Michael Koryta - The Prophet

“Adam sent her to him?” Beth leaned back, searching his eyes. “Adam?”

He nodded. “You remember the night that Colin asked me about him? Saw him in the team photo from the championship year and asked where he’d gone? Well, I told him he was still here, and I said… I said he was a private detective. He remembered that, apparently. And when Rachel decided to try and find her father…”

“She went to Adam.”

“Yes.”

They were silent. Kent finished his water. Neither of them turned on the lights.

“She was such a beautiful girl,” Beth whispered. “In every way. Too mature. You know I used to tell you that. Like she’d never been a girl, always had to be an adult.”

“I know.”

Beth wiped tears from her eyes with her fingertips. “She was going to do so much, Kent. She was one of those… you could just tell that she was going to do so much.”

Her voice trailed off and he reached out and stroked her hair as she took a shaking breath, folded her arms tightly around herself, and said, “By tomorrow morning, people will have heard what happened. Maybe before practice.”

“We won’t practice. I’ll say a few words, send them home.” He leaned against the counter and removed his baseball cap and ran a hand through his hair. “They’ll try to connect it to football. Make her a symbol, start dedicating games to her. I wish they wouldn’t.”

“They’re just boys.”

“It’s not going to be only the boys. It’ll be the parents, the fans, the guys on the radio. It’ll be the cheerleaders and the teachers and the janitors and even the police. All of a sudden a bunch of kids playing a game are going to represent something they should not.”

“Maybe that won’t happen.”

“Trust me,” he said. “It will.”

The police had finished with him before three, but Adam didn’t make it home until the sun was up. He went to his office—a convenient trip from the police station—and then he drove north to the lake. There, on the tumbled slabs of rocks that formed the breakwater, in the shadow of an empty mill that had once produced steel and now stood as a tired symbol of an age that had been gone for generations but that people still mourned as if it had just ended, he sat in the cold and drank from the bottle of whiskey he’d removed from his office. It was very good whiskey. Auchentoshan Three Wood, a fine Scotch. He kept only good stuff around his home and office. You didn’t drink the good stuff as fast, couldn’t afford to.

He drank it fast now.

Didn’t get much of it down.

As the moon went pale and then faded beneath the dawn’s lead light, Adam Austin vomited fine Scotch into Lake Erie and then he let himself weep, slipping down until one arm and one foot were in the frigid water, the wind heedless and unforgiving. This would make him sick, being both unprepared for the cold and unwilling to step out of it. It would infect him in time.

Why again? he thought. Why wasn’t bearing it once enough? How can it not be? He crawled back up the rocks and stared out at this lake that touched three other states and one other country in places he couldn’t see, this lake that was always cold, when you needed it to be and when you didn’t. Watched the horizon take shape and then, when it was bright enough or as close to bright as this day seemed inclined to get, he returned to his car and drove home. It was the only home he’d ever known, the home his parents had brought him to from the hospital, their firstborn son, firstborn child, eldest of three. He’d remodeled when he could afford to, replaced what he cared to. Other than the basics of the structure, there wasn’t much left to the house that recalled what it had once been. He’d changed almost everything.

Except for one room.

He walked to it now, stood in the dim upstairs hallway, and reached for the knob. Laid his hand on the chill metal and read the handwritten sign: MARIE LYNN AUSTIN LIVES HERE—KNOCKS REQUIRED, TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN! THANKS, BOYS! He shook his head. Not yet. He couldn’t enter like this, nothing more to show her than a drunk man with wet shoes and bile on his shirtsleeve and blood on his hands. More blood.

Instead, he went down the hall and peeled off his clothes and turned on the shower, looking into the mirror as the old water heater took its time limbering up and preparing for action. His eyes were dry now. They’d stay that way. He knew that.

“I’m coming for you,” he whispered, and then he thought that was a strange thing to tell your own reflection, and turned away.

7

WORD SPREADS FAST IN Chambers, Ohio. There was nothing in the morning newspaper, but his kids already knew, anyhow, and Kent was not surprised. It is a small town, close-knit. Or invasive. You picked the word depending on your role in it, the way it impacted you. The familiarity, the way everyone knew everyone else, either wrapped warm arms around you or pried with cold, cruel fingers. One of the boys on his team had a father with the police. Another had an uncle with the coroner’s office, a third had a mother who worked as an emergency dispatcher. It would have started with one of the three. Or maybe one with a connection he didn’t even know about, and it ultimately didn’t matter; somewhere, somehow, one of them would have heard, would have issued a late-night call or text message or e-mail, and that would have spawned a dozen like it, and most of the town probably woke to the news.

The weight of it was visible on them as they took to the field, parents walking down with their sons, parents who would ordinarily have sent their sons out into the cold day alone. This was one of the things that he liked about Chambers. It was small enough that people considered everything a shared experience. There was a positive to that. There was also a darkness. Those who never knew Rachel, who wouldn’t have recognized her in a grocery store checkout line, would today claim to remember her quick laugh and generous smile and kind spirit.

Except for the truly dark ones. For those exist in Chambers, too, make no mistake. Kent remembered them well. By noon today, someone would have voiced the first rumor— She was a little slut, you know. Or maybe it would be even worse, tinged with more of the things they attach to disaster in their private moments— I heard she was running around with some Mexican boy.

Only some of them would have memories of Rachel, but all of them would have a theory.

He stood in the center of the field as they gathered. There were a few nods exchanged, a few whispers, but no one actually said words of substance. They were waiting on him.

Remember Walter Ward, he thought, and he wished his old coach were here so bad it stung him, a child’s need, desperate and weakening. Take this one for me, Coach Ward, take this one and handle it the way you did once before, please.

But Walter Ward had been in Rose Hill Cemetery for six years now. By then he was more than an ex-coach, he was family, Kent’s father-in-law, and Kent had stood beside the open earth and delivered the eulogy. That earth would not offer his old coach back today. Kent had accepted the job from Ward, and all that came with it. This was one of those things. He’d never imagined it would be, and yet somehow he felt as if he couldn’t be surprised. Everything circled. Everything with teeth, at least, everything that snapped and bit and drew blood.

When the full team was gathered, he spoke. The crowd was well over a hundred deep. Lots of adults. Parents, mostly, but there were faces in the group he didn’t recognize.

“I expect most of you have heard,” he said, “but just in case you have not, let me explain that there will be no practice, and why not.”