Jodi Thomas: Twisted Creek

Nana patted my knee three times as she always did. Three pats for three words she used to say.

She didn’t say the words now, she didn’t have to.

“I know,” I said as the van rattled across a bridge. “I love you, too.”

September 17, 2006

1100 hours

Twisted Creek

Luke Morgan swore as he stomped through the bush toward Jefferson Platt’s property.

He didn’t have much time. He’d been here two days, talking to residents, checking out the area for trouble, but he had put off going to Platt’s home.

Until now.

Much as he hated to acknowledge it, once he went inside, he’d have to admit the old man was dead.

Jefferson Platt had been a fixture in his life for as long as Luke could remember. Platt had taught him to fish when he’d been five. He had been his grandfather’s friend for forty years and in so doing Jefferson had watched first Luke’s father and then Luke grow up. Jefferson had been Luke’s safe house when a bullet almost ended his career five years ago. The smells of the lake ran as thick in Luke’s blood as his Navajo heritage.

Going into Jefferson Platt’s apartment would be like closing a door, and Luke had closed enough doors in his life lately. This was the one place on the planet Luke thought never changed…and now it had.

He circled near the lake, deciding it would be faster to plow through the muddy bank than try to fight the willows and pines that stood fortress-thick between his land and Platt’s. If he’d had time, he would have gone around to the road and walked over, but he could feel trouble coming as clearly as his Navajo grandfather used to say he felt storms brewing all the way to the edge of creation.

Reaching the lake’s shoreline, Luke stopped a foot before he stepped out in the open and pulled his Glock 9mm from his boot. He wasn’t in the mood to clean lake water out of the weapon again.

Pressing the gun in his vest pocket, he jogged down the shore to a long dock everyone called Jefferson’s Crossing. With a jump, he grabbed the side of the muddy dock and pulled himself up. From here on he would be in easy sight of any fisherman passing, so he walked slow, hoping they’d notice no more than they’d seen the past few days-a drifter circling the lake. With a week’s worth of growth across his face, he was a far cry from the efficient ATF agent who’d left his post in Austin for a leave he’d listed as “personal business.”

Within minutes he had slipped inside the kitchen window and climbed the stairs. Boarded up, the place he’d visited a hundred times seemed unfamiliar. Glancing down, he could barely make out the outline of the old potbellied stove in the center of the wide, empty room or the small safe no one had remembered how to open in so many years it had become simply a stool huddled beside the stove. The mismatched pair stood alone in the room that had been Jefferson’s store.

Luke smiled, remembering one summer when Jefferson had told him that the safe’s combination was someone’s birthday. Luke had spent hours trying every set of numbers he could put together. Jefferson had laughed at him, along with everyone else who wandered in.

Luke turned away, forcing his mind to present problems. He took the last half of the stairs two at a time and wasn’t surprised to find the second floor a mess. Jefferson’s no-doors apartment hadn’t changed since he’d been here years ago. His trained eyes missed little. He’d read the police report and knew Jefferson Platt had died in the water a few feet from the dock, but someone had walked across the dusty floor of his bedroom recently. Maybe someone looking for the same clues.

The sound of a car drew Luke to the window. From behind the curtain’s shadow, he watched as an old blue van with Tennessee tags rattled down the drive. It was time to move, and fast, but he hesitated. The blonde driving held his attention.

When she jumped out of the car, he thought her little more than a kid until she stepped into the sunshine and stared up at the house. Her hair might be in braids and her shorts barely covering her bottom, but her petite body was definitely all grown up.

“Hell,” he mumbled. The new owner had arrived and he was wasting time staring.

Luke smiled as he took another look. It had been a long time since he’d admired a woman without wondering if she had a rap sheet.

Too bad he had to disappear.

The numbers 6112 flashed past on a post just outside Nana’s window. I didn’t slow. Something in the back of my mind said if I acted as if I hadn’t seen the place maybe it wouldn’t be real.

But for once, Nana was paying attention and yelled, “Bingo!”

I backed up and turned into the drive. Forty feet down the gravel road, the left front tire hit a hole, almost knocking us out of our seats, but I managed to keep the van from tipping as we rattled toward the largest of several buildings scattered on the property. My property. At least until Garrison D. Walker figured out he’d made a mistake and found the wrong Allie Daniels.

A hundred feet behind the buildings the lake lapped against dingy sand. Barbed-wire fencing framed the boundaries on the other three sides of the wide lot. The land to the left looked wooded and unclaimed from nature. The acreage to my right appeared too hilly to even get a road through, making my property seem lonely on the space between the road and the water. Cluttered driftwood scattered like bones along the shore and beneath the dock.

Nana leaned forward and stared at the building twinkling in the morning sun. “It’s a store, I think.”

Tin signs advertising everything from Camel cigarettes to Coors beer looked like they held together the front wall. The steep tin roof had two windows, and with the long wooden porch running the length of the front, the building seemed to smile at us. The downstairs windows were boarded up. Broken wicker furniture littered one end of the porch while metal lawn chairs lined up on the other end as if at attention-old and rusty, but too tough to die.

I let the van roll into the shade of the shack and noticed a long, covered walk out back that led to a dock on the water. It looked in better shape than the building so I guessed it must have been added.

“This is it, Nana.” I fought to swallow. “Our new home.” We’d lived in some pretty rough houses on land hardly worth plowing, but none looked as bad as this.

Nana smiled and was out of the van before I could throw it into park. She might be in her eighties, but my grandmother was a ball of energy. By the time I caught up with her, she’d already tried the front door.

I pulled out the keys Walker gave me and on the third attempt we were in. Cold, stale air rushed passed us, fighting for freedom and leaving my skin chilled. My body parts were voting on whether to run or stay when Nana flipped on the lights. Bare bulbs above us flickered, then came on along with ceiling fans.

“Would you look at this,” Nana whispered as hundreds of tiny lights along one wall blinked to life. “It’s like a party in here.”

I wondered how much I could get for Christmas lights at a garage sale as I studied a room divided in half by wide stairs.

Fifteen feet of bare shelves lined the north wall, with a high glassed-in counter in front. The oldest cash register I’d ever seen sat on a long table along with several empty wire racks. River rocks the size of footballs formed the wall facing the road. The back wall had two huge bay windows that looked out over the lake. Dark wood framed each view like a homemade picture frame.

The south side of the room must have been a café at one time. There were tiny round tables and a pass-through with a drink chest beneath it. A low counter ran parallel to the pass-through with half a dozen stools anchored in front. The vinyl was so worn the seats looked silver in spots. Any wall space not claimed by shelving had a dead animal head or a mounted fish on it.