HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Milliner saw him coming down the road. The detective slouched down in the driver’s seat. The kid didn’t seem to notice him. In fact, as he approached the Blazer, he didn’t so much as glance in Milliner’s direction.

Milliner saw him clearly enough — a gibbous moon shone down over the conifers and birches, lighting the dirt road. Milliner could even see the faint shadow the young man cast as he approached.

The young man’s head was down as though he was studying the road. Was he drunk? Trying to keep his footing? Lost along the one-track mind that often comes with a good booze on? Milliner didn’t think so.

He passed, less than ten feet from the Chevy. The boy exhibited none of the gait of a drunk, so familiar to the old investigator. He was more reminiscent of the lost boys of the eighties — dressed in dark colors and listening to the likes of Motley Crew and Skid Row. He imagined tattoos and perhaps even eye shadow.

Milliner knew the kids in Red Rock and this wasn’t one of them. They populated the crumbling apartment buildings along the small downtown strip. They were brooding, morose, slicing themselves with box cutters or burning their arms with cigarettes; sometimes taking their own lives.

It was safe to conclude that the young man was from further south, from the city or down near it — Westchester, maybe — and there might be a drug connection. So Milliner had taken an interest in him. He had nothing better to do.

The youth wore the right uniform — three-quarter coat, black jeans, and work boots — still, he appeared more like a young guy who’d just been dumped by his girlfriend than one high on a substance. Or he was deep in thought about some mystery of the universe, like young men often were.

He watched the kid until he rounded the bend and went out of sight. Milliner sat and waited for a few seconds, giving the young man time to turn onto the other road. He started up the Chevy and with a bit of coaxing it coughed to life.

He glanced up at the night sky as he turned the vehicle around to head after the boy. The wind picked up, blowing in the open window. The tops of the evergreens were swaying back and forth. He idled for a moment, looking out, watching the trees, remembering the unnamed animal he thought he’d seen hopping from one sagging bough to another.

Dark clouds were rolling in swiftly, filling up the sky with black billows, like ink in a jar of water. It was going to rain. It hadn’t been forecast, but that was no surprise. Rain had been coming and going unpredictably for over a month. The motto in the mountains was, “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”

Milliner let off the brake and the Blazer started forward.

* * *

Liz sat chewing her nails. She stared at the puddle of water — well, the small lake, really — on the kitchen floor.

What in the hell had just happened? How was she going to clean up the kitchen floor?

She thought about calling Serafina, but she called her sister too often as it was. She called her when she was bored, when she was lonely; mostly she called to talk to Finna about Jared.

Jared wasn’t likely to be upset if he came home and found the puddle. He’d probably take it in his stride, because he’d be drunk, or at least heavily buzzed. When Jared was like that, which was nearly every night, he was affable. He would laugh off just about anything. It was in the throes of the morning hangovers that he was easily angered. He would attempt to deal with the hung-over angry state by getting into a project: building or splitting wood or cleaning. A lot of cleaning got done during those mornings after. He became a machine. There was a stockpile of heavy-duty sanitation products in a chest out on the front porch. So, although he probably would slough it off that night when he got home, if the untidiness were still there by morning there would be ugliness. Plenty of ugliness. Jared would scour and clean to deal with his hangover, but he would still be angry that there was a mess.

So, she wouldn’t call Finna. Not this time. She would get to mopping the water up, but with what? There was a push-broom on the front porch. She could maybe at least sluice the brunt of it out of the kitchen and across the porch, and finish with towels.

Suddenly Liz had the urge to bend down and taste the shining liquid. Not just to poke a finger in and put it to her mouth, but to start lapping it up like a cat. She saw herself doing it, plain as day, could even see, as she stood there, chewing her nails, the reflection of her own self bent down on all fours, her face at the edge of the huge puddle, drinking it up.

“Oh God,” she said.

It
was
just a liquid, wasn’t it? How did she even know it was water? Had she ever seen someone standing in front of her, leaking like a human raincloud? She’d heard of spontaneous human combustion, everyone had heard of that, but spontaneous . . . what? Leakage? Seepage? She’d never heard of that. No.

She dropped her nail-bitten hand from her mouth and moved to the edge of the liquid. She realized she was reluctant even to walk through the stuff, to get any of it on her. A second ago she had been thinking of drinking it, but now she was inclined to wear a Hazmat suit.

She would need rubber boots, at least. There was a pair on the front porch, near where the broom was; near the axe, the chainsaw, and the chest full of Jared’s industrial-strength cleaning products.

Liz wondered if she might be having some kind of episode, some sort of mental breakdown, but the evidence was right there in front of her, all over the floor, a tremendous plash that had just emanated from the body of a human being, from a man named Christopher. The puddle was inarguable.

She considered going after him. It was a sudden, strong compulsion, but one she forced herself not to heed. It wasn’t right. Not now. Besides he’d probably come back. He’d shown up out of nowhere after all this time; it felt like the beginning of something.

She gathered what she needed from the porch. As she turned to go back into the kitchen she saw the taillights of a car moving away, blinking through the trees, down the dirt road toward the highway. She heard the gurgle of an engine, and it didn’t sound like Jared’s truck.

Was that Christopher? As far as she knew, he didn’t drive, didn’t own a vehicle. But who else could it be?

She paused. She felt out-of-body again, and realized that it was the wine she’d drunk, starting to pull at her, coaxing her to bed.

Just after I clean this up
, she thought, and started to sing, and the singing pushed all unsavory thoughts away.

* * *

Jared peered out from the windshield of the Jeep, looking up at the sky where the bluish-black clouds were coalescing.

“Bring it on,” he said, and laughed. When he returned his attention to the road he saw that he was swerving left, over the yellow, and jerked the steering wheel to get back into his lane.

* * *

Upstairs in the bedroom, Elizabeth tossed and turned, images moving in and out of her restless mind. In her blunted consciousness she experienced a torrential rainstorm. She saw the pond with the rain pummeling its surface with such force that the drops splashed two feet into the air. The loon was there, still bereft of its mate, if it had ever had one, and its oily feathers were ruffled and clumped from being battered by the driving, windblown rain. In her sleep-skewed view, the pond seemed lower, not higher, than recent memory served.

Liz tried to get comfortable, on her back, on her side, on her stomach, tangling the covers around her. It was Jared’s parents’ bed, which she and Jared slept in while at their house,
Harrier Trace
.

When she first heard the name Liz had no idea what it referred to. She’d tried working it out. A Harrier is a bird, she’d thought. A type of eagle, or something. And a trace is its path, like in the sky, or some sign of passing. The Eagle’s Path Across the Sky? She’d told him it sounded pretentious, and he’d snorted, laughing a little, as if to convey the absurdity of a suburban girl saying something was pretentious. In Jared’s estimation everything about suburbia was pretentious. Superficial, anyway. And he was right. In a way.

Sometimes Jared was right, she had to admit, and in that moment something clicked in Elizabeth Goldfine’s mind. She thought that if it weren’t for Jared’s smug, sometimes pompous, demeanor she might have left him already. His arrogance, one of the things that had attracted her in the first place, was enough for her to feel a distance from him. That was what worked — what was working — and she knew it.

She found herself dreamily drifting, gliding over the pond and through the frosted scrim of the downpouring rain as if she were the harrier. She passed the beavers’ dam where the pond’s outlet surged against it, then banking to the right where the spruce and balsam firs stippled the edge of the pond. She turned in a large arc and flew back the other way towards the center, towards the embattled loon, to where something else awaited her.

A small figure seemed to be caught in the middle of the pond. As she flew closer she saw that it was a child, three or four years old, standing on the water, beneath the shower of rain. She flew closer, until she was so near to the child-figure that she could discern a little boy’s face. She could see his eyes. They were closed, glued together by some greenish pus-like adhesive. Abruptly she — the harrier — shot up and away from the pond, terrified.

Liz woke up, startled, in the big bed. Her breath caught in her throat and for a few panicked seconds she was sure that she wasn’t going to be able to draw breath ever again.

She finally did, inhaling in a labored, trembling rush, her hands clutching the bed sheets. She jumped as she heard a car door slam. Jared was home.

CHAPTER THREE

She heard him rattling — perhaps staggering — his way into the house below. Was there someone with him? He was talking, though maybe only to himself; she could hear the muffled rise and fall of his voice, and then she heard him laugh. Would he notice anything about the kitchen? About the towels in the dryer — had she left them there? She realized she had. She’d come upstairs to lie down, thinking she wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. She had planned to wait there for the dryer to finish, and then go and retrieve and fold and replace the five towels she’d used. She’d soaked them and rung them out off the back porch twice — would he notice the muddy spot she’d made in the dirt driveway, by the far corner of the porch? Likely not. Not at night, not in his jocular, inebriated state.

More muffled talking and then another bout of laughter, followed by a coughing fit. Lying back down on the bed, Elizabeth waited for him to climb the stairs to her.

She lay there for a while longer, listening for his voice, her dream painted upon her; the silhouette of it lingering, the impression like Rorschach blots. What was it? The rain. The loon. The — what? What else had been there? Something, right at the end of it — she couldn’t remember. She could only really recall a sense of flying, swooping low over the pond, past the cluster of the beaver dam, alongside the evergreens.

Things grew quiet downstairs, but Liz couldn’t shake the idea that someone was with him. Who would it be? Boothe? Petey? Those were the only two friends Jared spoke of, and he wasn’t keen on having them over — or anyone over — as it was. “It would be disrespectful to my parents,” he’d once said, when Liz had raised the idea of having a small get-together.

Jared had big plans for Harrier Trace (God, how she loathed the name) and was already acting like it was his, and hatching plans for additions and renovations. He was a hypocrite; he used his parents’ supposed no-guests mandate as an excuse to keep people at bay, while he assumed control of the grounds.

The sound of the wind was comforting. Liz wasn’t fond of deep silence like Jared was. She heard what sounded like a tool dropping — a wrench, maybe, by the steel clatter of it — followed by what she thought was Jared cursing about it under his breath. The screen door opened and shut loudly, carelessly. There was the unmistakable crunch of his boots on the driveway.

She heard a car door open — it sounded like the back hatch of the Jeep; there may have been something else, maybe more talking, but it was buried in the wind.

She gathered the covers around her, smoothing them out, drawing them taut, and pulling them up to her chin. She shivered, even though she should be warm enough, and suddenly had the intense, uncomfortable sensation of wishing she was somewhere else.

* * *

Milliner had passed the Kingston boy — that was how he still thought of Jared, having known him since he was a small child. His speed, his unsteady path, and his undimmed lights were sure signs he was inebriated — at least to some extent. Through years of practice Jared had become better able to handle it than most, but the signs were still there.

During the day, Jared might have slowed to wave or even stopped, recognizing Milliner’s vehicle. Milliner had known Jared’s parents, Marshall and Winnie Kingston, for many years. As summer people they were snubbed by some of the locals, but Milliner had found them genuine and pleasant. Why penalize someone like Marshall Kingston who had carved out a decent life for himself, was a hard worker, and could afford to buy a nice summer retreat in the mountains? Those who cold-shouldered folks like them, more often than not, were simply jealous.
We often despise that which we cannot obtain
. That had been one of Stephanie’s adages when she and Tom had still been together.

He thought of turning after the Kingston boy; he could certainly arrest him for drunk driving, but Jared had already made it nearly all the way home, blessed by the aid of angels, perhaps, Milliner thought, and he would likely catch his hell soon enough.

That such a thought might be irresponsible was not lost on Milliner. He knew that drunk driving was a dangerous thing — he knew it, perhaps, more than most — but he was also a very instinctual man, a man who went with his gut more often than not, and right now his gut was telling him that hassling Jared Kingston would be a distraction, a deviation from what he needed to be focusing on, and that was the strange young man who had arrived in town two days before.

Milliner saw him there ahead, walking along the side of the dirt road, with his black coat flapping in the wind, head down, and his arms hanging at his sides.

He set the emergency light on the dash and flipped it on. He pulled close beside the lad. The dash light swept the road and trees in red waves.

* * *

“There’s going to be a storm,” Milliner called out the passenger window. “You got some place to go?”

The young man didn’t respond.

“This is a private road,” Milliner said.

He was driving slowly alongside of the kid. He guessed at his age, putting him in his mid-to-late twenties. He was six feet, one-sixty pounds — a little thin, perhaps, for his height. In many ways the kid was unremarkable. He had glazy, cropped hair and no jewelry or tattoos that the investigator could see. The long, dark denim coat didn’t set him apart either, not in Red Rock Falls, where so many of the kids wore outfits like this, as if they were vampires, held séances, drank absinthe.

Milliner was a sixties kid, but had never been a flower child or lived the hippie lifestyle. His hair had never grown much over his ears before it was sheared neat and trim by the barber he had shared with his old man. Tom Milliner had been destined for the life of a straight arrow from the beginning, coming from the conservative background of his father and his father before him. That hadn’t stopped young Tom from dabbling in drugs — doing so, he’d told himself more than once, so that he might better know what he was dealing with, that he might sup with his enemy and not betray himself. He had smoked the reefer and sherm, even dropped acid a few times (and lied through his teeth on his state and city applications, thank you and yes sir). While he had moved on from that, many of the local Goth kids seemed to be stuck in one perennial, inescapable trip.

This kid didn’t look like that — no, not exactly. But it was hard to tell. The gathering clouds had sheathed the light of the moon, and Milliner could only make out a little of the young man’s face, just the edging of his profile illuminated by the wash of Milliner’s high beams. He wanted a closer look.

“Will you stop, please?”

He had to raise his voice over the wind.

The young man kept walking. His gait didn’t falter. He walked with an ease that made Milliner uncomfortable. He walked as though there was no hurry but with determined strides that perhaps reflected some purpose, as though fully involved in some train of thought.

A fresh gale suddenly swirled in, rattling the Blazer, rocking it on its shocks. Milliner grabbed the wheel with both hands. He glanced over at the kid. The young man’s hair was tousled and the lapel of his jacket flapped against his chest, but he appeared emotionally unaffected by the worsening weather.

“I’m asking you to stop,” said Milliner.

Again, the young man was unresponsive. Milliner stopped the car and shifted into park. He got out and circled around in front of the Blazer, immediately catching up with the kid. He put his hand on the young man’s shoulder, grabbing a little of the jean jacket in the process.

“Hey,” Milliner said, “I’m talking to you.”

To Milliner’s surprise, the kid stopped immediately. Maybe it was the physical contact, Milliner thought, which seemed to break the spell the kid was under.

Now they were both standing there. The wind soughing through the trees periodically changed to a whistling noise; here and there a sound like a waterfall was heard among the
shushing
of hundreds of thousands of needles rubbing together as the air swirled around them.

Milliner reached into the inner pocket of his red-checked flannel hunter’s jacket and pulled out his badge. It hovered there in front of the kid’s face, gleaming in the Chevy’s high beams, flashing red in the twirling dash light. The young man looked past it, straight ahead into the night.

“I’m Investigator Milliner.”

He slipped his badge back into his pocket.

Milliner found the kid strange, mysterious, vaguely irritating, but not really a threat. He detected no indication of alcohol — not a scent, not a body-language giveaway, not a burst capillary in the eye. The kid seemed sober as a judge. Yet Milliner’s hand had found its way to the holster just the same.

He found himself stepping back, unsnapping the thong that secured his firearm as though preparing to draw. He was suddenly, and all quite unexplainably, scared, but he kept calm. He needed a reason to be scared but couldn’t find one. That, too, was unnerving.

“Who are you? What are you doing out here?”

Tom heard the unexpected quaver in his own voice. He lowered his tone back into its deeper, more masculine, normal range.

“I’m sick of playing games with you, kid, now talk.”

“What do you want to know?”

Milliner was surprised to hear the kid speak — the voice was soft, even pleasant — but he set that observation aside and pushed on.

“What I first asked you. Who you are and what you’re doing here.”

“That wasn’t what you first asked me,” said the young man, his eyes on the trees, as if scanning the woods. “You asked me if I had some place to go. The answer is, I don’t know.”

Now the kid dropped his gaze to the ground.

“You don’t know?”

“Why are you pointing a gun at me?”

“How about you tell me your name?”

The young man sighed.

“My name is Christopher. I was just seeing a friend back down the road.”

“Who?
Look
at me.”

The kid at last raised his head. His eyes were soft. His demeanor remained calm and unflustered.

“Elizabeth.”

“At the Kingston house?”

“Yes,” he said. “You were there. You saw me.”

“I was,” said Milliner. “You on anything?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t be an asshole. Are you on anything? Scripts? Anything?”

“No, Sir. No drugs.”

“And you were just there to visit Elizabeth — what, your ex-girlfriend?”

Christopher shrugged.

“Does her boyfriend Jared — did he know you were there?”

In his mind Milliner replayed the Jeep passing him, going a bit too fast, high beams on, the dark shape of Jared Kingston tucked behind the wheel. He could’ve been on a mission. Some sort of love triangle at work.

“No,” said Christopher. “He didn’t know I was there.”

“I see.”

Milliner lowered his gun and holstered it, watching the kid for a long moment, considering his options.

“Alright,” he said at last. “I think I should drive you to where you need to go.”

“Why?”

“Look,” Milliner said, the gruffness rising in his voice again, “I could arrest you for trespassing right now.”

“Wouldn’t the Kingstons have to press charges for that?”

Milliner took two steps forward and once more grabbed the kid by the shoulder of his jacket.

“They’re friends of mine. All I’ve got to do is give them a quick call. Get in.”

There was another shrug, but the boy complied.

Christopher sat, appearing resigned to his fate, as the passenger door shut and the dome light winked off. He dropped his head as if studying his hands, maybe, or the space between his feet.

Milliner rounded the front of the vehicle as the first drops of rain, cold as ice, began to chatter against the Blazer, chill his balding head, and sending a shiver through him before he reached the driver’s side door.

* * *

They had come to the end of the dirt road, and Tom signaled right onto Route 15, in the direction of Red Rock Falls.

“You look cold,” said Christopher.

Tom said nothing.

“Maybe you should take a drink,” said the kid. “That would warm you up.”

Tom glanced over then, expecting, at last, to see the kid looking at him, perhaps with a shit-eating, smartass grin on his face, but Christopher was still looking down. Tom was struck by the resemblance he bore to a young Jim Cruickshand, Tom’s best friend during high school. Christopher’s expression was somber — he certainly wasn’t smiling — and he had slumped a bit in his seat.

“I’m sorry,” said Christopher. “Sometimes I can still be wicked. I’m trying to stop that. It’s not a perfect state, you know.”

“What state is that?” Tom asked, confused, his tone mellowed somewhat from before.

He hadn’t intended on engaging the boy, although playing shrink to the people he investigated was often part of the job; sometimes a little psychobabble went a long way. He wanted to hold onto his irritability with the kid — it stemmed from the
take a drink
comment. Even though he hadn’t touched a drink in over two years, with recovery you were in for life and didn’t need any more temptation than life itself offered every moment of every day.