The Siege (24 page)

VI

A
n hour after the funeral, especially after he had changed out of his suit, Dale felt a slight measure of relief; and when he picked up Donna at her sister’s house, he felt even better. She was wearing jeans and a mint green sweater that did very little to hide the curves of her body. Without makeup, her face radiated a clean, natural beauty that, despite knowing her for so short a time, filled him with a bubbly, light-headed feeling.

“I hope Angie’s feeling all right,” Donna said as she slid into the front seat. She leaned forward and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. It was not as steamy as last night’s “heavy petting,” but Dale was just as glad to let things slow down… a little bit.

“I feel a little guilty, leaving her alone now,” Dale said, smiling weakly.

“We don’t have to do anything today,” Donna said quickly. “If you think you should spend the time with her, you should.”

Dale grunted and shook his head. “Well, I don’t know. She said she was feeling better. And Lisa and she were planning on going to a movie in Houlton. Mrs. Appleby was going to drive them. So—I guess she’ll be in good hands. She has to be out doing things to get her mind off it.”

“Getting over something like this takes a lot of time,” Donna said. She had her own thoughts about things that she had to get over. Thinking about Brad Phillips made her envy Angie and her grief in at least one respect: they both had to overcome the pain of losing someone they once loved but at least Angie didn’t have to get over the black poison of resentment!

Her smile was warm and sympathetic, and it made Dale like her all the more. He told himself he wasn’t in love but when he was honest with himself, he admitted that he felt good with her. Time spent with Donna was good and comfortable, as if they had known each other much longer than one day.

“She’ll do fine,” he said as his gaze drifted out toward the vault of the sky, and he really believed Angie would be fine eventually. But he honestly wondered if he himself would be fine again. The funeral had stirred up thoughts and feelings he had buried long ago. Memories of Natalie rose in his mind like dark fragments swirling in a ghastly stew.

And it certainly struck him as ironic, that he would meet someone like Donna when he least expected to. He had gotten used to living with his memories and his loss, and now here was Donna! He had no idea what her plans were; he knew she didn’t want to stay in Dyer for very long, but beyond that, she was evasive. On top of everything else, he felt like such a fool for even thinking about such things.

“I’ve already shown you all of Dyer’s hot spots,” Donna said. “What did you have in mind?”

For a moment, for the sake of levity, Dale almost said “Let’s drive out to the No-Tell Motel, rent a room, and screw until we’re raw!” But when he considered what he really intended to do, a sudden wave of darkness clouded his mind.

“You said yesterday you’d drive with me out to Casey’s Curve.”

Donna heaved a deep sigh as she looked him squarely in the eyes. “Don’t you think you might be…” She paused and drew another breath, choosing her words carefully. “Maybe pushing this a little too far?”

“What do you mean?”

They were driving down Burnt Mill Road, with the afternoon sun behind them, lighting up the town with a soft, golden light. Except for Sparky, still manning his post by the gas pumps, the town seemed all but deserted. The windows in the town building reflected back the sky like slabs of cool, black marble.

“I mean,” Donna said as Dale signaled and turned left onto Main Street, “that I’m beginning to worry about you just a little bit,” she hurriedly added.

“Because I want to go out there and have a look around?”

She nodded. “You don’t just want to, you
have
to!” she said, an edge of irritation creeping into her voice. “Why don’t you just forget about it? I mean, Larry’s dead and buried, and that’s that! Let him rest in peace.”

“Yeah, but that’s just it,” Dale said. “There are still a couple of things bothering me. And it’s not me alone; it’s Larry’s mother, too. I won’t rest easy until I check it out. I just think we might find something. I don’t know what! I just want to have a look around.”

As they approached the edge of town, Dale stepped down on the accelerator. Soon they were cruising south along Route 2A, his car negotiating the curves with solid ease.

Donna was silent for a while, having decided to let Dale have his way. She figured this was one way he had of laying Larry’s ghost to rest once and for all, so maybe after he did that, it would be over and they could get on with…

With what?
she wondered as she looked out at the wall of pine trees flashing past the window. What the hell exactly was happening between them? He certainly wasn’t any Brad Phillips, but you could never tell.

“It’s coming right up,” Donna said.

Dale eased up on the gas, and realized he had been lost in his own thoughts, completely unmindful of why he was driving out here.
Maybe
, he thought,
it has something to do with the winding road. It does sort of hypnotize you
.

“Just over this crest. There on the left.”

Dale checked his rear view mirror to make sure there were no cars behind him before pulling over to the left side of the road and stopping right in front of the rock that marked Casey’s Curve. He killed the engine, and he and Donna got out.

Dale noticed that here, so short a distance out of town, the forest began to reassert itself. Dyer was surrounded to the north and west by large expanses of potato fields, but to the south and east, towards Canada, it was all heavy forest, primarily towering spruce and pine. The wind swayed the tall tops of the trees which hissed like steam. The slanting sun had almost no chance of cutting through the thick growth, and everything was cast in deep shadow.

As they walked from the car toward the rock, three crows took flight from the pile of litter where they had been picking. Cawing rough protests at being disturbed, they wheeled overhead once and then vanished into the woods.

“Great omen,” Dale said. He was a bit surprised at himself for sounding so superstitious—
first Rodgers and his evil eye, and now three crows! Good way to end up in the funny farm
, he told himself.

The boulder on the side of the road was much larger than Dale had imagined it from Winfield’s description. It was twelve feet tall and covered an area of ground larger than three full-sized dump trucks. Rusted beer and soda cans, along with candy wrappers and empty potato chip bags, which the crows had been picking ranged the base of the rock like a filthy necklace.

Dale whistled between his teeth as he looked up at the rock. “Looks like the kids in these parts like to party out there,” he said.

Donna nodded. “It was the same back when I was in school. They like to sit up at the top at night, drinking beer or smoking pot, waiting to see if there’d be an accident.

“They’re not ambulance chasers; they let the ambulance come to them. Sounds like great fun!” Dale said, kicking up a clump of crumpled, sun-bleached litter.

Winfield had been right about one thing, though; the kids from surrounding towns had had a field day, spray-painting messages and pictures on the face of the rock.
Terry luvs Debbie
—(The “luvs” had been X-ed over and replaced with “rubs”),
Houlton Hornets Suck Shit, Eat The Rich
;
You can take away my Gusto, just keep your hands off my Busch
, along with the symbols of several high school fraternities and sororities and what Dale guessed were the logos of some current heavy metal bands. One particular drawing caught his eye: a scaly white snake, swallowing its own tail.

“I guess you couldn’t miss this in the dark,” Dale said, glancing at Donna.

She was lost in her own memories, thinking about the time, long ago, when Ralph Hutchins had painted
Ralph Loves Donna
on the rock. He had used Latex paint, and the message didn’t even survive one winter. But that was longer than the romance had lasted, she thought with a laugh.

“The thing is, it comes up kind of fast on you because of the crest back there,” she said, hiking her thumb back the way they had come.

Dale wandered around the rock, stumbling over the torn-open bag of garbage that was the departed crows’ supper. When he saw the swath Larry’s car had carved out of the woods, a thick lump formed in his throat and almost choked him. One edge of the rock looked freshly chipped, and at a sharp angle from there, a seven-foot-wide strip cut more than twenty feet into the brush. The trees that had finally stopped Larry’s progress had fresh gashes, like trail blazes left by a vicious woodsman.

“Goddamn!” Dale said when Donna came up behind him and slid her arm around his waist. “He must’ve been going sixty or seventy miles an hour to do this kind of damage.”

Donna said nothing; she simply stood there, shaking her head. Dale broke away from her and carefully walked the length of the clearing made by Larry’s car. Smaller trees were flattened, and the mulchy ground had twin runnels, several layers deep where the tires had skidded. He could see the deep tire imprints where the tow truck must have backed in to haul out Larry’s car.

For the next few minutes, Dale walked back and forth across the cleared area, bending low and carefully observing the ground. He really didn’t know what he was looking for; it certainly looked as though the police had done a thorough job of cleaning up. The woods would take its own time to heal the rest of the wounds.

“You know, one thing just keeps coming back to me,” Dale said when he rejoined Donna, who was still waiting at the edge of the road.

“What’s that?”

“How really God-damned pitiful it is that the reason Larry was up in this area in the first place was the reason he died. It was roads like this that the state wants to improve. We’ve certainly had enough complaints to warrant some improvements up here.”

Donna nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s just the curves in the road that cause accidents. If you’ve ever driven a long stretch of this road, you’d know it’s the monotony that gets you more than anything else. Just trees, and trees, and more trees! It can all sort of lull you, until you come to a sharp curve. Sometimes on a straight away, a logging truck will pull out on to the road from some timber road, and
whammo!
That’s it. You’re history. Of course, some people sort of add to it.”

“What do you mean?”

Donna shrugged and looked fearfully down the dark stretch of road. “Lots of people insist this stretch of road is haunted. You’ve got to admit, it is kind of creepy.”

“I suppose so,” Dale said, nodding agreement. He stood there silently for a moment, his chin in his hand, contemplating. At last, with a deep sigh, he said, “Yeah, but Larry was just heading out of town. He’d been on the road for what, a few minutes? He didn’t have time to get ‘highway-hypnotized.’ ”

“It was late at night,” Donna said. “Maybe he was overtired and shouldn’t have been driving.”

Dale shook his head. “Another thing I wonder is, why was he going so damned fast? I knew Larry. He wasn’t a hot-rodder. As a matter of fact, when he would drive me out to a construction site or something, I’d get frustrated at how slow he went. I always said he drove like an old lady. It just wasn’t like him to speed.”

“Yeah, but you’re forgetting how fast this turn comes up on you after that crest back there,” Donna said.

“And you’re forgetting that Larry grew up here. He knew this curve and this rock were here just as well as you did! You were in the same class as Larry, right?”

Donna nodded.

“How old were you when Casey totaled the school bus here?”

“I don’t know, maybe five or six.”

“But old enough to remember it, right?” Dale said.

“Oh, sure.”

“So,” Dale said, clapping his hands to his sides. “Larry wasn’t a dummy. He knew the curve and the rock were here. So why… why wasn’t he more careful? Unless maybe he was being followed. Or maybe chased?”

“Right,” Donna said, snorting with laughter. “He was—I’ve got it; he was running drugs from Canada, and the Mounties were after him. He died in the crash, and they confiscated the drugs, so there was a big cover-up. Starting with Jeff Winfield, who was getting a kickback from some Canadian drug lord. Right?”

Dale’s frown let her know immediately that he wasn’t amused. “I was thinking more along the lines of Franklin Rodgers,” he said. He tried, but wasn’t successful in keeping the image of Rodgers’ blue eye and dilated pupil from rising in his mind.

“Oh, yeah. Sure,” Donna went on, “Rodgers was in on the drugs. Larry was so pumped up, the last thing the authorities wanted was an autopsy, so Rodgers forced the closed casket on Mildred to hush everyone up.”

“That isn’t close to funny!” Dale shouted, suddenly turning on Donna with a blast of anger. “My best friend
died
here! And if you’re going to stand there making jokes about it, you can… you can…”

“Hey! Come on,” Donna said. She came up close to him and slid both arms around his waist. “I was just trying to make you see how silly it is for you to be getting all worked up about this.” She pulled his face down toward hers and gave him a long, slow kiss. Her tongue darted into his mouth, and she made a soft moaning sound as she hugged him closer.