Point Pleasant (23 page)

Nicholas kept his head lowered and said nothing.

“This is worth losing your job over, Nic. If that even happens.”

Nicholas’ jaw clenched. He stood straighter as if he had finally found his resolve.
Or his backbone
, Ben thought with cynicism.

“Can I see the photo? And the diary?”

Ben nodded and headed to the front door. With annoyance, he noted that he was still uneasy on his feet as he grabbed his bag. He flicked on the living room lights so that they were no longer shrouded in darkness.

“Here,” he said, passing the photocopies to Nicholas. “Those are the relevant entries from Emily Lewis’ diary.”

“Where did you find this? The library?” Nicholas asked, skimming the first page. He sat down on the edge of the coffee table while he read, and Ben frowned, thinking Andrew would have disapproved.

“In the archives,” Ben confirmed, sinking onto the sofa. The leather emanated the same coldness that had coiled itself in Ben’s chest, refusing to ease even under the warmth of Andrew’s best whiskey.

Nicholas’ lips pursed into a tight line as he shuffled through the pages. “Holy shit,” he said at last.

“Here’s the picture.” Ben offered Tucker’s journal, which was already open to the pages on the collapse of the old Silver Bridge with the photo attached.

“This Tucker’s?”

“He let me borrow his research.”

“Why are we alive, then? And Tucker?” Nicholas asked, standing to pace again. “We saw it, all of us, twenty years ago. We should be dead if seeing it means you’re going to die.”

“I don’t know,” Ben answered honestly. “Maybe because we found
it
. Maybe because it didn’t come to us. We stumbled across it, after all.”

“I don’t even know what we’d do if we found it again,” Nicholas said. “I doubt my G22 would have much of an effect. Tucker’s 12-gauge didn’t. And anyway, what if your theory is wrong? What if this is all just a coincidence.”

“
Nicholas
, seriously? A coincidence?
Every
sighting?”

Nicholas dropped onto the coffee table once more and put his face in his hands.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Ben said, shifting awkwardly. “It
is
pretty fucking crazy.”

Nicholas shook his head. “All those people,” he said. “They’re expecting over six thousand visitors to the festival. Over the course of the week, there will be over six thousand people who could end up dead if what you’re saying is right. And who is to say that we can even stop it from happening?”

“We’ve gotta try something.
Anything
. Even if we have to shoot it with silver bullets, we have to at least try if there’s any chance that finding it and killing it would make this shit stop.”

“You’re awfully cavalier about the fact we could die doing it.”

“My dad is dead,” Ben said, fixing an empty expression on the other man. “Because of the thing in the woods. Because I didn’t know what the phone call meant. It called me
twice
, okay? Whatever happens, I’m probably dead anyway.”

“I won’t let that happen, Ben.”

Ben laughed without humor and slumped to let his head loll against the back of the Eames. “Maybe I should leave,” he said. “I should never have come here. Maybe this curse, omen, or whatever you want to call it only works when you’re in Point Pleasant. On the rotten ground.”

“Maybe you
should
go,” Nicholas echoed in a whisper. “If that’s what keeps you safe.”

“You know what I keep wondering?” Ben asked as he stared up at the stucco design on the ceiling.

“What?”

“I keep wondering if my mom got a phone call.”

“Don’t think about that.”

“Maybe seeing it when we were twelve was a curse in and of itself,” Ben mused. “We didn’t die, but we might as well have.”

Nicholas said nothing, but he moved to sit next to Ben.

“Tucker brought up something,” Ben said after a moment. “Why would it warn us? Why would it go out of its way to let us know that something shitty was about to happen?”

“What, like it has a conscience?”

Ben shrugged. “And then there’s Grant Harper.”

“What about him?”

“Well, you remember. He disappeared from his backyard but then he showed up perfectly okay a county over. Said he got ‘saved.’ Everyone just assumed he meant something saved him from the thing in the woods. But what if—what if
it
saved him from something else?”

“I could ask him,” Nicholas said.

“He still lives here?”

“Works checkout at Chapman’s. Doug was really good about it when he took over after the Harpers’ finally lost the Save n’ Shop. Said he wanted to make sure Grant had something constructive to keep him out of trouble. People think Grant’s simple, but he’s just quiet. I don’t think he ever got over what happened to him.”

“Trauma’s an asshole,” Ben murmured, and he ignored the way Nicholas’ gaze jerked toward him. “Do you think he’d talk to you?”

“It’s worth a shot,” Nicholas said, frowning as he assessed Ben with a closeness that made Ben want to slither into the fireplace and set himself alight.

“I was gonna find Evelyn Lewis and Charlie Warren tomorrow,” Ben said, trying to focus on the situation. “Do they still live in town?”

“They do. I understand Lewis, but why Warren?”

“He knows the history of the area better than anyone else. Or he used to. I figured maybe he might know something about how the Shawnee and Mingo defended themselves.”

“You’re not gonna ask him outright?”

“Of course not. But considering Lizzie blew my cover, I can’t really go with the ‘
I’m writing something about local legends
’ line I would have liked to use. Even if it was true.”

“Right,” Nicholas said, sighing. “I guess it’s fair to say you’ve got the material you need for your next book.”

“I don’t think I’ll be writing about this.”

Nicholas regarded Ben in silence for a long moment before he whispered, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

“Me too,” Ben said. He stood to return to the office for the whiskey. Nicholas followed.

Ben grabbed the bottle and collapsed into the desk chair. “You know, all the fucking things I wanted to say to him but never did. Now all I get is this fucking room. And that fucking chair,” he said and gestured at the armchair in the corner. “And his fucking voice on my car radio.”

Nicholas lingered in the doorway as Ben kicked his feet up onto the desk and took a swig of whiskey. “What about the radio?”

“I drove out to River Bend Road after I saw you this afternoon.”

Nicholas stepped closer and crossed his arms.

“I got out and screamed at it. Like that would do any good,” Ben said, laughing without humor. “All of a sudden, my car just died. But the radio came on, and it was all static and this weird screeching noise. Then my dad—my fucking dad’s voice—was there. It said my name. It said, ‘
Benji
,’” He shook his head and drank again. “It was taunting me.”

Nicholas shifted uneasily.

“What I don’t get,” Ben continued, “is if it had any fucking conscience, if that’s why it warns people, then what the fuck was
that
about?”

“I don’t know, Ben.”

Ben took the lid to the whiskey and screwed it to the top of the bottle. He pulled the drawer open to return it to its place, but he stilled when he noticed the other contents of the drawer for the first time.

“Fuck,” Ben whispered.

“What is it?” Nicholas asked, stepping forward.

Ben pulled a book from the drawer. He thumbed through the pages, and his laughter subsided as he noticed the scrawl of his father’s unmistakable, almost illegible handwriting in the margins. Passages were underlined, sometimes twice for emphasis, and a skim of the entire book showed that almost every page bore some kind of mark as proof that his father had read the work in its entirety.

“What is that?” Nicholas asked.

Ben did not look up from the copy of
The Blue Tulip
. “It’s my first book,” he said. “The asshole actually read it.”

Nicholas stepped closer, and Ben glanced up to the other man as he spied the book. Ben flipped through to the last page.

The final note from his father was a vindication written in chicken scratch. “
This is the best thing I ever read, Benji.
”

Ben tossed the book into the open drawer and put his head in his hands. He kicked the drawer closed, and the loud thud of the wood reverberated.

“Ben,” Nicholas said as he moved around the desk.

“You should go.”

Nicholas knelt down at Ben’s side, but he kept quiet. “Let’s get you upstairs,” he said after several minutes passed in dreary silence. “You should sleep.”

Ben let Nicholas take hold of his shoulder and haul him up from the chair. As they walked to the entry hall, Ben whispered, “I can belong here, you know.”

“I didn’t mean what I said before,” Nicholas replied, his tone soft and apologetic as he guided Ben upstairs. “I was being a dick.”

Ben did not reply. In the bedroom, he waved his arm to gesture at the four walls. “Love what I’ve done with the place?”

Nicholas huffed out a laugh and unknotted Ben’s tie. Ben’s arms hung heavy at his sides, and he allowed Nicholas to continue.

“Oh, yes. It’s still very you.”

Ben gave Nicholas a wretched smile. “You should see my place in Boston,” he said. “It’s very grown up.”

“I’m sure it is, Ben.”

Ben’s head lolled, and he sighed as Nicholas unbuttoned his shirt for him. “Everything’s so fucked up,” he said. “We’ll probably never see each other after this.”

“Is that what you want?” Nicholas’ voice was quiet, too quiet, and the controlled brokenness of it twisted at Ben’s insides.

After a long moment of contemplation, Ben shook his head. “But it’s what will happen.”

Nicholas took each of Ben’s hands in his own so that he could undo the cuffs of Ben’s sleeves. “It doesn’t have to.”

Ben kept quiet, but his uncertainty permeated the air around them.

Nicholas helped him out of the shirt and tossed it over the chair by the bed. “So you’re Preston James.”

“Surprise.”

“I guess that makes you my favorite writer.”

“I guess it does.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. James,” Nicholas said with a tenderness that Ben would not have expected after their earlier arguments. “But I still prefer Ben Wisehart.”

“You’re alone in that.”

Nicholas unbuckled Ben’s belt before he unzipped his pants and let them drop down to the floor. It felt intimate without the rush of sex that would usually follow such a disrobing.

“Get in bed,” Nicholas whispered.

Ben complied. Nicholas pulled the covers up and over Ben’s shoulders.

“I’m gonna stay a while,” Nicholas said.

Ben watched the other man through heavy eyelids and managed a small nod.

“
You’ll find it, Ben
,” Caroline said as her red eyes stared up from the kitchen floor. “
But you have to trust it when you do
.”

Ben’s eyes snapped open. The familiar image of his mother sent a jolt of panic through his brain. He had not dreamed of Caroline for years.

Bright light poured in through the window. Ben’s head throbbed. He yanked the pillow out from underneath his head and covered his face with it, certain that he was in his bed back in Boston.

The smell of the fabric softener on the pillowcase made him bolt upright in alarm. He was not in
his
bed, these were not
his
sheets, and that was not the lemony-fresh scent of
his
usual detergent.

Ben grimaced at the sunlight, but his bleary vision settled over the man in the chair beside the bed. Nicholas was asleep, and his long body was stretched out in an awkward pose. Ben sat up further, causing the mattress to creak slightly, and Nicholas stirred.

“Good morning,” Nicholas said in a voice that was gruff from sleep. He straightened and scrunched his nose as he rolled his neck.

Ben rubbed a hand over his left temple and winced. He struggled to recall their conversations from the night before through the murky haze of his hangover. “You didn’t have to stay.”

“I wanted to.”

Ben said nothing. His head throbbed in outrage over last night’s whiskey.

“You got aspirin or anything?”

“Maybe,” Ben said. “Downstairs, probably.”

“Come on, let’s go.”

Every muscle in Ben’s body felt stiff. He tugged a gray t-shirt out of his bag and pulled it on as he followed Nicholas downstairs.

The clock on the wall in the kitchen read just after six o’clock. Nicholas shuffled around the kitchen before he finally found a drawer with a bottle of Tylenol inside.

“Here,” he said, offering Ben two tablets and a glass of water.

Ben swallowed them and drank the entire glass. His mouth felt like it had been stuffed with a ball of cotton.

“I’ll put some coffee on,” Nicholas said, but Ben shook his head.

“No, you sit down. You slept in a chair. I’ll make it.”

Ben prepared the coffee while Nicholas sat at the kitchen table. He was aware of Nicholas’ contemplative gaze on him the entire time.

“We should talk,” Nicholas said.

“Oh?”

Nicholas took the cup of coffee when Ben offered it to him. Ben sat down opposite the sheriff and sipped from his own mug.

“Let’s hear it, then.”

“Maybe you were right yesterday,” Nicholas started. “Maybe I have this idea of you, and you’re not that idea anymore.”

Here it comes.
Ben stared down at the steam that rose from his coffee. A part of him had expected this revelation even before their failed dinner the night before.

Nicholas brushed his right hand over Ben’s. “You’re better than the idea I had, and I’m sorry I’m not a better version of whatever memory you have of me.”

“Are you going to help us kill the thing in the woods?”

Nicholas blinked at Ben for a beat before he nodded in confirmation. “Of course.”

“Then you’re fine the way you are, Nic.”

Nicholas’ forced smile was full of melancholy. “Did yesterday fuck things up for us?” he asked with caution as if he did not want to know the answer.