Bitch Creek (22 page)

Calhoun shook his head. He raked some leaves away from the ground with his fingers. Underneath was a layer of half-decomposed twigs and pine needles, and under that was moist black earth. He began digging in the dirt with both hands. He felt the sheriff touch his shoulder. He shook away his hand. “Shine your light here,” he said.

“Come on, Stoney,” said Dickman. “This isn't the place.”

“The hell it's not,” said Calhoun. “It was right here.”

“You said a foot was sticking up.”

“It was here,” Calhoun repeated.

One of the other men grumbled, “Jesus,” and another said, “Let's move around. See what we can find.”

“You're not gonna find anything,” said Calhoun. “This is the damn place.”

The others wandered away. Their flashlights flickered through the bushes. The sheriff squatted down beside Calhoun and put his hand on his shoulder. “Stoney, listen—”

“I'm not crazy, if that's what you're thinking.” He scooped away some more dirt, on his hands and knees, digging furiously now, throwing handfuls off to the side, his fingers scraping into the soft dark earth, gouging out a hole the way Ralph had done.

Dickman grabbed him by both arms and held him that way until Calhoun sank back onto his heels.

“I'm not saying you're crazy,” said Dickman quietly. “You've mistaken the place, that's all. It's a big woods. It looked different in the twilight, you said so yourself.”

Calhoun shook his head. “I've got this gift,” he said. “I can remember things exactly. I have these pictures in my head. It's why I could draw Mr. Fred Green's face for you. I can see him. You want, I'll draw you another picture, and you'll see that it'll look exactly like that other one. I got a picture of this place in my head, too, and by Jesus, it's here, right where I'm digging, where Ralph found that foot.”

“Tell you what,” said Dickman. “Suppose you and I come back here tomorrow when the sun's out and we can see it better. Maybe that picture in your head will be clearer then. What do you say?”

Calhoun turned to look at him. In the darkness, the sheriff's face was a shadow. But Calhoun had heard the kindness in the man's voice, a gentle concern mingled with doubt. There was no anger in it, no frustration that he'd been dragged out of his house at midnight on a Saturday night, that he'd assembled a posse of skeptical homicide authorities and been led on a wild goose chase through the Maine woods.

Calhoun figured he knew the difference between one of his brain tricks—like a naked body drifting in a trout stream—and the real thing.

Maybe not. He knew his grip on reality was shaky. Sometimes all of it—Kate, Ralph, his house in the woods—seemed to exist only inside his own imagination. Sometimes he wondered if he'd never regained consciousness when that lightning bolt zapped him five years ago, and while all these things were happening, he was actually lying motionless in a hospital bed somewhere, with tubes and wires and machines keeping him alive and doctors looking at him, stroking their chins and mumbling to each other.

He let out a deep breath, shrugged, and said, “Okay. I guess we can come back tomorrow.”

The sheriff stood up and held down his hand.

Calhoun took it and pulled himself to his feet. He wiped his hands on his pants. “I know how it looks,” he said.

Dickman shook his head. “It doesn't look like anything except that we can't find the place. It'll look different in the daylight. We'll bring Ralph. He'll help. Now let's get the hell out of here.”

“Why don't we try Ralph now?”

The sheriff shook his head. “We'll do it tomorrow.”

Calhoun stood there while Sheriff Dickman moved away and spoke to the others. They gathered around him and grumbled and mumbled for a few minutes in voices too low for Calhoun to understand, then the sheriff said, “Come on, Stoney. You've got to show us how to get back. These city boys're all worried about bears.”

No one said anything as they trekked out of the black woods. When they arrived at their vehicles, Calhoun climbed into the sheriff's Explorer. Ralph, who'd been sleeping in the back, stood up and dropped his chin on the back of Calhoun's seat. “Wish you could talk,” Calhoun said to him. “You'd tell them that I'm not nuts. Hell, you could tell me, too.”

The sheriff was outside, leaning against the state police cruiser, talking to the others. In the rear-view mirror, Calhoun could see him gesturing with his hands while the other men stood there shrugging and shaking their heads.

After a few minutes, the sheriff climbed in behind the wheel, switched on the ignition, and pulled away. The others followed along behind.

“Are you in some kind of trouble for this?” said Calhoun.

“Nope,” he said. “They don't like it, but the hell with 'em.”

“Can't blame them,” said Calhoun. “You dragged them out here in the middle of the night for nothing. They think I'm some kind of whacko, I bet.”

Dickman chuckled. “That they do, Stoney. I guess if you'd seen yourself on your hands and knees digging in the dirt like a wild dog, you probably would, too.”

They drove in silence for a while, then Calhoun said, “What do
you
think?”

“About what?”

“You think I'm a whacko?”

The sheriff let out a long breath. “Tell you the truth, Stoney, I don't know what to make of it. It's peculiar, you've got to admit that. Those other fellas covered all that ground down there behind that hillside, and they didn't find a single foot sticking up. Folks who're buried hardly ever change their minds, undig themselves, crawl out of their holes, shovel the dirt back in, cover it all over with leaves, and walk away in the middle of the night. Unless we're dealing with some kind of ghoul or something here.”

“You're a good man, Sheriff,” said Calhoun, “and I appreciate your tolerance. But this isn't a joke.”

“I know. I've got to admit it. You got me worried.”

“Me, too,” said Calhoun. “That foot . . .”

“That's not what I'm worried about,” said the sheriff. “Finding Lyle like that, lugging him out of the woods—pretty damn upsetting for a man.”

Calhoun said nothing.

“Stoney, don't get me wrong—”

“It's okay,” said Calhoun. “I don't blame you. Sometimes I wonder about it myself.”

They arrived back at the restaurant where Calhoun had left his truck. He slid out of the sheriff's vehicle, opened the back door for Ralph, then leaned in. “So now what?” he said.

“Now you go get yourself some sleep. That's what I'm going to do. I'll get ahold of you tomorrow. We'll take it from there. I'll call you.”

Calhoun stood there looking in at the sheriff. Dickman met his eyes for a minute, then turned to look out the front window. “I'm beat, Stoney. Give that door a good slam. It doesn't latch right.”

Calhoun closed the door and the Explorer pulled away. Calhoun watched its taillights disappear around the corner.

Then he whistled in Ralph, and they got into the truck and drove home.

It was almost three in the morning. Calhoun had promised Kate he'd open up, and since it was a Sunday, another busy weekend day at the shop—a day when folks tended to stop in on their way to the water to check the tides, pick up some extra leader material, buy a few flies, and ask for advice—he should have the
OPEN
sign hanging on the door by six.

Going to bed didn't make much sense.

So he and Ralph sat out on the deck, with the kitchen lights glowing from inside and Bitch Creek gurgling peacefully in the darkness down at the bottom of the hill, and he waited for the time to pass. Calhoun never needed much sleep. Some nights he hardly slept at all, and it didn't particularly affect him the next day. He figured it was just another thing that getting struck by lightning did to a man.

Anyway, on this night he feared sleep and the dreams it would likely bring. He'd seen a foot buried in the woods—except now he found himself questioning it. Maybe it
had
been another one of those mind-tricks, another phantom drifting down a trout stream.

The sheriff doubted him, doubted his sanity. Kate was generally pissed at him, and Lyle was dead, and the Man in the Suit was apparently setting about to alienate those who knew him. That left him with nobody, which put him back to where he'd started five years ago when he'd left the hospital—alone and rootless, a man with no past and no clear vision of the future, only some vague unanchored mind-flashes that seemed to connect him to the Maine woods.

When he'd seen it, Calhoun had believed it was a real foot sticking out of the ground. Ralph had been whining. He didn't whine for no reason.

But Calhoun had to confront the possibility that this was another apparition, another ghost. Or a ghost's body part, anyway. He knew he'd found the place where he'd seen it, and it was pretty clear that there was no foot.

When he'd seen that dead body floating in Bitch Creek, it meant that he was going to find Lyle's body in the water.

So what did this foot apparition—if an apparition it was—mean?

Out there on the deck, the diffuse light from the kitchen made the woods absolutely black around him. Calhoun reached down and gave Ralph a scratch on his ribs. Ralph
had
whined. He knew that.

The rain on his face awakened him. The woods were still dark, but the sky had begun to brighten. His watch read a little after four-thirty. He stood up, stretched, went inside, and took a long hot shower. Then he put the coffee together, slipped on his windbreaker, and went out onto the deck.

He checked the sky and the wind, as he did automatically every morning. Weather, wind, tide—crucial variables for the saltwater fisherman. Today a layer of gray clouds hung thick and heavy over the woods, and the damp easterly breeze riffled the leaves at the tops of the oaks. The air smelled salty and wet, and the rain was soft and misty.

He figured it was already raining hard along the coast.

Well, Calhoun knew exactly what he'd say to the fishermen who'd come stomping into the shop shaking the rain out of their hair and looking for advice. “Don't forget your foul-weather gear,” he'd tell them, and the smart ones would nod solemnly and share his joke. Then he'd explain to them how the wind would stir up the bait and drive it against the shore, and how a gray, rainy day emboldened striped bass, how even the big ones, normally nocturnal predators, might hang around inshore on a day such as this one.

It promised to be a tough day for fly casting, a miserable day to be on the water—but a good day to catch some fish.

He went back into the kitchen, filled his travel mug with coffee, whistled up Ralph, climbed into the truck, and headed for Portland.

In the five years that he'd been in Maine, Calhoun had explored the coast from Casco Bay to Boothbay, sometimes with Lyle or Kate, sometimes on his own. On a Sunday in June, even a cool, rainy Sunday, dozens of fishermen would drop into the shop looking for guidance, and Calhoun had learned how to spread them out, point them in a direction where they might find some fish without bumping into too many other fishermen.

Put them onto fish, make them believe they'd been directed to a special, secret place, and they'd come back to the shop, and next time they'd buy something. Send them off on a wild goose chase and they'd never return. That, Kate had repeatedly told him, was the essence of the fishing-shop business.

Fishermen didn't spend a lot of money on weekends. They got geared up during the week, stopping in on lunch breaks and on their way home from work to study the merchandise, maybe pull the trigger on that expensive Billy Pate reel or the latest-generation graphite fly rod. A fishing shop such as Kate's donated goodwill on weekends and made money during the week.

So Calhoun gave away free advice all morning while the east wind skidded clouds across the sky and blew a steady soft rain against the windows of the shop and Ralph snoozed on the sweater in the corner, and he was too busy to think very much about Lyle's murder or a foot buried in the woods.

Kate came in around noon, which happened to coincide with the first time the shop had been empty of customers all morning. She was wearing sandals and jeans and a pale blue T-shirt under an ancient yellow oilskin poncho.

She shucked off the poncho in the doorway, ran her fingers through her long black hair, and smiled at Calhoun.

God, she was beautiful.

“Morning, Stoney,” she said.

“That,” he said, “is the first smile you've given me in a couple days.”

She came over to him and kissed him quickly on the cheek. “I know,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

He touched the place on his cheek where he could still feel the hot imprint of her lips. “I thought about calling you last night,” he said. “Then I figured, hell, if she's still pissed with me, I'd rather not know it.”

She shook her head. “Don't start on me, Stoney.”

He shrugged. “How's Walter?”

“Suicidal, I think, though he tells me he's fine, not to worry. This morning when I left, I made sure the bottles only had enough pills in them to get him through the day. Brought the rest with me.” She let out a long breath. “I can't live this way, and neither can he.”

“You didn't need to come in,” he said. “I can take care of it.”

“I had to come in, Stoney. I've got to live my life. Hell, you know the last time I went fishing?”

“You went out with Lyle a couple weeks ago.”

She nodded. “And before that it was another couple of weeks. You and I, we've got to fish, Stoney. That's our business. We can't let ourselves turn into goddam merchants. We got a fishing shop here, not a grocery store. What about tomorrow morning?”

Monday was the slowest day in the shop. In the off-season, they didn't open at all on Mondays, and during the season they opened at noon.