Down River (14 page)

“Why did my father never tell me?”

“When you were young, he didn’t want to scare you. Didn’t want you worrying about ghosts and such, or the nature of mankind, for that matter. Then when you were older, Jamie and Miriam were too young. By the time you were all grown, I guess he just failed to get around to it. It’s no mystery, really.”

I edged closer to the pit, and my feet scraped on the raw granite. I leaned forward, but was not close enough to see down into the crack. I looked back at Dolf.

“What does this have to do with my father selling?”

“Your old man is like those Sapona. As far as he’s concerned, some things are just worth killing for.” I looked hard at the man. “Or dying,” he said.

“That right?” I asked.

“He’ll never sell.”

“Even if the farm goes bankrupt over Jamie’s vines?”

Dolf looked uncomfortable. “It won’t come to that.”

“You willing to bet on it?”

He declined to answer. I moved closer and leaned out over the cruel mouth, looked down the shaft. It was deep, lined with sharp protrusions of hard stone; but the sun angled in. I thought that I saw something down there.

“What did those archaeologists do with the remains?” I asked.

“Tagged ’em. Hauled ’em off. Sitting in boxes somewhere, I’d imagine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. Why?”

I leaned farther and squinted into the gloom. I got down on the warm stone and hung my head over the edge. I saw a pale, smooth curve, and below that a hollow place, and a row of small white objects, like pearls on a string; and a large dark hump of what appeared to be stained, rotting cloth.

“What does that look like to you?” I asked.

Dolf got down next to me. He stared for a good minute, wrinkled his nose, and I could tell that he smelled it, too, the faintest lick of something foul. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Do you have any rope in the truck?”

He rolled onto his side and the metal rivets of his jeans rasped on the stone. “Are you serious?”

“Unless you have a better idea.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dolf repeated, then got up and went to the truck.

   I tied the rope off with a clove hitch and dropped the loose coil over the edge. It flicked against the stone as it went down.

“Any chance you have a flashlight?”

He pulled one out of the truck, handed it to me. “You don’t have to do this,” Dolf said.

“I’m not sure what I see down there. Are you?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Positive?”

He did not answer, so I turned my back to the hole and grasped the rope. His hand gripped my shoulder. “Don’t do this, Adam. There’s no need.”

I smiled. “Just don’t leave me.”

Dolf muttered something that sounded like “dumb ass kid.”

I got down on my belly and slid my legs over the edge. I planted my feet, let them take what weight they could, put the rest on the rope. I caught Dolf’s eye once, and then I was in, the lip of the crevasse seeming to fold over me.

Cold crept up and the air thickened. I descended past layers of rock, and the descent tore the warm, bright world away. The sun abandoned me, and I felt them, three hundred of them, some still alive when they went in. For an instant, my mind got away from me. It was real, as if I could hear the crack of shot on rock, the high screams of women tossed in alive to spare the cost of a bullet. But that was centuries ago, a faint vibration in the ancient stone.

I slipped once, heard the rope sigh as my weight came onto it. I swung away from the wall, and the void tried to suck me down, but I didn’t stop. Ten feet more and the smell overwhelmed me. I forced a breath, but the stench was thick. I put a light on the body, saw twisted sticks of legs, and moved the light up. It struck the exposed curve of forehead bone, what had looked, from above, like an upturned bowl. I saw the hollow sockets, the tattered flesh, and teeth.

And there was something else.

I looked closer, saw denim turned to black, and a once white shirt now eggplant with seepage and decay. I almost threw up, and it wasn’t because of the colors or the smells.

I saw insects, thousands of them. They moved beneath the cloth.

And they made the scarecrow dance.

   Four hours later, under a vault of clear, sweet air, they hauled Danny Faith out of the ground. There was no pretty way to do it. They went down with a body bag, and used the winch on one the sheriff’s trucks. Even over the whine of it, I heard the scrape of the vinyl bag, the apologetic knock of bone on rock.

Three people followed the body out: Grantham, Robin, and the medical examiner. They wore respirators, but still looked as fragile and gray as charred paper. Robin refused to meet my eyes.

No one but me was saying for sure that it was Danny, but it was. The size was right, and the hair was hard to mistake. It was red and curly, not something you saw that often in Rowan County.

The sheriff made an appearance while the body was still in the hole. He spent ten minutes talking to his people, then to Dolf and to my father. I could see the animosity between them, the distrust and dislike. He spoke to me only once, and the hatred was there, too: “I can’t stop you from coming back,” he said. “But you shouldn’t have gone down there, you dumb shit.” He left right after that, like he’d done the only important job and still had better things to do.

I caught myself rubbing my hands on my thighs, like I could abrade away the smell or the memory of the damp rock. My father watched me, and I shoved my hands into my pockets. He seemed as stunned as I, and moved close every time Grantham approached with yet another question. By the time Danny left the knob for the last time, my father and I stood less than five feet apart, and our own troubles seemed reduced next to the awkward sack that refused to lie flat in the back of the sheriff’s truck.

But the body wasn’t there forever. The trucks dropped away and quiet descended again. We stood in a rough line by the broken stone, the three of us, and Dolf’s hat was in his hand.

Danny Faith was no more than three weeks dead; but for me, in some strange way, he’d been resurrected. Grace had been hurt, yes, but Danny had nothing to do with it. I felt the hatred slip away. In its place rose bittersweet relief, quiet regret, and no small amount of shame.

“Can I give you a ride back?” my father asked.

The wind moved his hair as I stared at him. I loved the man, but could not see a way past our problems. Worse, I did not know if I still had the energy to search one out. Our words came with cost. His nose was swollen where I’d punched him. “Why, Dad? What else is there to say?”

“I don’t want you to leave.”

I looked at Dolf. “You told him?”

“I’m tired of waiting for you two to grow up,” Dolf said. “He needs to know how close he is to losing you for good. Life is too damn short.”

I spoke to my father. “I’m staying for Grace’s sake. Not for you or anything else. For Grace.”

“Let’s just agree to be civil, okay? Let’s agree to that and see what the future brings.”

I thought about it. Danny was gone, and I guessed that there were still things to say. Dolf understood, and turned without speaking. “Meet us at the house,” my father called after him. “I think we can all use a drink.” Dolf’s truck coughed once before the engine caught.

“Civil,” I said. “Nothing has been resolved.”

“Okay,” my father said, then, “You really think it’s Danny?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

We stared for a long time at the black, black hole. It wasn’t the fact of Danny’s death or the questions that his death raised. The rift between us was as raw as ever, more so, and we were both reluctant to face it. It was easier to contemplate the dark slash in the earth, the sudden wind that pressed the thin grass flat. When my father finally chose to speak, it was of my mother’s suicide, and of the things I’d said.

“She didn’t know what she was doing, Adam. It didn’t matter if it was you or me. She’d chosen her moment for reasons we can never understand. She wasn’t trying to punish anyone. I have to believe that.”

I felt the blood leave my face. “This does not seem like the time to talk about it,” I said.

“Adam—”

“Why did she do it?” The question tore itself free.

“Depression does strange things to the mind.” I felt him looking at me. “She was lost.”

“You should have gotten her some help.”

“I did,” he said, and that stopped me. “She’d been seeing a therapist for most of that year, for all of the good that it did. He told me that she was improving. That’s what he said, and a week later she pulled the trigger.”

“I had no idea.”

“You weren’t supposed to. No kid should know that about his mother. Know that dredging up a smile took everything she had.” He waved a hand in disgust. “That’s why I never sent you to see a shrink.” He sighed. “You were tough. I thought you’d be okay.”

“Okay? Are you serious? She did it in front of me. You left me there, in the house.”

“Somebody had to go with the body.”

“I scrubbed her brains off the wall.”

He looked appalled. “That was you?”

“I was eight years old.”

He seemed to fall away from me. “It was a hard time,” he said.

“Why was she depressed? She’d been happy all of my life. I remember. She was full of joy and then she died inside. I’d like to know why.”

My father looked at the hole, and I knew that I had never seen such distress in his features. “Forget it, son. No good can come of it now.”

“Dad—”

“Just let her lie, Adam. What matters now is you and me.”

I closed my eyes and when I opened them I found my father standing before me. He put his hands on my shoulders again, as he had in his study.

“I named you Adam because I didn’t think that I could love anything more, because I was as proud on the day you were born as the good Lord must have been when he looked down on Adam himself. You are all that I have left of your mother, and you are my son. You will always be my son.”

I looked the old man in the eyes, found a hard place in my heart that all but destroyed me.

“God cast Adam out,” I said. “He never came back to the garden.”

Then I turned and let myself into my father’s truck. I looked at him through the open window. “How about that drink?” I asked.

   We drank bourbon in the study. Dolf and my father took it with water and sugar. I drank it neat. In spite of all that had happened, no one knew what to say. There was too much. Grace, Danny, the turbulence of my return. Harm seemed to lurk around every corner, and we spoke little, as if we all knew that it could still get worse. It was like a taint in the air, and even Jamie, who joined us ten minutes after the bourbon was poured, sniffed as if he could smell it.

After careful consideration, I told them what Robin had said about Grace. I had to repeat myself. “She was not raped,” I said again, and explained the nature of Grantham’s deception. My words dropped into the room with enough weight to take the floor from beneath us. My father’s glass exploded in the fireplace. Dolf covered his face. Jamie went rigid.

Then I told them about the note. “Tell the old man to sell.”

That sucked the air out of the room.

“This is intolerable,” my father said. “All of it. Every damn piece of it. What in God’s name is happening here?”

There were no answers, not yet, and in the painful silence I carried my glass to the sideboard for another drink. I tipped two fingers’ worth into my glass and patted Jamie on the shoulder. “How you doin’, Jamie?”

“Pour me another,” he said. I filled his glass, and was almost back to my seat when Miriam appeared in the door.

“Robin Alexander is here,” she said. “She wants to talk to Adam.”

My father spoke. “By God, I’d like to talk to her as well.” There was no mistaking the metal of his anger.

“She wants to talk to him outside. She says it’s a police matter.”

We found Robin in the yard. She looked unhappy to see all of us there. Once upon a time she had been a part of this family in every way that mattered.

“Robin.” I stopped on the edge of the porch.

“May I speak with you in private?” she asked.

My father answered before I could. “Anything you want to say to Adam, you can say to all of us. And I’d appreciate the truth this time.”

Robin knew that I’d told, that was clear in the way that she looked at the group of us, as if she was assessing a possible threat. “This would be easier if it was just the two of us.”

“Where’s Grantham?” I asked.

She gestured at her car, and I could see the silhouette of a man. “I thought that this might go better if it was just me,” she said.

My father stepped past me, down onto the grass, and he towered over Robin. “Anything that you have to say regarding Grace Shepherd or events that happened on my property you will, by God, say in my presence. I’ve known you a long time, and I am not scared to say how disappointed I am in you. Your parents would be ashamed.”

She eyed him calmly, and did not flinch. “My parents have been dead for some time, Mr. Chase.”

“May as well say it here,” I said.

No one moved or spoke. I was pretty sure what she wanted to talk about.

Then a car door slammed, and Grantham appeared around Robin’s shoulder. “Enough is enough,” he said. “We’ll do this at the station.”

“Am I under arrest?” I asked.

“I am prepared to take that step,” Grantham said.

“On what grounds?” Dolf demanded, and my father raised a hand, silencing him.

“Just what the hell is going on?” my father asked.

“Your son lied to me, Mr. Chase. I don’t take well to lies or to liars. I’m going to talk to him about that.”

“Come on, Adam,” Robin said. “Let’s go to the station. Just a few questions. A few discrepancies. It won’t take long.”

I ignored everyone else. Grantham disappeared, as did my father. The communication between Robin and me was complete; she understood that, too. “This is the line,” I said. “Right here.”

Her determination wavered, then firmed. “Would you step to the car, please.”