HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (24 page)

“Whore.” The trooper looked into the mirror. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Jared.

His heart was still hammering and he was still cold — gooseflesh all over his arms now — but he felt a little better. Not much, but a little. Without a doubt, the cop was a few strokes short of a cylinder, and that was somewhat alarming, but he felt that as long as he kept the big ox on his side, things would go well enough. He decided to try one more time to find out where they were headed.

“I’m sorry to ask, sir: so are we going to another jail?”

The cop seemed to have forgotten his earlier harsh admonishment. He sucked in a drag of the cigarette and said with a held breath, like he was holding in a hit of pot, “No, no.” He let the breath out and said, “We’re going to a hospital. That’s where he’ll be, your partner.”

In the rear-view mirror, Jared could see the dashboard lights reflected in the cop’s eyes. “Because,” the cop said, “your girlfriend is there.”

“Liz? Really? Is she okay?” Jared was less concerned about her safety than having her blow his story.

“Piss if
I
know.”

And at that moment Jared heard the first siren behind them.

“Okay,” said the trooper, “here come the sons of bitches.”

The Caprice lurched forward as he stomped on the gas pedal.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Have to move fast now
, Tom thought. Based on their recent phone call, he had a grim feeling that Cruickshand was planning to abduct Jared Kingston. If so, it would be remarkably similar to Tom’s own actions, when he’d taken Christopher.

Like some repeating pattern.

If Tom was right,
there was a good chance Jim would get here before the cavalry caught up with him.

Jim Cruickshand was just one man, but unlike Tom and his brother Charlie, Jim had gone to ‘Nam. He was a force of nature; more than once he’d almost been kicked off of the force for his harsh behavior with civilians and even other troopers. But he had some people who were loyal to him. Probably, Tom thought, out of fear.

If Jim came, he might cause havoc. But Tom didn’t think Jim and the Kingston boy were all the strange young man, Samuel, had meant by the phrase “they’re coming.”

Jim and Jared would only be part of what was coming. Tom didn’t know how he knew, but he did. And he also knew that whatever harmony there was now — the Goldfine girl opening up, the young boys reciting to the child — this would be disrupted, at the very least, by Cruickshand’s presence. And these things were best left uninterrupted. He wasn’t sure yet how the rising water tied in to all of it but he knew that it did.

Tom smiled at the girl.

“I’m still here,” Liz said, looking wistful. She was balled up on the small couch, with her feet tucked up under her. Tom watched her, feeling, for some reason, like he was seeing her for the first time. She was wearing the hospital gown with her jeans underneath. On her wrist was a plastic hospital bracelet. Her hair was pulled back and spilled over her ears in loose, thick locks.

Tom remained close to the door to keep an ear on whatever might be happening out on the rest of the floor.

“I’m glad you’re still here,” he said. His mouth hung open slightly as he mentally prepared his next question. But she spoke first.

“I lost a baby,” she said.

“When was this?”

“It was about three years ago.”

“And how old are you? Twenty-three?”

She nodded, glanced at him, then studied her hands. The look on her face, and the way she turned her hands over and looked at them, seemed to Tom like a gesture far beyond her years.

“How did it happen? You miscarried?”

“Chris and I were clean when we met each other. And then we started using again. I followed him. I followed him out of rehab when he relapsed and I got back into it. And when I tried to pull out, I got sick. Really sick. I was pregnant.”

Tom found that Liz was calm. Resigned. “I don’t remember everything,” she said. “I think I . . . repressed it. As best I could. And he just left. Just left me afterward. Until, you know, the other night, when he showed up out of the blue.”

“At your place with Jared.”

She nodded.

“You remember that ride, when I picked you up?”

“Some of it.”

Tom shrugged himself away from the wall and started pacing around a little, back and forth. “You sort of went mannequin on me there, for a while. Have you done that before?”

She studied her hands again. “Yes. Sort of . . . after . . . it happened with the baby. I had some trouble. It started with me leaving things places. Forgetting things. Important things. I’m not supposed to drink. With the meds I’m on.”

“The meds.”

She looked sharply at him. “The doctors have all of that information. Anti-depressants. Sometimes sleep aids. I have a hard time sleeping.”

“Me too.”

She smiled thinly.

He scowled. “What do you make of all this, then? With the boy? Caleb? You’re DNA is a match.”

He smile faded. “I went over this with them. I don’t know. I didn’t have a baby and then forget about it, okay?”

“Okay,” Tom assented. “Do you remember what happened the night before you had the, um, incident with Christopher?”

“The night he first showed up? Yeah, I remember. He came in and stood in the kitchen and wouldn’t look at me. And he was . . .”

“What?”

“He was wet.”

“Wet?”

“Yes, wet. He was soaked. Getting water all over the floor.”

Tom ran trembling fingers over his scalp. “You hadn’t seen him in a couple years.”

“He disappeared. I thought he was dead. I really did. No one heard from him. I missed him, but I was glad he was gone. I hated him. I blamed him. Then I would blame myself. Mostly myself. Because even if I was blaming him, it was because I loved him. And I followed him.” She sighed and looked at her hands. “Seeing him brought up a lot of old stuff, you know?”

“Of course,” said Tom. They were nearing the part about the shooting, and Tom was careful to let it play out.

She seemed to ball herself up even further. She was small girl, but hardy, not frail. She had “moxie,” as his father might have said. But she was still just a young woman, caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Considering how they’d started out together, the girl was doing quite well.
Then tell her that
, urged Steph’s voice.

He sat himself in one of the chairs. Before he realized what he was doing he had leaned forward and touched the girl’s hand.

“You’re doing great. I’m proud of you.”

She smiled at him, and looked away, up at the ceiling. There was a moment of silence.

Tom leaned back and folded his hands together. “Elizabeth, what do you think is happening?”

She was quiet for a little while, closed her eyes and shook her head with a faint smile on her lips.

“What?” Tom asked.

She grew serious and her eyes fixed on a point over his shoulder.

“It’s like you’re the Joseph. And I’m the Mary.”

Tom kept his eyes on her. He watched a tear roll down her cheek and she lowered her head. “It’s just . . .”

“What?”

“His name.”

“The baby’s name?”

She nodded. She was beginning to cry now, her voice nasal, wet. “It’s the same name. We never picked a name, not out loud. But that was the one I had in my head. Caleb.”

When she looked up, she smiled again. It was a demure, pretty smile, and it aged her, like the way she’d studied her hands. “None of this makes any sense.”

“He’s special,” said Tom, picking up the thread. “Don’t you think so?”

She nodded, tears welling in her eyes. He had an impulse to reach for her again, to show her some comfort, but he resisted.

“If I’m the Joseph, and you’re the Mary, what does that make Christopher?”

She surprised him by offering a quick laugh, just a breath of air that caused her gaze to shift up and away and her mouth to turn up into a smile. She wiped away the tears that rolled down her cheeks.

“I don’t know. My grandmother once said ‘Even the most faithful among us will be fooled.’”

Tom was no stranger to religious dictums. “You think there’s some trick to all of this? With Caleb?”

She shook her head. He got up and moved around the coffee table to sit beside her on the couch, placing an arm around her shoulders.

“Now,” he said, in a quiet voice, “Do you still think you killed Christopher?”

“No. I think that that’s maybe the trick. Or part of it. We’re seeing things that are not real.”

Tom realized it was what Samuel had warned him of. Fears manifesting, needing to discern the truth from the lies.

“I think so, too.”

“And I think the world is changing,” she said. “We don’t realize how many different worlds it’s already been. My sister, Serafina, says that it’s astrological, or something. But that’s my sister. One age is coming to an end and a new one is starting. And we’ll forget all over again, just like we always do. Maybe only remember the old world when we dream.”

“Which age is coming to an end? I do the crossword, I don’t read the horoscopes.”

Elizabeth offered that breathy laugh again and looked at him. She then wobbled her head a little and affected a charming sort of skepticism. “Aquarius, I guess.”

“And . . . which age is that? I mean, I remember the song. Big hit when I was growing up.” Surprising himself, Tom started to sing a few bars. “
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
. . .”

She laughed again. “You’re terrible.”

“Thank you.” And in the humor he found himself thinking of the young men, the boys — wagerers. The differences in their ages, and the significance of an
Age
itself.

Phases. Stages each individual went through. How we used phrases like “our technological adolescence,” or the fact that we are a “young species.” As if somehow, innate within ourselves, we each had a much broader sense of time. A universal time. Time that had more to do with the rolling of the earth or the thermodynamics of entropy than it did with our personal, ticking clocks.

Three-degree black-body radiation.

Leftover from the origin. The source.

“Do you have a tissue?”

Tom looked around and saw a box of Kleenex on the small end-tables next to the couch. He pulled a couple of tissues from it and handed them to her. He gave her some room.

“What’s Aquarius, um, do?” he asked.

She blew her nose and wiped at her eyes. “It’s stupid, but Aquarius is the water-bearer.”

“Water-bearer,” he repeated.

Both of them fell silent. He wondered if she was thinking of Christopher, spilling water on her kitchen floor. Or about the news of the rising water table throughout the region.

He stood up and walked back around the tables and to the wall by the door. Elizabeth watched him. He read her face. She looked somewhat relieved, he thought, and still carried that mature look, and, just residually, she looked a little guilty, or maybe she felt vulnerable now that she had revealed herself somewhat. But he didn’t have time to worry about that now. He sensed that he needed to prepare for Jim and Jared and whatever else was to come. They would need to move the child, for one.

CHAPTER FORTY

“Listen,” said the Goldfine girl, “there’s one last thing.”

Tom raised his eyebrows and looked at her. For some reason he felt like the two of them were suddenly linked, that she was able to read his thoughts. It was disquieting and comforting at the same time. It reminded him of the feeling of electricity he’d had out on the front lawn of the Red Rock Medical Center, or the bond with Maddy along Route 33. He found himself looking at the locket she wore around her neck, his eyes drawn to it, as if magnetized.

“About Caleb . . .” she started. “We might not be out of the woods yet, as my dad says. There’s something about the pond. The one where Jared’s house is. It . . .” She couldn’t seem to finish.

“Go ahead.” He smiled. “It’s okay.”

She shook her head, took her legs out from underneath her — she was barefoot — and put feet on the floor. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, holding the wad of tissues with both hands. She looked down and then up at Tom.

“I’ve heard things. Someone talking to me. From . . . down there. It sounds absolutely crazy, I know, but I think Caleb has something to do with it, too. The water, the rain . . .”

Tom glanced up at the window. The curtains were drawn, but he was sure that if he pulled them back he would see flakes of snow still blowing around. But by midday tomorrow it might be warm enough again for rain to fall.

Everything changed. Nothing stayed fixed.

When you stepped back as far as you could, he suddenly thought, and you looked at the whole picture, time — existence — became everywhere, became every
when
.

They had already been here in this room. This had already happened. Bridges were formed between the neurons in the brain, and they formed between people. Individuals were the neurons of the collective mind. The mind of everything.

Sometimes it was referred to as
Atman
.

“Why do you think . . . ?” He started to ask her. “How do you know this?”

She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “Just dreams, I guess.”

He paused.

“Thank you, Elizabeth.”

She shrugged once more, and attempted a wan grin.

He looked at her locket. Tom chose his final words carefully. “We’ll get it sorted out, okay?”

He looked back up at her.

She nodded, her face once again like a young girl’s. “Got it,” she said.

* * *

“Sanctification. The sacraments. What is holy protection?”

Tom stopped outside of Caleb’s room. The five boys were still standing around the child’s bed, in what might have been the exact same position he’d left them. There were two policemen guarding the door. Tom had been about to ask them where Mahoney, the sergeant, was, but he’d been cut short by the voice he heard in the room.

Liz had stayed back to use the bathroom in the break room. He wished the girl was here with him to witness the resident — the thin, mousy thing named Sophie with the clipboard perpetually pressed to her flat chest — standing on the empty bed in the room, preaching. Once again, a small crowd was starting to gather around the door. Tom recognized the mother of the child with the intestinal problems, and the attractive jogger-type he’d seen coming in earlier. They were all listening. Even the cops were tuned in.

“To come in contact with ‘the Element’ in its many forms — to feel the presence of the Element — nervousness, anxiety, desire to flee or fight . . .”

Tom didn’t know what she was talking about. He glanced at the policemen. One cop held a finger to his ear and twirled it. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, this cop. The other, Javitz, looked older, with a goatee framing his thin lips.

Tom looked at the boys around Caleb’s bed, one bed over from the resident’s pulpit. They were looking at her. That was something. To get these guys’ attention it seemed one had to — what? Set oneself on fire? Something like that. Or speak Spanish.

“. . . conflict — pornography, drugs, lying, theft — to come into contact with sin — with what’s behind the sin, powering it, the Element. The Intelligence.”

Tom had heard street preachers before, in his twenty-two years on the job he’d come across a busker or two. Problem was, sane and insane often sounded similar. You had to listen beyond your prejudiced filter. If you went to church with an open mind, you could hear the metaphor in the gospels, or find the logic in the homilies. You could find application to your life and the world around you in the poetry of it, if you had some artistic bent, some flexibility. There were many things a man could find in church, or in the Bible, even a thinking man, so to speak, a man whose job involved evidence and reasonable doubt. You could.

Even
Atman
was just a term, another symbol, or clue. Not an answer.

However, a waifish, bespectacled resident standing on a hospital bed in the children’s ward wasn’t exactly the same as listening to a worthy sermon in church. She was more like a carnival barker. It was hard medicine to swallow, in other words. But, Tom thought, aside from the young cop’s little gesture, the girl seemed to be doing alright. Even Tom felt drawn in . . . though by what, exactly, he couldn’t quite say. She sounded inspired, not like she was reciting; and the young woman looked the part too. Her eyes were wide, her lips quivering with excitement; it all had a certain gravitational pull. That was what was drawing people in.

“After a while,” she said, “you simply come to
know
what the forms of the dark Intelligence are, your heart knows, your soul knows; you don’t have to be taught, you only need to be alert, chaste, penitent.”

And with that, she was done. A kind of awkwardness overcame her, and she pushed up her glasses with one bony finger as she looked down, negotiating how to get off the hospital bed.

Tom went over and extended his hand to help her down. She smiled at him like a grande dame of older days. The whole thing felt exotic, as if the room Caleb occupied had become some other place, some other dimension, crazy as it sounded, or host to different dimensions; though perhaps not dimensions, not entirely, not technically, but different
consciousnesses
. Maybe that was it. There was a charge in the air, not unlike what he’d experienced the night before in Red Rock and on the drive through the middle of the night, or when the Depression-era boys had first shown up on the pediatrics floor. That sense of giddiness was there in the background, of laughter waiting to erupt.

He kicked himself for not having found out where Maddy had gone to rest. He should have kept better tabs on her. He wished she was here.

Tom was suddenly aware that something had changed in the room. Sophie was standing next to him, and he still was holding her delicate hand. He was looking around and so was she. He felt like they were spinning, a little — or no, that wasn’t completely right— it felt like something was spinning around
them
. Didn’t it? And it seemed brighter in the room — not in a harsh way, not like the fluorescents, garish already, had surged, but things were just more illuminated — the table and two chairs in the corner were crisper, the faces of the boys were brighter, their eyes sparkling like dark jewels . . . but just as Tom was noting all of this, the opposite occurred, and things began to fade.

Tom looked to the entrance. He made out a half-dozen faces, blank and oval, looking in, watching. Tom wondered what they saw.

The room continued to darken and achromatize, as though a cloud had passed over on an otherwise sunny day. It wasn’t depressing, though, Tom thought — he still felt that electric high. He still held the girl’s hand. He felt very close to her now, too. It wasn’t a sexual closeness, but it wasn’t
not
that either. He looked at the boys around the bed again. Their eyes were glowing.

Caleb was sitting up in the bed. His legs out in front of him, bent at the knees so that his feet nearly touched. His face was a picture of sweetness, with no trace of fear, guile, or darkness. He was looking at the people in the hall.

All eyes were on Caleb. His arms came up at his sides, floating beside him.

Tom felt the hairs standing up on his neck, along his arms, even his legs. He started to see things: a tire swing; Maddy as a child, in her Sunday dress, standing on the porch steps of his family home, over to play after church; a red mailbox; and his long-dead dog, Champ, the black lab.

Tom heard something. He couldn’t quite have described it, not then, and only later was he able to say it was something like the sound of an orchestra tuning up, that coming together of the various instruments, the strings, especially, he guessed, making that one-noise. It was similar to the ringing he’d heard twice before. He felt it running through him and running through Sophie as well, channeling back and forth between the two of them.

And then the child’s mouth opened, and a new sound-vibration was added. It first came in like a soprano’s voice, off the stage somewhere, hidden in the audience or high in the mezzanine. Tom could barely get his mind around it; there was just no start, no stop to anything. No lines.

No boundaries,
he thought, and gooseflesh broke out all over him.

Then the child started to rise in the bed.

He began to float in the air, just as the boys had along the route to the hospital.

The child’s bow-like mouth was open, that soprano voice singing soft and sapid, his eyes round and peaceful and seeming to see everything at once. He was levitating ten or twelve inches above the hospital bed. Tom was riveted, and then he had the strangest thought, to smell the air, to see what sort of aroma there was to all of this.

He let his head drop back and inhaled through his nostrils and smelled, well, he could have guessed, or maybe he should have guessed, he smelled the only thing that made sense. He smelled rain and mountain air.