Turn Signal (14 page)

“Dear Jack,” it begins, “You have a very interesting book here. I have read most of it, and there are some very good parts.

“However……” Here, Jack sighs. He was hoping there would be no “however” whatsoever.

“However, I am wondering if perhaps you might want to consider writing this in the first person instead of the third. I think I'd like to hear more from the voices of Lovelady and Pettigreen. I think they would be very compelling.”

The letter goes on for two more paragraphs, ending with the belief that “this book has promise. The suggestions here would only make it better.”

Jack sits on the toilet for another 10 minutes, only slightly discouraged by Gerald Prince's belief that Lovelady's antagonist is named Pettigreen instead of Pettigrew.

Then, he tells Shannon he's going for a walk.

Among the small things he misses from their life at the farmhouse is the access to open land. He could set out from the back door of his late mother's home and walk for more than a mile through country that was mostly wooded but not swampy, crisscrossed with barely perceptible paths he'd used since he was a boy.

From Speakeasy Glen, though, there is the swamp on one side and the winding, car-friendly streets of the subdivision on the other, bereft even of sidewalks. It is not possible to walk without drawing the attention of neighbors, one of whom brakes her SUV alongside him this day and asks if he needs a ride. In Speakeasy Glen, if you're over 16 and you are walking, it is assumed that your car is broken down somewhere.

He takes Larkmeadow Lane toward town, with no real destination.

There is one stretch, between the entrance to the subdivision and the '50s and '60s brick ranchers nearer to Main Street, where nature still holds sway. As the road swings south toward Speakeasy Creek, the other branch bordering the town's peninsula, it is met by a rutted dirt lane leading toward the creek. Here, Jack knows he might see a red-tailed hawk perching high in the bald cypress that is the area's largest tree, or even watch deer down by the stream at the right time of day.

The late-fall sun hangs low, and he has to shade his eyes as he walks away from the road, stopping now and then to pick up a beer can or plastic wrapper. He wishes he had remembered to bring a trash bag. All kinds of people—Boy Scout troops, church groups, Wal-Marts, even a Ku Klux Klan chapter in Missouri he read about recently—adopt stretches of the big paved highways. Jack would like to adopt this little path.

He reaches the creek itself, a fast-moving stream at the bottom of a vertical clay cliff taller than he is. As he's standing there, he glimpses movement out of the corner of his eye, and thinks it might be a deer. When he turns, toward where the creek winds around a modest bend, he sees nothing at first.

Then, not 50 feet away, on the opposite bank, he appears.

The old man steps into the open from a thicket of briers Jack would have thought impenetrable. The sun makes him a little hard to identify, but Jack is sure that it's him. He stands there with his arms at his sides, saying nothing, smiling slightly across the water. He looks no older, and seems to be wearing the same baggy clothes he had on nearly two and a half years ago, even though it's 40 degrees colder than it was that June day.

“Hey,” Jack calls. “Where've you been? Who are you?”

The old man keeps smiling. He puts his index finger to his lips and shakes his head, slowly and deliberately, the gray ponytail swaying slightly.

Jack is almost afraid to breathe, the way he is when he watches the deer drink, knowing they soon will scatter so fast he'll wonder if he saw them at all.

He doesn't know how much time passes—probably no more than two minutes, and then the old man turns and walks back into the thicket.

“Wait,” Jack calls. “I have to ask you something.”

But he is gone.

It is no mean feat to cross the creek here. There are some rocks 100 yards downstream, just far enough apart to require a couple of leaps. Jack makes it without soaking anything except his lower left leg.

When he reaches the spot where he saw the old man, he can't find any evidence that he was there, not even a shoe-print in the hard red clay.

In the dying light, Jack walks on into town, right down Main Street, past the diner and Speakeasy Lightfoot's marker. Susan Edmonds blows her horn as she goes past but doesn't stop to ask him if he needs a ride. Like most of the people in the town itself, she knows he likes his walks.

He drops in at the fire department long enough to again thank the ones who are there for their wasted efforts of six weeks ago.

The insurance money will be coming soon, maybe by the end of the year. It's obviously arson, but Jack has little hope that anyone will be caught. The last thing he wants to do is draw unwanted attention to Brady Stone's nearest living relatives, and he hopes the drug dealer who burned his mother's house down would just as soon sever his ties with Speakeasy.

The money is less than they would have received from the Korean couple, and Mike and Sandy don't speak to him unless absolutely necessary, even though he's certain their need is less than his.

By the time he gets back home, it is fully dark. Gina is home from work; Shannon has already gone somewhere with friends.

He takes three deep breaths to calm himself, and goes inside.

“Well,” she says. “Where have you been? I thought maybe you had a hot date tonight and forgot to tell me.”

She is sitting in the living area, drinking a glass of white wine, her feet up on their leather couch.

He walks over to her, kisses her on her forehead and goes to get himself a Coke. He settles into one of the Barcelona chairs Gina talked him into getting three years ago before he broaches the decision he reached this afternoon.

“I heard from Gerald Prince today,” he tells her with studied casualness.

“Oh, really,” she says, and then waits.

“He says the book is promising. He thinks it's really good, but he thinks maybe I ought to change it from third person to first.”

“Really?” She frowns and hesitates before speaking again. “Won't that be kind of, um, difficult?”

Yes, Jack tells her. He's been thinking about it, and it won't be easy.

“That's what I want to talk to you about,” he says, and she frowns in spite of herself.

“I'm thinking,” he says, turning to face her, “I'm thinking that I really need to give this my full attention for a while. And, with the money from the insurance coming in soon, I figure I can pay the mortgage at least through the end of the year …”

“Whoa,” Gina says, holding up her right palm like a traffic cop. “Are you telling me that you can't pay the mortgage without the insurance money?”

He has tried to keep it from her. He hasn't wanted her to worry needlessly, and if he required any further proof that he is on the right path, the old man's appearance today clinched it. Still, how do you tell your wife that you've hitched your—your family's—star to a wrinkled old man who she's never seen and who disappears into thin air?

He tells her that, yes, it has gotten a little tight, with the stock market going south and all. Thank God, he thinks, she doesn't know about the $7,000 Brady took to California, more than three months' mortgage payments.

“My God,” Gina says, getting up to get herself another glass of wine. “Why didn't you tell me we were getting so strapped for money?”

“We won't be tight much longer,” he tells her. “Just hang on until the … until they buy my book.”

She sits down again, and he walks over and kneels beside her.

“Trust me,” he tells her. “This is going to work. I know it's going to work. I haven't ever believed in anything this much.”

He knows, from her small frown, that he should have added, “since I first met you,” but the moment is gone, and he's never been good at fooling her.

There is a pause, and then he plunges on.

“I'm thinking that, if I had six weeks, from now to New Year's, I could do it. I could rewrite the whole book the way Jerry … Gerald suggested, in the first person, and have it ready to send back to him by New Year's Day.”

“You mean …” she knows what he means but doesn't want to give it legitimacy by saying it. “You mean, quit your job?”

“I'm not making that much anyhow,” he says.

“Almost enough to make the mortgage payment,” she says, a thin, humorless smile playing on her red lips. She's had her dark hair done in a way that makes it look wild, with no two strands seeming to go in the same direction but with the result somehow coherent. She is flushed, the way she gets when she's had too much wine or she's angry.

“It'll all work out,” Jack tells her.

“How?”

“It just will.”

“‘Just will'? Good Lord, Jack, that sounds like Brady talking.”

He knows that he isn't doing a very good job of selling his idea, but he's known, since he left the creek, that this is what he has to do.

“Just give me till New Year's,” he says. “I can make it work. Believe in me.”

“I want to.” She shakes her head, and her hair floats back and forth before regaining its shape. “I really want to. But what if it doesn't work?”

He has to give her credit. She has never, before now, even mentioned that possibility. He feels like a tightrope walker who has just felt the faintest breeze testing his equilibrium.

“It will,” he tells her. “I won't let it not work.”

They go around and around.

“What about Christmas presents?”

“We can charge them.”

“On what? We're barely paying the interest on the two cards we have now.”

“We'll get another one. Hell, they offer us about 10 a week.”

He can tell he's scaring her. He's always, until the last two-and-a-half years, been the stable one, the one who tried to talk her out of extravagance and spontaneity. It's as if they've changed roles, with Gina now the unhappy voice of reason.

“You know, Jack,” she says at last, when they realize it's almost 8 o'clock and they haven't even thought about dinner, “I believe in you, but you've got to promise me one thing. We don't lose this house. Promise me that, Jack.”

He tells her they won't lose the house.

“Because, if we lose the house, I—I don't know what I'd do, Jack.”

But he knows exactly what she'd do.

They haven't ironed things out completely when Shannon comes in, tires peeling rubber as her ride tears down the 200 yards of cul-de-sac. She has her books with her, and Gina asks her what she was studying, and with whom. Shannon's answers seem to satisfy her.

“Anything to eat?” she asks them.

“Let's call Domino's,” Jack says.

“Think we can afford it?” Gina replies, cold enough that Shannon picks up on it, Jack's afraid.

That night, in bed, he'd hoped that they could talk some more, but she says she's tired.

“Just one thing,” she tells him, before turning away. “You're awfully sure about all this, and you'd better be.”

When he knows she's asleep, he gets up and tiptoes into the empty living area, careful not to wake the dog, then walks up the spiral staircase and gets out his copy of the manuscript.

He calls up the first chapter and starts over, just like that, his fingers clicking in the silence that is broken only when he reads a passage to himself:

“I'd been traveling for three days solid. Hadn't slept the last two, since I slit the girl's throat back in Dothan, in that place that made you pay extra for ice …”

Yes, Jack says to himself, and realizes he's talking out loud.

Yes.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Come back to bed,” Gina says. “You've still got to be at work in five hours. You'll be bleary-eyed all day.”

He tells her he'll be down in a minute. He sees the hurt in her eyes, but he can't stop now. Just a little more, he begs her, and she turns without another word and edges her way down the narrow spiral staircase.

“I'll make you proud,” he calls weakly after her. “It'll be worth it, I swear.”

Just then, the heat pump kicks in, and he doesn't hear what, if anything, she says.

He goes back to the desk, where the computer waits patiently, humming low.

He looks up on the bookshelf. They had floor-to-ceiling shelves built when the house was being constructed, and on the one nearest him, at eye level when he's sitting, is a photo montage put there by Gina. In the middle is one of the two of them, on their trip to Cancun, taken by another cruise-ship passenger, not long before they were married. She is wearing a small fuchsia bikini, and he has on flourescent green trunks. They look young and happy, without a doubt or a care.

“It's going to work,” he says to the picture. “I know it will.”

Even the picture, though, looks doubtful.

They met at his 30
^th
birthday party.

By then, Jack Stone was fairly sure his life was not destined to follow any plan he might have helped design.

The truck farm did not turn out so well. After Carly left, he threw himself into it fully for more than a year, because he had to throw himself into something. But then he woke up one late-summer morning, and he knew he could not bear another year of it. He was no farmer, had never planned to be one, had never prepared to be one. He knew, as he lay in bed and watched the first light slip into his room, that he was not going to be either successful or happy growing fruit and vegetables for other people's tables. He wondered how his father had stood it so long.

His mother left the decisions up to him, and she told him later she was relieved. She'd had no more intention of working on a farm than he had, until she fell in love with a farmer.

They managed to lease most of the acreage to a man who finished Gladden High two years after Jack, and from then on, Jack Stone's experience with farming consisted of a few rows of tomatoes, beans and squash, mostly tended by his mother. The house was paid for, and Ellen could afford to take it a little easier.