Michael Koryta - Last Words

“They seem to have been good enough to you.”

Cecil’s cockeyed grin held no humor. “Seem to, right? But that’s another question you might think on before you throw in with the MacAlister family, buddy. You might ask why in the hell it’s worth paying a caretaker to live down here if you have no intention of opening the cave or selling it. Why not seal the fucker down, pour some concrete in that entrance, and be done with it?”

“You’re the caretaker,” Mark said. “You tell me.”

Cecil shook his head. “I can’t, honestly. I keep expecting to get my walking papers. They never come. I stick on because, well, I like the place. I live for free, I hunt for free — there are fine deer in these woods, I take a buck every season — and what work there is ain’t so bad. Painting and roofing and general repairs. I like working with my hands, I like my solitude, I like this place. But I’m providing maintenance on a forgotten property and one without any future. There are times I wonder about that. But then?” He spit into the snow again. “Then I remind myself to be grateful for the job. It’s a paycheck, and it’s a fine place to live. Better than any I had before. Long as I can get away with it, I’ll stay here. But there are questions.” His eyes remained on the smoke wafting from the chimney and joining the leaden sky. “There are certainly questions.”

Mark was so tired when he reached the car that he wanted nothing more than to start the heater and sleep with his head on the steering wheel. Instead he drove through the blowing snow back to town, back to the same hotel where it had all begun.

The same clerk was on duty, the one who had looked the sheriff directly in the eyes and lied to him. When she saw Mark, she walked into an office and shut the door. A moment later, the door opened and a fat man with a receding hairline, pleated pants, and a stern expression appeared. Management.

“What do you need, sir?”

“A room, please.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. “The sign says vacancy. ”

“It’s not an issue of space.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Let’s not play dumb, please. The last time you were here, you caused some problems. You frightened my staff. You’re not welcome back.”

Mark leaned on the counter, a move the man apparently took as a show of aggression, because he backed up fast.

“I didn’t cause any problems, and if your staff member was frightened, she was frightened by whoever convinced her to lie. Either way, I just want a shower and some sleep.”

“Please don’t make this difficult. I don’t want to call the police.”

“Call the police? I’m just asking for a damned room!”

“They have some across the street,” the fat man said, and then he, too, turned and walked into the office, leaving Mark alone in the lobby where once he’d believed he’d met Diane Martin. He stood there for a moment, then gave up and shouldered his bag. He walked back out into the cold and across the parking lot. The only other options were the kind of motels he hated, where the doors opened directly to the outside. The crime scene — tape doors. There was one across the street.

The clerk there was a bored-looking woman with dyed-blond hair and long, bright red acrylic nails. She didn’t seem happy that Mark had interrupted her television viewing with his arrival, but she rented him a room without question or curiosity.

According to the thermostat, the room was warm, but Mark’s body argued that. He cranked the heat up and fastened both the dead bolt and the flimsy chain and then sat on the bed, thinking of Danielle MacAlister and the information she’d provided and the questions he could have asked, should have, while she was talking. It had been a surprise that she was that willing to talk. From Jeff London to Sheriff Blankenship to Cecil Buckner, nobody had given him the idea that she’d be cooperative.

Why had she been, then? There was something wrong with that. He’d intrigued her with the information about Ridley, yes, but had he hooked her enough for an attorney, no matter how young or inexperienced, to begin to tell the family stories to a stranger, let alone a potentially problematic stranger? No. She should have been more guarded than that, and she’d intended to be when he walked into the house. Then she’d pulled a one-eighty during the conversation. Why?

He leaned back on the bed as warm air smelling of burned dust swept out of the small heating unit, then he closed his eyes and fell asleep on the grimy comforter before even removing his boots. When Jeff London called, he didn’t hear the phone ring.

His dreams were filled with maps. Obstinate, senseless maps. Frustrated in his attempts with them, he laid a compass down on the paper, trying to get his bearings. It was the compass his uncle had given him for his tenth birthday, a plastic device with a rotating bezel and a signal mirror to be used in case you needed rescue. To see the compass, you had to lift the top of the case, exposing the mirror. In the dream, when Mark set the compass on the map, the needle began to spin, true north impossible to find. Any true direction impossible to find. As the needle spun faster, the bezel began to move, too, going counterclockwise, so the magnetic needle and the guide were turning in opposite directions, spinning faster and faster. Something moved in the signal mirror then, and when Mark looked at it, he saw that the mirror was filled with Ridley Barnes’s face. As the spinning compass picked up even more speed, Ridley smiled.

The drive to Stinesville usually took more than an hour in good conditions, and it took Ridley two hours in the snow. The county roads hadn’t seen a plow yet, and though the accumulation was minimal, the changeover from rain to snow had allowed for a thin layer of ice. The rubber on the tires of his old truck was thinner still. He nursed the truck along, a tow chain jingling among the sandbags and cinder blocks that he’d tossed in the back to add weight over the rear axle.

The snow was blowing harder in Spencer, and the town streets were empty and unusually dark, none of the neon glowing at him from the gas stations along the highway. A power outage, evidently. He turned east and drove with the wind at his back, as if being offered up to the world by the storm itself.

The old family land was down a gravel road marked by sets of massive ruts left behind by an oversize four-wheel drive. Ridley decided he’d rather hike than shovel his tires out, and he left the truck on the side of the road, slipped his backpack over his shoulders, and stepped out into the wind. His breath was coming fast, fogging the air in quick puffs like antiaircraft fire. He didn’t like this place, never had, never would. It was where he’d buried the darkest parts of him. Or where he’d tried to.

He walked down the road, his boots occasionally catching gravel but more often just snow, and above him the naked branches of the ash and walnut trees weaved and creaked. Shadows flickered ahead, dancing from one side of the drive to the other, and once he was certain that he saw his father among them. He kept his head down after that. His mother was the only one who belonged here — they’d scattered her ashes on an autumnal wind beneath a sky so blue that it hurt to look at — but it seemed unlikely she’d make an appearance. She’d been a quiet presence in Ridley’s life and when his father was around, not much of a presence at all.

He wasn’t certain who lived in the old house now. It had changed hands a few times, he was aware of that. He didn’t care much. He’d sold the place as soon as it was his to sell, used the money to send his younger sister through two years of college. She lived in Rhode Island now, and he didn’t hear from her often. Christmas cards always came, but they bore no message beyond whatever the card company had thought to offer. Once they had spoken on the telephone with some consistency. That had ended about ten years ago. He hadn’t fought it. She had children who would ask questions about their uncle if they knew he was out there. You had to be understanding of something like that.