Buried Alive (21 page)

The wall open to the high ceiling on the fireplace end of the living area had been plastered or dry-walled and painted a creamy white. Ditto the wall beside the stairs to the loft. The seamless white formed the background for dozens of items from photographs through old advertising posters to antique tools. A tan and red-banded hat of straw centered the collection. Arranging a sizeable number of items on a surface is difficult - it’s composition - but Cherry had an eye for balance.

I studied the tools, odd assemblages of wood and leather and metal. A couple of them looked cruel, almost threatening. “I’ve never seen tools like these before,” I said. “What are they?”

She padded over and stood at my side, beer bottle in hand. “I have no idea. They were in Uncle Horace’s shed. I suppose they have something to do with horses. The hat’s his, too; he wore it everywhere. Here’s my favorite picture—”

She pointed to a photo of a pretty young girl, eight or nine, standing beside a barrel-chested man with waxed dark hair. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, dark bolo tie, and the same tan hat hanging on the wall. He was grinning like he’d just won the lottery.

“Uncle Horace and you?” I asked.

“Yep. That’s Uncle Horace in most of the shots.”

I studied another photo, Horace Cherry bedecked in an ice-cream suit with cocked and jaunty hat riding his crown. His smile seemed radiant and boundless, the young Donna Cherry at his side looking heartbreakingly innocent.

“He always wore the suit, right?” I asked, knowing it was a uniform.

“With the hat atop his crown everywhere he went. He was a dandy. It was funny.”

Something in the photo started to make me uneasy. Something in the eyes perhaps. Or maybe it was the age of the photo, a darkening of the shadows.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea.” Cherry crouched to reach into a low cabinet, pulling out a squat brown bottle. I tried not to notice the way her dress hugged her body. She shook back her hair and studied the bottle’s yellowed label as she stood. I saw her nipples buzzing against the
fabric of her dress like anxious bees. I wanted them to carry honey to my tongue.

“It’s some kind of special cognac,” she said. “A gift from Uncle Horace years ago. He said to have a sip on special occasions. Want a tipple to celebrate your first skylift ride? All in all, you liked the trip, right?”

“It was wonderful,” I lied, feeling a smile rise to my lips as I moved a half-step closer to Donna Cherry. My knees loose with the promise of honey, I started to reach for her hand.

And stopped. Froze with my hand suspended in midair. I couldn’t tell if the hand was part of the me I knew as me or the priapic rogue my brother kept telling me was me. Was it me interested in Cherry or was it he, the broken me? From nowhere my brother’s mocking voice rose unbidden in my head.

“Part of your childhood damage manifests in a shy roguish charm you use to warm yourself with temporary lovers, Carson
…”

I realized he’d said those things knowing I’d hear them at moments like this. I’d forgotten how consuming was his need to affect others from a distance. To keep a tight chain.

“Wait here a second,” I told Cherry.

“Uh, Carson, did I say something?”

“You’re fine. I’ll be right back.”

I walked outside, close to the edge of the precipice, where I crouched and found a round chunk of sandstone. I mentally mapped my position, turned to the general
direction of the hollow, trying to aim my eyes directly at my brother’s cabin, visualizing him sitting on the porch. I side-armed the stone high and away in his direction and closed my eyes. I pictured the rock traveling five or so miles, falling from the sky like a meteorite and smacking my brother dead-center in his forehead, knocking him backwards in his chair, newspaper fluttering down on his startled face.

“Keep your hands outta my head, Brother,” I said, backing my symbolic missile with the most potent digital icon in American culture.

When I stepped back inside I felt fifty pounds lighter, like a leaden yoke had melted from my shoulders. “Pour the cognac,” I said, stepping to Cherry and no longer wondering who was talking.

She lifted a perplexed eyebrow. “Are you all right?”

“I had a simple ritual to perform. Like an exorcism.”

“Uh, do you always—”

I pressed my finger to her lips, stilling them. The sensation of warmth was exquisite. “My own small skylift ritual. I had something bothering me, but it fell away.” I withdrew my finger, reluctantly.

“When you put it in those terms, I think I understand.” She lifted her glass. “Shall we drink to solving the case?”

“No,” I corrected. “Let’s drink to us.”

We clicked glasses. The cognac was dizzying in my head, distilled manna aged in oak and leather. We next raised our glasses to the tan hat of our cognac-giving benefactor, Horace T. Cherry, staring dark-eyed from the
photo centering the wall of pictures and weird objects. We set the glasses on the table and sat on the couch, almost touching. I’m sure I heard her bees buzzing.

My cellphone rasped from my pocket. I rolled my eyes and answered.

“This is Heywood Williams,” an elderly male voice said, loud, like a guy with hearing problems. “I’m manager of the Pumpkin Patch Campground. We got a dog running loose around here matches the description on a poster one of the Woslee cops dropped off.”

“The dog’s a big guy?” I asked. “Kinda odd-looking?”

“I guess. Odd looks different to different people. Big ol’ boy. Friendly.”

I took the address, clear on the other side of the Gorge. I’d already had several calls, able to figure out it wasn’t Mix-up by questioning the caller. But this call had promise.

“I heard,” Cherry said as I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “Go, Carson. I hope it’s Mix-up. But even if it isn’t, I’m still hopeful, right?”

She stood on her toes and gave me a millisecond’s kiss on my lips, more dizzying by far than the cognac.

The Pumpkin Patch Campground was twenty minutes distant. I drove past the campground sign, pumpkin-shaped and promising hookups, fire pits and a dumping station. Mr Williams was reading a newspaper in a folding chair beside a small wooden kiosk where guests checked in. He was somewhere in his seventies, wearing a pumpkin-colored porkpie hat and Bermuda shorts.

“I’m sorry,” Williams said sheepishly. “The dog belonged to a group of campers. I hadn’t seen it when they checked in.”

He pointed to a bright recreational vehicle across a small park area. The family - husband, wife, three smallish kids - were still setting up, the husband on the roof of the vehicle passing lawn chairs down to the wife as a huge shaggy dog with some resemblance to Mix-up frisked at the wife’s ankles.

Williams was a chatty guy and since he’d made a valiant effort on my behalf, I kept him company for a few minutes, talking about the weather and his work.

“We got twenty sites for RVs,” he related proudly. “Full hookups. And another dozen sites for tent campers.”

“Must keep you busy.”

“Busy enough. People drive in, stay a night or two, head off to another place. Easy to do when you’re driving a box filled with all the comforts of home.”

I saw a big recreational vehicle that had recently pulled in for the night; hooked to the towbar behind it was a Mazda compact.

“Do many people pull cars with them?” I asked, killing time.

“Sure. So they can move around locally with less gas. If a big RV is like planting your house anywhere you want, having a car is like bringing your garage along as well.”

“Are there many RV campgrounds in the area?”

“Depends what you mean. There’s maybe five or six real near the Gorge. Add another thirty miles to the circle and you get a bunch more. Plus some folks have acreage set up to hold a few RVs to make a little pin money.”

I studied nearby RVs, saw three more with towing packages. It hit me that the set-up was the perfect mobile hideaway, especially with props like bikes and boats and fishing rods. A recreational vehicle could be moved from campsite to campsite, hard to track. They offered
a place to plot, to change disguise, to sneak in under cover of dark, tear a body apart, pack it with manure. There was also the image: recreational vehicles were the happy whales of the road, friendly and benign, filled with cheery families and retired couples. Mad killers drove rusty vans and dark, low-slung sedans with obsidian windows.

I recalled the words of Gable Paltry, the scruffy old voyeur who scanned the parking lot behind the funeral home where Tanner’s body had been stolen.

“I
saw me a big a RV pull in
…
Stayed maybe ten minutes. Light color. Had bikes and crap roped to the back. A barbecue grill tied up top, too.”

I asked Williams if I could wander the campground and, sauntering from site to site, I looked at the bright machines, seeing families and children and several RVs with no one around, owners out hiking or kayaking the river or sightseeing.

When I left Pumpkin Patch, my mind was fixated on the possibility of RVs as hideouts - not just this case, but for future reference. I passed another such campground and pulled in to take a look. That led to a third such place, the Haunted Hollow Campground. The campground was up by Frenchburg, high on the northwest side of the Gorge area. The murders and bulk of the investigation had occurred on the eastern side.

I parked near the entrance and wandered past the twenty or so sites. The lot, thick with trees, was tucked
back in a verdant hollow - haunted, presumably - with a small creek singing merrily alongside. It didn’t seem a place where a killer would tuck down and think murderous thoughts.

I scanned RV after RV, seeing occupants, or swimsuits drying on a line, or hearing voices from inside, doors open wide to accept the cooling air of dusk. At the end of the road was a huge cream-colored RV resembling a vacation on wheels, bikes parked against the rear wheel, man’s, woman’s, a couple kid’s bikes. Two short recreational kayaks were strapped atop the vehicle, plus a plane-sized inner tube for playing in the water. The tips of fishing rods pressed against a back window. The shades were drawn and no one seemed inside.

I wandered to the rear and saw the requisite bumper stickers:
Smoky Mountains, Everglades National Park, the Ozarks,
a dozen or so. The stickers looked new and I wondered if the vehicle’s owner or owners were recent retirees.

The vehicle had both a tow bar and a rack holding a Kawasaki dirt bike, a big one. The distance from the ground to the rack was twenty or so inches and I figured it took a couple people to grunt the motorcycle into the rack. Or one strong one.

Turning away, a motion at a rear window caught my eye, a curtain shifting perhaps. Or a motion behind it. I stared for several seconds and saw nothing, recalling a classic bumper sticker admonition:

Don’t Come Knockin’ When This Van’s A-rockin’.

Hoping my nosy wanderings hadn’t disturbed anyone’s merrymaking, I retreated to my car, shooting backwards glances at the RV and wondering if my imagination was running past the red line.

I started back to my cabin, but being cloistered with my thoughts seemed claustrophobic so, for a few minutes at least, I drove where the roads led me, restless, thinking that maybe if I gave Mix-up a little more time, he’d be at the cabin when I returned, nose-nudging his food bowl my way as though nothing had happened.

Dusk was thickening and I saw headlights behind me, but they dissolved into the distance. I drove westward, windows down, as night fell deep into the valleys. The road straightened for a moment and I saw the headlights again, closer, the vehicle moving at speed. To my left I saw a Forest Service road and pulled from the main road, wanting to find a bit of calm before returning to the cabin.

I heard a slow rumble through the mountains as I stepped from my truck and stretched my back. It was distant thunder, the promised front approaching. But for now the moonlight was bright enough to light the trail.

I started walking, right away stepping into a spider web. I brushed it from my face, recalling McCoy’s observation regarding a second traveler on the Rock Bridge trail. I was a half-mile down the trail when I heard a car door close somewhere to my right. My parking area was behind me,
the other vehicle at another trail access; kids, I figured, kissing or sipping beer in the dark.

Two minutes later I heard a limb stepped on, the sound from my side quadrant. I gauged the distance as two or three hundred feet.

After a few seconds, I heard a second footfall. Then, a third.

I nearly called out a plaintive
Hello,
but stopped myself. If I could hear their footfalls, surely the other person had heard mine. It seemed odd that in the hundreds of square miles of the local forest, two people had chosen this section as a nighttime venue.

The night bloomed darker and I looked above to see a cloud covering the white face of the moon. The cloud sifted free and moonlight blazed so white as to feel hot on my neck. To my right I heard an odd sound, like tape being stripped from a roll.

I was craning my ear that direction when a bullet slapped a tree four feet to my right. I dove to the ground, heart racing.

At first, no sound. Then a voice in the dark.

“Here coppie, coppie, coppie,” it crooned, as if calling a dog, a high and metal-raspy voice. Another pop. The bullet sizzled past my ear.

The voice was unforgettable. I’d heard it once at a brief prison interview, once at a hypnosis session turned sour: Bobby Lee Crayline.

Bobby Lee Crayline?

For one horrible second it occurred that speaking of
him recently, figuring out his escape in Alabama, had worked black magic, that I had conjured him into my life like a demon from hell.

I breathed away the irrational and started running low, tough enough when the moon was out, impossible when clouds passed between us. My feet snagged roots and vines, stumbled over rocks. I stepped on limbs that cracked like firecrackers, ran headlong into low branches.

Why is Crayline here?
my mind kept saying.
Why is he trying to kill me?