Michael Koryta - Last Words

He hadn’t heard of the road to Cassadaga in those days.

They’d been in Cooke City, Montana, when his mother was arrested, and the cop told them that they couldn’t take the dog. Mark, then fourteen, punched a grown man for the first time in his life that day. A police officer, no less. When his uncles heard the news and finally came to get Mark, they told him that Amigo was doing well, and the last time they’d seen the dog he’d been lounging in front of Miner’s Saloon. He’s the town dog now, Uncle Larry had said. It’s just as well. With your mother’s habits, well, that’s no way to raise a dog.

If he’d understood the irony of that statement, he hadn’t shown it.

For years, Mark dreamed of that hopeless run and the inevitable death that he was supposed to see, more a captured memory than a dream, always waking with a gasp when the dream dog’s tongue touched his tears.

He missed the days when that dream had qualified as a nightmare.

He reached the stop sign and turned and looked back to where his rental car sat with the blinkers on, and he remembered everything that had happened here but he could not prove it. It was bad, but there were worse things, and he was well aware of them. At least he knew what had happened on this road.

From his vantage point in the middle of the intersection, he could see a weathered sign that he’d missed on his first trip, when all of his attention had been on the truck in his mirror. If he’d looked to the right at the stop sign, he would have seen it — a billboard advertising the Amazing Trapdoor Caverns! only two miles away, on the left.

The Leonard brothers’ home was “three point two miles ahead, destination on left,” his GPS informed him.

Neighbors.

There were places where this wouldn’t matter. He’d lived in enough one-stoplight towns to know that. But Garrison had a little more size to it, and Trapdoor wasn’t on a major artery.

He walked back to the car and drove ahead slowly. The gated drive to Trapdoor appeared on his left and then fell behind in his mirror and the road curved sharply and then straightened out again and he saw that he was approaching the farm that could be seen from the banks of the creek near the cave, its rolling fields spread out over the bluffs.

Mark pulled into the gravel drive. The farmhouse was dark and the only vehicle in sight was a truck that looked as if it hadn’t been moved in days.

No one answered his knock at the door, but instead of returning to the car, he walked up the drive and toward the barns, searching for any sign of life. He went from one outbuilding to another, knocking on doors, opening them, calling out. The only answers were the echoes of his own weary voice. He was winded from the walk, and even the echoes knew it.

He reached the stable last. It was set farthest back from the road and was clearly the newest of the buildings, styled to look like a high-end Kentucky ranch, home to Thoroughbreds. From the moment he entered it, memories slapped at him like storm-tossed waves. Nothing drove memories through you faster or harder than the senses. He’d learned that in a crippling way after Lauren was killed. He could be doing fine, getting through a day with a feeling of emotional control, and then something as simple as the smell of the right soap or the distant sound of the right song threatened to bring him to his knees.

The stable was all of this, heightened. He’d worked in a dozen of them, all in the West, and when he’d arrived in Florida with no money and needing a job, he’d known damn well that he could find the best pay at a stable, but he had gone to gas stations instead. He didn’t want to remember the West. Not then, not now.

But here it was.

He put one hand on the steel rail of a stall gate and closed his eyes, drinking in the smell so pungent, it almost seemed to have a taste. The senses brought him another memory then, unbidden, as the thought of his family had been, relocating him in time and place once again. What he remembered was a smell that had been familiar but that he couldn’t identify: the scent of the hood they’d pulled over his head in the field, rough as burlap, stinking of something earthy.

It had smelled of horse feed.

He opened his eyes and looked around the stalls and now he was entirely in the present.

There are a million feed sacks around here, he told himself. It was farm country. It could have come from anywhere.

But the Leonards didn’t come from anywhere. They came from this place, and they ran with Evan Borders, and Evan Borders had once been a suspect in the murder of his teenage girlfriend Sarah Martin, and Evan Borders had exchanged calls with Ridley Barnes in the minutes preceding Mark’s abduction.

He heard the sound of an engine then and walked out of the stable in time to see a pickup truck rattling in. A white Silverado. Like feed sacks, there would be plenty of them around here.

He waited outside the barn as the truck was parked and the driver got out — a large, bald man with a gray beard.

“Can I help you?”

“I was looking for Brett and Jeremy Leonard,” Mark said, approaching the truck.

The man’s face went from cordial to wary. “Those are my boys. What do you need with them?”

This obviously wasn’t the first time someone had arrived in search of the Leonard boys.

“Wanted to ask them about clearing some snow,” Mark said. “I was told they do that?”

“Oh, sure.” The elder Leonard was relieved now. “I can just take your name and address, get you put on the list. ’Nother storm due this evening is what I’m hearing. Be good to get on the plow schedule. I’m Lou, by the way.”

Mark shook his hand but didn’t give his own name, just said, “Good to meet you, Lou,” and then he followed the older man inside the house. They walked into a kitchen that smelled of bacon, and Lou Leonard grabbed a notepad and a pen.

“It’s my plow truck, but I don’t get out there much anymore. That’s a young man’s game, you know? Takes a toll that you wouldn’t think, all that time behind the wheel. And, hell, my eyes aren’t what they used to be. When I was out in the last storm, I was struggling, to be honest. Was damn happy when the boys took over.”

“Your boys, they work with Evan Borders?”

“Time to time. Evan’s sketchy. Some days he’s on time, some days he don’t show up at all.”

“Why do you keep him on?”

Lou Leonard sighed. “Family ties. That’s my nephew. His mother left when he was a child, and I didn’t blame her, though I’m not proud to say it. She’d found the wrong man. Carson was in a bar when he wasn’t in a jail, and then he got sent up to Pendleton for a good stretch and Evan was in the wind, and I took him in so the state wouldn’t. He lived with me while his daddy was in prison. You try to look out for someone that doesn’t have anybody else. Some people call it foolish; I call it Christian.”

“You said you were out in the last storm?” Mark asked.

“For a bit. I’m only good for a couple hours anymore.”

Mark tried to keep his voice casual when he said, “What time was that?”

The old man gave him a curious look, and Mark said, “I was just thinking, it was blowing hard there for a while around noon. More than I could’ve handled.”

“It was blowing hard,” Lou agreed, and then he bent to his notepad again. “What was your name?”

“Mark Novak.”

No reaction. For once, someone in Garrison didn’t seem to be aware of who he was. He watched as his name was lettered in, and then Lou said, “Address?”

“I’m at Trapdoor Caverns right now.”

This caught his attention. He looked up with a frown. “Doesn’t Cecil clear the snow?”