The Fall of Never (21 page)

“So what’s really the problem?”

“Maybe,” he said, “you feel bad for leaving your family behind. Maybe you feel bad for leaving
Becky
behind.”

The concept was nothing new—in fact, she’d thought it herself several times—but Gabriel’s words struck her like a hammer whacking a gong nonetheless. She’d just needed to hear someone else say it.

“I think maybe you’re right,” she said. “So how do I fix that? How do I make up for lost time and fix those mistakes?”

For some reason, she anticipated some grand solution to come from Gabriel Farmer—something that would make everything all better and heal old wounds, erase the ugly scars.

“I don’t know,” was all he wound up saying.

Just as Kelly and Gabriel entered Gabriel’s tiny apartment, Detective Felix Raintree parked his sedan outside the police station. He wasn’t thinking about old wild-eyed Graham Rand; rather, he was silently observing the weather. It had gotten cold feverishly quick this year, and winter wasn’t even fully upon them. Lawns were already stiff with frost. Windows had been shut and locked weeks ago, heaters already pumping.

Going to be brutal this year,
he thought to himself as he mounted the front steps of the station.

Inside, Annie Haas, the station’s dispatcher, sat at her desk with her face buried in a desk drawer, as if searching for something. Behind her on the desk was a small Philco radio from which Billie Holiday gently worked through “Solitude.” Annie, who normally communicated an air of pleasant contentment to those around her, looked frazzled and even a bit irritated. As Raintree approached her desk, she looked up sharply and nearly sighed with relief at the sight of the detective.

“Felix,” she said.

“What’s the matter? You look distraught.”

“Mr. Rand. He’s just been getting me so uptight and nervous, walking around the way he was.”

“Where is he?”

“I told him to wait in your office.”

“Sheriff?”

“He went home,” Annie said. Raintree had a distaste for Sheriff Alan Bannercon, a young fellow from Shitpoke, Kentucky who, the detective surmised, would probably have himself a difficult time if he ever had to distinguish his handgun from his nose-picking finger.

“And Sturgess?”

“Out on a call. Mr. Rand was quite adamant about speaking with you, Felix.”

“Rather,” Raintree mused. He slid off his overcoat and, standing on one foot, leaned over Annie’s desk to peer through the wire-mesh glass wall and into his own office. The shades were half-drawn. He could make out a flannel hunting jacket pacing back and forth from behind them.

Felix Raintree really had no problem with old Graham Rand—he was a lonely, keep-to-himself widower with an excruciatingly dull life and a severe imagination that compensated for such dullness. To date, and since the death of his wife three years ago, Graham Rand had professed to several members of the Caliban County Police Department that he’d seen the ghost of his dead wife roughly sixty-three times since her demise. Sometimes she was standing out in the yard, half-hidden behind a huddle of blue spruce; other times, he claimed to have opened the bathroom door only to find the poor dead woman using the toilet, or sponging herself in the bath. Or sometimes just standing there in the middle of the night at the foot of his bed. Usually Graham Rand made these claims while in his cups and seated on a bar stool at Rita’s; other times, he called the station and insisted someone be sent over immediately. Being the patient and good-natured soul that he was, Raintree usually found himself volunteering to drive out to the old Rand place. Soon, Graham Rand began asking for him by name.

Raintree knocked his boots against the wall, leaving splatters of melted frost on the linoleum. “Coffee on?” he called to Annie.

“I’ll put some on.”

“Don’t bother,” he said and entered his office.

Graham Rand was seventy-seven and looked twice that. He was as thin and as spindly as an uprooted weed. To Raintree, Rand’s face looked as if someone had untied some essential knot at the back of the old man’s head, allowing nearly eight decades of cheesecloth flesh to hang loose. He had the jowls of a junkyard bulldog and the head-works of a common house rodent that’d been cracked over the cranium one too many times with the business end of a broom.

Rand paused in midpace as Raintree entered the office, his hands frozen in a death-grip around his wool hunting cap. His granite-colored eyes were wide and obtrusive.

“Detective,” Rand said.

“Graham,” Raintree said, moving behind his desk and taking a seat. There was a sharp draft coming from a crack in the windowpane behind his head—he could feel it on the nape of his neck when he leaned back. “You could take a seat.”

“Thank you.” The old man dropped into the wooden chair on the other side of Raintree’s desk. So thin, he appeared to be swimming inside his hunting coat.

“Annie says you had some trouble up in the woods today?”

“Oh, yes.” He was fidgeting and looked uncertain where to begin. “I was out most of the day. Collecting box-traps. It sometimes takes a while, having to stick them way out past the yard—”

“I’ve told you about trapping squirrels, Graham.”

“They get into my shed, tear apart the birdseed, tear apart the fertilizer. Damn things already gnawed the life out of my spark-plug wire on my mower…”

“What happened?”

“One of them varmints chewed right through the wire.”

“No,” he said, “what happened today in the woods?”

“Oh.” His eyes were red and shifty and Raintree guessed the man had been drinking. “Well, it was just starting to get dark—sun was just slipping through the mountains out west, could see it through the trees—and I’m out collecting the last of the box-traps when I heard something. Sounded like someone laughing. Well, I stood stark still and started looking around—you know how I don’t cotton to folks trespassing, and I own that whole lot right until that valley begins, and then it belongs to Mr. Kellow…”

“Someone laughing?”

“Yes, sir. And it sounded close by, but I didn’t see nobody when I looked up. But like I said, it was getting dark and things in the woods tend to look funny in the dark.”

Raintree leaned forward in his chair. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, working the cold out of it.

“Anyhow, I shout out, ‘Who’s there?’ but no one answers, so I think maybe it was an owl or whippoorwill or something and I start heading back home. And then I stop because I saw something on the ground.”

In one quick motion—quite agile for such an old man—Rand pulled open the snaps of his jacket with his left hand and dove into the jacket’s lining with his right. In that instant, Raintree had time to think,
Dear God, I think the old coot is actually going to pull out a gun and shoot me.
But Rand didn’t pull out a gun. What he pulled out was a wool hunting cap, nearly identical to the one he’d been wringing through his hands just moments before, except this one was green, not red.

Rand slammed the cap down on Raintree’s desk. “I found this,” he said with as much conviction as someone who’d just presented incontestable evidence that there was life on Mars.

“A hunting cap,” Raintree said.

“A hunting cap belonging to one of
them,”
Rand said, and pulled back the inner lining of the cap, exposing the brand tag. Two initials were written on the tag in permanent marker: J.M.

“Them?” Raintree said.

“One of them hunters that disappeared,” Rand said, now with some agitation. “One of them fellas was named Justin McCullum, am I right, sir?”

“Shoot,” Raintree said, reaching out and grabbing the cap from the old man’s gnarled fingers. “You playing some kind of head-game with me, Graham? That’s serious business with those hunters, you know…”

“No games, Detective, no way.” He thrust a finger at the hunting cap. “Sure as shade, that cap belonged to one of them disappeared hunters, I’ll bet any amount of money on it. I read the names in the papers last month when everyone was out looking for them and I know one of those names was Justin McCullum, know it just like I know my own shoe size. I’m right, yes?”

Raintree sighed. The cap was still damp from having been out in the woods—presumably for a month, if the old man’s story was authentic. “Justin McCullum,” he acknowledged, “yes, one of the hunters. You found this where? Could you take me back to the spot where you found it?”

The old man’s face grew dark. Jesus save the world, his eyes just wouldn’t
stop.

You’re pumped up a good one there, pal,
Raintree thought.

“I ain’t going back.” Rand’s voice suddenly sounded very small.

“And why is that?”

“I can tell you where I found it, right down to this rock and that tree, but I ain’t going back in those woods. Not now, not tonight and in the dark.”

“Why not, Graham?”

“That cap,” Rand said, and now he was nearly whispering, “ain’t the only thing I found out there tonight.”

Graham Rand had become a small, helpless child before Raintree’s eyes. He watched him—watched his eyes, really, those crazy and rolling eyes—regress until there was no sense behind them. Only fear. Basic, animal fear—like the unencumbered fear of small children.

“What else did you see out there tonight?” Without realizing, Raintree’s own voice came out in a whisper.

“A man,” Rand said.

“A man.”

“I think it was a man. It was dark. A man…or a boy. It was male.”

“This is the person you heard laugh?”

“Oh, I’m certain of it.”

“Did you recognize this man?”

“No, sir.”

“It was too dark?”

“Well, too dark…but not just the dark, you know what I mean?”

“I don’t think I do.”

“I didn’t recognize him because…well, Detective…he didn’t seem like no man I’d ever seen before.”

“A stranger? Not someone from town?”

“Not someone from…” Rand’s rheumy eyes narrowed. He chose his words. “Not someone
real,
Detective. At least, not someone I’d ever imagine seeing in town. Or in any other town anywhere else for that matter.”

“I’m not following you, Graham.”

“Don’t think it’s nonsense—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“All right.”

“Just explain to me who—explain to me what you saw tonight.”

Rand worked his livery lips together, created a slightly irritating clicking sound. His hands had gone back to torturing his own hunting cap. “I caught him out of the corner of my eye just as I was heading back to the house. He was running, moving fast, and half-hidden behind some trees. He was deeper in the woods, an’ toward the northeast where the woods was already grown dark. But I saw him and he saw me, too—I’m pretty certain of that—and I think he
wanted
me to see him.”

“Why did you say he was like no other person you’d ever imagine seeing?” Raintree asked. “I don’t understand that part, Graham.”

“I was afraid,” Rand said frankly, unashamed. “It was like a warning came with him, maybe some warning that followed him in the air, I don’t know. But there was
something
there, sure as I’m sitting right here in front of you. Something. Just something, Detective.”

“Could you describe him? What was he wearing?”

To the detective’s astonishment, Graham Rand let out a small chuckle. But it was a nervous chuckle. Rand was still that child sitting before him. “That’s the other strange thing,” the old man said. “He wasn’t wearing no clothes.”

Raintree blinked. “He was naked?”

“As a jay bird, at least from what I could tell.” Rand swallowed a lump of spit that, from his expression, apparently felt like a golf ball going down. “And his skin was white, like snow. Or like—you know, when a dead body’s been laying around? Just white. Like no skin I’d ever seen before in my life. Not on anything alive, anyway.”

“Like snow,” Raintree repeated. If it wasn’t for the hunting cap, Raintree would have smiled at the story, patted the old man on the back, and bought him a cup of coffee. But that cap—J.M.—was here, dampening the Xeroxed papers that it rested upon. Smelling of cedar and winter and, faintly, soil. There was no denying the cap. Also, there was the fact that this strange man—this strange
naked
man—had frightened this poor old fellow enough to keep him out of the woods. And Graham Rand
loved
the woods. It was all he had.

“Ain’t making this up, Detective,” Rand said, mistaking Raintree’s silence for disbelief.

“Did this person just disappear?”

“Ran off into the woods. I said it was dark.”

“What direction?”

“Northeast, just like I said.”

“And he looked at you?”

“Yes, sir. Saw him turn his head as he ran. It was quick and I suppose if my eyes weren’t as good as they are—twenty-twenty, you know, all my life—then I wouldn’t have even noticed. But I noticed, all right. And then he just took off deeper into the woods.”

“What did he look like?”

“Not sure. Face was…I don’t know…kinda smeary.”