Bad Men (2003) (24 page)

Dupree poured some of the green tea into one of Amerling’s delicate little Chinese cups. He held the cup gently in the palm of his hand. The three men exchanged pleasantries and island gossip for a time before lapsing into an uneasy silence. Dupree had spent the morning trying to put his concerns into words, to explain them in a way that did not make him sound like a superstitious fool. In the end, Amerling saved his blushes.

“Jack’s here for the same reason you’re here, I think,” Amerling began.

“Which would be?”

“There’s something wrong on the island.”

Dupree didn’t respond. It was Jack who spoke next.

“I thought it was just me, but it isn’t. The woods feel different, and…”

“Go on,” said Amerling.

Jack looked at the policeman.

“I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you’re thinking, least of all not enough for this.”

“I didn’t think that at all,” said Dupree. There was no way to tell if he was lying or not.

“Well, you may reconsider when you hear this. My paintings are changing.”

Dupree waited a heartbeat.

“You mean they’re getting better?”

There was a burst of laughter that eased the tension a little and seemed to relax the painter slightly.

“No, smart-ass. They’re as good as they’re gonna get. There are marks appearing on the canvases. They look like men, but I didn’t put them there. They’re in the sea paintings and now they’re in some of the landscapes as well.”

“You think someone is sneaking into your house and painting in figures on your work?”

He tried to keep the disbelief from his voice. He almost succeeded, but Jack spotted it.

“I know it sounds weird. The thing of it is, these figures aren’t painted on.”

He reached down to the floor and lifted up a board wrapped in an old cloth. He removed the cloth, revealing one of his seascapes. Dupree stepped closer and saw what looked like two men in the shallows. They were little more than stick figures, but they were there. He reached out a finger.

“Can I touch it?”

“Sure.”

Dupree ran his finger over the board, feeling the traces of the brush strokes against his skin. When he came to the figures, he paused, then raised the tips of his fingers to his nose and sniffed.

“That’s right,” said Jack. “They’ve been burned into the board.”

He picked up a second painting and handed it to Dupree.

“You know what this is?”

Dupree felt uncomfortable even looking at the painting. It was certainly one of Jack’s better efforts. He sucked at sea and hills, but he did good trees. They were mostly bare and in the background of the picture, almost hidden by mist, Dupree could make out a stone cross. It was definitely a departure for the painter.

“It’s the approach to the Site,” he said. “I have to tell you, Jack, you’re never going to sell this painting. Just looking at it gives me the creeps.”

“It’s not for sale. I do some of these for, well, I guess out of my own curiosity. Tell me what you see.”

Dupree held the painting at arm’s length and tried to concentrate on it.

“I see trees, grass, marsh. I see the cross. I see—”

He stopped and peered more closely at the detail on the canvas.

“What is that?”

Something gray hung in the dark place between two trees, close by the cross. He almost touched it with his finger, then thought better of it.

“I don’t know,” said Jack. “I didn’t paint it. There are others, if you look hard enough.”

And there were. The closer he looked, the more apparent they became. Some were barely blurs, the kind of smears that appeared on photographs when someone moved and the shutter speed was kind of slow. Others were clearer. Dupree thought he could distinguish faces among them: dark sockets, black mouths.

“Are these painted on?”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “They look painted to you?”

“No, they look like photographs.”

“You still afraid I might be drinking too much?”

Dupree shook his head. “I’d say you’re not drinking enough.”

Amerling spoke.

“You going to tell me you came here because you’re worried about raccoons, or have you felt something too?”

Dupree sighed. “Nothing specific, just an unease. I can’t describe it, except to say that it’s a sensation in the air, like the prelude to an electrical storm.”

“That’s about as good a description as I’ve heard. Other people have felt it too, the older folk, mostly. This isn’t the first time something like this has occurred. It happened before, in your daddy’s time.”

“When?”

“Just before George Sherrin disappeared, but it wasn’t quite like this. That buildup came quickly, maybe over a day or two, then was gone again just as quickly. This one is different. It’s been going on for longer.”

“How long?”

“Months, I’d say, but it’s been so gradual most people haven’t even noticed it until now, if they’ve noticed it at all.”

“But you did?”

“I’ve been feeling it for a while. It was the accident that confirmed it; the accident, and what the Lauter girl said before she died.”

“She was in pain. She didn’t know what she was saying.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do either.”

“She was talking about the dead.”

“I know.”

Dupree walked to the window of the little office and looked out on Island Avenue. It was quiet, but it wasn’t peaceful. Instead, it was like a community awaiting the outbreak of some long-anticipated conflict, or perhaps that was just a tormented policeman, a drunk, and an old romantic trying to impose their own interpretation on an innocent world.

“People have died on the island before now, some of them pretty violently,” Dupree said. “We’ve had car crashes, fires, even a homicide or two. You think they all saw ghosts before they died?”

“Maybe.”

Amerling paused.

“But I’d guess not.”

“So why the Lauter girl, and why now?”

“Your father, he told you about the island?”

Once again, Dupree glanced at Jack. He remembered taking the old man out on his porch, after Danny Elliot had found him with blood pumping from a deep scalp wound. He had been furious with the painter, maybe because he saw in him some of his own flaws, but mostly because he had scared the boy. Now he was about to reveal a part of himself that he had kept hidden from everyone. Jack, however long he might have been on the island, was still an outsider.

Amerling guessed his thoughts.

“If you’re worried about Jack, then I’d lay those worries to rest. He’s more sensitive to this place than some who have grandparents buried in the cemetery. I think you can speak safely in front of him.”

Dupree raised his hands helplessly before the painter.

“I understand,” said Jack. “No hard feelings.”

“He told me,” began Dupree. “He went through the histories of the families, right from day one. He made me memorize them all. He told me about the slaughter and the new settlement that followed later. He told me about George Sherrin and why he thought Sherrin had been taken. He told me all of it. I never fully understood. I don’t think I even believed some of it.”

“But he tried to explain it to you?”

“Yes. He told me what he himself believed. He believed that this place was always different. The natives didn’t come out here, and they used most of these islands before the whites arrived, but for some reason they wouldn’t come out to this one.”

Amerling interrupted. “They had pretty good reasons for not coming here. This island is kind of an anomaly. It’s big, but it’s way out on the outer ring. They only had bark canoes to get them out here. I think it was just too far away for them to worry about it.”

“Well, anyhow, then the settlers came,” continued Dupree, “and they were killed. My father thought like his father: what happened to them tainted the island, and some remnant, some memory of those events, clung to this place. The violence of the past never went away. Something of it stayed here, like a mark in stone. Now there’s a balance on the island, and anything that endangers that balance has to be dealt with. If it isn’t…”

He swallowed the last of the tea.

“If it isn’t dealt with, then something else on the island will deal with it in its own way. My father thought that it had found a way to purge itself of anything that might threaten it, the way a person’s system will flush out toxins. That’s what happened to Sherrin. He was toxic, and the island dealt with him. That’s what my father believed.”

He finished and stared at the leaves in the bottom of his cup. It sounded absurd, but he remembered the look on his father’s face as he told him the history of the island. His father was not a superstitious man. In fact, he was the most realistic, no-bullshit man that Dupree had ever met. Frank Dupree was the kind of man who would carry his own ladder around with him just so he could walk under it to show up more credulous folks.

Amerling poured himself some more tea, then offered the pot to Dupree. The policeman declined.

“Why do you drink this stuff, anyway?”

“It keeps me calm,” said Amerling.

After a pause, Dupree reconsidered and extended his cup. “Any port in a storm,” he said.

“Your father knew that this place was different,” said Amerling. “We talked about it some, and we both came to more or less the same conclusion. Sometimes, bad things happen in a place and it never truly recovers. The memory of it lingers. Some people are sensitive to it, some aren’t. I read once that Tommy Lee Jones, you know, that actor fella, he lived in the cottage where Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, or was murdered, or whatever you believe took her from this earth. Didn’t bother Tommy Lee Jones none. He’s not that kind of fella, from what I’ve read. But me, I don’t think I could have lived in a place like that, knowing what happened there. I believe, and I may be a fool, that something of its past must remain there, like damp trapped in its walls.

“What happened on Sanctuary was so much worse than a single murder. Like you say, it tainted this island, marked it forever. Then a bunch of rapists took a woman here a long time after, and they disappeared. Flash forward to George Sherrin, and he winds up under the roots of a tree. I was there when they dug him up, and I saw what the roots had done to him.”

Amerling leaned forward, grasping the teacup in both hands.

“He was an evil son of a bitch. There were stories about him, after he died. He tormented and abused his own children and they say he might have hurt children on the mainland.”

“I heard that too,” said Dupree. “My father believed it was so.”

“Well, if your daddy believed it, then it was true. I got no doubt in my mind now. The island, or whatever dwells here, wouldn’t tolerate him, and it got rid of him. There’s no better way of putting it than that.”

“But where does that leave the Lauter girl, and Wayne Cady? You’re saying they deserved what happened to them?”

“No, I don’t think the island played any part in that. They died because they’d been drinking and decided to boost a car. But I think something was drawn to that place as they died, because there’s an awareness now. This tension that we’ve all felt, it’s there for a purpose. I think when the crash happened, the nature of the tragedy—sudden, frightening—drew something. It came to see what was happening.”

“Something? Something like what?”

“I don’t know. Have you been out to the Site lately?”

“Not for a while.”

“It’s almost impossible to get to. The path’s become overgrown. There are fallen trees, briers. Even the marshes seem to be getting bigger.”

“You said ‘almost impossible.’ Does that mean you’ve been out there?”

Amerling paused. “Yesterday. Jack went with me. We didn’t stay too long.”

“Why?”

“It’s stronger out there. It’s like getting too close to the bars of the lion’s cage. You can feel the threat.”

“And there are no birds,” said Jack.

“Not out there, not anywhere,” said Amerling. “Haven’t you noticed?”

To tell the truth, Dupree hadn’t, but now that he thought about it, there was a silence to the island that he had never experienced before. The only bird that he had seen was the dying gull on Marianne’s lawn.

“That’s where your daddy and I differed about the island. He believed it was something unconscious, like a force of nature. A tree doesn’t think about repairing breaches in its bark, it just does it. He thought the island operated on that level.”

“But you don’t?”

“No, and the Lauter girl’s last words just confirm what I believe. Whatever is out there is conscious. It thinks, and reasons. It’s
curious
. And it’s getting stronger.”

Jesus, thought Dupree, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. If anyone from the department heard me, they’d have me jacketed and locked up in a padded room. But the brass don’t come out here, so they don’t know what it’s like. They don’t understand it. Most of them don’t understand much about any of the islands, but this one in particular is beyond them. All I can do is hope that nothing happens that would force me to try to explain it to them.

Well, Chief, I guess you could say that the island is haunted, and I think some dead people came to take a look at Sylvie Lauter. Oh, they had lights, did I mention that? They must go through a hell of a lot of batteries, so that’s our main lead. We’re scouring the island for batteries…

“So, why now? Why should it be so strong now?”

“A convergence of circumstances, maybe. A new factor on the island that we don’t recognize, or haven’t noticed.”

“You’re thinking it’s dangerous?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you think it’s—” Dupree paused, uncertain that he wanted to use the word that came to mind, then relented.

“Do you think it’s evil?”

“Evil, that’s a moral concept, a human concept,” said Amerling. “It could be that whatever is on this island has got no concept of morality and no need for it. It just wants what it wants.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know that. If I knew it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I’m not sure I even want to be having this conversation as it is.”