The Cartoonist (22 page)

As he crunched into the dooryard, an illusion of a similar clapboard in Newfoundland materialized before his eyes, and for a shimmering moment Scott expected to see Krista burst smiling through the doorway, arms flung wide in greeting....

But a stooped, wary-eyed man appeared where Krista should have been and the illusion misted into drab reality. A gaggle of geese, dirty white in the drizzle, scattered as the man strode across the unmowed lawn. He nodded, but the wariness in his eyes sharpened when he noticed Scott’s haggard features. He stopped several paces back from the car, watching as Scott climbed out.

“Lost?” Clayton Barr said.

“I don’t think so,” Scott said, curiously aware of his own voice. “I was hoping to talk to Mr. Clayton Barr.”

“That’d be me,” Clayton said, extending an open hand. Scott accepted the hand and shook it, aware at once of its callused strength. “What can I do for you, Mr.... ?”

“Bowman,” Scott said, wishing he were someone else. “Scott.”

Clayton’s face emptied itself of expression, then grew somber, almost pained. He lifted an arm as if to encircle Scott’s shoulders, then let it drop again. His eyes, sad, stripped of their former wariness, shifted to a point somewhere beyond the barn.

“Come on inside, Scott,” he said. “It ain’t a day for standin’ in the yard.”

Remarking the man’s bowlegged gait and the darker green of his shoulders where the drizzle had soaked through his work shirt, Scott followed him onto the porch. Inside, a big old calico cat lay curled in the hollow of a sagging couch, and an assortment of mud-caked boots lay scattered about. A folded newspaper sat next to a half-drunk bottle of beer on the threadbare arm of an easy chair. Beyond the inner door a radio murmured a torchy country ballad, and, off-key, a girl’s voice hummed along.

Clayton grabbed the beer. “Set right here,” he said, indicating the chair. He shooed the cat and claimed its spot on the couch. Rusty springs chattered under his weight. “Helen,” he said over the sound of the radio. “Fetch us a couple of cold ones, would you?”

Scott dropped heavily into the worn easy chair, which still had Clayton’s warmth on it. The pager clipped to his belt dug into his side. Smiling shyly, a homely girl of about eighteen brought the beers onto the porch. Clayton waited for her to leave before speaking.

“Terrible tragedy, Scott,” he said, leaning forward, picking at the label on his beer. “I know it don’t help, but I believe I know how you feel. I lost my Sally years ago, givin’ birth to Helen in there.” He hooked a thumb toward the kitchen door. “She wasn’t much more than Helen’s age, neither. It hurts, hurts deep, and there’s no words to soften it.” He fell silent for a time, then said: “What brings you out here?”

Staring into his beer, Scott said, “I wanted to thank you...” But then, desperately, he said, “Can you tell me what happened? What happened to my girls?”

Clayton took a swig of his beer. “That I can’t tell you, chum. Only what I heard and saw.” He turned his dark eyes out to the yard. “Couldn’t sleep last night, so I was sittin’ out here, right where you are now, havin’ a beer and...thinkin’ about my Sally, I guess. Yeah, thinkin’ about my girl.

“It was quiet—that’s what struck me. I guess the quiet was what set me to thinkin’ ’bout Sally.” Clayton shifted, the couch springs griping beneath him. “Quiet. I mean, there wasn’t even a cricket singin’. Strange, now I think of it. Just dead silent, ’cept for the odd semi roarin’ by out on Ninety-Five.

“Then all at once I hear this horn blarin’. Some jackass, I’m thinkin’, one of the Teevens boys out roddin’ around. But this horn keeps right on goin’, and its startin’ to spook the cows.

“Well, I just ignored it a while, you know. But it went on for ten or fifteen minutes, and I got to thinkin’ maybe there’s been an accident. So I lit out across the south field there and down to Route Five, the way you must’ve come in from the highway, ’cept the other end.

“I found your car plowed up against the fence, down the hill from the cemetery.” Clayton paused in uneasy reflection. “God’s mercy, I took an awful chill standin’ there in the road lookin’ down at that car, nothin’ movin’, and that horn just a screamin’. I don’t mean to sound like no pansy or nothin’. I mean, I wasn’t afraid of what I’d see. It was a feelin’, that’s all I can say about it...but I wanted to turn tail and run. Somethin’ in the air, I dunno. A smell. A dead smell, but old dead. Know what I mean?”

Scott said nothing—but he thought of the smell around Krista’s corpse, and the similar stench in the car.

“Ended up talkin’ to myself out there,” the farmer said. “‘Come on, Clay,’ I says to myself. ‘Get your ass down there. Suppose somebody’s hurt?’”

“Was there anything around?” Scott said. “Anything they might have hit? A big animal...anything?”

“Well, I did see somethin’, or I thought I did—a cloud took the moon just then—shiftin’ around in the graveyard.”

“What was it?” Scott said, his voice raised and a little menacing. “What did you see?”

“Can’t say for sure. Every once in a while somebody’s cows get out and they turn up in the boneyard, grazin’ on the parish grass—”

“Well, what did it look like?” Scott pressed.

The wariness stole back into Clayton’s eyes. “I can’t say, chum. It might’ve been an animal, or a shadow, or just my beery imagination.”

Or a man, Scott thought, remembering the drawings. Could they have hit a man? It seemed unlikely. If they had, where was he now? Surely no one could have survived such a collision.

Clayton took a long, gurgling pull on his beer, stalling to see if Scott had anything more to say. But Scott’s eyes had gone glassy again, distant and reflective.

“Your wife was already gone,” Clayton said. “God rest her soul. And your girlie, well, she was moanin’ and...” He cut off in midsentence, dropping his gaze to the ratty-eared tom twining in and out between his legs.

“And what, Mr. Barr?”

“Well, she was moanin’ and sort of starin’-like, with her mouth open and kind of twisted, as if she was screamin’ but no sound was comin’ out.”

Scott knew the expression.

He started to push to his feet, but his elbow caught his untouched beer and sent it spinning to the floor. Beer boiled out and spread in bubbly-yellow fingerlets. Scott remained frozen in mid-motion, a Polaroid of a man getting out of a chair...or perhaps sitting down in it. He had no idea what he should do.

“Never mind that,” Clayton said, getting to his feet. “Helen’ll mop it up.”

“Can you take me there?” Scott said. “To where it happened?”

“Now?” Clayton said, glancing at his watch. “It’s early for lunch, but we could offer you a bite... There’s nothin’ out there for you, chum.”

Scott turned to the door. “Thanks, no, Mr. Barr,” he said, and started out through the drizzle. “I’ll find it myself.”

“Turn right at the end of the lane,” Clayton called after him. 

But the car was already rolling out of the yard.

30

––––––––

HAMPTON MEADOW CEMETERY OCCUPIED an acre of hilly ground about a half-mile east of Clayton Barr’s entryway. Finding it easily, Scott pulled off the road and parked in front of the wrought-iron gates. Before stepping out into the light caul of rain, he removed the drawings from his pocket and carefully unfolded them.

The westbound continuation of the road followed a sweeping curve for several hundred yards, then banked up sharply and out of sight beyond a low, hunchbacked hill. Keeping to the shoulder, Scott moved slowly toward that hill. Even from this distance he could see the deep gouges in the dirt where the Volvo left the pavement. Skid marks like black ribbons curved into view from beyond the hill, overlapped, then opened again as they angled off to the shoulder. As he drew closer, Scott could see where the car struck the wall; crumbled wafers of stone lay scattered about. There were no trees near the damaged section of fence, no low-slung branches to explain the Volvo’s inwardly shattered windshield.

Skidding on the rain-slicked grass, Scott descended the steep embankment to the ditch. Something down there had caught his eye, a steely glint beneath a trough of stagnant water. Reaching in, he retrieved a section of molding that belonged to the Volvo. The water was foul and his hand came away smelling as if he’d dipped it into a cesspool.

He dropped the molding and scaled the opposite bank. Then, breathing heavily, he stepped over the fieldstone fence and made his way into the graveyard.

As he ventured more deeply into it, the initially orderly cemetery became a mishmash of scattered memorials, a sizable proportion of which were little more than square granite plaques laid flat in the earth. It appeared the grounds back here, with the exception of a few individually cared-for sites, were untended. Almost unconsciously, Scott avoided stepping on the actual burial plots. His mother had warned him against that when he was still quite young, and since then it had always bothered him in a vaguely superstitious way to do so.

Now he ascended an easy grade, pausing beneath a gnarled, leafless tree providing little shelter from the rain. Beyond the grade, in the contour of a shallow, monument-studded basin, a woman in black sat on her haunches before a sand-colored marker. She was rocking and weeping, making a wretched sound that reached Scott’s ears in wavering bursts. A soggy wreath of summer flowers lay atop the freshly sodded plot.

Grief, he thought. Black grief.

The rain tapered off as he gazed at the woman’s back, and the air grew colder; Scott could see the vapor of his breath. Chilled, he eased down the opposite face of the incline, veering away from the mourner until he could no longer hear the loonlike quality of her wails. He was dragging his feet instead of lifting them...and yet he was possessed by an awful, badgering restlessness.

Krista, he thought despondently. Dear Krista...

In that instant Scott stopped short, the feeling of eyes on his back a physical thing. He wheeled around sharply, his legs now almost magically light, muscles taut, ready to bolt—

But there was nothing there. Only that dead, wretched tree, cresting the rise, poking dragon fingers into the swirling slate of the sky. Nothing but a stupid tree....

Something ice-cold slipped beneath Scott’s hide and spread like ripples on a pond. He clutched the drawings in both hands, tearing the page along a soggy fold-line, his gaze running giddily to the frame with the leafless tree stamped black against a cotton-white moon When he looked up again, his eyes were round with disbelief.

The tree in the drawing was identical to the one in front of him. Every branch, every twist, every knot.

His balance betraying him, Scott scanned from landscape to drawing and back again, comparing, mentally photographing, shifting from side to side and then front to back, a surveyor lining up markers in proper perspective. Now he edged backwards at a gradual angle, squinting into the dreary geography before him, matching it to the sketch, to the frame with the tombstone a slanted silhouette in the foreground. The tree was shown from farther back...and there, off to the right, a partially ruined section of wall.

It wasn’t just the tree. The drawing matched the whole dreary scene in every detail. It was as if the old man had been sitting right here when he drew this sequence and not two-days’ drive away in Ottawa.

The angle was still a touch off, though....

Back
, Scott’s mind coached.
Back and to the right.

There. That’s it. Perfect.

Something hard met Scott’s leading heel. Slowly, and with a dreadful certainty spawning in his heart, he turned to face it.

It was the same stone, just as he’d feared and at some deeper level had known it would be, and instinctively he shrank away from it, skittering off that sunken, six-by-three rectangle of turf like a child whose worst nightmare has suddenly come true.

Shaking his head to dislodge the gray, he read the weather-worn verse carved into the upper tier of the monument.

Time was I stood as you do now,

And view the dead as thou dost me,

E’er long you’ll lay as low as I,

And others stand and gaze on thee.

Inclining his eyes, Scott read the name of the deceased:
Marissa Rowe
. And when he compared the two, he found that the letters legible in the drawing matched those on the monument in front of him, matched them exactly...the
M
and the
i
, the double
s
and the
R
.

But who was Marissa Rowe? The name meant nothing to him....

Standing hunched against the rain, puzzling over a meaningless name carved in stone, Scott’s eyes ran almost absently to the dates.

And when he read them, when his mind made that final cross-connection, a fear so elemental, so utterly unmanning blazed its way through him that he twisted around to flee, to run until continents folded in behind him. But his feet wouldn’t let him, they were glued there, nailed there, and he only stood, gaping and making whimpering noises deep in his throat.

Because Marissa Rowe, who was ten years old when they buried her, had died on July 12, 1972. The same day Scott and his friends struck down and killed a child with Scott’s Volkswagen Beetle.

A little girl who couldn’t have been much older than ten...

Kath’s age.

no

Scott’s legs dissolved and he sat down hard on Marissa Rowe’s grave plot, his teeth digging painfully into his lip as his chin struck one bent knee. He felt himself slipping, sliding closer to the stone as if dragged, and now there was something wet dripping from his chin, droplets of it spattering the back of one clammy hand...blood?

Yes, it was blood, and—

glass was flying stinging like furious yellowjackets and the child was shattering the windshield with her face and when we got out of the car she was already dead but there was no one around and so much to lose our careers our futures we all knew that—

so we ran...

Still on his backside on the ground, Scott crabbed away from the plot on the heels of his hands and feet, trying to escape his own backlashing memory.