No Woods So Dark as These Read online

  He was glad to see Buddy standing. Apparently he needed to go outside. DeMarco looked down across the bed. Pale gray light in the windows. In the third week of October, the sun would not peek over the horizon until 7:30 or so, first light a half hour earlier. He had overslept.

  As quietly as he could, he slipped out of bed. His movement woke Jayme. “Where you going?” she mumbled.

  “Buddy and I have to pee.”

  “He walked upstairs?”

  “Unless you installed an elevator last night.”

  She smiled, mumbled, “Have fun,” and closed her eyes again.

  Downstairs, still in only his boxers and T-shirt, DeMarco followed Buddy to the back door and then outside. The animal was in no way frisky but walked the way DeMarco felt, old and heavy and missing the warmth of his bed. The grass was chilly with dew and the air made DeMarco’s leg hairs stand up.

  Buddy stood in place a few feet to the right of the unfinished brick path. Lifted his head and sniffed the air. “My toes are getting numb here,” DeMarco said. But the dog showed no interest in lifting a leg.

  DeMarco shivered awhile longer and considered showing Buddy how to pee in Mrs. Craig’s forsythias, which were now only clumps of naked branches, the younger ones tall and spindly, the thicker branches mere stumps pruned early last summer. But a soft yellow light shone in the old woman’s kitchen window. So he led the dog to the bushes, said, “You figure it out,” and hustled back onto the porch with his toes stinging and his bladder full.

  A few minutes later, as he watched Buddy from the threshold, Jayme padded up behind him. “How’s he doing?” she asked.

  “Number two,” he said. “And you can’t have two without one.”

  She rubbed a hand against his back. “I didn’t smell any coffee brewing, did I?”

  “Flip you for brew or doggie doo retrieval.”

  “I’m on the coffee,” she said, and turned away. A minute later she returned to hand him an empty plastic sandwich bag. “How about Max for his permanent name? It means the greatest.”

  “Too much pressure to put on a guy,” DeMarco said. “How about Draco?”

  “That makes no sense at all,” she said, and pushed him toward the steps.

  * * *

  At exactly 9:00 a.m. Jayme’s cell phone rang. Dr. Lisa inquiring of her patient’s status. After the call, Jayme joined DeMarco in the dining room, where he was seated with the case notes spread before him, the dog at his feet.

  “She says it might be two weeks before he’s back to his old self. We shouldn’t expect much until he’s finished the antibiotics. Until then keep him clean, don’t let him lick himself, and keep an eye out for infection.”

  “Don’t let him lick himself? That’s like telling a goose not to honk.”

  “We could call him Goose,” she said. “That’s a cute name for a dog.”

  “He doesn’t poop enough to be a goose.”

  She sat down across from him, pulled her laptop close but did not open it. “We should get back to Chase Miller today.”

  “Okay. Let me know how he takes the news.”

  “We haven’t made that decision yet.”

  He pretended to be engrossed in his notes, then felt her eyes on him and lifted his head. “He’s your project, not mine,” he told her. “You clean up his messes, I’ll clean up Buddy’s.”

  She flashed him a scowl, then stood and went into the living room to collect Miller’s phone number from the landline.

  He could hear her talking as he worked, but could not follow the conversation. A few minutes later she returned to stand beside him. Laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m meeting him in an hour at the Gallery Grille. I think you should go too.”

  He looked up from his papers. “You’re driving to Greenville?”

  “He works there. It opens for lunch at 11:30. After work there he goes to his job at Goodwill. He’s a very responsible young man, babe. At least let’s give the kid a chance.”

  He was having no luck getting his thoughts together that morning, trying to plot out their next move. Maybe a twenty-minute drive would clear his head. Besides, it was going to be a sunny day. Temperature near fifty. Maybe they could sit on the patio with coffee and a chocolate éclair and watch the old gray duffers in loud sweaters squirting their balls into the sand and high grass. And maybe he could take the dead man’s photo along and show it to the golfers and staff. And maybe he should remember that his first priority was to support Jayme and keep her happy and be the man she wanted him to be.

  He pushed his chair back. “I’m going to ask Chase about Draco,” he said. “Bet you he likes it.”

  “Bet you it doesn’t matter,” she said, her smile twice as warm and sweet and devilish as a chocolate éclair.

  Twenty-Eight

  “The only thing that concerns me,” Jayme said to Chase Miller, “is not your work ethic or your honesty or anything like that. It’s your blog. It seems rather sensationalistic to me, and…sometimes lacking in compassion, I think.”

  They were seated on the concrete patio at the rear of the Gallery Grille, overlooking the golf course, she and DeMarco in full sun, Chase Miller’s face in the shade of the table’s closed green umbrella. The restaurant would open for lunch in forty minutes, and the clangs and bangs and clinks already coming from the kitchen jarred DeMarco. He allowed his gaze to wander over the other round wrought iron tables, the simple iron chairs, all empty, and at the closed umbrellas rising like cloth steeples from the tables, the fine stone wall and coach lanterns, and he wished he had a place like this to go to every morning, a place to sit alone in the sun and sip his coffee and steel himself for the day. In the distance down a long green slope, four golfers were converging on a green still twinkling from the morning’s soaking from the sprinklers, four silent, unhurried men, each pulling a handcart, each hoping to hit the ball closest to the hole, hoping for the lowest score, maybe hoping they could have their fading lives to live over again.

  DeMarco wished Miller had offered them coffee and something sweet, but their tables were empty and a bit dusty and he was having a hard time staying interested in the conversation.

  Miller’s brow wrinkled in response to Jayme’s comment. “Did you read them all?” he asked. “Because if you did, you’d see that I never criticize people who are innocent or deserving of help. I criticize the system. Whether it’s the system that makes it so easy for criminals to get away with what they do, or the system that makes it easy for lazy, dishonest people to milk the system. Or the system that hides all the nasty stuff it’s doing to us. I mean…I have a ton of compassion, I really do. But you have to admit there are some people who don’t deserve it.”

  Here he looked at DeMarco, who had tuned in just in time, and now found himself having to suppress a nod. He knew better than to corroborate Miller’s negativity in front of Jayme. He also knew that, in theory, each of them was merely an assemblage of photons and dark matter, and he wished he could kick free of some of his own darkness and shine a little brighter. It was not easy, though, to hold that aspiration paramount in one’s mind, not with murderers and ambitious youngsters and a newly emasculated dog to contend with. Usually the aspiration surfaced only in quiet moments when the photons were already beaming. The trick would be to hit the light switch when all he wanted was to be swallowed by the darkness, a desire that was the path of least resistance and unworthy of even a ten-watt photon. He did not know what wattages photons put forth but ten seemed a low enough number to be attainable. He figured Jayme for an assemblage of hundred-watt photons, and knew that if he could illuminate his space even half as brightly as she did hers, he would be well on his way to enlightenment. Time was running out for him faster than ever, though, and more and more often now he wondered what awaited him when the last grain of sand fell out.

  So, instead of encouraging the young man’s darkness, DeMarco t
old him, “Forbearance.”

  Miller’s brow wrinkled even more.

  “Confucius was asked for a single word that would ensure a good, happy life, and that was his answer: chu. It means forbearance. Tolerance and restraint. Patience and self-control.”

  “It’s not like I’m out killing people, am I?” Miller asked. “I’m trying to bring some attention to stuff that’s wrong. Are we supposed to just let all that stuff slide? Never try to change anything?”

  “I still have a hard time with it too,” DeMarco confessed. “But it’s the anger that will do you in, kid.”

  Miller wasn’t ready to concede. To Jayme, he said, “Do you expect me to love it? All the crap in this world?” Here he looked up into the blue firmament, scanned it from side to side. “Okay, you can’t see any up there now, but do you know what chem trails are? Tiny particles of aluminum supposed to reflect the sun and stop global warming. But we’re breathing that stuff. Us, the animals, the plant life—it’s killing everything. Which makes you wonder if maybe that’s not the real reason for it, right? Maybe that’s why they want to keep it so secret.”

  DeMarco had heard it all before. Was the entire generation obsessed with conspiracies? And why did they have to speak in italics all the time, emphasizing words as if the listener were too stupid to understand? And even if they were right about chem trails…what could anybody do about it? Stop breathing?

  “Am I supposed to love all that?” Miller asked.

  “No,” Jayme told him. “Just don’t take it all so personally.”

  Miller wasn’t buying her argument; DeMarco could tell by the look on the kid’s face. He wanted to keep arguing but was silently talking himself out of it.

  “Okay,” Miller finally said. “Okay. I hear what you’re saying. But the thing about it is, a lot of it is just my voice. My persona. There are a million bloggers out there. Sometimes you have to get loud to be heard, you know what I mean?”

  Maybe Jayme was right and the kid wasn’t so bad after all. Young and angry, neither condition fatal. And as far as he knew, nobody had ever died from an overuse of italics. DeMarco said, “Tell us something about your history. Where do you come from? What do your parents do?”

  “I grew up here, in this dying little town. My dad lives in Columbus. Haven’t seen him in six, seven years. My mother has a cleaning business. That’s all she’s ever done is to mop other people’s floors, clean their toilets, do whatever they want done. She started out on her own, has three other ladies working for her now. But she’s still doing the same thing every single day. Still mopping floors and cleaning out other people’s toilets.”

  DeMarco heard the young man’s resentment, the love for his mother, and he understood it all. Off the job the kid might look like a spoiled preppy, but he wasn’t that. He was driven.

  “Where did you go to college?” DeMarco asked.

  “Allegheny. BA in English.”

  Private liberal arts, DeMarco thought. Expensive school. “What’s the tuition there? About forty-five a year?”

  “More like fifty after all the fees. Another twelve grand if you live on campus and have a meal plan. Plus the books on top of that. But I commuted. I had a Trustee Scholarship that paid about half the tuition. I did work-study every semester, plus worked here weekends, full-time every summer.”

  Jayme asked, “How does one get a Trustee Scholarship?”

  Miller shrugged. “SAT scores, I guess. Plus class rank in high school. I was a Presidential Scholar there, so that helped.”

  Jayme smiled, then raised her eyebrows to DeMarco. You see? her eyebrows said.

  “Okay,” DeMarco told him. “My question is, what would you expect to do for us, and what kind of pay are you looking for?”

  “You know, ten, twelve dollars an hour would be great. I mean, if I could get an extra hundred a week, I’d work my ass off for you. Day or night, whatever you needed, just so long as I could keep the jobs I already have.”

  “And what would you do for us?” Jayme asked.

  “Like I said, I’m a great researcher. And not just online. I meet all kinds of people here. I mean all kinds. This used to be a private country club, and a lot of those people still play or eat here. That’s one slice of society I have access to.” He leaned against the table edge and lowered his voice. “We have a line cook and servers and at least one busboy who can get you any drug you want. Not that either of you would. I’m just saying I know those people too. The whole drug scene.”

  He leaned back in his chair again. Held up two fingers on his right hand and enclosed them in his left hand. “So that’s two. Three,” he said, and enclosed another finger, “are the kind of people who shop at Goodwill. That’s half the reason I work there. People on welfare, people collecting unemployment. Dopers, college kids, people doing their best to make ends meet.”

  He opened both hands and held them out, palms up. “I’m telling you guys, I have it covered. Everybody! If I don’t know somebody, I know somebody who does.” He turned to DeMarco. “And how effective are you talking to people my age? Nothing personal, but you look and act like a cop. Me, I fit right in. The kids around here know me, they know what I came from. If you want the scoop on what’s happening on the street, I’m your man. I can get into places you two never could.”

  Jayme asked, “And why would you do all that for a hundred dollars a week?”

  “It’s like I told you in my phone message. I plan to be a writer. A writer needs stories. A guy nailed to a tree, two women burned to a crisp, that’s a hell of a story.”

  DeMarco studied Miller’s face for a few moments. Then he said, “I have the feeling you’ve been doing some digging already. What have you come up with?”

  A small smile creased Miller’s mouth. “Am I hired?”

  DeMarco turned to Jayme. Her smile was his answer.

  To Miller, DeMarco said, “Two weeks probation. One hundred a week. But you do not go off half-cocked. You follow directions. If you even once come within fifty yards of jeopardizing the investigation…”

  “My ass is grass,” Miller said with a grin. “I got it. And I accept your terms, boss.” He stuck out his hand.

  DeMarco shook his head and blew out a long breath. Then extended his hand over the table.

  “Mrs. Boss,” Miller said, and offered his hand to Jayme.

  She took his hand and corrected him. “Ms. Boss.”

  “Right,” he said. “I just thought…I mean I know you’re not married or anything but you’re, you know, together…”

  She said, “And how do you know that?”

  His cheeks flushed a little, but he held her gaze. “I told you I’m a good researcher.”

  “Who’s your source?”

  “Unh unh uh. That’s on a need-to-know basis only.”

  “And we need you to give up the blog,” DeMarco told him.

  “Ah, man, I can’t let my readers down like that.”

  “Are you making any money from it?”

  “Not yet, but…”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “Man, you’re hard. Okay. Dire Wire is officially on hiatus.”

  “And you will never, ever, ever mention our names or this investigation online.”

  “Never ever? Geez, boss. Why don’t you just yank out my soul while you’re at it?”

  “Also,” DeMarco told him, “this relationship ends when the case is closed. No guarantees we will be able to employ you afterward. Deal or no deal?”

  “Deal,” Miller said. When he shoved back his chair to stand, the chair legs made a shrill scraping sound that sent a quick chill up DeMarco’s back.

  “Hold on,” DeMarco told him. “You have some information for us. What is it?”

  Miller took a glance to his right and left. Turned to glance at the door to the building. Then said, sotto voce, “Th
e crispy critters? Hundred-dollar hookers. They worked the Hadley and other I-79 rest areas.”

  DeMarco let his breath slip out between his lips. “Anything else?”

  “That’s it for now. I’ll have more soon.”

  “We need names,” DeMarco said.

  “I’ll get them. That and more.”

  To Miller, Jayme said, “Crispy critters is not acceptable language.”

  Miller flinched. But quickly recovered and said, “Heard, boss,” and rapped his knuckles twice on the table’s edge. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He turned and walked briskly to the side entrance, went inside, closed and locked the door. DeMarco and Jayme sat there looking at each other. “Am I going to regret this?” she asked.

  He gazed up at the sky. A tiny silver needle silently speeding west. Behind it, a long white trail, widening out from the tail of the jet, smearing itself across the blue.

  Twenty-Nine

  From the Gallery Grille parking lot DeMarco phoned Trooper Boyd and asked for a meeting with him and Flores in thirty minutes. Boyd suggested they meet for lunch at the Yellow Creek Inn, a small restaurant a couple of miles from the station house.

  “Too crowded this time of day,” DeMarco said. “And too much butter, batter, or cream sauce on everything. How about if Jayme and I grab some pizza on the way back?”

  “That works,” Boyd said.

  “How many people will be on hand today?”

  “Around lunchtime? Six to eight, I’d say.”

  “We’ll bring enough for everybody. Tell the boss he’s welcome to join us. If his secondary teeth have come in yet, that is.”

  Boyd chuckled. “I’ll let him know.”

  Forty minutes later Jayme and DeMarco arrived at the station carrying four large pizzas—one plain, two pepperoni, one supreme. After the other personnel had filled their paper plates and returned to their desks, Captain Boyd closed the conference room door. Took two slices of supreme for himself, then joined DeMarco, Matson, Boyd, and Flores at the table. Their conversation proceeded slowly, between bites.