Neil McMahon - Lone Creek

I didn't think that without that aspect, I'd have let her lead me so far. But Lord, the way I'd bought it made me want to weep.

Most of my anger was for myself. I'd not only let myself get drawn into the fantasy-absurd, adolescent, and self-serving-I'd largely created it.

As for Laurie, with everything she'd done for me and to me, everything that had happened and everything that still might, she had, without question, blessed me with a precious gift.

An education that took her kind of woman to teach and my kind of fool to learn.

When I got back to Madbird's house, he made it clear that I was welcome to stay as long as I liked, and showed me how to slip into a closed-off part of the attic in case the sheriffs came-a sort of priest hole, like Catholics had used to hide their clergy during the English Reformation. I tried to take some comfort in the thought that the worst I was looking at was nothing compared with back then. Getting caught usually had meant the rack-the Jesuit Edmund Campion had been stretched four inches-followed by castration, disembowelment, and other niceties in the name of God.

But staying here still would be an extra risk to them, and it wasn't going to solve anything for me.

Madbird broke out some of his homemade venison sausage and started making spaghetti sauce. I sat at the kitchen table and gave him and Hannah a quick rundown of what had happened. Usually he really got into cooking, but as he listened, he seemed to be just pushing the sausage around the pan. He didn't comment, and his silence told me he had things figured pretty much the same grim way I did and didn't want to say so.

Hannah was in the next room unpacking her bag. In the silence after I shut up, she spoke in her lilting accent.

"Is this a present for me?"

She held up the book I'd lifted from Kirk's cabin, Consumer Guide to Precious Metals and Gems. I'd brought it into the motel room last night, thinking I might get a chance to look through it. But I didn't, and when I'd gone back this morning and realized that Laurie had disappeared, I'd crammed it into Hannah's bag along with our other stuff. Then I'd forgotten about it.

"It's Kirk's," I said. "I took it because there's some writing inside, but I'm sure it's nothing."

She brought it to the table and we all spent a couple of minutes trying to make sense of the scrawled entries on the folded sheet of paper.

The writing started out relatively neat but he'd gotten sloppier as he went down the page, finally scrawling FUCK in frustration. School hadn't been his strong suit. He'd probably had a calculator for the simple math-at a glance, that looked correct, and there were no signs of figuring. At the very bottom, it looked like he might have tried a more complex calculation, but that was scribbled over with the pen point dug into the page.

"Heroin?" I said. "Trying to figure the value? Say the first number's the weight, the next ones are money, and the difference is whether it gets sold as a chunk or dealt in packets."

"If them weights are ounces, it ain't much dope, and if they're pounds or kilos, it ain't much money," Madbird said.

"Maybe it's just his cut. Say that's how he was getting paid."

He flicked a fingertip at the line that read 13416 maybe more.

"So if this is what two of them's worth, whatever the fuck they are," he said, and moved down the page to 2887 x 4 = 11548, "and this is four times a half, how come it's less? Dope don't get cheaper when they sell it in smaller amounts. The other way around."

I shook my head. It was a feeble premise anyway. The thought of gold crossed my mind, but the entries didn't make sense that way, either. Besides, I was still sure that Kirk hadn't found any gold or even looked. I flipped through the book. There was no other writing and nothing that struck me as related to the numbers. I closed it again.

I wanted to do one more thing before I left.

I hadn't used my journalism training to speak of in almost a decade, and Hannah had to spend a couple of minutes showing me around her computer. But things came back fast, and the task wasn't complicated.

A quick search for Laurie Balcomb gave me her maiden name, Lennox, and the location of her family's estate in Virginia. There were plenty of news archives available-it looked like genealogies were a big thing in that part of the country. I went to the nearest newspaper, the Charlottesville Daily Progress. It mentioned her a few times as a debutante and equestrienne.

And then as an arsonist.

The few brief items on the stable fire she'd told me about matched her account pretty well-except that by all indications, she had, in fact, set it. There was no suggestion of a delayed attempt at blackmail. She'd been caught red-handed, with the eyewitness reporting her to firefighters as soon as they arrived on the scene.

The story disappeared from the news, as such stories usually did. I doubted that she'd gone to jail or even to trial. An influential family in a place like that would most likely be able to settle the matter quietly. Or maybe Wesley Balcomb really had played a role somewhat like she'd claimed-scared the eyewitness into backing off, or even silenced her for good. I couldn't find any more mention of her in the Daily Progress. If she had, in fact, been killed, it was possible that her body had been discovered in a different area, and the two events were never connected.

The one thing I was sure of was that the scars on Laurie's breasts were real. She might have lied about how they'd been caused, although I was quite sure that her terror of John Doe was real, too.

As to what would happen to her now-whether her husband really would have her murdered-that was out of my hands.

It was time for me to finally decide what was going to happen with me.

I sat in Hannah's office a few minutes longer, weighing the factors once more. As near as I could tell, I had three options. The first, keeping on running, didn't look any better than it did to start with. The second, turning myself in, looked more disastrous than ever. Things had gotten so much more complicated that I'd trip all over myself if I tried to spin a tailored story. My only course would be to stonewall completely, but that was practically an admission of guilt, and would leave me helpless to defend myself against a case built against me.

Both choices carried the added problem that Laurie might decide that the best way to save herself would be to cooperate with authorities. If they leaned on her hard enough, she might let it slip that I'd set out to kill Balcomb, adding another major felony to my list. She might also drag Madbird in, and now we weren't talking just about abetting a fugitive. Conning Balcomb out of that money and working outside the law would have both those parties furious. No doubt Madbird would be charged with felonies there, too. Especially with him being an Indian, he'd land in Deer Lodge along with me for sure.

My third option was a final hike in the woods with my old man's pistol-with a stop at Balcomb's first to carry out last night's aborted mission. I could leave a written confession-admitting that I'd killed him and Kirk and giving the location of Kirk's body-but leaving out everything else. The cops would run a routine investigation, but there'd be no point in pushing it, and nobody involved had anything to gain by talking, including Laurie-with her husband dead, she'd have gotten what she wanted. I'd have the satisfaction of protecting my friend, avenging myself, and ridding the world of a scumbag.

My rational mind still rejected the idea, but some deeper part was starting to think about choosing a place to draw my last breath.

When I went back out to the kitchen, Hannah was sitting at the table with Kirk's book open in front of her again.