Down River (28 page)

“Why would you ask that?”

“The cops doubt Dolf’s confession. They think that he might be lying to protect Dad.”

Miriam shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

“Does the name Sarah Yates mean anything to you?” I asked.

“No.”

“What about Ken Miller?”

She shook her head. “Should it?”

   I left her on the porch swing, wondering if she had a blade tucked away somewhere. Wondering if her talk of “one last breath” was just talk.

I turned the car toward town, called information and got the number and address for Candace Kane. I knew the spot, an apartment complex near the college. I dialed the number and let it ring ten times before hanging up. I’d try again later. When the road forked, I pulled onto the gravel shoulder and stopped. The cops were not going to look beyond my family to explain Danny’s death. I refused to accept that. I had two possible leads, people who shared a history of violence with Danny Faith: Candace Kane, who swore out an assault warrant, and whoever it was that beat Danny so badly four months ago. Candy was out somewhere and Jamie was not answering his phone. I had nowhere to go. Frustration put knots in my back. There had to be other avenues.

But there were not. Zebulon Faith was off the radar. Dolf would not talk to me. My father was gone.

Damn.

My mind turned to the other issue that bothered me. It was smaller, less urgent, but still, it ate at me. Why did Sarah Yates seem so familiar to me? How did she know who I was? I put the car in gear, and at the fork in the road, I went left. Davidson County was to the left.

So was Sarah Yates.

I crossed the river and forest marched beside me as I struggled to get my head around this powerful sense of knowing her. I turned off the road and onto the narrow track that led to her place on the river. When I came out of the trees, I saw Ken Miller in a lawn chair by the purple bus. He was in jeans, with bare feet stretched out in the dirt, and his head tilted back to catch the sun on his face. He stood when he heard the car, shaded his eyes, then stepped into the road to block my passage. He held out his arms as if crucified, and frowned with great commitment.

When I stopped, he bent low to peer inside, then stepped to my window. Anger put an edge on his words.

“Haven’t you people done enough for one day?” he demanded. His fingers gripped the window frame. Earth grimed his neck and gray hairs protruded from his shirt collar. Swelling closed one of his eyes. The skin shone, dark and tight.

“What people?”

“Your goddamn father. That’s what people.”

I pointed at the eye. “He did that?”

“I want you to leave.” He leaned in closer. “Now.”

“I need to speak with Sarah.” I put the car in gear.

“I have a gun inside,” he said.

I studied his face: the hard line of his chin, the vein that pulsed at the temple. He was angry and scared, a bad combination. “What’s going on, Ken?”

“Do I need to get it?”

   I stopped at the blacktop. It was empty, a long slice of hard black that curved away in a two-mile bend. I turned left for the bridge, window down, noise level ramping up. I came out of the bend doing fifty. Any faster and I would have missed it.

Sarah’s van.

It was parked at the back corner of a concrete biker bar called the Hard Water Tavern. She’d nosed it in beside a rusted Dumpster. All but hidden, it was definitely hers. Same maroon paint, same tinted windows. I slowed the car, looking for a place to turn around. It took another mile, then I whipped into a gravel drive, backed out, and gunned it. I parked next to her van and got out. Sixteen Harleys were lined up between the door and me. Chrome threw back sunlight. Studs gleamed on black leather saddlebags. The bikes angled out with military precision.

Inside, it was dark and low. Smoke hung above pool tables. Music blasted from a jukebox to my left. I went to the bar and ordered a beer from a weary woman who looked sixty, but was probably not much older than I. She stripped the cap off a longneck and put the bottle down hard enough to bring foam out of the mouth. I sat on a vinyl swivel stool and waited for my eyes to adjust. It didn’t take long. Lights hung over green felt. Hard light pushed in from the edges of the door.

I pulled on the beer, set it down on the moisture-stained bar.

It was a one-room, three-table joint with a concrete floor and drains that would serve equally well for washing down booze, vomit, or blood. Ten feet down, a fat woman in shorts slept with her head on the bar. Two of the pool tables were in play, circled by men with beards so black they looked polished. They handled the cues with calm familiarity, and looked my way between shots.

Sarah Yates sat at a small table in the back corner. Chairs had been pulled aside to accommodate her wheelchair. Two bikers shared the table with her. They had a pitcher of beer, three mugs, and about fifteen empty shot glasses. As I watched, the bartender threaded her way across the room and delivered three more shots of something brown. They clinked glasses, said something I could not hear, and knocked them back. The bikers slammed the empties down. Sarah lowered hers between two delicate fingers.

Then she looked at me.

There was no surprise in her face. She bent a finger to summon me over. The bikers made room for me to pass, but not much. Hard cues brushed my shoulders, smoke exploded in my face. One man had a teardrop tattoo on the edge of his left eye. I stopped at Sarah’s table, and the pool games resumed. Her companions were older than most of the other bikers. Prison tats on thick arms had faded to powder gray. White streaked their beards, and lines carved their faces. They wore thick rings and heavy boots, but appeared neutral. They would take their cue from Sarah. She studied me for half a minute. When she spoke, her voice carried.

“Do you doubt that any of these boys would split your head if I asked him to?” She gestured around the room.

“Because you’re their dealer?” I asked.

She frowned, so did the bikers next to her. “Because I’m their friend,” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t doubt it.”

“I ask because I don’t want a repeat of the same kind of crap your old man pulled. I won’t tolerate it.”

“What did he pull?” I asked.

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Partly.”

She looked at the two bikers. “It’s all right,” she said. They got up, huge men smelling of smoke and booze and sunbaked leather. One of them pointed at the bar and Sarah Yates nodded. “Sit down,” she said to me. “Want another beer?”

“Sure,” I said.

She caught the bartender’s eye, lifted the pitcher, and pointed at me. The bartender brought a clean glass and Sarah poured. “I don’t normally drink in the afternoon,” she said. “But your father put a kink in my day.”

I looked around. “Is this your regular place?”

She laughed. “Once, maybe.” She gestured with a finger, swept it across the room. “When your life revolves around ten square miles for as long as mine has, you get to know pretty much everybody.”

I studied the big men with whom she’d been drinking. They sat with their backs to the bar, feet on the floor like they could still cross the room in seconds. Unlike the others, they watched us closely. “They seem to care about you,” I said.

She sipped her beer. “We share a similar mind-set. And we go way back.”

“Can we talk?”

“Only if you take back the dealer comment. I don’t deal.”

“Then I take it back.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

In spite of the empty glasses, she did not appear to be drunk. Her face was soft and unlined, but a hardness underlay all of that, a metallic glint that sharpened the edge of her smile. She knew something about hard living and tough choices. I saw it in her measuring gaze and in the way she kept a thin line of contact with the boys at the bar. They watched and they waited.

“Two things,” I said. “How do you know me and what did my father want?”

She leaned back and adjusted herself in the chair. Fingers found an empty shot glass and spun it slowly on the table. “Your father,” she said. The glass twisted in her long fingers. “A stubborn, self-righteous, son of a bitch. A hard man to like, but an easy man to appreciate.” She showed small teeth. “Even when he behaves like the world’s biggest asshole.

“He didn’t want me talking to you. That’s why he came out to see me this morning. He rolled up like the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Angry, cold. Started barking at me like he had the right. I don’t accept that kind of behavior. Our conversation got a little heated. Ken, poor bastard, tried to intervene when he should have known better. First, because I didn’t need it. Second, because your father won’t tolerate another man laying hands on him.”

“He hit Ken?”

“Might have killed him on a different day.”

“Why was he so angry?”

“Because I’d been talking to you.”

“You talk to Grace all the time.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the issue, boy.”

I leaned back, frustrated. “How do you know me? Why does he care if we talk?”

“I made him a promise once.”

“I found a picture of you in my father’s desk. It was taken a long time ago. You were with Dolf and my parents.”

She smiled wanly. “I remember.”

“Tell me what’s going on, Sarah.”

She sighed and looked at the ceiling. “It’s about your mother,” she said. “It’s all about your mother.”

A pain detonated somewhere in my gut. “What about her?”

Sarah’s eyes were very bright in the gloom. Her hand fell away from the shot glass and flattened on the table. “She really was a beautiful woman,” Sarah said. “We were very different, so I couldn’t admire everything about her, but what she had, she had in spades. Like you, for instance. I’ve never seen a woman be a better mother or love a child more than she did you. In that way, she was born to be a mother. In other ways, not so much.”

“What do you mean?”

Sarah knocked back the rest of her beer and spoke over me. “She couldn’t get pregnant,” she said. “After you, she had seven miscarriages. The doctors couldn’t help. She came to me and I treated her.”

“Did I see you? You look very familiar.”

“Once, maybe. I usually came at night, when you were asleep. I remember you, though. You were a good kid.”

She raised her hand to the bartender, who delivered two shots as if she’d been waiting with them in hand. Sarah raised hers and inclined her head toward the other. I lifted it, tapped her glass, and swallowed liquor that burned all the way down. Sarah’s eyes had gone distant.

“But my mother…?”

“She wanted a baby so badly. She ached for it. But the miscarriages were wearing her down, physically and emotionally. By the time I got to her, she was already depressed. When she conceived, though, the spark came back.”

Sarah stopped speaking and studied me. I had no idea what she saw. “You sure you want to hear this?”

“Just tell me.”

“This one went to the second trimester before she lost it. But she did lose it, and lost a lot of blood in the process. She never got over it, never got her strength back. Depression ate her down to nothing. You know the rest.”

“And my father didn’t want me to know this?”

“Some business is between a man and his wife and nobody else. He came out today because he didn’t want me telling you. He wanted to make sure I remembered my promise.”

“Yet, you did tell me.”

Heat flashed in her eyes. “Fuck him for not trusting me.”

I thought about what she’d said. “It still doesn’t make sense. Why would he care that much?”

“I’ve told you all I’m going to tell.”

My hand came down on the table, hard. I didn’t even know I’d moved it. Her eyes grew still, and I saw that her friends were on their feet. “Careful,” she said softly.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I repeated.

She leaned closer, laid her hands upon my own, and lowered her voice. “Her complications stemmed from a difficult delivery,” she said. “Problems when you were born. Do you see it now?”

Some invisible hand twisted a wrench in my heart. “She killed herself because of me?”

She hesitated and squeezed with her fingers. “That’s exactly what your father did not want you thinking.”

“That’s why he wanted me to stay away from you.”

She leaned away from me, brushed her hands along the table’s edge. Whatever sympathy I’d seen in her disappeared. “We’re done now.”

“Sarah…”

She lifted a finger and her biker friends crossed the room and stood behind me. I felt them there, a wall. Sarah’s face was unforgiving.

“You should leave now.”

   The day exploded on me as I walked outside. Sunlight drilled into the back of my skull and the booze churned in my empty stomach. I replayed her words and the look on her face. The cold, hard pity.

I made it to the car before I heard footsteps.

I spun, hands up. It was that kind of place. One of the bikers from Sarah’s table stood five feet away. He was six two, in leather chaps and wraparound shades. The white in his beard looked more like yellow in the sun. Nicotine streaks at the corners of his mouth. I put his age at sixty. A hard, brutal sixty. The handgun wedged in his pants was chrome-plated.

He stretched out a hand, a folded scrap of paper between two fingers. “She wants you to give this to the guy in jail.”

“Dolf Shepherd?”

“Whatever.”

I took the paper, a folded napkin. Handwriting stretched loosely over three lines, blue ink that leeched into soft paper.
Good people love you and good people will remember what you stand for. I’ll make sure.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

He leaned forward. “None of your fucking business.”

I looked past him to the door. He saw me thinking and dropped a hand to the pistol in his belt. Muscles twisted under his leather skin.

“That’s not necessary,” I said.

Yellow whiskers moved at the corners of his mouth. “You upset Sarah. Don’t bother her again.”

I stared him down, and his hand stayed on the gun.