Shades of Simon Gray (24 page)

“Like exams,” Danny said, nodding and laughing at the same time. His laughter bubbled out like hiccups.

Kyle stared at him, trying to take in this interesting twist of fate. Then he laughed even more loudly than Danny.

“This calls for major celebrating,” Danny told him. “Let’s par
-tay
! I’m getting me a couple of brews. One for each hand.”

Kyle grabbed him by the arm as Danny started back to the Hendershots’ house. “Not a word. Got it? It sounds to me like the cops think they’ve got their suspects. So keep your trap shut.”

Danny’s face sagged. “Have I ever once, in the past three years, ever told anybody about the project?
Ever?
” He jerked his arm from Kyle’s grip. “Lighten up, man.”

Kyle cocked his head to one side. “We’re not out of the woods yet, you know.”

“We’re not?”

“If the cops found out about the porn sites, who knows what else they’ll find?”

Danny’s shoulders slumped. He nodded. Kyle was right. They couldn’t afford to let their guard down.

But in spite of Kyle’s caution, Danny was able to take a full breath for the first time in two weeks. He felt as if he’d gotten his life back. He looked up through the branches of the trees, thick with buds waiting to burst into leaves, and to the sky beyond, ignoring the crows. It was almost impossible to see the stars for all the ground light. Even the North Star wasn’t visible tonight. But he knew it was up there, just as sure as he saw his future stretching out before him, huge and glorious.

Jessup Wildemere’s clothes were soaked in blood. He stared at Simon as if he’d never seen him before. Simon saw the panic in the man’s dark eyes.

“I tried to stop her,” Jessup told him, between breaths. Simon could see he had been running hard.

“Who?”

Jessup didn’t answer. He bent over, balancing his hands on his knees. “She was like a madwoman.” He moaned softly and shook his head as if trying to dislodge the image. “So much blood.”

Simon stared at the blood-soaked figure before him as he struggled to remember how the story went. Cornelius Dobbler had been stabbed more than fifty times as he slept in his own bed. There had been so much blood, even the sheets couldn’t soak it all up. It had dripped into a pool on the floor, run into the interstices of the loose floorboards, and formed a stain on the parlor ceiling below.
The Dobbler house still stood on Prescott Street. And to this day, not one single family—and there had been seven over the years—residing in the Dobbler house had been able to get rid of the stain, not with sealers, undercoats, sanding, or replastering.

According to the story, a group of men from town had gone out looking for Jessup Wildemere. When they found him, clothes drenched in blood, there wasn’t one among them to question his guilt. They simply hauled him off to jail, where he would wait to be tried the next day.

Simon looked over at Jessup, who stared down at his bloodstained hands, then rested his forehead against the coarse bark of the Liberty Tree, eyes closed, as if to shut out some terrible sight. His hands, pressed against the tree, left bloody fingerprints.

Simon thought he heard him whispering Hannah’s name. A chilling thought came to him. “Was Hannah there?” Simon asked Jessup.

“Her father discovered us by the riverbank. He was going to force her to marry Elias Belcher this Sunday.” Jessup turned to face Simon, who was stunned to see tears in the man’s eyes. “Hannah told me not to worry. She would talk some sense into her father. I waited for her tonight. Behind the barn. When she came to me, she still carried the knife. Her clothes were drenched with blood.”

“
Hannah
killed her father?” Simon could hardly get his mind around this distortion. This was
not
how the story went.

“I held her, there behind the barn, while she cried.” He stared down at his clothes. “Her father’s blood is on
me as well. As it should be. The crime belongs to us both. I am as guilty as she.”

Simon shook his head vehemently. He wanted to tell Jessup that Hannah was the murderer, that he was innocent. But the words wouldn’t come.

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Simon knew what was going to happen next. The townspeople would come for Jessup. They would put him in jail. Then they would hang him. But the hanging happened in the winter, didn’t it? At least that was how Simon remembered the story, although he was beginning to realize there might be considerable flaws in that original tale, the one he’d grown up with.

Jessup looked off into the woods. “She’s going to meet me here.”

Simon wondered why Hannah hadn’t left with Jessup right after she’d met him behind the barn. A horrible thought came to him. Hannah was the only one who knew where Jessup was. Was it Hannah who told the men where to find him?

Simon felt sick. He knew how all this was going to turn out. “You have to leave,” he told Jessup.

“Leave Hannah?” Jessup shook his head, as if this wasn’t even in the realm of possibility.

“If you wait here for her, they’ll find you.”

He wanted to shout right in Jessup Wildemere’s face that if he didn’t get his ass out of there
fast
he was a dead man. That was crazy. Jessup was already dead. He had been for more than two hundred years. And there wasn’t a thing Simon or anyone else could do to change that.

Simon was frantic to leave this place. He couldn’t bear the thought of Jessup throwing his life away. He covered his eyes, as if he could make the nightmare disappear. When he dared to take his hands away, Simon found himself standing in his own backyard, at the edge of the field.

Overhead the moon was so full and bright, it hurt his eyes. In the cemetery beyond, on the opposite side of the field, stood a woman. Simon knew, as you can only know such things in dreams, that this was his mother. She raised her hand and waved to him.

He looked down at his bare feet, sunk in soft grass, only inches from the edge of the field. He couldn’t seem to move beyond this spot. When he looked up again, his mother was gone. A deep, painful loneliness threatened to swallow him whole, from the inside out.

A thick fog began to form. The gravestones seemed to melt into it as it drifted toward him.

All his senses were deadened. He felt nothing. Saw nothing. Tasted nothing. Smelled nothing. Heard nothing. When he tried to breathe, a heaviness pressed down on his chest. He could no longer draw air into his lungs. A terrifying thought seized him. He was dying. This time he would not be returning to the hospital.

From somewhere in the fog he heard a voice. Muffled. Someone was calling his name. The sound was barely a whisper. But he turned his head toward it and listened.

Liz Shapiro dreamed she was digging in the mud with Simon in the backyard of her house. They were once again
five years old, and the two of them were smeared from head to toe in cool, delightful ooze. It squished through their fingers and toes as they danced in their soppy underwear beneath raindrops so large they could fill a whole pitcher in less than a minute. But then the rain began to come down in torrents.

As the muddy water rose from the stream in her backyard, Liz ran for the porch, and when she looked over her shoulder she saw that the stream had swelled to the size of the Delaware. It pulled Simon along so fast, she didn’t think she would ever be able to reach him. His head bobbed up and down like a rubber ball as he paddled furiously to stay in place.

By now the water had risen to the top step of the porch. Simon’s alarmed cries echoed in her head. He was no longer five years old. He was seventeen again. His face was bruised and his head, bandaged. The bandages were brown with muddy water. In a panic Liz looked around for something she could throw to him, something he could grab on to to keep afloat. Simon’s cries became more piercing.

Frantic, Liz began to throw the porch furniture into the raging river. Wicker chairs, cushions and all. Anything that might float, anything for him to hold on to. Up ahead was an enormous oak. She had never seen a tree this large, except for pictures of giant redwoods, and certainly never an oak. The river water beat against its lower branches. If Simon could seize one of the branches, maybe he could pull himself out. She shouted to him, screamed for him to grab hold. Simon’s voice echoed back
to her. He was coming closer to the tree but didn’t seem to notice the branches.

“The branches, Simon. Grab one of the branches,” Liz yelled.

Simon’s cries became the barking caws of crows outside her window. They grew so loud they punctured Liz’s dream, like a pin popping a balloon.

She bolted upright and blinked into the glare of moonlight streaking across her bed. Something was wrong. Horribly wrong. She threw the covers back and grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from the floor. She scribbled a note to her mother, left it on the kitchen table, and snapped up the car keys.

The stars were still out when Liz pulled into the parking lot of the hospital. She entered through the emergency room and made her way to the west wing, which housed the intensive care unit. She might not be able to get into the ICU, but she could badger the hell out of any doctor or nurse coming down the hall, keep at them until she wore them down enough to get some information on Simon.

The second she came through the door of the waiting room and found Courtney, her face red, eyes wet and swollen, Liz knew Simon had taken a turn for the worse.

The sky was still a predawn gray when Courtney slipped behind the garage to smoke a joint. She was so messed up she thought she might fly right out of her skin.

Dr. Greenberg had insisted Courtney and her father go home and get some rest, insisted Simon’s condition
was stable for now. They planned to go back to the hospital later that morning. Courtney knew she should try to get some sleep, but she was too wired. Even the marijuana wasn’t helping.

Last night Simon had almost died. Courtney had been alone in the room with him, holding his hand, hoping his finger would move for her the way it had for Liz Shapiro. Suddenly she saw one of the colored lines on the monitor go from sharp pointed mountains to gentle sloping hills, then almost flat.

Three nurses and two doctors came through the door so fast Courtney thought they had materialized out of thin air. One of the nurses wheeled a crash cart in front of her. Another slapped a blue switch—marked Code 99—on the wall above Simon’s bed, while the third took Courtney’s arm and tried to escort her to the waiting room. But Courtney held back. She demanded to know what was going on.

“You can’t be in here,” the nurse said. She put her hands on Courtney’s shoulders and attempted to steer her through the door. “Let’s let the doctors do their job, okay?”

Courtney hated the woman’s condescending tone. She wasn’t stupid, for god’s sake. She knew there was every chance Simon had just died. And not one of those people would let her be with him. Simon needed someone to call him back. She didn’t know why she thought this, but she did. The feeling was so strong that she’d begun to scream Simon’s name as loudly as she could. Three or four times she managed to call him, while her flailing arms battled back the startled nurse. Another nurse came to help the
first, and between them they all but lifted Courtney off the floor and carried her out of the room.