Текст книги "Buried Alive"

Автор книги: Jack Kerley

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

35

I craned my head back as the moon shone through a wisp of cloud. Four stories above me in the sandstone I saw a hueco – Spanish for “hole” – a depression eroded into the cliff face, common in the sandstone cliffs. I heard a trampled branch, a crunch in the black air. Crayline had moved one tree closer. He was silent now, fully focused on gliding in for the kill.

I looked back to the cliff face. There was cover of a dozen feet of rhododendron before I’d be lit bright on the sandstone. Sweat stinging my eyes, I hid my shoes under leaves and leapt on to the rock, hand grabbing upward at a small shelf. I missed, tumbling to the ground. My clothes were binding me and I stripped to skivvies and pulled off my socks. I hid the clothes with my shoes.

I leapt again and made the jump, fingers holding. I pulled, straining, until my scrambling toes found purchase.

A dull pop and I heard lead splat against the cliff a dozen feet away. Crayline was guessing at my position, firing blind into the point of the V. The moon broke through the clouds and the world turned spotlight white for twenty seconds. I saw a vertical crack, used it to pull ten feet higher, leaves tickling at my back. I emerged above the rhododendron, now an easy target on the cliff face.

The moon disappeared and I recognized the impossibility of my task. The only way to see hand and footholds was in the moonlight. But the same light displayed me like I was centering a snow-white screen at a movie theater.

The moon filtered through a thin cloud and I saw a handhold two feet above me. My feet scrabbled, found purchase. I brought my right foot to the tiny outcrop now holding my hand. With my foot secured, I slipped my hand away, slapped it upward. My face pressed into the stone. Even my breath was an enemy, inflating my chest, pushing my center of balance back an inch or so. I heard Crayline move another tree closer, the sound now as much below as behind. I prayed his upward view was cluttered by limbs or brush.

I saw another hold four feet up and three laterally, a handhold no larger than a pack of cigarettes. An impossible move, almost, the edge of my limits.

The world went black, a thick cloud rolling over the moon. Come back! my mind screamed at the moon. I need you!

I froze against the sandstone, heart pounding in pitch-black. I heard a gnome in my head: Gary, my rock-climbing instructor. Make the move before you make the move, he constantly lectured, promoting visual and physical visualization. I pictured the rock’s surface, the small holds I needed to catch, felt how it would feel to make the move.

I launched myself upward, exploding like a coiled spring, scrabbling for something only seen in my mind, feeling nothing, then …

My right index and forefinger fell atop a one-inch outcrop, left toe on a tiny shelf, the rest of me stretched tight between hand and foot.

Another shot from Crayline, a dull pop aimed into the rhododendron below. The moon returned. To my right, waist-level, I saw a small stone rumple that might hold a foot. My fingers burned, shivered, muscles filling with lactic acid, strength dying away. I checked the position of the rumple, brought my leg up … easy, easy … Visualize as the moon tucked under cloud. See the move and … Got it! I pulled upward with every ounce of strength, sweat searing my eyes.

“Here, coppie, coppie, coppie …”

Crayline returned to the taunt, trying to spook me into making a move, but still looking for me at ground level. He was almost to the cliff. I tried to pull up another few inches for stability but my toehold crumbled into dust, my foot kicking wildly. My body canted sideways, falling, hands flailing uselessly, slapping at the rock, falling, goddammit it’s over why now falling…

My fingers slammed something pushing from the rock. A metal circle. I grabbed. My fingers howled in pain, but held.

It was a bolt. A freaking BOLT!

I’d found a regular climbing route, a path pioneered up the cliff. The rock had been drilled, bolts jammed in to hold safety ropes affixed to harnesses.

I had no rope. No harness. No chalk to enhance my grip. But I was on a pre-built route. The moon blazed again, white light now revealing the series of bolts above me, tiny lighthouses in the rock. I tried to recall everything Gary had taught me. Every move. Every technique.

The moon fled. I dangled one-handed from the bolt for several seconds until my feet found holds. My hands patted rock above, knowing the metal circles were there, waiting. I found one and grunted upward, crossing my body length through the dark in seconds.

Moon. I looked up and saw the dark hueco just feet above me, beside a cleft in the rock. I heard a muffled pop and the stone inches beside me splintered. Seen! I held my scream of terror and pulled for the hueco like a man swimming vertically, waiting for the second shot.

I tumbled into the hueco seconds later. Below me I heard cursing and the sound of stripping tape. I realized Crayline was using a soft-drink silencer – an empty plastic bottle duct-taped over the weapon’s muzzle – to blunt the shot’s sound. A fresh bottle had to be taped on for each shot.

Crayline knew an open gunshot could carry for miles. But the semi-silenced shots sounded numb and inconclusive, liable to be mistaken for a falling branch if noticed at all. He probably had a backpack full of bottles.

Another pop. The bullet whanged off the roof of the hueco, buried in the dust three inches from my knee. I rolled against the rear of the hole and tucked fetus-tight. “HELP!” I yelled into the night, hoping the cavity performed like a giant megaphone. “HELP! CALL THE POLICE!”

I heard my words echo back to me, no idea if they were carrying a hundred feet or a thousand yards.

“HELLLLLLP!”

I screamed for two more minutes, until I saw a flashlight through the trees, moving quickly away. Crayline had decided it wasn’t worth the risk. I watched his light diminish until I knew I was out of range. I crawled into the crevice at the side of the hueco, wormed the final dozen feet to the ridge and circled toward my truck.

Rain had started when I found it an hour later, shoeless and limping from countless stumbles, listening into the dark before I approached. I tried my phone, but recalled the nearest cell tower was miles away and this section of the forest was a dead zone.

I fired up the engine but kept the lights off, snapping them on only when shadows indicated I might be nearing a precipice. I was afraid Crayline was lurking in the trees. I continued several miles until the service road intersected two-lane. I was still deep in the backcountry, but felt safer using headlights and speed. The rain escalated as I tapped a phone button, finding no reception. I flicked on the dome light and checked between the map and the road. Cherry’s home was about three miles away.

I saw headlamps ahead on the highway. They shifted to dim as I cut mine back. Then they blazed bright and blinding between my wipers. I held my hand in front of my eyes to cut the glare. The vehicle passed by, a high-sprung mini-pickup painted with camouflage blacks and greens.

A hunter’s truck.

I looked in the rear-view and saw the scarlet lights of braking. I knew in my gut it was Crayline. My eyes returned from the rear-view to see a tight curve ahead. I braked too hard, skidding from the road into a shallow ditch, wheel spinning in my hand until I grabbed tight, losing valuable seconds. Crayline roared up and banged my bumper, pushing me ahead. I downshifted, slid through a bend, straightened.

He was on me in an instant, another ramming. I heard a gunshot as my side window crumbled away. I braked hard for a switchback, rain sweeping my face. Crayline’s lights seemed in my back seat.

“History’s getting fixed,” he roared incomprehensibly. “You ain’t stopping it.”

I ran another blind curve, Crayline cutting low and trying to clip me into a spin. I watched him miss by inches, screaming out his window between shots. Rain blew into my eyes like a gale. I downshifted and gained a few feet. Somewhere ahead was the turn-off to Cherry’s home. Crayline was on my bumper.

Our combined lights showed a lane between trees. I jammed on the brakes, cut sideways and slid off the road a hundred feet before Cherry’s drive. I clipped a tree, fought for control, made the turn on to the lane to Cherry’s house.

Crayline was behind me seconds later. I blinked away rain and saw the lights of Cherry’s house, the tree-studded yard, the drive appearing to continue beyond the cabin.

Crayline was closing fast. A shot screamed off the cab.

I roared past Cherry’s house, waited a millisecond beyond hope, downshifted to second. The truck slowed with a jolt but without brake lights. I aimed into a tree, hit a glancing blow. The air bag exploded. I shoved it aside as Crayline roared past, probably wild with glee at seeing my wrecked truck.

But there would be no stopping and no coming back for Bobby Lee Crayline. I pictured his hideous grin freezing as he looked ahead and saw nothing but air.

Crayline jumped on the brakes. His taillights were horizontal for a split second, then arced inexorably into the valley. I pushed from my truck as the door opened on Cherry’s cabin, I saw a shotgun muzzle sniffing over the threshold.

“It’s OK,” I yelled. “It’s me.”

She stepped outside, wearing an outsized T-shirt and little more. It seemed appropriate, given that I was standing in her yard solely in sodden boxers.

“Sweet Jesus, Ryder. What’s going on?”

I waved her to follow me to the edge of the cliff. We stared into the valley. Forty stories below the trees were orange with the gasoline-fueled glow of Bobby Lee Crayline’s funeral pyre.

36

Eight thirty a.m. found Cherry and me at the largest of the pair of park cabins the Feds used as their Woslee field HQ. Krenkler had arrived, her hair even brighter and stiffer than I remembered, the out-curling side points like she’d honed them in a pencil sharpener. She was on her cell and sending her harried agents to and fro solely with irate glances and fingersnaps.

She jabbed her fingers toward where we should sit: the dining-room table. Krenkler finished her call, popped a stick of gum between her scarlet lips and gave me her best cross-examination stare as she strode over.

“You knew this guy, Ryder. You interviewed him in the Alabama State Prison. You were at the mental institute when he escaped. He died trying to kill you. That’s three too many coincidences for me. What’s the story?”

Questions I’d been asking myself for hours. I rubbed my face with my hands.

“I’m flummoxed. Utterly mystified. There’s nothing I ever did to Crayline to piss him off. He probably had grudges against half the people in his life, but he picked—”

“You. He wanted you here.”

“There’s no reason for it. I was never anything to him.”

Krenkler had big hands with several shiny rings aboard. She set the hands on the table beside me and leaned close. “You sure it was a woman’s voice that called you to the guy with the tool up his pooper?”

I said, “It sounded like a woman’s voice.” And it had, that being the gender my brother was imitating.

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes,” I said, frazzled and sore and feeling like I was still clinging fifty feet in the air with bullets slapping beside me. “Why?”

Krenkler stood and backed away, leaning against the knotty pine wall, her arms crossed. With her black pantsuit and flared lapels, she resembled a looming raven, only blonder.

“Ryder, can you think of any reason Robert Crayline would want to kill any of the three others he’s killed here?”

I rubbed my face. “I don’t have any idea what he’d have against…” I paused, hearing Crayline’s words the day of his escape, right after the lawyer’s hired goon had spat on Bobby Lee and called him a genetic moron.

“Don’t go dumb on me Ryder,” Krenkler said. “What is it?”

“Bobby Lee threatened a guy the day he escaped. Last name was Bridges. I don’t recall the first name. Bridges was half-bright muscle, probably an occasional employee of Crayline’s legal firm. Call Arthur Slezak, of Dunham, Krull and Slezak in Memphis. Ask Slezak if he’s seen Bridges lately.”

Krenkler frowned. “You think the guy with the tool up his tailpipe might be this Bridges?”

I thought back to the horror show in the reeking shack, saw the body wired to the bed. “The corpse’s face was ruined,” I said, “but the body size fits. Hard and fit. Crayline said he was going to fry Bridges’s guts for supper.”

I heard one of the agents at my back mutter Holy shit. Krenkler glared at the agent. “How about checking on this Bridges?” she snapped. “That too much to ask?”

In the past dozen hours I’d been to my cabin only long enough to put on clothes and note with despair I was still sans dog. I stood.

“Where you think you’re going, Ryder?” Krenkler growled.

“I’m going to shower and go to bed for a couple hours,” I said quietly. “Anyone thinking different better be ready to use their gun.”

Cherry said she’d drop me off, my truck still at her home until photos and reconstructions were made, but Krenkler wasn’t through grilling her on local developments. Now would come the reconstruction: why Crayline had selected Woslee County as his killing field. Cherry didn’t look happy at the prospect of continuing the tête-à-tête with Krenkler, but it was part of the job. I was ferried back by Agent Rourke. He seemed the most human of the robots on Krenkler’s team.

“How is it, working with Agent Krenkler?” I asked him.

“I retire in two months,” he said, not turning his eyes from the road. “Ask me then.”

“Gotcha,” I said.

He dropped me at my front door. I had hoped whatever forces propel the universe had put my night’s ordeal in the book and, checking the account to date, decided I might deserve the return of my dog.

The budgeting was not in my favor.

I showered and changed and, still charged with adrenalin residue, lost my need to sleep. I downed two power bars and made coffee strong as the bolts I’d clung to on the cliff face. I added a tot of Maker’s Mark, going out to the porch to sit and think.

Crayline had been at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior, the first time during my brother’s tenure. That in itself didn’t mean a whole lot. Though the Institute housed seventy or eighty full-time patients, another hundred or so criminals might rotate through on an annual basis, there for a few days or weeks of evaluation or study. Plus there were levels of security, different wings – “wards” in the semi-hospital parlance used at the Institute. Since Crayline had been there as a transient, a person for temporary study, he might not have had access to the general population which included my brother.

But I had to know, just for my own knowing. I called Dr Wainwright at the Institute, gave her a brief overview of the situation with Bobby Lee Crayline, and asked for records of his stay. Wainwright was apologetic.

“Those records are just for staff, Detective. And not even the general, non-medical staff. Only the doctors are allowed to view the records.”

“It could be important,” I said.

“I’m very sorry. There are certain notes and observations made that could be subject to privacy issues.”

“It wasn’t that long ago, Doctor, you begged me to come to the Institute to help stop Bobby Lee Crayline’s hypnosis. I came running. Afterwards, you said you owed me big-time and if there was anything you could ever do to—”

“I remember,” Wainwright said.

“In my book that was a promise. I’m here to collect.”

A long pause. She said, “Let me close the door to my office.”

I started taking notes as Wainwright looked through Crayline’s records, but after a couple minutes I flung the notes to the floor of the porch, too angry to write. My voice was even as I thanked Wainwright and told her she’d closed the account.

I hobbled toward my brother’s cabin, fists clenched as tight as my jaw.

37

I stood on Jeremy’s porch and willed myself calm. If he saw my anger he’d shut me out or disappear into the forest. I had to appear serene. The door was unlocked and I entered.

“Jeremy,” I called, stepping over the threshold. “Where are you?”

“Upstairs, in my office,” he yelled, joy in his voice. “Come watch me make money, Brother. The blustering drunkard is starting the day on a binge.”

I took the steps two at a time, strode the hall to his open office door. He was at his desk, wearing a dark pinstriped suit, pink shirt, tightly knotted tie. It seemed odd until I realized he was in his business mindset. He had his gentleman gardener garb, his button-down business dress, his retired academic outfit, his rugged outdoorsman wear … he affected the uniform necessary to fully complete each personality.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

He spun in his chair. The screens on his desk danced with charts and graphs and crawls of stock symbols. “The Chinese Ministry of Economics issued a report calling for increased spending on infrastructure. The drunkard is puking gold … I’ve got a heavy position in an Asian copper-mining company that jumped eight points in an hour on the Hang Seng Index. I’m about to—”

“NO! What the hell is going on here?” I said, flailing my arms, meaning here, the locale, the region.

He regarded me warily before turning back to the monitor. “Whatever kind of question is that, Carson? It’s vague. What are you talking about?”

I crossed the room in a half-heartbeat, grabbed the back of his chair and spun him to face me. My voice was a constricted hiss. “I’m talking about Bobby Lee Crayline. He just tried to kill me. He’s dead, thankfully.”

The surprise in my brother’s eyes turned to evasion, which in Jeremy was less a tactic than an emotion. He switched into acting mode, moving up-angled eyes back and forth, as if searching a catalogue of names in his head.

“I’m sorry, Carson. I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“You know exactly who Bobby Lee Crayline is,” I said, sick of his games. “You got into the heads of everyone who came near you at the Institute. You needed to know what made them tick and how they could be of use to you.”

“That’s so cynical. I never had any real contact with the man.”

“STOP LYING!” I roared. From nowhere my hands were around my brother’s throat, lifting him from the chair, spinning him into the wall. “Did you know the staff at the Institute keep round-the-clock track of who the inmates talk to, relate to, spend their time with? It’s an interaction study to see who pairs up, weak with weak or weak with strong … and who appears to be using who.”

“It’s whom,” my brother snarled. “And it’s disgusting.”

“From the moment Crayline walked in the door, you started circling him. Nodding the first day, speaking in passing the second, eating together on day three. Five days later you two were bonded like Siamese twins. Crayline started his mornings in the community room, waiting for your dramatic daily entrance. The staff read the body language, Jeremy. You were the Alpha in the relationship. Big nasty dangerous Bobby Lee Crayline treated you like some kind of wizard king.”

“A pack of lies from a den of spies.”

“You know what else was recorded, Jeremy?”

“My bowel movements, from the sounds of it.”

I wrenched him tighter to the wall. “You and Bobby Lee Crayline sitting alone in a corner of the ward, Crayline sobbing on the couch as you patted his back and whispered in his ear. People like Crayline don’t cry like babies, Jeremy. What was all that about?”

Jeremy pushed my chest, hard. It broke my grip, sending me backwards. “All right,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I remember Bobby. He had things clanging together inside him, issues.”

“Everyone there has issues!” I snapped. “They define issues. What did you and Crayline talk about?”

“I told Bobby things about my past. My experiences touched something inside him. He seemed fascinated at how I’d overcome my history. My abuse.”

“You told him how it ended?” I said. Jeremy had disemboweled our father and strung bits of him in the trees.

My brother smiled and stabbed his hand in the air, as though plunging a knife deep into tissue. “Not an end, Carson. A beginning.” He canted his head, regarding me with curiosity. “Helluva day, wasn’t it, Carson? The day the cops came to tell us we were free?”

… police at the door telling my mother her husband had been found in a nearby woods, lashed to a tree, disemboweled while still alive, his innards spread across the ground and into the surrounding trees as if a terrible ritual had been performed.

I said, “I’ll remember it forever.”

“Do you remember the knife I used, Carson? You do, don’t you? Father’s old hunting knife, the one he’d gotten from his father? Hidden in the back of his top desk drawer?”

I felt the knife in my hand as if I’d held it yesterday. Razor sharp. Hickory handle, an eight-inch stainless-steel blade with a curve like a gentle smile.

“Of course,” I said. “I know the knife. Why is this important to—”

“Did I ever tell you why I selected it?”

“I don’t know. I guess it was close and wouldn’t be missed.”

My brother shook his head like I was wasting his time. “Don’t be a simpleton, Carson. It was Daddy’s beloved knife. I needed to do something very important with it. But first, I needed to perform a magic trick: I had to move the knife from his alliance to mine.”

My brother’s voice had dropped into a soft monotone and I again felt him leading me into the chaos of his mental landscape. “You’re talking about befriending wood and metal?” I scoffed.

“I’m talking about a power akin to magic, Carson. Gaining power over the past. I started by opening the drawer to get the knife used to seeing me. Later, I took it on visits to my room where it learned to trust me. After I’d made the knife mine, I put it above the ceiling tiles. Beside the light above my bed.”

“Jeremy, this is completely insa—”

“SHUT UP! Whenever Father entered my room, he walked beneath the knife. I visualized fingers of blood-red light reaching from the knife to Daddy dear. It felt delicious. By the time I used the knife, Carson, I had granted it power unheard of by Excalibur: the power to cut me free of my past.”

I shook my head. Excalibur, befriending knives, transforming time through delusions … Talking to my brother was like being locked in a revolving door and thrown into a maelstrom. I walked to the window, finding the reality my brother was attempting to dissolve. Reality was the amber sunlight filtering through the trees and dappling the garden. Reality was the red wheelbarrow, the weathered shed, the hoe against the fencepost. Reality was the finches pecking at the feeder, the bees crisscrossing above the hives.

My brother’s voice broke into my thoughts. “You don’t believe me? You came into possession of father’s magical knife, Carson. You discovered it behind a brick in the storm cellar, right? Where it had been waiting for you.”

“It was just a knife, Jeremy,” I sighed, keeping my eyes outside, looking at the real. “It was always just wood and metal.”

hidden behind a loose brick, rolled in a strip of velvet, the blade mottled with dark stains

“Really? What did you do with the knife, Carson?” he asked. “What happened?”

“You know that, Jeremy. I threw it away.”

“Oh? Just tossed it in the trashcan? Or perhaps flung it out into a field?”

“I threw it in the Gulf, Jeremy.”

“So the knife went into the sea,” he purred. “Interesting. Where in the sea, Carson? Where exactly?”

at the mouth of Mobile Bay, or perhaps throat

“It’s not important.”

“Come on, O brother mine,” he said. “Tell big brother about the knife.”

“I was on the Dauphin Island ferry. I threw the knife overboard. No big deal.”

waiting far out on the waters and knowing the sea floor was littered with the carcasses of broken ships and doomed men

“Ah. In the channel where the Battle of Fort Morgan occurred. Seems a heroic place to drop a sad old knife, Brother. Down to the depths where the bones of the valiant dead rattle and cry.”

the knife concealed in my belt, shirt overhanging, my thumb sliding over the edge of the blade as I looked side to side, no one watching

“Yes,” I admitted.

“How did you feel when it sunk beneath the waves?”

the knife moving in a see-saw motion in the current, as if cutting away bonds, a final glint of light slicing from the blade and then covered forever by green and flowing water…

“Free,” I said, closing my eyes, amazed at how swiftly I’d been manipulated.

Jeremy walked over and stood beside me at the window, surprising me by laying a reassuring arm around my shoulders, pulling me tight. “The people Bobby Lee wants to kill are already dead, Carson. That was the terrible clanging in Bobby Lee’s head: He needed to kill people he thought had wronged him, but they were already in the ground. I have no idea who they were, Brother, God’s truth. But you can’t kill someone twice, right?”

“You’ve not seen Crayline since the Institute?” I asked.

A half-beat pause. “Not a blink’s worth. He was at the Institute two months, Carson. It’s like you said, I got to know him because I wanted to get in his head. Everyone needs a hobby.”

“So you haven’t…”

Jeremy squeezed my shoulder. “Haven’t spoken a word to Bobby in years. I’m happy he’s dead, Carson. I expect he’s happy he’s dead, too.”

The room seemed to close in and I could take no more of the darkness inside my brother’s home. I turned and exited the cabin, shaking loose from Jeremy’s spell, letting the sun burn his words away. It felt like escaping a darkly enchanted castle, where fierce dreams whirled and fought in the charged air. I breathed deeply, wondering how I’d again let his words pull me into his obsessions.

Walking back to my cabin I heard tires crunching gravel at my back, turned to see Krenkler in a dark sedan piloted by one of her drones. I turned as the car pulled beside me, Krenkler looking out through the window and folding a stick of gum into her mouth.

“If you think you got your beauty sleep, Ryder, think again. You look terrible.”

“Always a pleasure to see you, Agent Krenkler. Might I ask the reason for the delight of your company?”

“There’s a 2008 Fleetwood Discovery in the Haunted Hollow Campground, empty and locked. The campground manager ID’d a pic of Crayline as the owner. Now that we know who to show photos of, we’re finding out Mr Bobby Lee C stayed at every campground in the area, two days here, three there. He kept moving. You nailed his hideout.”

“I stumbled on to it.”

“That’s a big shiny box he was driving. Expensive. He made good money, I figure, as the one-time head honcho of SFL.”

“XFL – Extreme Fight League.”

“Whatever. We’re more interested in his current history. Like why did he spend his money living in an RV and killing people? And did he do it other places?”

“Damn good question.” Fifty-four per cent of all murders went unsolved. A small percentage were serial killings, madmen – and occasionally women – skulking in the dark and taking lives. It was very possible Woslee County wasn’t the first place Crayline visited. Or perhaps it was his shake-down cruise. I wondered if that was why he’d alerted the Bureau, his maniacal ego figuring if he could kill with the Feds around, he could kill anyone, anywhere.

Krenkler continued: “Did you know Crayline is under suspicion of gunning down three people in his home county in Alabama? Someone shot them four years ago, a rage shooting, the bodies riddled like Swiss cheese.”

I nodded. Krenkler said, “I take it you also know why Crayline went to prison the last time?”

“He abducted the only guy who ever beat him in a fight.”

“Mad Dog Stone. How’s that for a name? Crayline tossed the poor schnook in a pit and fed him garbage. Guess ol’ Bobby Lee Crayline hated to lose. But he lost to you, Ryder.”

“Is there a point here, Agent Krenkler?”

“I also wanted to tell you Soldering-iron Man was Charles Bridges, the guy who pissed off Crayline at the Alabama crazy hospital. Like you said, Mr Bridges did occasional work for Dunham, Krull and Slezak.”

“You spoke to Slezak?”

Krenkler’s nose wrinkled. “I spoke to him personally. It reminded me of what it must be like to talk to a grease pit.”

“Good description,” I said, meaning it.

“Thank you. One more thing you might like to know. Something we dug up from a long time ago back in ol’ Alabammy. Ever hear of the Marshmallow test?”

I saw a mind picture: a bespectacled experimenter holding a bag of marshmallows while talking to a child sitting at a small desk.

“The Bing Nursery School studies at Stanford,” I affirmed, wondering what the hell it had to do with Bobby Lee Crayline. “Young kids were offered treats, like candy or marshmallows. An experimenter gave them a choice: eat one marshmallow right then, or wait for the experimenter to leave the room and return fifteen minutes later. If they waited the full time, they got two marshmallows.”

“An experiment in patience?” Krenkler asked. “Or maybe self-control? Most kids popped the treat straight away, right?”

“What’s truly being observed is the child’s ability to reason,” I corrected. “To create a situation where they can out-think their own need for immediate gratification to gain the larger reward. Some did it by covering their eyes, or looking away, or singing, or playing games with their fingers. What does this have to do with Crayline?”

Krenkler consulted some notes on her lap. “Back in the early eighties a psych class at Alabama U. replicated the test with children in the rural Talladega Mountains. One of the test cases was Crayline. I guess Crayline’s screwed-up parents heard the test paid a stipend, used the kid to make a few bucks.”

I pictured a skinny, poorly nourished Bobby Lee diving on the treat like a hawk on a sparrow, jamming it down his gullet with unwashed hands. “I take it Bobby Lee devoured the marshmallow and maybe the experimenter’s hand?”

“Listen to this, Ryder: when the experimenter told Crayline one marshmallow now or two in fifteen minutes, the kid looked up and asked, ‘How many do I get if I sit here until tomorrow?’”

“What?”

“The researchers put Bobby Lee to the test with a dozen marshmallows. Not all night, of course. But three hours.”