The Third Hill North of Town (9 page)

“MY NAME IS
ELIJAH
!” he howled. “STOP CALLING ME
BEN,
BECAUSE IT’S NOT MY NAME, OKAY? AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE
FUCK
WE ARE, BUT IT’S NOWHERE NEAR
MY
HOME! I LIVE IN PRESCOTT
FUCKING
MAINE, LADY, AND YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR
FUCKING
MIND!”

The scream was earsplitting, and Julianna and Jon both recoiled from the force of it. Elijah, too, seemed shocked by the immensity of what had just issued from his mouth, and they all sat still, dumbstruck, in the ringing stillness that followed his outburst.

“Shame on you, Benjamin Taylor,” Julianna said primly, recovering at last. “Your mother would blister your little bottom for speaking like that.”

Elijah put his face in his hands and screamed wordlessly through his fingers before at last falling silent.

Jon looked through the rear window and cleared his throat. “What happened to the trooper?” he asked Julianna. “Is he . . . is he still alive?”

Julianna frowned. “What trooper, Steve?”

Jon made a face, realizing he had to step into Julianna’s fantasy world for her to understand what he was talking about. “Sheriff whatever-you-called-him. Burns, I guess. Sheriff Burns.”

Julianna’s eyes met his in the mirror as he faced front again; she seemed perplexed by his question. “Sheriff Burns lives in Hatfield, so he doesn’t get over our way very often. I really haven’t seen him in
ages.
”

Jon opened his mouth, then promptly shut it again, giving up.

Elijah dropped his head in despair, but as he did so he noticed that the cut on Jon’s leg was now dripping blood onto a crushed grocery bag on the floor. All of a sudden it occurred to Elijah he’d be dead if it weren’t for the older boy, and he began to feel ashamed for not doing anything to try to help him with his injury. He shrugged out of the remains of his shirt and ripped another long piece from the back to use as a tourniquet. When he had it ready to tie around Jon’s thigh, he looked up at the other boy for guidance.

Jon grimaced. “Sorry. I don’t know how to do it, either.”

“How heavy is the bleeding, son?” Julianna asked.

Until that moment, her speaking voice had been high and breathy, like a schoolgirl’s. But as she asked this question her voice deepened perceptibly, becoming lucid and more adult in an instant. Both boys heard the change and gaped at the back of her head.

“Steve?” she prodded. She was unaware of their scrutiny. “Is it slowing down at all?”

Jon tore his gaze away from her and lifted his hands to inspect the cut again. “Yeah. I think so.”

“You might not need a tourniquet, then. Just keep pressure on it for a little while.” There was a brief pause, and when she resumed speaking her voice had reverted to its girlish timbre. “You can use the rest of Ben’s cape as a bandage.”

The boys looked at each other again.

“Jesus,” Jon whispered. “We are so screwed.”

Elijah nodded but said nothing. He tried to cover himself again with the pathetic remnants of his shirt, but so little was left of it that he soon gave up. Fresh tears welled in his eyes as he let the soft white cloth fall from his fingers to the floor, and he turned his head so Jon wouldn’t see him cry.

“It’s not a cape,” he grated at Julianna, fighting to keep from having another panic attack. “It’s my
shirt.
”

Jon had been watching him. He was almost as upset as Elijah, but at the moment he was less worried for himself than he was for the younger boy. For whatever reason, Elijah was the one being hunted by the police, and he looked so sad and vulnerable sitting there in his bare skin that Jon’s heart ached for him.

“You want my shirt, man?” he asked. “It’s wet, but you can have it if you want it.”

Elijah stared at him. The kindness behind Jon’s offer astonished and moved him, and he eyed the other boy’s blue T-shirt for a moment before shaking his head.

“Nah. That’s okay.” He hesitated. “Thanks, though.”

As much as he hated being unclothed, he hated the idea of wearing somebody else’s dirty shirt even more.

Jon shrugged. “Sure.”

There was a long, shy silence as they searched for more to say to each other. Julianna was humming what sounded like a hymn, and the trees on both sides of the road were blurs of green and brown through the windows.

Jon finally cleared his throat and leaned closer to Elijah so Julianna wouldn’t hear him. The corners of his mouth turned up as he spoke in Elijah’s ear. “Just be glad she didn’t think your underwear was some kind of surgical gauze,” he whispered.

Elijah flushed, but when he realized he was being teased he almost grinned, too, in spite of everything. He was still trying to think of an appropriate reply when the Edsel’s engine sputtered and died.

“Oh, dear!” Julianna cried, wrestling with the wheel to bring them to the side of the road before they stopped moving altogether. “Now what?”

 

Samuel and Mary Hunter weren’t the only parents on tenterhooks about a missing child in trouble with the law. One hundred and three miles north of Prescott, Maine, in the quiet little town of Tipton (home of Toby’s Pizza Shack), Earl and Marline Tate were praying as hard for Jon as the Hunters were for Elijah.

The Tates felt they’d failed as parents. Their eldest child had not only run out on his responsibility to the underage, pregnant Becky Westman, but on his way out of Tipton he had also robbed Toby, his friend and employer, of nearly four hundred dollars. Because of this, he was now wanted by the police, and there was nothing Earl and Marline could do about it except wait for him to be caught, and fret about the consequences.

Marline, especially, was so torn between agitation and rage she couldn’t sit still.

“What will happen when the Westmans find out he’s skipped town?” She was pacing the floor in Jon’s apartment, pausing now and then to aim a vicious kick at various stacks of paperback books that kept getting in her way. “What if they decide to tell the police about Becky’s baby?”

When the Westmans and the Tates had left Jon alone in the wee hours of the morning, the plan had been to meet again for lunch with both Jon and Becky to discuss their future. But before this meeting could occur, the Tates had gotten a call from the Tipton sheriff, informing them Jon had stolen cash from the Pizza Shack and was now a wanted criminal. The last thing Jon needed was for the sheriff to discover he was fleeing from more than a simple misdemeanor theft, so Earl and Marline had decided to go to lunch with the three Westmans anyway, to stall for time until Jon could be apprehended. Once there, they’d made up a story about his not being able to join them due to a sudden onset of flu-like symptoms. The Westmans were suspicious about his absence, but Marline was at last able to convince them she’d spent the morning nursing Jon herself, and that he was at home in his bed with a high fever and chills, and was clearly in no condition to be around a pregnant young girl like Becky.

When Marline was desperate, she could be a particularly effective liar.

“Calm down, Marline,” Earl grunted from Jon’s comfy reading chair. Earl was attempting to be stoical, but his hands were trembling on the chair’s arms. “Don’t borrow trouble.”

“Don’t borrow trouble?” Her lips quivered. “Statutory rape, Earl,” she whispered. “They’ll charge him with statutory rape. He could go to jail for years.”

She resumed pacing. Her small, thin legs were moving so fast it reminded Earl of those little tiny birds he’d seen the last time time he and Marline had taken their sons to the beach.

What were those funny little birds called?
he wondered, rubbing his temples.

It bothered him that he couldn’t remember. They’d watched the birds for hours, though; the nervous little guys with their tiny stick legs fleeing the tide, then sprinting back onto the wet sand to hunt for food every time the ocean withdrew. Jon and his younger brothers, Billy and Evan, had made a game of imitating them, and Marline had laughed herself silly. The boys were all tan and handsome that day, and Earl had been so proud to be their dad.

“What were those birds called?” he asked. “You know, the funny little ones at the beach a couple of summers ago.”

“What?” Marline stopped pacing and stared at him. “What on earth are you talking about?”

He shook his head, knowing it wasn’t worth explaining. “It doesn’t matter.” He swallowed. “I was just trying to remember something.”

She kept staring at him. She’d already forgotten what he’d asked her; her mind was wandering as much as his was.

They look so much alike,
she thought.
How can they be so different?

The resemblance between Earl and Jon was remarkable. Earl’s face was puffier than Jon’s, of course, and his hair had gray in it, but the two of them were peas in a pod, from their wide shoulders and thin waists to their gray eyes and flat chins. If you saw their baby pictures, too, you’d swear you were looking at the same infant. Even Marline had trouble telling the photos apart if you put them side by side.

But the similarity between her husband and her oldest son was limited to the surface. Earl was a model of sobriety and maturity, and Jon was nothing but a spoiled child. Marline mostly blamed herself for this; she’d let Jon have his way far too much of the time when he was growing up. He was her oldest and brightest son, but he’d squandered all his gifts, one by one, and now he’d turned into the kind of kid who ran away when the going got tough.

He’s become a coward,
she told herself, grieving.

Earl didn’t notice that Marline was still staring at him.
Jon was really something that day,
he was thinking.
He was good as gold to Billy and Evan.

Jon had helped his younger brothers build a sand castle, and he’d played Frisbee with them, and when some other kids who were Jon’s age came over and asked if he wanted to join them for volleyball, he said no, because he knew how hurt Billy and Evan would be if he ditched them to play with the older kids.

Marline started pacing once again, but then halted almost immediately to bend down and look at a book with no cover, resting on a milk carton. It was
Anna Karenina.
She’d adored that book when she was in college, and she thought this battered copy may have even been hers: Jon had been stealing books from her shelves for years. There was a small pyramid of empty beer cans by the milk carton, too, and something about the sight of those filthy cans next to her beloved book felt like desecration. It made her want to scream.

“Where in God’s name is he?” she cried at the ceiling. “He’s ruining his whole life!”

She picked up
Anna Karenina
and swung it like a ping-pong paddle at the aluminum pyramid. The beer cans went flying in every direction, making a horrendous racket as they bounced along the floor and against the walls. It took a long time for the last one to come to a standstill in the corner by the lamp.

In the silence that followed, she slowly straightened. Her lungs felt as if they weren’t working; her breathing sounded odd to her own ears. But when she gazed over at her husband her throat closed, and she stopped breathing entirely.

“Oh, my dear,” she whispered.

Earl’s face was composed, but his eyes were brimming with tears.

Plovers,
he was thinking, knowing it didn’t matter.
Those little birds were plovers.

Julianna put the stalled Edsel in park and turned the key in the ignition to “off.” To the left of the car was a heavily wooded area; to the right was a stone fence, surrounding what appeared to be a dairy farm. Julianna sighed, then shifted in her seat to face the boys in the back.

“I believe we’re out of gasoline,” she said, flustered. She very much wanted to get home, and she was uncertain how to deal with this unforeseen delay. “Daddy must have forgotten to refill the tank earlier this week.”

“Wonderful.” Jon’s voice was tinged with hysteria. “We just killed a cop, and now we’re stranded in the middle of nowhere.” His eyes darted from window to window, as if he were expecting dozens of police cars to surround them at any moment. “That’s . . . yeah, that’s just great!”

Fewer than twenty minutes ago, Elijah would have been thrilled at the notion of the Edsel failing them, but now all he felt was dread. He was thinking more clearly than he had been when Julianna first ran over the state trooper, and it seemed to him his sole remaining hope of living through this day was to get as far away as he could from the scene of the crime.

And to do that, he needed the Edsel.

He needed the Edsel right
now.

“How did this happen?” he demanded. “How could you have let us run out of gas?”

Julianna seemed oblivious to their distress. She was making small sounds of dismay over the blood on her outfit.