New Title 1 (23 page)

An hour later, I was driving past the New Hope town square. The temperature had dropped several degrees since I'd left, and the sun had vanished completely, leaving a gray sky that was boiling with storm clouds to the west.

Even though all I could think of was the white Lincoln the two black men had described, I needed to stop by and see Eve McNally first. I wanted to know about her daughter and if she'd heard anything from her husband. I was beginning to suspect how McNally and Sam Lodge fit in with the good reverend.

After leaving the small shopping area, I swung left to pick up an asphalt drive that would take me straight to the northeast edge of town, where Eve McNally lived.

The sky was getting so dark that several oncoming cars turned on their headlights. Then the rain came, spits and fits at first, then a rumbling grumbling downpour.

I heard the siren before I saw the spinning red cherry. Then I noticed my speedometer. I was traveling 46 in a 35 mph zone.

I pulled over on the shoulder of the road, set the gear in neutral, heeled on the emergency brake.

It was a long minute before anybody got out of the squad car behind me. In the downpour, it was hard to make out any face, just a person with a campaign hat and a fold-up plastic raincoat on.

I watched the cop approach in my rearview mirror. Then the mirror was empty.

Where had the cop gone?

Knuckles rapped the window on the passenger side. A finger pointed to the door lock. I leaned over and unlocked it.

The cop got in, smelling of rain and chilly but very fresh air.

"You were speeding."

"I'll say one thing: getting stopped by a cop as pretty as you is a real pleasure."

"Yeah, I look great in this campaign hat," Jane Avery grinned. "Like Smokey the Bear's daughter."

"You look fine to me."

"I saw you coming in from the highway."

"Yeah."

"So you were out of town?"

"Uh-huh."

"You going to tell me about it?"

"Boy, you're really relentless."

"Your friend Karl in the hospital?"

"Yeah?"

"He died this morning."

I looked through the steamy window at the rain. It danced like bouncing nail heads on the asphalt. Headlights appeared and faded, appeared and faded, in fog and rain.

"Something terrible's happening to me," she said after our mutual silence.

"Yeah? What?"

"I'm starting to like you."

"Well, for what it's worth, I'm starting to like you, too."

"But I can't trust you, and that scares me."

"Of course you can trust me."

"Then you're going to tell me what's going on? Who Eleanor Saunders was, and who Karl was, and what's going on with Eve McNally?"

"This doesn't have anything to do with trust—not the way you mean it." I turned toward her in the seat. Her eyes looked more hurt than angry—she really was taking this personally; as perhaps I would, too—and her otherwise-full mouth was pursed tight. "This isn't personal, why I'm not confiding in you—it's professional. And there's a difference."

Now it was her turn to stare silently out the window.

"I saw Joanna Lodge," she said after a while.

"Did you ask her why she was out at the Brindle farm this morning?"

"She gave me a reason but not a very believable one. She said she felt like going for a walk in the country and that the Brindle place was nice because it was deserted."

"You're right. Not very believable."

"She wasn't any more cooperative than you've been. She knows what's really going on, too. That's you and Eve McNally and now Joanna Lodge. Who else knows what's really going on?"

I sighed. "You're making this harder than it has to be."

"I'm a cop. A good one, I think—at least a dedicated one. I need to know what's happening in my town. And you can tell me."

I shook my head, said, in barely a whisper, "No, I can't, Jane. No, I can't."

She stared at me silently for a moment and then said, "I think we'd better skip tonight."

"I was afraid you were going to say that."

"Do you blame me?"

"I guess not."

She put her hand on the door handle. Opened up a few inches. Rain hissed. The air was cold. "I had some real hope for us. I really did."

I was going to say something soothing but she was gone, slamming the door, before I could form the right words.

If there were any right words.

The plain pure smell of it, of human flesh as it rotted . . . Sometimes he would dip his head down into the darkness below and let his entire consciousness be suffused with the odors. And in the frenzy of it he would touch himself—that was all it took at moments such as these—touch himself and know an orgasmic ecstasy none of the women, not even the dead ones, had been able to give him. Nor was there any pity or scorn or smirk in the air because he had failed them and failed himself—the charge of orgasm was perfect, blinding, all-encompassing emotionally as well as sexually.