Moonbog (35 page)

Les stood on his tiptoes, straining to see if he could read the headlines of the paper Marshall had been studying. All he could see was one word of the headline:
ANOTHER
. Just below that was a grainy photograph that Les could not make out.

Concentrating so much on the newspaper, Les forgot about Marshall, who was standing by the counter mixing sugar and milk into his coffee. As Marshall turned to put his spoon into the sink, their eyes met and locked.

Les was frozen for a second, like an animal in the glare of approaching headlights. He heard Marshall shout, “Hey! What the hell?” as he ducked down, pressing his back against the clapboard side of the house. He heard the thumping steps of the old man as he started for the front door.

“Goddamn!” Les muttered, squeezing the butt of his revolver as he aimed it at the door. “
Goddamn!
”

When a light suddenly washed over Les, he thought for a moment that the old man had turned on his outside light. But the light moved. Les glanced down the driveway, and saw that a car had turned into the driveway and was nearing the house.

“Fuck!” His eyes jumped nervously from the approaching car to the front door. As the door opened a crack, Les dropped into a standing crouch and started moving away from the house, back toward the woodpile. All the while his eyes shifted from the car to the door and back again.

The light beside Marshall’s front door came on as the door opened wider. Les raised the pistol and shot once, the report deafening him for a moment. He ran to the woodpile, not bothering to see if his shot hit. The headlights from the car in the driveway shot up over his head, illuminating the large bulk of the tree in the backyard.

As the car pulled to a stop, Les glanced back and saw Marshall dash from the house. He knew he was safe, undetected at least for the moment. The old man stood in the center of his walkway, gawking this way and that as he scanned the surrounding night; Les couldn’t tell if he had been hit or not.

Les cursed softly under his breath and wished that he now had the time to take a careful aim. He’d get that old fucker right between the goddamn eyes!

Les watched from the border of the lawn, confident that even if he was seen he could easily lose any pursuit in the woods. No one knew the Bog at night better than he did. He waited for a moment, listening, tensed, then turned and ran into the dark woods. The last thing he heard from the direction of the old man’s house was the sound of the car’s engine idling.

After he had run about a hundred yards or so into the woods, Les halted and listened. The night sounds of the Bog filled his ears. The memory of his earlier panic filled him with apprehension, but he mastered the fear, held it in check. As far as he could tell, no one was following him. He wondered if the old man would be fool-hardy enough to try to run him down.

“Let him try,” Les muttered, slapping his revolver in his hand. “Just let him try.”

Les stood in the darkness of the woods for a long time wondering what to do next. He knew he should probably just get on home before Leah wondered where he was. But he was also wondering who had driven up into Marshall’s yard.

What if it was Shaw and that statie, Porter?
Les thought.
What if they were coming out now to talk with that old fucker and find out what he knows? Should I go back and find out?

Les was pretty sure Marshall hadn’t recognized him outside the window. Pretty sure—but it wouldn’t take a hell of a lot of brain power to figure out who would be creeping around his house at night; not if Marshall knew what Les had done.

And if it
did
turn out to be Shaw and Porter, they just might come out looking for him if the old man had gotten scared enough to spill his guts.

“Shit!” Les hissed, kicking at the decaying leaves underfoot. He wanted to know, but the chances were just too great.

One final thought crossed Les’ mind before he turned and started through the woods, making a wide circle that would bring him down to the road where he had left his car:
What if that one shot—one-in-a-hundred—one-in-a-thousand—hit the old fucker? What if that old son of a whore is lying on his doorstep right now, slowly bleeding to death?

“It’ll serve that bastard right,” Les whispered, walking silently along a narrow trail. The swelling sound of the spring peepers grew in intensity, but it hardly bothered Les now, he barely heard it; his mind was filled with what he had to do next—provided he hadn’t gotten his one-in-a-thousand shot already.

VIII

A
fter the phone call from Allison, David had spent another hour or so sitting on his bed, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. After the initial nausea of smoking again after a year, he was surprised at how rapidly his body adjusted to the intake of nicotine. An occasional wave of dizziness made him glad that he was lying on the bed, but he realized as he looked over at the nearly full ashtray, that he should eat something soon—if only to help settle his churning stomach.

Grunting loudly, he stood up beside the bed. For a moment he felt as though he would crumple back down, but he braced himself and walked into the bathroom. After splashing water onto his face and brushing his teeth vigorously, he got dressed. It was time to go for a drive—to get something to eat to help him clear his head.

He stepped outside the motel room and tugged on his jacket. The late afternoon sun hit his eyes. He squinted, shielding his eyes as he walked down to the car.

His first thought was to go down to the Sawmill and have a quick bite to eat, then come back to the motel and sleep. As he drove down Main Street, though, he realized that in all likelihood, everyone at the Sawmill would be talking about yesterday’s discovery of the Hollis boy. He decided that the last thing he needed was a fresh reminder of finding Billy Wilson last weekend, so he drove straight through town and down Route 302 to North Windham. There was a restaurant there, just out of town, called The Red Sands. They had a reputation for the best seafood in the area, and David wanted to see if their reputation was still deserved.

Two hours later the sun had set. Feeling well-stuffed with boiled lobster and a hearty salad in his stomach David drove back to Holland satisfied and tired. He had bought another pack of cigarettes, but had restricted his smoking because he was already thinking about stopping again.

As he drove up Main Street, he considered going back to the motel, but then the thought that Allison might call just to get in one more last dig made him turn around and head back on into town. He drove the length of Main Street again and was about to turn around and go back when he got the idea to go out to his uncle’s house for one final visit.

Before he and Allison had had the big blow-up, he had been pretty much decided on letting Sidney Latham and his contractor buddy have the property. He suspected that he could get a better price, but with the economy the way it was and feeling anxious to be rid of the old albatross, he figured he could get a quick closing, get the money, and then maybe drive on up into Canada as he and Allison had originally planned.

“
Voulez vous à couchez avec moi?
” he said aloud to himself, repeating the only sentence of French he knew. An old college buddy had told him that was all he had to know to have a good time in Quebec. He smiled, thinking of the prospects; a hell of a lot better than hanging around in Holland for another week or more, trying to milk a little extra money out of the property sale.

He turned right onto the Little River Road. As he drove toward Marshall’s, he found himself forgetting about Allison and thinking about his boyhood. At the wooden bridge, he unconsciously raised his feet from the floor of the car so Old Man Troll wouldn’t grab at him.

The abrupt change in the landscape as he approached the old homestead always surprised him. It seemed as though one minute you were in a thickly settled area, almost suburbia, and then you were lost somewhere in the boondocks. Just like the old joke: blink your eyes and you’ve missed the town. But the old joke didn’t make David smile as he looked out at the desolate Bog, swallowed by the thick blackness of the night.

“Old Man Troll
is
out there,” he whispered to himself, shivering at the sight of the jagged line of trees standing out against the night sky like a violent slash.

What black shadows moved in the Bog, he wondered.

When he came up to the old homestead on the left, David stepped on the gas pedal just a bit harder, not even bothering to lock up at the darkened old place. He felt its looming presence behind the screen of trees, but he tried to ignore it, telling himself that at least that part of his life was signed, sealed, and just about delivered. He continued up the road until he came to the turn for Marshall’s driveway.

As he started to take the turn, his eye caught a quick flash off to the right. His headlights had reflected off something and he gave it little thought, figuring it was probably just a beer can or something tossed out of a car by a passing motorist.

He hesitated for a moment at the foot of the driveway, asking himself why he was bothering to do this. His last interaction with Marshall had been cold to the point of blatant rudeness. Why not just leave the old man in peace? If he didn’t want his last living relative to bother him, why push it?

“The old man lives alone,” David said softly as he looked up in the direction of the house. “That’s the way he likes it, and that’s the way it will always be.”

David grinned tightly, shook his head, and decided on one last try. Like the sale of the property, he felt his relationship with Marshall was signed, sealed, and just about delivered. After this weekend, he could scratch the old homestead, Uncle Marshall, and Holland, Maine, out of his life forever!

As he drove up the steep incline, David still felt doubt as to what he was doing. But as he crested the hill and his headlights swept across the front of the house, he saw the light on the porch come on. Marshall now knew he had a visitor.

“Hell,” he said aloud, “might’s well go through with it.”

He started to slow his car, and as the lights swung around, David saw something that made a surprised gasp catch in his throat. He saw an indistinct form, a dark shape against the darker woods behind, shift silently like a shadow and dissolve into the night.

“What the—” He hit the brakes hard, making the tires skid in the loose gravel. The hissing sound masked the sound of the gunshot, and David thought his muffler had backfired.

It had just been an instant—barely perceived before it shifted and blended into the dark enfolding forest, but in that instant, David felt a sudden sinking in his stomach.

—A massive, black shadow loomed over him, blotting out the night sky.

David stopped his car and then jockeyed it around until the lights washed over the spot where the shape had disappeared. For a brief moment he thought that perhaps he had seen nothing, but some deeper level of his mind sounded an alarm.

David sat still, staring off into the darkness as the memory of what he and Allison had seen last Friday night as they were driving into town, rose unbidden.

“Could that have been—?” he said, mouthing the words to himself.

He stared into the darkness, trying to peel it away to see who had been outside his uncle’s house.

“Could that have been the same person who . . . who . . . who had killed Billy Wilson?”

David knew it was impossible to know for certain, and he immediately determined that he might not have seen anybody just now; it might have been a shadow from the trees, or a dog, or something—anything! Almost anything would be enough, he thought, to remind him of the person he had seen in the Bog before he found Billy Wilson. Hell, maybe he had smoked too many cigarettes and had had a momentary hallucination.

He shut off the motor of the car and sat for a moment longer with his head out the window. He listened intently but could only hear the chorus of spring peepers that filled the night.

Marshall had come to the door and walked down to the driveway. He stood there, halfway between the house and David’s car. David got out and started up the walkway toward his uncle, wondering if Marshall had come out because he had heard the car coming up the road or if he, too, had realized that there had been someone snooping around outside his house.

“Evening,” David said, as he came up to Marshall. He forced the edge from his voice, jammed his hands into his pockets, and affected a casual manner. If Marshall had seen anything unusual, David figured, it was up to him to tip his hand first.

Marshall was still standing motionless, then with a sudden rasping in his throat, he said, “G’evenin’ to yah. What you doin’ out here tonight?”

Surrounded by the night and the loud chirring of the spring peepers, the two men faced each other, neither one speaking for what David considered an uncomfortably long time. All the while, David wondered if right over there, beyond his uncle’s shoulder, in the woods, in the dark, the person waited and watched.

Old Man Troll.

David noted that his uncle’s face looked frail and worn. Deep lines creased his cheeks, highlighted by the light shining from the porch. The night sounds seemed to swell louder.

“I . . . uh . . . I was out for a drive,” David said, irritated by the tension he heard in his voice, “and uh . . . I just thought I’d drop by. I thought you might like to know what I’ve decided to do with the house.”