John Hart - Down River

I nodded.

“She says it wasn’t you.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No, but she didn’t see a face. Inconclusive, according to Detective Grantham.”

I looked at the cabin. “Did they find Danny?” I asked.

“No sign.” She stared at me. When I turned back, I knew what she was going to say before the words left her mouth. “You should not have been here, Adam.”

I shrugged.

“You’re lucky nobody got killed.” She peered through the glass, clearly frustrated. “Jesus, Adam. You don’t think right when you get like this.”

“I didn’t ask for this to happen but it did. I’m not going to sit on my hands and do nothing. This happened to Grace! Not some stranger.”

“Did you come here to do harm?” she asked.

I thought of Dolf Shepherd’s pistol lying out there in the leaves. “Would you believe me if I said no?”

“Probably not.”

“Then why bother to ask. It’s done.”

We were both stripped-down, nerves exposed. Robin had her cop face on. I was getting to recognize it pretty well. “Why did Grantham let me go?” I asked. “He could have made my life hell.”

She thought about it, then pointed at the pile of black ash. “Zebulon Faith was running a methamphetamine lab in the shed. He was probably using the money to cover the debt on the property he’s bought. He had it rigged to burn. He must have known that the police were coming in. We’ll find something to that effect. A motion sensor up the road. A phone call from one of the trailers you pass on the way in. Something that told him to get out. There’s not much left.”

“Enough?” I asked.

“For a prosecution? Maybe. Juries are fickle.”

“And Faith?”

“He’d have disappeared completely, with nothing but circumstantial evidence linking him to the lab.” She faced me, pivoting in her seat. “If it goes to trial, Grantham will need you to put Zebulon Faith at the scene. He weighed that into his decision to cut you loose.”

“I’m still surprised he did it.”

“Crystal meth is a big problem. A conviction will play well. The sheriff is a politician.”

“And if Grantham thinks I had something to do with Grace’s rape? Would he sell her out, too?”

Robin hesitated. “Grantham has reason to doubt that you were involved with the assault on Grace.”

There was a new tension in her face. I knew her too well. “Something’s changed,” I said.

She thought about it, and I waited her out. Finally, she relented.

“Whoever attacked Grace left a scrap of paper at the scene. A message.”

Cold filled me up. “And you’ve known this all along?”

“Yes.” Unrepentant.

“What did it say?”

“‘Tell the old man to sell.’ ”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“That’s what it said.”

My mind went red, and I got out of the car, started walking.

I should have killed him.

“Adam.” I felt her hands on my shoulders. “We don’t know that it was Zebulon Faith. Or Danny, for that matter. A lot of people want your father to sell. More than one person has made threats. The ring could be a coincidence.”

“I somehow doubt that.”

“Look at me,” she said. I turned. She stood on a depression in the earth, a low place, and her head barely reached my chest. “You got lucky today. You understand? Somebody could have been killed. You. Faith. It should have ended worse than it did. We will handle this.”

“I don’t owe you any promises, Robin.”

Sudden bitterness twisted her mouth. “It wouldn’t matter if you did. I know what your promises are worth.”

Then she turned, and as she left the darkness beneath the trees, the day fell upon her shoulders like a weight. She disappeared into her car and threw dirt from her rear tires as she slewed the car around. I stepped onto the road behind her, watched her taillights flare as she slammed her way out.

It took half an hour to find Dolf’s gun, but eventually I saw it, one black patch among the millions. I found the path next, and followed the river, my feet soundless on the soft earth. The river moved, as always, but its voice was hushed, and after a time I ceased to hear it. I put the violence behind me, sought some kind of peace, a stillness that went beyond mere numbness. Being in the woods helped. Like memories of Robin in the early days, my father before the trial, my mother before the light winked out of her. I walked slowly and felt rough bark under my fingers. I rounded a bend in the trail and stopped.

Fifteen feet away, its head lowered to drink, was a white deer. Its coat shone, still damp from the night air, and I saw a quiver in its shoulder, where it took the weight of its thick neck, and of the antlers that spanned five feet from tip to tip. I held my breath. Then its head came up, turned my way, and I saw those great, black eyes.

Nothing moved.

Moisture condensed around its nostrils.

It snorted, and some strange emotion stirred in my chest: comfort shot through with pain. I did not know what it meant, but I felt it, like it could tear me open. Seconds rolled over us and I thought back to the other white deer and how I’d learned, at age nine, that anger could take away pain. I reached out a hand, knowing that I was too far away to touch it, that too many years had passed to take that day back. I stepped closer, and the animal tilted its head, scraped an antler against one of the trees. Otherwise, it stood perfectly still and continued to regard me.

Then the sound of a shot crashed through the forest. It came from far away, two miles, maybe. It had nothing to do with the deer; but still, the animal rose. It leapt out and arced above the river, the weight of its antlers pulling it down by the head; and then it hit, surging across the current, lunging as it drew near the opposite bank. It powered up the slick clay, and at the top, it stopped and turned. For a moment, it showed one wild, black eye, then it tossed its head once and slipped into the gloom; a pale flicker, a slash of white that, in places, looked gray. For no reason that I could explain, I found it suddenly hard to breathe. I sat down on the cold, damp ground, and the past filled me up.

I saw the day my mother died.

I didn’t want to kill anything. I never had. That was my mother in me, or so the old man would say if he knew. But death and blood was part of what it took to go from boy to man, no matter what my mother had to say about it. I’d heard the argument more than once: quiet voices late at night, my parents arguing over what was right and wrong in the raising of their boy. I was eight, and could drill a bottle cap from sixty yards out; but practice was just practice. We all knew what was out there.

The old man killed his first deer when he was eight, and his eyes still went glassy when he talked about it, about how his own father had dragged hot blood across his forehead that day. It was a baptismal, he’d say, a thing that stretched through time, and I woke on the designated morning with a stomach full of cold and dread and nausea. But I geared up, and met Dolf and my father outside in the dark air. They asked if I was ready. I said that I was, and they flanked me as we climbed the fence and set out for the deep and secret woods.

Four hours later we were back at the house. My rifle smelled of burned powder, but there was no blood on my forehead. Nothing to be ashamed of, they said, but I doubted their sincerity.

I sat on the tailgate of my father’s truck as he walked inside to check on my mother. He came down with a heavy step.

“How is she?” I asked, knowing what his answer would be.

“Same.” His voice was gruff, but could not hide the sadness.

“Did you tell her?” I asked, and wondered if my failure might bring her some rare joy.