Point Pleasant (21 page)

“My secret?” 

Nicholas gestured to the café. “With Dawson.”

“Oh. It’s nothing,” Ben said and rolled his eyes. He considered the way the man had seemed to revel in the officers’ disdain, and Ben wondered if Dawson had any real sense of discretion.

Nicholas steered them toward Dunmore, and Ben noted that the sheriff’s lips were pursed and his frown had returned. He seemed uneasy with the idea of Ben sharing a secret with a man he clearly despised.

“He recognized me,” Ben said. “From an interview.”

Nicholas lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “You’re kidding.”

“And before you go interrogating him for my pen name, he swore he would keep it a secret.”

“Please,” Nicholas said, scoffing. “I’d rather interrogate you myself.”

Ben lacked the impulse to reciprocate the tease. “I don’t think I’m going to be very good company tonight. I’ll just spoil your evening.”

“Don’t be stupid. You won’t spoil anything. Listen, I have
The Twilight Zone
box set. We can just sit and watch Serling wax philosophical about the weird and unknown, and we don’t even have to talk if you don’t want to,” Nicholas said when they approached his house.

Ben could not help a weak smile as he thought of all the nights from their adolescence spent fawning over the genius that was Rod Serling. Ben took Nicholas’ house keys out of his pocket and returned them to their owner.

“We can do anything you want,” Nicholas continued, and he squeezed Ben’s hand when he took the keys. “I just don’t want you to be alone.”

“You’re nice when you want to be,” Ben said after a beat.

“I have my moments,” Nicholas said. He unlocked the door and ushered Ben inside.

Ben dropped his bag by the front door and took off his coat. “How’s your ear?”

“I’ll be fine,” Nicholas replied as he took Ben’s coat and hung it up. He slid out of his own jacket, stowed his unholstered Glock 22 in a drawer in the table by the door, and removed his duty belt to hang it next to the coats. “Doc said there was no damage. I can hear fine now anyway.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“You want a beer?”

“Sure.”

“Sit down, I’ll bring it,” Nicholas offered.

Ben pulled off his suit jacket, draped it over the back of the sofa, and took a seat. Nicholas reappeared a moment later with two open beers.

“I called Kate,” Ben said after Nicholas sank down beside him. “She’s going to fly out in a couple days.”

“Good,” Nicholas said. “That’s good. You should be together right now.”

Ben nursed his beer and ruminated over the sentiment.

“Do you see her much?” 

“Not lately,” Ben replied, and he scraped his thumbnail over the Corona’s label. “She’s always busy since she got partner. And if she’s not, I am. Two ships, you know.”

“Right.”

“It’s fine, I guess,” Ben said with a shrug. “Life just gets in the way sometimes.”

Nicholas’ expression was loaded with a sadness that shot a pang of regret through Ben’s chest. “I wish you had come home sooner.”

“And if I had,” Ben started, his voice edged with caution, “would you have said those things you said last night?”

Nicholas put his bottle on the coffee table and faced Ben. “Maybe not as clearly. I’ve had a lot of time to think about everything I wanted to say to you. But yeah. I would have.”

Ben regarded the other man’s sincerity and sighed. “I’m just worried that you’ve got this idea of me in your head, and I’ve got this idea of you in mine, but what we end up with won’t be what either of us thought it would be.”

“Where is this coming from?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I don’t even know.”

Nicholas took a moment before he spoke again. “I think I understand what you mean,” he said. “And you’re right. I’m different. You’re different. But wouldn’t you rather find out what we end up with whether or not it’s what we thought it would be?”

“I’m not saying I don’t want to find out,” Ben said, keeping his tone even and deliberate. “I’m just still surprised you feel this way, I guess.”

“We’re both grown up now, Ben. A lot has changed.”

Understatement,
Ben thought and took a sip of his beer.

For a moment, Nicholas’ steely confidence slipped away. “If I was too forward last night, I apologize.”

“I like forward you.”

Nicholas’ lips quirked, but uncertainty was still apparent in his stiff posture.

“Truth is, I never would have—” Ben started, but he trailed off. He hated the way he seemed to fumble for words since his return to Point Pleasant. “I guess I thought this was something I closed a long time ago even if I still felt something for you. I thought you were married with a couple of kids by now.”

“I’m glad I’m not,” Nicholas said.

“Me too.”

“Let’s just see where this goes,” Nicholas suggested after a long silence. “And take it from there.”

“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “Sounds good.”

“Just don’t eat any of Dawson’s muffins.”

“I’ll avoid the banana especially.”

“I would hope so.” Nicholas reached up to brush his fingers through Ben’s hair and nodded to the television. “Do you want to enter another dimension?”

“I kinda feel like I’m already in the Twilight Zone.”

“Okay, I’ll make dinner,” Nicholas said. “Want to keep me company?”

“Make sure you don’t poison us, you mean?”

“I’m an
excellent
cook, thank you,” Nicholas said.

“Let’s see what you got, Bobby Flay.”

Nicholas mumbled to himself as he stood and grabbed his beer. Ben followed him into the kitchen and was more amused than he should have been by Nicholas’ mock haughtiness. He leaned against a nearby countertop while Nicholas washed his hands.

“So what were you doing at the library anyway?” Nicholas asked. “That’s the last place I would have looked for you.”

Ben thought of Tucker’s urgings to get the sheriff on their side. “I was doing some research,” he replied, steeling himself. “On the Battle of Point Pleasant.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I came back to find some fuel for my next book. I kinda felt like I needed
something
, like maybe I’m losing my mojo.”

Nicholas took out a chopping board. “I’m sure that’s not true. If you let me read one of your books, I could agree even more.”

“You have.”

Nicholas shot Ben a startled expression. “What?”

“You have one of my books on your shelf,” Ben replied. “I saw it last night.”

“Are you being serious or teasing? I can’t tell.”

“I’m serious,” Ben said and downed the last of his beer.

“Which one?”

“That part I won’t tell,” Ben said. He remained aloof even as Nicholas let out a frustrated groan.

“You’re impossible. I
will
find out.”

“Until then,” Ben said, and Nicholas threw a glare in his direction.

“You’re a fucking tease, Wisehart.”

“You have no idea, Sheriff.”

“I’d like to find out,” Nicholas said as he pulled a paring knife from a drawer and cleared his throat as if to refocus himself. “So you’re a historical fiction writer, then?”

“Huh?”

“The Battle of Point Pleasant. Why are you checking into it for your next book if you’re not a historical fiction writer?”

“I’m definitely
not
historical fiction,” Ben said, scrunching his nose. “The battle just became a point of interest, really. I only started researching today.”

“Find anything noteworthy?”

“Yeah, you could say that,” Ben said. “I don’t know if you’d be interested, though.”

“Try me.”

Ben licked his lips and braced himself for another glimpse of the authoritative version of his old friend, the one who had threatened to throw Ben in jail the day before for asking the wrong questions. “I found a diary in the library archives. From the daughter of Colonel Lewis.”

“Yeah?”

“She wrote about the army’s campsite in the forest.” Ben looked at his shoes for a second and then continued. “She wrote that the woods watched her and that she saw what she thought was an angel with red eyes by the river. She even wrote of how she heard it screaming in the night.”

Nicholas’ fingers stilled on the chopping board, and Ben fidgeted with the label of his empty Corona.

“In the days before the battle, it started appearing to all the soldiers in the camp. The Shawnee who were held captive afterward were terrified of the area because they believed the forest was rotten and corrupted by something dark.”

Nicholas resumed chopping, but his posture had gone rigid. Ben was not sure if the sheriff was waiting for more information or if he was trying to figure out a nice way to say ‘
please shut the fuck up about this
’ to someone he wanted to sleep with at some point in the near future.

Either way, Ben carried on.

“I’ve been reading up on the collapse of the old Silver Bridge too,” he said. “The day it fell, an hour before, a photographer from the
Gazette
took some pictures of the bridge all lit up with Christmas lights. She noticed something on top of one of the towers, though. A big black shape was perched there. She even caught it on film. It looks like a giant bat.”

“
Ben
,” Nicholas started, but Ben cut him off.

“There’s a list of over fifty people in as many years who claim to have seen it, and you know what I mean by
it
, Nic. I did some searching and so far at least half of them—or someone close to them—were in some kind of accident within a week of seeing or hearing the thing in the woods.”

“Ben, that’s
enough
.”

“I got two calls yesterday like the one you got last night. And now my dad is dead.”

Nicholas slammed the knife onto the counter and turned to face Ben. “I said
enough!
”

Ben stood straighter as Nicholas stepped closer.

“Ben, you don’t understand. This is
not
a horror film. Bad things happen. They just happen, and there’s not a supernatural cause.”

“I think you’re wrong, and I think it’s foolish to ignore this. You got a call last night, Nic. A big one.”

“It was probably just a fax machine gone haywire!”

“Who even uses fax machines anymore? Are you kidding me?”

“This is a small town, Ben. We’re not as advanced as you folks up in Boston.”

The snide undercurrent in Nicholas’ tone swept away the easy camaraderie that had settled between them since their first beer at The Point.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ben asked.

“I mean don’t just come into
my
town and thumb your nose at it for not having a fucking iPhone like you. People still use fax machines here.”

“Way to deflect.”

“I’m not deflecting. I’m going to reiterate what I said to you yesterday. This is
not
the time to come back and stick your nose into this stupid old story. Point Pleasant has a lot going on right now. More than you would understand. You’re not from here anymore.”

Ben clenched his jaw. He was tired of being told he was an outsider.
I grew up in this goddamn town.

“We’re trying to stamp out this kind of bullshit,” Nicholas continued. “I hear what people say. I know the stories. But they’re just that.
Stories
.”

“Nic, you
saw
it! You were there!”

“Ben,” Nicholas started. His voice was strained as if he was struggling to keep his patience. “That was a
long
time ago. We were kids. We were both just
kids
. It was dark. We were driven out there by the overactive imaginations of all the town idiots, and we let it influence what we
thought
we experienced.”

Ben widened his eyes in disbelief. Nicholas’ words felt like a betrayal. “Who the fuck
are
you?”

Nicholas’ composure snapped like the rotted beam in Jack Freemont’s barn. “I’m the fucking sheriff of this town. I’m the one who goes out at four o’clock in the morning when every other drunken nutcase of a farmer claims there’s a giant moth on his barn roof. I’m the one who signs off on all the reports of missing cattle that are probably the result of said drunken nutcases leaving their gates open for the animals to escape. You saw it yesterday with Freemont’s horses.”

“He probably let them out intentionally,” Ben said, noting the numbness in his own tone. “So they wouldn’t starve while he swung there like rotten fruit, and the quality townspeople like yourself assumed he was just off on a bender.”

“That’s
enough
,” Nicholas said, and his shoulders squared into an intimidating stance. “For fuck’s sake. Freemont hanging himself is not my fault.”

“No, it’s the Mothman’s. Freemont had been hearing it scream in the woods.”

Angry exasperation rolled off Nicholas in waves as he threw his hands in the air.

“Speaking of the woods,” Ben pressed. “You were out there yesterday. Didn’t you think it was odd how there was no noise? No crickets, no birds, nothing. Just total silence.”

“It’s October, Ben. It’s getting too cold for fucking crickets.”

Ben let out a frustrated sigh and rifled a hand through his hair. “This is insane, Nic. I have notebooks filled with reports of missing livestock. Almost two hundred separate incidents since the sixties. You’re gonna tell me that overdevelopment-related coyotes are responsible for
all
those disappearances?”

“
People
steal livestock. You can make a quick buck of a good sheep.”

“So that’s it?” Ben asked, crossing his arms. “You have an excuse for everything? What about the historical account from 1774? Or the photograph of Silver Bridge before its collapse? You gonna logic those away too?”

Nicholas stepped closer and crossed his arms as well. “Listen to me very carefully.
You need to stop
. You need to stop looking into this and just move on. Find something else to write about. This town isn’t here for your amusement. We’re trying to move forward, to get this place out of the fucking dark ages and on the map. The Harvest Festival is next week, and people are already anxious enough about it, but we need it to go smoothly without some fuckshit crazy theory about a two-hundred-and-something-year-old bat creature that eats up sheep and cattle and crickets and birds! Oh, and if you see him, you’ll probably die soon. Do you
hear
yourself?”