Bloodline (42 page)

There was one coffee cup in the sink, rinsed but not washed. Another clean in the rack. Three cigarettes in the ashtray on the dinette table. I opened the refrigerator: a quart of milk, starting to sour. An aluminum tray of leftover TV-dinner lasagna, brown and crusty. Three big tomatoes, one sliced in half. I opened the freezer door. More TV dinners, four ice-cube trays, and one bottle of very cold vodka.

Half full or half empty.

I looked around one more time and then left the way I'd come in.

It was like Joyce had left for an appointment and had never come back. Had she met a cute guy in the waiting room at the dentist's? Met a cute dentist? Run into an old flame at the general store? Traded her car for a one-way ticket to someplace warm?

Her car.

It seemed as though the cops could put out a call for her car. If she was shacked up with some guy in the area, at least her daughter could rest easier. Mom's safe and sound and isn't sleeping alone. Not to worry.

I started the truck and pulled ahead in the gravel drive to start to back up to turn around. When I did, I noticed that there were tracks that kept going where the driveway ended, petering out at the edge of the woods. Between the gravel and the trees, there was a fringe of tall grass and leafy scrub, and it appeared that someone had driven through the grass and into the woods. I eased the Toyota into four-wheel-drive, got out, and turned the dials to lock the front hubs, and followed the tracks.

They led through a break in the trees onto the remains of an old woods road. At some point, somebody had logged these woods and left narrow paths like this, now overgrown. Soon they would be part of the woods again, but this one was still passable, though without four-wheel-drive, you'd have a hard time getting through in the spring mud, never mind the winter snow. But autumn was dry and the ground was hard and the path was easy going. Branches slashed the cab on both sides, springing away as I passed.

I drove along in first gear for fifty yards and passed a little sinkhole pond fringed with withered cattails. The road forked at a big flaming-orange maple and I went left, following the faint indentation in the grass that the car or truck had left. It was getting darker, especially in the woods, and I turned on my headlights to better see the trail. I hoped I wasn't tracking some kids out drinking, or a bunch of hunters, or even Joyce Hewett, off to commune with nature and some hot-to-trot trucker.

“Sorry, Mrs. Hewett. Just passing through. No need to get dressed.”

The truck eased along but the path started to narrow. I had begun to think that I'd be backing up to get out when the headlights reflected from something red. First one. Then two.

Taillights.

I flicked on my high beams and the two red lights glowed. Nudging the gas, I drove ahead until I was fifty feet behind them. And I could see Joyce Hewett's maroon Chevy.

It was pulled nose first into the brush where the road came to an end. The bushes were up around the doors and only the rear end of the car poked out. A white hose was attached to the exhaust pipe and snaked around to the rear window on the right side. I left my motor running and my lights on and got out.

I knew it was her before I'd walked ten feet. Her blonde hair showed plainly in my lights, her head leaning against the window of the driver's door like someone sleeping behind the wheel in a roadside rest area. Except Joyce Hewett wasn't sleeping.

The hose was from a vacuum cleaner. It was wrapped with duct tape at the exhaust pipe and the window had been rolled up to keep the other end of the hose in the car. In front of Joyce Hewett, red dashboard lights glowed weakly, but the motor wasn't running.

I squeezed between the car and the brush and started to open the door, then stopped. Joyce Hewett's face was turned to the glass and her eyes were open and still, like a statue's. Her skin was a pale white and her lips and tongue were blue. Her blonde hair looked unreal, like yellow yarn glued to the head of a doll, the kind with the eyes that swing shut if the doll is laid down, stay open when it's held up.

Swallowing, I took a breath and tried the door.

It was jammed with grass at the bottom and opened stiffly. When it did, the dome light went on dimly and whiskey smell billowed out,
rancid and hard. Joyce Hewett started to fall toward me and I grabbed her shoulder and pushed her back upright. Her eyes stayed open, fixed on nothing, as if she were lost in thought. She was wearing jeans and a black sweater with red flowers knitted in it and sneakers. The sneakers were white. Her ankles were bare.

I touched her behind the jawbone to find a pulse but her skin was cool and lifeless. Beside her on the seat was a bottle of Schenley whiskey, a fifth. It was empty, and the metal cap to the bottle was also on the seat, near the passenger door. The car reeked of booze, as if she had opened the bottle and sprayed it, like champagne in a winning locker room. A locker room with a hose attached.

I looked around the car. The nozzle of the hose was pointed at Joyce Hewett's head from behind, like a gun. There was nothing on the backseat, nothing other than the whiskey bottle in the front.

Whiskey.

Why would Joyce Hewett choose “brown liquor” to die with? Why not her precious chilled vodka? Why would she choose what she had called a man's drink for her last cocktail?

Unless she hadn't done the choosing.

She stared at me, no help. I looked her over quickly for marks, but none showed. Her hands weren't tied and the keys were still in the ignition. I looked at the dashboard and noticed the gas gauge was below empty. Looking up toward the top of the dash, I saw something that looked like words. I leaned in over Joyce Hewett's lap and looked again.

she

It was written in the dust on the top of the dashboard. The letters were scrawled sloppily, probably by a finger. I picked up Joyce Hewett's right hand and turned the palm toward me and held it up toward the light.

The tip of the index finger was a dirty dark gray. I put her hand down and took a swipe at the dash, away from the writing.

Our fingers matched.

I felt a chill and suddenly was aware of the darkening woods all around me. My truck still was idling, and I fought back the urge to run to it and get the hell out. Instead, I eased myself up and out of the car and let the door fall shut. I walked to the truck, backed it up, and drove back down the path, very fast.

she

Who was
she
, and what did she do? Did she kill Joyce Hewett? Did she kill Missy? Did she kill both of them? Was she the one who wanted to kill me?

she

I passed Joyce Hewett's trailer and rattled down the road to the paved highway. At the highway, I squealed the truck around the corner to the right and drove on fast until I saw a house. It was another trailer and there was a pickup outside. I skidded to a stop in their dooryard and a dog started barking somewhere out back. Leaving the truck running, I ran to the front door and banged.

Nobody answered, so I yanked the door open and went in. The place smelled of cat urine and cigarettes, but there was a light on over the kitchen sink and a phone on the wall. I dialed and a man answered, “Emergency 911.”

I told him there was a woman dead in a car. I told him where it was. He asked me my name and I told him, and he asked what number I was calling from, and I looked at the phone but couldn't read it, and had to say I didn't know.

“You said the woman is deceased?” the dispatcher asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“It's Joyce Hewett, and she's in her car in the woods behind her trailer on the Leonard Road, about a mile in from 220, on the right. And there's a hose from the exhaust to the window. She's dead and she's got whiskey all over her. And she wrote on the dashboard before she died. She wrote
she
, so I don't think she killed herself. And she didn't drink brown liquor.”

He asked me my name again and where I was calling from. I told him my name, and said I was calling from a trailer on Route 220 near the Leonard Road. He told me to drive back to the scene and stay in my truck on the highway with my flashers on and wait for the trooper. I said I would, but when I got back out to the truck, something told me to go the other way, instead.

she

I drove home as fast as the truck would go, skidding around the corner onto the dump road. My house was dark, so I kept going to Clair's, and drove onto the grass by the back door. Mary's surprised face appeared in the doorway.

“Jack, what's the matter?”

“Is Roxanne still here?”

“No, she went home a little while ago. To make some supper.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Jack, you okay? You wait, I'll get Clair.”

I wheeled back down the road and pulled up hard beside my burnt truck. The house was still dark, so I left the headlights on but turned off the motor.

It was quiet. I pushed the back door open slowly and listened. Nothing. I took three steps inside and listened again. Still nothing.
I reached behind me for the light switch and flicked it. The lights came on. I froze.

There was a piece of typing paper in the center of the dining-room table. I walked toward it, read it without picking it up. It was Roxanne's handwriting:

                   
Jack. Went out back for a little walk. Join me.

                   
Love, Roxanne

A little walk? In the woods, in the dark?

I went to the closet and took out the rifle. Opened the chamber and jacked in a shell. Put the safety on and went back out.

I went out the side door, the way I'd come in, instead of using the big glass door to the backyard. It was very quiet and growing darker, and there were stars but no moon as yet. I walked around the shed, staying in the shadows close to the building until I got to the backyard. I looked out at the edge of the woods and it looked black. With the rifle in front of me, barrel pointed slightly down, I crossed the high grass and started down the path.

How far would Roxanne go? Not far, if she were alone. If she were alone, she wouldn't go at all.

Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the woods. The path was grassy at first, skirting its way between the poplars and small maples. Then it turned hard, littered with fallen leaves that crackled with each step. I moved to the edge of the path and listened.

I heard a bird flutter, settling onto its roost for the night. I heard the distant whine of a truck, out on the highway. I heard a rustle nearby but a light one, like a mouse or a vole moving through the leaves. I waited a minute more and continued on.

It was hard not to make a racket, moving out here at night. I tried picking my feet straight up but that didn't help, so I moved to the edge of the path where the leaves were more damp and didn't crackle when I walked. If I kept my feet low and slid them along the ground, I sounded like one elephant walking through the woods, not a herd.

After fifty feet, I stopped and listened. Fifty feet after that I was in the bigger trees, beeches and maples, and somewhere above me I heard what I at first thought was an owl, but then realized was a mourning dove.

I walked on.

How far would she go? How far would she—or they—think I would follow? I had decided to turn back when I heard it.

“Shhhh.”

It came from behind me. A human sound. No mistaking it. Someone telling someone else to be quiet.

I froze. Slipped the safety off on the rifle. Should I move toward it? Could they see me better than I could see them?

Dropping to a crouch, I peered into the trees. I could make out the trunks, the branches, but little else. There was no movement. No sound. Then the dove again. I waited longer, holding my breath as I listened.

“Shhhh.”

It was louder this time. Unmistakable. I waited a full minute, then eased my way back down the path, bent low, pausing between each step. I had a sudden urge to call out “Roxanne,” but didn't. Instead, I continued toward the point where I'd heard the sound. One step. Another step. Still another.

“Bones,” the voice whispered. “Don't shoot.”

“Clair?” I said softly.

“Jack. To your right.”

He moved onto the path like an apparition. His clothes were blurred in the dark. I saw a glint from his hair. Another from the gun at his side.

“It's Roxanne,” I said. “She wouldn't have left. Not out here.”

“I saw the note,” Clair said.

“Something's wrong. I don't even know if she came this way.”

“Yeah, she did. Her and somebody else.”

“You saw them?”

“Their tracks,” Clair said.

I looked at the blackness at my feet.

“I'll take the point,” he said, and moved past me, shotgun resting under his arm.

We walked slowly, Clair in front, me five feet behind him. Every twenty steps or so, we stopped and listened. I heard rustles on the ground. Creaks from the branches above us. My own breathing. I couldn't hear Clair's.

I thought maybe we should call to her. She could yell something. We'd know where she was. She'd know we were coming. I was going to say this to Clair but he just kept walking. And listening for a sound from the black woods that wasn't the wind or the trees or the birds.

A woman screamed.

Clair broke into a silent trot, shotgun in both hands. I was right behind him. He pulled up and held his hand out behind him to slow me, too. This time it was a cry, a wail, a sob.

It wasn't Roxanne.

We almost ran into them. They were standing on the edge of the path, where it passed under a big pine. Roxanne's face was white in the darkness. Janice Genest's face was white, too. She was crying, and her cheeks were wet with tears.

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