things in Pine Deep seemed to swing back and forth between a rash of new deaths and periods of calm. In a weird way Francisco was more freaked out by the long spaces between the deaths. It was too much like calms before bad storms. And each one was a little longer than the last, so each time it became way too easy to start thinking that it was over. This time it was over.
Except that it wasn’t over.
The guys still met at the Scarecrow. They still talked about things, and all the time what Scotty said stayed with them like they’d been tattooed with it. But they didn’t actually talk about it. Not out loud, not in words. But through eye contact? Sure. And with silences and with things that weren’t said aloud. They all knew each other well enough to have those kinds of conversations. Francisco wondered who would pick up Scotty’s conversational ball and run with it.
For his part, Francisco had to deal with another effect of the increased mortality in Pine Deep. He managed a cemetery. He dug the graves.
And he didn’t like what was going on at Pinelands Grove, which is what the place was called.
His discomfort with things at work started a few weeks after Lou’s funeral. It was an overcast day late in October. The colors of the autumn leaves were muted to muddy browns and purples as the slate gray sky thickened into an early darkness. A wet wind was blowing out of the southwest, and the breeze was filled with the smells of horseshit and rotting leaves. Francisco was working in the west corner of the Grove, which was almost a mile from the front gate. The Grove was huge, with sections of old plots that dated back to the Civil War and even a few to Colonial times. But the west corner was new. Before the Trouble it had been a cabbage field that belonged to the Reynolds farm, but the Reynolds family died that night and the farm went to a relative who sold it cheap just to unload it. Now the only thing that was planted there were dead bodies. Nineteen in the last month. Not all of them from accidents or fires, but enough so that it was a sad place to be.
That afternoon the O’Learys, a nice young couple, buried their thirteen year old daughter. She’d been run over by a UPS truck. The truck driver tried to swerve, at least according to the skid marks on the road, but he’d clipped her and then plowed right into a tree. Two dead. Francisco didn’t know where the driver was buried. Doylestown or New Hope, maybe. But little Kaitlin O’Leary went into the ground after a noon graveside service. Pretty pink coffin that probably cost too much for her family to afford. One of those sentimental decisions funeral directors count on. And, Francisco thought, Kaitlin was the only kid. She wouldn’t need a car, college tuition or anything else. If buying a pink casket gave her mother even a little bit of comfort, then fuck it.
The family stayed while the coffin was lowered down by the electric winch, and they and all their friends tossed handfuls of dirt and pink roses into the hole, but Mrs. O’Leary lost it around then and her husband took her away before she had to watch Francisco dump a couple of yards of wormy dirt down on their little girl.
Francisco waited a good long time to make sure nobody came late. Then he used a front-end loader to shift the dirt. He tramped it all down with his shoes and pats from a shovel, put his equipment away, and came back to arrange the bouquets and grave blankets according to the parents’ wishes. The garage was by the gate, but he didn’t mind the walk. He walked four or five miles a day here at the Grove, and he was okay with that. Kept his weight down, good for the heart.
Except when he came walking across the damp grass toward the grave he could see that something was wrong.
The flowers were no longer standing in a neat row waiting for him to arrange them. They were torn apart and scattered everywhere. The grave blanket was in pieces, too. And the little teddy bear Mrs. O’Leary had left for her little girl had been mutilated, gutted, its stuffing yanked out and trampled in the dirt.
Francisco registered all of this, but what made him jerk to a stop and stand there was the condition of the grave.
It was open.
Open.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed.
In the time it had taken Francisco to drive the front-end loader back and put his gear away, someone—some fucking maniac—had come up, dug up all the dirt, and left a gaping hole.
Francisco snapped out of his shock and ran to the grave, skidded to a stop and teetered on the edge, staring down.
The coffin was exposed.
Pale pink metal, streaked with dirt.
But it was worse than that.
Much worse.
The coffin had been pried open, the seals broken.
Inside there was tufted white silk. There was a photo of the whole family at Disney World. There was a letter from Mrs. O’Leary. All of that was there.
But Kaitlin was not there.
She was gone.
Gone.
God.
-4-
That was one of the longest nights in Francisco’s life. Calling Gaines. Calling the cops.
Answering a thousand questions.
The cops—Sheriff Crow—grilling him, almost accusing him.
Gaines looking furious and scared, and giving him looks.
Everybody watching as the sheriff made Francisco take a breathalyzer. Their confusion when he passed. No trace of alcohol.
All the rubberneckers showing up in crowds like someone sent out invitations.
The reporters. First the local guys, then stringers for the regional news. Then the network TV vans. Shoving cameras and microphones in his face.
Hour after hour.
Then the O’Learys showing up.
Yelling at him.
Screaming.
Mrs. O’Leary totally losing her shit. Nobody thinking that was strange, because it wasn’t strange. Francisco thought about how he’d feel if this was the grave of one of his kids. He’d fucking kill someone. Himself, probably.
Francisco saw Mike and Scotty and Lucky from the Scarecrow. Some of the other guys, too. Hanging back, standing in a knot, bending now and then to whisper something to each other. Scotty nodded to him once, and that made him feel a little better. Solidarity. He was still one of them, and that wasn’t a sure bet at first. Sometimes things cut you out and make you one of ‘them,’ one of the people the guys talk about rather than talk to.
Debbie texted him a dozen times, asking if he was okay, telling him everything was on the news, telling him things would be okay, asking when he was coming home.
It was nearly dawn before the cops cut him loose and let him drive home. By then most of the crowd was gone. His friends were gone, and the Scarecrow was closed.
Even Gaines was gone. Probably on the phone with his lawyer, worrying about how much of his money he was going to lose to the O’Learys when they sued. And, of course, they would sue. This was America, everybody sued everybody. Might even mean that Gaines would fire him, cut his losses, try to blame it all on him.
The last person left at the cemetery was Sheriff Crow.
“You can go,” he said.
Francisco stood for a while, though, staring at the grave.
“Why?” he asked. For maybe the fiftieth time.
The sheriff didn’t answer. Instead he asked a question he’d already asked. “And you saw no one here?”
“Like I told you. I was alone here.”
“No kids?”
That was a new question and it startled him.
“What—you think some jackasses from the college—?”
“No, I mean younger kids. Did you see any young teenagers?”
“No.”
“No teenage girls?”
Francisco shot him a look. “What? Like girls from Kaitlin’s class???
?
The sheriff just stood there, looking at him with an expression that didn’t give anything away. “You can go,” he said again.
Francisco trudged back to his car, confused and hurt and scared. Sad, too. He wanted to go home and hug his kids, kiss his wife, and check the locks on all the doors.
When he got into his car he checked his cell phone and saw that he’d missed a bunch of text messages. From Scotty and a couple of the guys. Shows of support. More from Debbie asking when he was coming home.
And one from Far Danny. He grunted in surprise. The Dannys sometimes texted him, mostly about sports or card games, and always on the birthdays of his kids, but he didn’t expect to hear from them tonight.
The message read: Saw u on the news, cuz. Somebody fucking with you?
For some reason it made Francisco smile. He texted back, Don’t know what’s happening. Thanks for asking.
As he was starting his car a reply message bing-bonged. Anybody gets in your shit, call.
Francisco smiled again, started the car and drove home.
-5-
Francisco headed down the long, winding black ribbon of A32 with music turned up loud so he didn’t have to listen to his thoughts. An oldies station. Billy Joel insisting he didn’t start a fire. Francisco not hearing any of the words because you really couldn’t not listen to your thoughts about something like this. His car was bucketing along at eighty when he topped the rise that began the long drop down to the development where he lived.
Immediately he slammed on the brakes.
Two people were walking along the side of the road, so close to the blacktop that Francisco had to swerve to keep from clipping them.
Two people.
A tall man with thinning blond hair.
A teenage girl.
Walking hand-in-hand.
They heard his car, heard the screech of his tires on the road, turned into the splash of high beams. They stared at him through the windshield.
They smiled at him.
Francisco screamed.
He screamed so long and so loud that it tore his throat raw.