Blood Trail (7 page)

“Go in peace,” said the minister.

Nobody went. Nobody moved except Mr. Gingrich, striding over to me. He stopped in front of me and glared into my face from about six inches away. I think the only reason I didn't step back from him was because I was so damn tired of everything.

He whispered at me between his teeth, “Traitor.”

“Mr. Gingrich, I'm sorry about Aaron,” I said, meaning it.

“Judas! How dare you—”

“He was my best friend.”

“Get out. Get away from him. Don't you ever—”

Coach said, “Mr. Gingrich, you're upset, you're saying things you'll regret—”

“You stay out of this!”

A policeman showed up at Mr. Gingrich's side. I knew him a little because he'd been keeping an eye on my house—it was getting so that I knew all the Pinto River cops. This one gave me a quiet, friendly look and touched Mr. Gingrich's elbow. “Your wife's waiting for you, sir.”

Mr. Gingrich turned to him and stabbed his finger at me. “I want him out of here!”

“He has a right to be here, sir.”

“It's time to go, anyway,” Coach said.

Fine with me; I was tired. I followed him to his car, and we left.

More silence as he drove me home. Finally I said, “So you don't think I'm a liar?”

“I don't see any reason why you would lie, Jeremy. But there's a lot I don't understand.”

“Me neither.”

He pulled up in front of my house and said, “Oh, for God's sake.” I saw too: yellow ick splattering the brick and the windows, along with sticky bits of shell. Somebody had egged the place while we were at Aaron's funeral.

chapter nine

When I finally got to sleep that night, I had a dream that was almost worse than lying awake. I don't remember all of it but I do remember that Aaron passed me the football and I fumbled and Coach yelled at me, “Liar! Liar!” but Aaron smiled and said it didn't matter, he was just being stupid, imagining things. Then somehow he had the football again and he ran it between the other players, only they weren't players, they were couples in tuxedos and evening gowns, he was running through the prom and every footstep left a blood trail. I screamed, “Aaron,
run
!” and he ran like a devil was after him, over the roof of the church and down Main Street and through Rose's café and his dad's store and all over Pinto River, leaving a blood trail everywhere. He ran into the development, down through my basement and up again and across his lawn, where all the dead flowers were lying, and instead of a football he was carrying his severed head under his arm, tracking blood like floods of red ink out of a lie detector machine. I screamed, “The river! Head for the river!” like in an old movie, like the bloodhounds were after him. We ran and ran, I ran with him up mountains and over cliffs and down the winding river road, and he left blood on the sky and blood on the boulders and scrub pines and blood on the asphalt as he ran. When we got to the river and he dived in, the water turned blood red. He dived into the swimming hole and disappeared, he didn't come up again, and I knew he was dying but I couldn't do a thing to help him, I stood there dripping sweat and tears, with my legs aching like my heart, just stood there in the shallows with a giant crayfish clamped onto my ankles like shackles. Only Aaron's head stayed on the surface. It floated past me, looked at me and said, “Booger, I'm scared—”

I woke up sweating. My throat hurt like I had a knife blade stuck in it. I heard someone whimpering and sobbing, and it wasn't me; it came from across the hallway. My stupid sister, crying in her sleep. Then she sighed and quieted down. Maybe she woke up. Outside, a car blasted past with the stereo thumping. Somebody yelled almost as loud as the stereo, and I heard a rock or something hit the front of the house.

God damn everything. I lunged out of bed and stomped downstairs. Without turning the light on, I plugged the phone in and quick-dialed my father.

On the third ring he picked up. “Yo.”

“Hey, you're there.”

“I ought to be,” he said. “It's three in the morning.”

There were a lot of things I could have said, like he could have still been hanging out at the Tipple Tavern, or he could have been with his girlfriend, or if he wanted me not to call at three in the morning, he should have called me back when he got my message. But all I said was, “Yeah, and people are throwing rocks at the house.”

“Just the usual dumb crap. Have they hosed down the car and dumped flour on it yet?”

“No, because it's in the garage!”

“They could get in there if they wanted to. Break a window, slash your mom's tires—”

“Yeah, and they might try it.”

“So what do you want me to do about it, son?”

“You're the security expert.” Like I said before, my father works security at the county courthouse. It must have been because he knew somebody, since he was never any kind of cop. When criminal court is in session, he mans the metal detector at the front door and he gets to help guard prisoners. Between that and hanging out at the Tipple, he knows everything. Even though I hadn't heard a word from him, I could count on it that he knew what I meant about people throwing rocks.

I told him, “They egged the place yesterday.”

“So? Just the usual stupidity, like I said. Did it wash off?”

“Mom said don't bother, just leave it that way for a while. Like we don't care.”

“Your mother is a wise woman,” Dad said.

“Whatever,” I said. Dad always said Mom was a wise woman, but that hadn't kept him from walking out on her. I told him, “I need a gun for self-defense.”

He sighed.

“Dad?”

“Is your mother asleep?”

“I guess so.” She wasn't asking me what the heck I was doing on the phone at three
A.M.

“Okay. Don't wake her. I'm coming over.”

The guys with the cranked-up sound system went past twice more before Dad got there. I kept the lights off and got a look at them out the window. Some kind of dark-colored pickup truck, with Baja lights and a roll bar. Each time they roared past, they yelled and threw something.

Finally Dad tapped at the door. He never came inside the house, so I went outside to talk with him. “Watch where you step,” he said, shining a big security-dude flashlight on a paper bag that had splatted open against the doorstep. “Looks like nice fresh cow manure.”

It smelled like nice fresh cow manure, too. I just stood there shivering. Except for streetlights and his flashlight and some people's landscape lights and stuff, it was dark out there. I didn't like it.

“You scared?” Dad asked.

“Yes!” I had got to a point where I didn't even mind being a coward.

“That's dumb. You don't have to be scared of those jerks.”

“Like hell,” I said.

“Son, this is all going to blow over. And these cretins aren't going to do jack except yell and throw crap.”

Mostly for the sake of argument I said, “Yeah, but what about the murderer?”

“What about him?”

“He's still out there!” And all of a sudden I realized it could be true. There really could be a murderer hiding in the black pines and hemlocks that grew like a beard all over the mountains. Or maybe closer. Maybe behind a boulder in the river bottom. Maybe watching from the poplars at the edge of my yard. Damn dark shaggy trees everywhere, damn rocks and caves, damn abandoned mines and foggy hills, he could be anywhere.

Dad looked at me kind of odd.

“The psycho who killed Aaron!” I said, getting louder. “Or intruder, whatever, maybe he's a serial killer, maybe he likes to carve up high school jocks.”

Dad started to laugh.

“Stop it!” I hated him. “I need a gun, Dad!”

“Get a clue, son!”

That hurt. I yelled, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Shush! You'll wake your mother.” He kind of gulped, then mostly stopped laughing. “You know who killed Aaron as well as the cops do.”

“I don't know anything!”

“C'mere.” He took me by the elbow and headed me toward his old Hyundai. Once I sat in the passenger seat and locked the door I felt calmer. Also, Dad was being serious now, which helped.

He settled himself behind the wheel but he didn't start the car. He said, “I shouldn't have laughed. All you know is what's been in the news, right?”

I gave him a look and didn't answer.

“Right,” he said. “But there's a lot they don't tell you. Such as, there is no evidence at all that any intruder was ever in that house.”

“Maybe he wore gloves,” I said.

“That only accounts for fingerprints. What about hairs, fibers, footprints, saliva, maybe a spot or two of blood? You can't go someplace without leaving evidence. Dirt, dead skin particles, whatever—with the technology the state police have got, they would have found something if an intruder had been there. And there was no sign of forcible entry. How—”

“Maybe some door wasn't locked.”

“The front door was unlocked when Cecily got home. Nathan said he locked the doors. Then he changed his story and said he wasn't sure. His first story, he said he locked the doors and went to bed, his sister woke him up screaming, he went down and saw Aaron's body, he called 911. He didn't say a word about your phone calls. But the cops have your voice on the answering machine, they have Jamy and Cecily and two others to verify that you made the calls, so Nathan changed his story. Now he says it's the phone that woke him up, and he answered it before Cecily came home and he saw the body. But to get to the downstairs phone from his bedroom, he had to walk past the body. So he says he got it upstairs. But that phone is in his parents' bedroom, and the carpet had just been vacuumed, and there are no footmarks. And the downstairs phone has bloodstains on it.”

I started to feel cold, remembering how I had felt so relieved when Nathan had answered, and now Dad was saying he had picked up the phone with—with blood on his hands.

“Maybe it got there when he called 911.”

“Okay, maybe. He says he wasn't thinking, he touched Aaron, and that's when he got blood all over him. Okay, fine, but Cecily would know whether he had blood on him when she got home, right?”

Oh, my God.

I just sat there. Couldn't make myself ask.

“And she's not saying,” Dad answered the question I couldn't ask. “The cops try to talk with her or hook her up to the polygraph, she just gets hysterical.”

God have mercy. Poor Aardy.

“They can't make her testify against her brother anyway,” Dad said, “but they don't need to. There's plenty of physical evidence. For starters, Nathan's footprints are in the blood trail all over the house.”

Cold. I felt cold. So cold I couldn't speak.

“Somebody—and I for one think it must have been Nathan—had cleaned up the blood trail,” Dad said, “but you can still see it under black light. Kitchen, living room, stairs, kitchen again, and Nathan's footprints are in it all the way.”

I found my voice. “So he was stupid, he cleaned it up, his footprints got in it—”

“But there are no other footprints in it. Only his and Aaron's.”

I turned away, staring out the car window at the night like it could tell me something.

I heard Dad's voice. “Use your brain, son.”

God damn everything. I whispered, “But … but why would Nathan kill Aaron?”

“Ah.” Dad actually sounded like I'd said something right. “That's the prosecution's one weak point. Motive. But with all the physical evidence, they don't really need to prove motive. I mean, brother killing brother, ask the cops. Something like ninety percent of domestic calls where it's brother fighting brother, sooner or later it ends up in murder. But I bet the funeral preacher didn't mention the first crime in the Bible, did he? I bet he didn't talk about Cain and Abel.”

I didn't say anything, just sat there, but Dad kept talking. “They'll send him up for psychiatric examination,” he said. “He'll probably plead insane. Maybe he is psycho. You should have heard the cops at the bar talking about his lie detector test.”

That made me sit up and listen. “What about his lie detector test?”

“No reactions. None. No nerves, no emotions, nothing. Like he's got no conscience at all.”

Cold. So cold. Trying to joke, I said, “Me, I flunked the baseline.”

“Oh, that old thing where they tell you to choose a number between one and five?”

Why did he always have to know everything? I clenched my teeth. “I can't believe Nathan did it.”

“Son, like I said, get a clue. The minute I heard about the autopsy, I knew it was the brother.”

“Huh? How?”

“Seventy-three stab wounds, for God's sake, that's how! That's not from some burglar the kid walked in on, or even a serial killer. Seventy-three stab wounds, that's rage that's been building for years, that's a personal grudge, that's hatred. Nobody hates that bad except family.”

I hated him. “That doesn't make sense.”

“Yes, it does. Ask any cop what calls are the most dangerous, and they'll tell you: domestic. Most murders, who do you suspect first? The family.”

My head hurt from listening to him, my throat hurt, and my eyes hurt, and my chest hurt. I had to make my voice hard to talk at all. “I still want a gun.” I needed one. Hate calls. People throwing rocks in the night. Mr. Gingrich.

“Forget it, son. Even if it was legal, I wouldn't get you one.”

“But I'm scared!”

“Worst reason. Worst thing you can do when your emotions are out of control is grab a gun.” Dad's voice changed gears into low. “I almost killed your mother once that way. Did she ever tell you?”

I sat there with my mouth open.