Текст книги "Buried Alive"

Автор книги: Jack Kerley

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

33

“Here’s my plan,” Cherry said as we climbed into her ride. “The FBI’s back in the picture tomorrow and I’ll be running errands for Dark Lady Krenkler. I’m going to drop you by your cabin so you can check on your doggie. Then we’re going to my place for supper.”

“I don’t know if I should—”

“The hell with the world, Carson. I want to stay up in the sky a while. Have supper with me.”

She’d never used my first name. I can’t explain it, but at that moment I would have jumped headlong from the nearest cliff had she asked.

“The sky it is,” I said.

Mix-up wasn’t at the cabin, but I hadn’t expected it. Cherry gave me directions to her place and boogied. I showered away the day and changed into a fresh white cotton shirt, barely used cords, brand spanking new socks. I put out fresh food for Mix-up and changed the water. When I looked into the woods and felt my gut begin to hollow out, I took a few deep breaths and thought of Cherry beside me in the sky where she had felt free, at least for a few minutes.

When I drove off for her home, directions in my lap, I passed my brother’s home. He was on the porch and reading a newspaper. He didn’t look up.

I twice passed the drive to Cherry’s house and would have taken a three-fer if I hadn’t finally swerved into the gravel drive I’d initially thought an ATV trail. Unruly vegetation bordered the lane, as though Cherry enjoyed making visitors brush shoulders with nature. I followed the track several hundred feet, stopping in a graveled parking strip at the rear of a two-story log cabin with a steep metal roof of green. I pulled next to Cherry’s cruiser, beside it her muddy and jacked-high Jeep.

“Come on ’round front,” I heard Cherry’s voice yell.

My heels found limestone slabs forming a walkway to the front of the cabin, passing a massive stone chimney set against square-cut logs chinked with gray caulk. Looking ahead, I faced a breathtaking mountain panorama of verdant forest studded with massive rock cliffs and outcroppings. The impression was of rock-hulled ships pressing their bows from beneath the green.

I turned the corner to find Cherry above on the cabin’s broad porch, drifting lazily in a swing, one hand on the chain. Music fell from the open windows, a woman singer with a plaintive voice singing a rock song rooted in madrigal. Cherry wore a dress, white and simple, the neckline square and open, the hem at her knees. The effect was limited by a ball cap touting Ruger firearms, but it still took a second to start breathing again.

“How about a cool brew for a warm day?” she asked.

“Sweet idea.”

She padded inside, her feet bare, her sandals beneath the swing. I returned to inspecting the view. The cliff’s edge was directly before Cherry’s porch, twenty feet of scruffy grass ending in a dozen feet of dark sandstone. Beyond lay only air.

I crept as near the edge as my skittish heart allowed, looking far down into dense treetops parted by a slender thread of creek. Adjoining cliffs rose from the valley, sheer cuts of sandstone between hillsides angled just enough to hold vegetation. I found myself holding my breath as if underwater, not knowing why.

“Watch that first step, Ryder,” Cherry’s voice called from behind me. “The second one doesn’t show up for four hundred feet.”

I returned to the porch, where Cherry was setting down a tray with sandwiches and bottles of beer. “I was sure I had some duckling à l’orange left over from yesterday,” she winked. “But all I found was sandwich stuff.”

“You really ought to put a barrier at the edge of the cliff,” I suggested, picking up a half-pound of roast beef and cheddar on rye. “A fence or a rock wall or something.”

“I know where the edge is,” she said. “And a fence would block my view.”

“It’s a helluva view. I’ll give you that. And a real fersure log cabin.” I tapped my knuckles on the door frame, as solid as concrete.

“Built thirty-three years ago by Horace Cherry, my uncle on my father’s side. My father passed away when I was seven. Horace never had kids, and always took a shine to me. When he died, three years back, he left the place to me, knowing I loved being here as much as he did.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“I have a lot of relatives, but I was an only child.” She smiled wistfully. “I’m the last Cherry on the tree.”

“Everyone around here seems someone’s kin in some way.”

“When there’s only a few dozen families who inhabit a three-county area for the first hundred years after a place gets settled, everyone’s kin to everyone’s kin, in some way or another. That’s changing, but not as fast as everywhere else. A writer once called Appalachia the most foreign of American cultures.”

“Foreign?” I said. “Isn’t it Scots-Irish, mainly?”

“And English, and plenty of Germans. Yeoman farmers, back in the old countries, people who knew farming and animal husbandry and pulling food from land that blunted plows and busted the spirits of lesser folk. It’s not foreign because the people are so different from the rest of the country, but because they’re similar to the way they always were. They’re only foreign in time.”

I took a bite of my sandwich. “Are you foreign in time?”

“I grew up with people who have never been out of the mountains, never will. Not even as far as Lexington. There are more of them than you’d think. I’ve been to college, spent a few months traveling abroad. Even been to New-freakin’-York and Los Angeles. I like big cities. But I love it here, too. So I guess I’m sort of suspended between two worlds. Come on inside, Carson. Let me give you the tour.”

I followed her into her home, basically the floor plan of my cabin back at Road’s End, just fifty per cent larger. There was a living area with vaulted ceiling, a half-loft above, a door at the end leading into an upper bedroom.

The wall open to the high ceiling on the fireplace end of the living area had been plastered or dry-walled and painted a creamy white. Ditto the wall beside the stairs to the loft. The seamless white formed the background for dozens of items from photographs through old advertising posters to antique tools. A tan and red-banded hat of straw centered the collection. Arranging a sizeable number of items on a surface is difficult – it’s composition – but Cherry had an eye for balance.

I studied the tools, odd assemblages of wood and leather and metal. A couple of them looked cruel, almost threatening. “I’ve never seen tools like these before,” I said. “What are they?”

She padded over and stood at my side, beer bottle in hand. “I have no idea. They were in Uncle Horace’s shed. I suppose they have something to do with horses. The hat’s his, too; he wore it everywhere. Here’s my favorite picture—”

She pointed to a photo of a pretty young girl, eight or nine, standing beside a barrel-chested man with waxed dark hair. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, dark bolo tie, and the same tan hat hanging on the wall. He was grinning like he’d just won the lottery.

“Uncle Horace and you?” I asked.

“Yep. That’s Uncle Horace in most of the shots.”

I studied another photo, Horace Cherry bedecked in an ice-cream suit with cocked and jaunty hat riding his crown. His smile seemed radiant and boundless, the young Donna Cherry at his side looking heartbreakingly innocent.

“He always wore the suit, right?” I asked, knowing it was a uniform.

“With the hat atop his crown everywhere he went. He was a dandy. It was funny.”

Something in the photo started to make me uneasy. Something in the eyes perhaps. Or maybe it was the age of the photo, a darkening of the shadows.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea.” Cherry crouched to reach into a low cabinet, pulling out a squat brown bottle. I tried not to notice the way her dress hugged her body. She shook back her hair and studied the bottle’s yellowed label as she stood. I saw her nipples buzzing against the fabric of her dress like anxious bees. I wanted them to carry honey to my tongue.

“It’s some kind of special cognac,” she said. “A gift from Uncle Horace years ago. He said to have a sip on special occasions. Want a tipple to celebrate your first skylift ride? All in all, you liked the trip, right?”

“It was wonderful,” I lied, feeling a smile rise to my lips as I moved a half-step closer to Donna Cherry. My knees loose with the promise of honey, I started to reach for her hand.

And stopped. Froze with my hand suspended in midair. I couldn’t tell if the hand was part of the me I knew as me or the priapic rogue my brother kept telling me was me. Was it me interested in Cherry or was it he, the broken me? From nowhere my brother’s mocking voice rose unbidden in my head.

“Part of your childhood damage manifests in a shy roguish charm you use to warm yourself with temporary lovers, Carson …”

I realized he’d said those things knowing I’d hear them at moments like this. I’d forgotten how consuming was his need to affect others from a distance. To keep a tight chain.

“Wait here a second,” I told Cherry.

“Uh, Carson, did I say something?”

“You’re fine. I’ll be right back.”

I walked outside, close to the edge of the precipice, where I crouched and found a round chunk of sandstone. I mentally mapped my position, turned to the general direction of the hollow, trying to aim my eyes directly at my brother’s cabin, visualizing him sitting on the porch. I side-armed the stone high and away in his direction and closed my eyes. I pictured the rock traveling five or so miles, falling from the sky like a meteorite and smacking my brother dead-center in his forehead, knocking him backwards in his chair, newspaper fluttering down on his startled face.

“Keep your hands outta my head, Brother,” I said, backing my symbolic missile with the most potent digital icon in American culture.

When I stepped back inside I felt fifty pounds lighter, like a leaden yoke had melted from my shoulders. “Pour the cognac,” I said, stepping to Cherry and no longer wondering who was talking.

She lifted a perplexed eyebrow. “Are you all right?”

“I had a simple ritual to perform. Like an exorcism.”

“Uh, do you always—”

I pressed my finger to her lips, stilling them. The sensation of warmth was exquisite. “My own small skylift ritual. I had something bothering me, but it fell away.” I withdrew my finger, reluctantly.

“When you put it in those terms, I think I understand.” She lifted her glass. “Shall we drink to solving the case?”

“No,” I corrected. “Let’s drink to us.”

We clicked glasses. The cognac was dizzying in my head, distilled manna aged in oak and leather. We next raised our glasses to the tan hat of our cognac-giving benefactor, Horace T. Cherry, staring dark-eyed from the photo centering the wall of pictures and weird objects. We set the glasses on the table and sat on the couch, almost touching. I’m sure I heard her bees buzzing.

My cellphone rasped from my pocket. I rolled my eyes and answered.

“This is Heywood Williams,” an elderly male voice said, loud, like a guy with hearing problems. “I’m manager of the Pumpkin Patch Campground. We got a dog running loose around here matches the description on a poster one of the Woslee cops dropped off.”

“The dog’s a big guy?” I asked. “Kinda odd-looking?”

“I guess. Odd looks different to different people. Big ol’ boy. Friendly.”

I took the address, clear on the other side of the Gorge. I’d already had several calls, able to figure out it wasn’t Mix-up by questioning the caller. But this call had promise.

“I heard,” Cherry said as I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “Go, Carson. I hope it’s Mix-up. But even if it isn’t, I’m still hopeful, right?”

She stood on her toes and gave me a millisecond’s kiss on my lips, more dizzying by far than the cognac.

34

The Pumpkin Patch Campground was twenty minutes distant. I drove past the campground sign, pumpkin-shaped and promising hookups, fire pits and a dumping station. Mr Williams was reading a newspaper in a folding chair beside a small wooden kiosk where guests checked in. He was somewhere in his seventies, wearing a pumpkin-colored porkpie hat and Bermuda shorts.

“I’m sorry,” Williams said sheepishly. “The dog belonged to a group of campers. I hadn’t seen it when they checked in.”

He pointed to a bright recreational vehicle across a small park area. The family – husband, wife, three smallish kids – were still setting up, the husband on the roof of the vehicle passing lawn chairs down to the wife as a huge shaggy dog with some resemblance to Mix-up frisked at the wife’s ankles.

Williams was a chatty guy and since he’d made a valiant effort on my behalf, I kept him company for a few minutes, talking about the weather and his work.

“We got twenty sites for RVs,” he related proudly. “Full hookups. And another dozen sites for tent campers.”

“Must keep you busy.”

“Busy enough. People drive in, stay a night or two, head off to another place. Easy to do when you’re driving a box filled with all the comforts of home.”

I saw a big recreational vehicle that had recently pulled in for the night; hooked to the towbar behind it was a Mazda compact.

“Do many people pull cars with them?” I asked, killing time.

“Sure. So they can move around locally with less gas. If a big RV is like planting your house anywhere you want, having a car is like bringing your garage along as well.”

“Are there many RV campgrounds in the area?”

“Depends what you mean. There’s maybe five or six real near the Gorge. Add another thirty miles to the circle and you get a bunch more. Plus some folks have acreage set up to hold a few RVs to make a little pin money.”

I studied nearby RVs, saw three more with towing packages. It hit me that the set-up was the perfect mobile hideaway, especially with props like bikes and boats and fishing rods. A recreational vehicle could be moved from campsite to campsite, hard to track. They offered a place to plot, to change disguise, to sneak in under cover of dark, tear a body apart, pack it with manure. There was also the image: recreational vehicles were the happy whales of the road, friendly and benign, filled with cheery families and retired couples. Mad killers drove rusty vans and dark, low-slung sedans with obsidian windows.

I recalled the words of Gable Paltry, the scruffy old voyeur who scanned the parking lot behind the funeral home where Tanner’s body had been stolen.

“I saw me a big a RV pull in … Stayed maybe ten minutes. Light color. Had bikes and crap roped to the back. A barbecue grill tied up top, too.”

I asked Williams if I could wander the campground and, sauntering from site to site, I looked at the bright machines, seeing families and children and several RVs with no one around, owners out hiking or kayaking the river or sightseeing.

When I left Pumpkin Patch, my mind was fixated on the possibility of RVs as hideouts – not just this case, but for future reference. I passed another such campground and pulled in to take a look. That led to a third such place, the Haunted Hollow Campground. The campground was up by Frenchburg, high on the northwest side of the Gorge area. The murders and bulk of the investigation had occurred on the eastern side.

I parked near the entrance and wandered past the twenty or so sites. The lot, thick with trees, was tucked back in a verdant hollow – haunted, presumably – with a small creek singing merrily alongside. It didn’t seem a place where a killer would tuck down and think murderous thoughts.

I scanned RV after RV, seeing occupants, or swimsuits drying on a line, or hearing voices from inside, doors open wide to accept the cooling air of dusk. At the end of the road was a huge cream-colored RV resembling a vacation on wheels, bikes parked against the rear wheel, man’s, woman’s, a couple kid’s bikes. Two short recreational kayaks were strapped atop the vehicle, plus a plane-sized inner tube for playing in the water. The tips of fishing rods pressed against a back window. The shades were drawn and no one seemed inside.

I wandered to the rear and saw the requisite bumper stickers: Smoky Mountains, Everglades National Park, the Ozarks, a dozen or so. The stickers looked new and I wondered if the vehicle’s owner or owners were recent retirees.

The vehicle had both a tow bar and a rack holding a Kawasaki dirt bike, a big one. The distance from the ground to the rack was twenty or so inches and I figured it took a couple people to grunt the motorcycle into the rack. Or one strong one.

Turning away, a motion at a rear window caught my eye, a curtain shifting perhaps. Or a motion behind it. I stared for several seconds and saw nothing, recalling a classic bumper sticker admonition:

Don’t Come Knockin’ When This Van’s A-rockin’.

Hoping my nosy wanderings hadn’t disturbed anyone’s merrymaking, I retreated to my car, shooting backwards glances at the RV and wondering if my imagination was running past the red line.

I started back to my cabin, but being cloistered with my thoughts seemed claustrophobic so, for a few minutes at least, I drove where the roads led me, restless, thinking that maybe if I gave Mix-up a little more time, he’d be at the cabin when I returned, nose-nudging his food bowl my way as though nothing had happened.

Dusk was thickening and I saw headlights behind me, but they dissolved into the distance. I drove westward, windows down, as night fell deep into the valleys. The road straightened for a moment and I saw the headlights again, closer, the vehicle moving at speed. To my left I saw a Forest Service road and pulled from the main road, wanting to find a bit of calm before returning to the cabin.

I heard a slow rumble through the mountains as I stepped from my truck and stretched my back. It was distant thunder, the promised front approaching. But for now the moonlight was bright enough to light the trail.

I started walking, right away stepping into a spider web. I brushed it from my face, recalling McCoy’s observation regarding a second traveler on the Rock Bridge trail. I was a half-mile down the trail when I heard a car door close somewhere to my right. My parking area was behind me, the other vehicle at another trail access; kids, I figured, kissing or sipping beer in the dark.

Two minutes later I heard a limb stepped on, the sound from my side quadrant. I gauged the distance as two or three hundred feet.

After a few seconds, I heard a second footfall. Then, a third.

I nearly called out a plaintive Hello, but stopped myself. If I could hear their footfalls, surely the other person had heard mine. It seemed odd that in the hundreds of square miles of the local forest, two people had chosen this section as a nighttime venue.

The night bloomed darker and I looked above to see a cloud covering the white face of the moon. The cloud sifted free and moonlight blazed so white as to feel hot on my neck. To my right I heard an odd sound, like tape being stripped from a roll.

I was craning my ear that direction when a bullet slapped a tree four feet to my right. I dove to the ground, heart racing.

At first, no sound. Then a voice in the dark.

“Here coppie, coppie, coppie,” it crooned, as if calling a dog, a high and metal-raspy voice. Another pop. The bullet sizzled past my ear.

The voice was unforgettable. I’d heard it once at a brief prison interview, once at a hypnosis session turned sour: Bobby Lee Crayline.

Bobby Lee Crayline?

For one horrible second it occurred that speaking of him recently, figuring out his escape in Alabama, had worked black magic, that I had conjured him into my life like a demon from hell.

I breathed away the irrational and started running low, tough enough when the moon was out, impossible when clouds passed between us. My feet snagged roots and vines, stumbled over rocks. I stepped on limbs that cracked like firecrackers, ran headlong into low branches.

Why is Crayline here? my mind kept saying. Why is he trying to kill me?

The clouds released the moon and I was spotlit on the trail. Another shot from Crayline. A rifle that sounded somehow blunted and dull.

“Here, coppie, coppie, coppie …”

The forest went black. I crouched and waited for the moon to light the path. It blazed and I moved forward, staying low, the trail a maze of shadows. I heard Crayline angling behind me. I had left my weapon tucked in a closet in the cabin. Sweat dripped from my forehead, my heart seemed to engulf my chest. I could find no avenue to set an ambush.

The moon poked through again. The trail veered into rhododendron and all I saw was rock and more rock, rising into the night sky until it disappeared into black. I had no escape route left. I had come to the end of a hollow, a box canyon.

I heard laughter at my back, a hundred feet? Less? Bobby Lee Crayline was moving with caution, tree to tree. Safe in the cover of the hemlocks and pines, he had only to slowly advance until I was in his sights.

I was in the point of a V, with nowhere to go. Nowhere at all.

Up, said a voice in my head. There’s nothing left but up.