Devil's Oven (8 page)

When they were done with him, the investigators moved off into the woods nearest the drive, and Denise came up to the porch with Keith. Keith asked if he could use the facilities and Tripp waved him inside.

“You doing all right?” Denise asked him when the door closed behind Keith.

Denise was good people. A thirty-year DNR veteran, she had survived six different governors’ administrations and an investigation into her alleged use of state money to finance a sweet house on Lake Norfolk. Nothing was proven, and six months later she had melted back into bureaucratic obscurity. Despite being a grandmother of six, Denise, only about five foot two, was compact in her gabardine pantsuit and tailored navy trench coat. The damp had caused her closely trimmed gray hair to curl slightly and her faded blue eyes were concerned. She cared about her people and liked to surround herself with those she felt she could respect and trust.

Tripp nodded. “Hell of a way to wake up,” he said.

“I imagine you don’t get much excitement in the neighborhood,” she said. “How long have you been up here again?”

“Almost twelve years,” he said. “As soon as I could afford it.” He didn’t mention how cheaply he had gotten the place, or how he had bought it off a doctor whose kids had been so spooked by the density of the nighttime woods, and the sounds of coyotes and owls they heard when they came up on the weekends that they refused to ever come back.

“Spotted a timber wolf last week up near the wood pile,” Tripp said. “He took off, but he looked pretty well fed.”

“Livestock around the place?”

Tripp shook his head. Even small talk felt weird to him, and Denise was always slow to come around to her point. “Nope, I think he was just marking territory.”

“You need to take a couple days off to clear this out of your head,” she said, gesturing to the uniform-surrounded body. “I can get Becker out of mothballs to cover for you. He’s had a good two months since his shoulder surgery. Plus he’s driving me crazy at the office.” She eyed him closely. “You sure you got some sleep last night? You don’t look like you rested very well.”

“I’m good,” Tripp said. “There’s been a lot of activity over on the western boundary. I need to follow up.” He knew he probably looked like shit, and it would be like her to notice. “But it can wait.”

“Works for me,” Denise said. She gave his upper arm a light squeeze. “Keep me posted. Get your beauty sleep.”

Tripp watched her walk down the steps and out to her state-issued SUV. She didn’t stop to talk to any of the investigators or troopers, but nodded to them as she turned the vehicle in the grass and drove out. He liked Denise. He didn’t like to lie to her.

“I don’t think the big boys need me hanging around,” Keith said behind him. “Ginger and I like to have some alone time while the kids are at school. But I guess I ought to look in at what’s happening at the Git ’n’ Go first, see if the Jolly Green Giant returned to the scene. Hell of a mess. I wonder where the rest of the poor bastard’s head is.”

“You know I appreciate you coming up here, man,” Tripp said, meaning it. “It was good to see a friendly face after…”

“No face at all?” Keith grimaced. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

They stood in silence for a moment. Tripp noticed that the bank of bird feeders he kept on the rise in the side yard was completely empty. He had overlooked more than a few things since he started seeing Lila. He felt sometimes like he had let his own life drift away from him while he took on another.

Keith started down the porch steps. When he reached the stone walk, he turned back.

“Hey, did you say you were dating a dancer a while back? What was her name again?”

Tripp said. “Not me, man.”

“Damn. Could’ve sworn you told me you were dating a redhead from the club. Or maybe someone said they saw you out.”

“Must have been someone else,” Tripp said.
Bullshit. No one saw me with Lila. We’re too careful.
Then he remembered what Jolene had said about Lila. “I gave one a ride home the other night. But she had black hair, and I wouldn’t call it any kind of date.”

“That’s what they all say,” Keith said. He grinned.

Tripp shook his head. “Plus, if The Twilight Club had a redhead, I never noticed.”

Keith laughed. “You wouldn’t,” he said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything, but I think the big boys will stay in touch. By the way, you make a helluva cappuccino. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

As much as Tripp wanted to follow Keith off the mountain and drive straight to Lila’s place, he knew he had to stay where he was. Lila, and probably Bud, were themselves certainly dealing with the sheriff’s deputies and Bud’s trucking employees. In fact, Tripp was kind of surprised that Bud himself hadn’t shown up to take a look at Claude Dixon’s body. Bud was that kind of guy—big and big-hearted and stubbornly honest. At the club, he was surrounded by half-naked girls any given time of day or night, but despite Lila’s paranoia, there was never even a hint he was screwing around with any of them.

No, Bud didn’t deserve the kind of treatment he was getting from either Tripp or his own wife. But Bud didn’t deserve Lila, either.

•  •  •

The coroner’s SUV, the state investigators, and the crime scene team were gone by four in the afternoon. As Tripp watched the last vehicle drive off, the exhaustion overtook him and he could think only of crawling back into the bed he had abandoned so early that morning. Instead, he made himself a bologna sandwich with mustard and ate it in front of the sliding glass door that looked out on the primitive backyard. The doctor he had bought the house from had cleared the yard of stumps and tried to plant some grass, but there was way too much shade from the surrounding forest and it had never taken off. The yard was also smaller now than when he had bought the place. Mindful of fire hazards, he kept the brush away, but he had nurtured the few oak trees that had managed to start themselves. Taming nature had never been one of his interests. He liked a certain order to things, but the mountain had its own rules and he never fought those rules. Sometimes, though, he found it difficult to live with them.

He had tried to leave the mountain more than once, first by going away to college a thousand miles away, a place where the mountains were too vast, too unfamiliar. And two years earlier, he had taken a winter’s leave of absence and half his savings to find out what life would be like living in a rental near his folks’ place near the beach. But he was back on the mountain in eight weeks. Now, there was Lila.

•  •  •

The daylight faded behind his closed curtains. He lay in bed, thinking of her. She was down there in that enormous house with Bud to comfort her instead of him. What was she telling him? Did Bud even know she needed comfort? He probably did. Lila had never been good at hiding her feelings.

As much as he despised the thought of Bud touching Lila, holding Lila, his weariness won out and he could no longer hold her face in his mind. He found himself remembering the distant sound of snapping tree limbs and the frantic rustle of fallen leaves, the sound of whoever—whatever—had been wandering the mountainside carrying the body of Claude Dixon through the darkness. The troopers had found no footprints in the woods and somehow that seemed right to Tripp. Whatever had killed Claude Dixon might have found him in Alta, but it had surely come from the mountain and was still somewhere on it. Tripp was strangely comforted by the thought. Terrible and dangerous as the thing was, if it was from the mountain he refused to be afraid of it. It would be like being afraid of himself.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The front door was only a few feet from where Jolene slept, so she woke at the sound of the first knock. Her mouth and throat were so dry, she could hardly swallow. Thirst was no small thing to her. Thirst was a memory of being buried deep in time-hardened soil, caressed by tree roots that searched year after endless year for hidden water. Thirst was proof there was some human part of her left, even though she couldn’t see or feel or hear until she had been thrust from the ground and into the world once again.

Instead of answering the door, she ran to the bathroom, desperate. Filling the plastic tumbler on the sink with tap water, she drained it then refilled it and drank again. It didn’t matter that the water tasted like rust and chlorine. It soothed her tongue and throat and cooled her skin as some of it ran onto her chin and dropped onto her chest.
One more glass. Always just one more.

She leaned against the sink, breathing hard. In the mirror, the skin beneath her eyes looked blue, translucent. After coming back from Ivy’s house, she had started to feel worse, and Charity had offered to cover her shift so she could rest. She had expected to feel better on waking, but only wanted to go back to sleep.

Out in the hallway, Charity was yelling at whoever was at the door.

“Eli, that better not be you!”

The milky light coming through the window above the shower told Jolene it was no later than seven thirty in the morning, and Charity awake after only three or four hours’ sleep wasn’t a nice thing to hear.

Eli had forgotten his front door key twice since he had brought Jolene to stay at the trailer. Both times Jolene had been the one to let him in, and Charity was always threatening to throw him out for waking them too early. If he and Charity were going to fight, they would do it in front of her. Dancing or not, Charity liked an audience. Then there would be at least an hour of noisy sex, also loud enough for Jolene’s benefit.

Charity’s aura was always a passionate red that flared directly over her heart. Jolene had trusted her from the moment Eli led her from the trailer out to his truck, where Jolene sat naked and not yet able to speak, wrapped in the sleeping bag he kept balled up behind the seat.

•  •  •

Shrouding her shoulders with the quilt, Jolene shuffled back down the hall toward the living room, hoping she might be able to sleep for another hour or two.

Charity swung open the door. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “What the hell’s on fire?”

Bud Tucker stood on the step looking chagrined. Taking off his fawn cowboy hat, he ducked his head unnecessarily as Charity stood aside so he could come in. Jolene felt the rush of cool air that came with him. Despite the cold, Bud’s face was flushed and his forehead wore a sheen of sweat.

The hints of gray around his chest worried Jolene. Otherwise, his aura was a rich indigo she had never seen waver; he cared deeply about the people around him. There were pictures of him in younger, healthier days on a wall in the club’s office—pictures with a governor; with a slightly gap-toothed woman who had signed her picture
Carly
in a tight, loopy scrawl; and with a smiling actor in front of a
Barbarian Master
poster. Both men wore tight-fitting suits and skinny neckties, and it was one of the few pictures in which Bud wasn’t the biggest person in the shot. Bud didn’t have any hair back then, either, but he’d had a more athletic build. She had never seen him smile as broadly as he had in the pictures, but his moss-green eyes were never threatening, even when he was dealing with the club’s roughest customers.

“Breakfast.” Bud held out two stiff paper sacks and gave Charity a conciliatory smile. Noticing that Charity’s satin robe had fallen open to partially expose her triple-D breasts, he glanced away. “I can’t stay long, but there’s some coffee and blueberry muffins for you and Eli, and I had Lori Ann at the diner pack up some of her chicken noodle soup for Jolene.”

Charity’s irritation softened at the mention of coffee. She pushed a hairspray-stiffened lock of blond hair behind one ear and then took the sacks.

“Yeah,” she said. “Some guy who worked at the trucking company, he got dragged off or something last night?”

Bud shook his head. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m on my way over to the office. It’s Claude, my dispatcher. Dwight called me, but I couldn’t get back in town until now.”

“That’s horrible,” Jolene said. She sank down onto the couch and wrapped the quilt tighter around her. A couple of the drivers hung around the club. They were nice guys, good tippers. But she had never met Claude.

She hadn’t even been in Alta two weeks and someone was dead of violence, or as good as dead.
Did I bring the violence with me?
Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the world as it might become: its edges seeping black, all its life drained away.

“I hope they find him alive,” Bud said. “I don’t have the whole story yet. I haven’t even told Lila. She’s probably still asleep.”

Jolene stopped herself from telling Bud she had seen Lila two nights earlier. Lila couldn’t see that the kindness Bud showed everyone around him cost him a hell of a lot. He couldn’t help being as trusting as he was. Deceiving him was too easy, like deceiving a child.
Deceit meant death for the soul.

“I heard the guy looked like some kind of ape,” Charity said. She looked at Jolene. “I was going to tell you, but you didn’t even move when I came in this morning, and Eli said you were totally passed out when he left. You still look like hell, by the way.”

Realizing that Bud was also staring at her, Jolene got self-conscious.

“It’s not anything,” she said. “I’ll be okay to work tonight if I rest today.” She knew she hadn’t done herself any favors spending so much time in the rain, but it had been worth it to spend an hour on the mountain. The very air there restored her.

And now she knew who/what Ivy was hiding. The huge man with the strange stitches on his skin. But Jolene didn’t know what to do. There was no voice, no helpful set of instructions written in the air. He had been dead on that table, hadn’t he? No aura at all, just the blank absence of life. The idea of Ivy hiding a dead man in her trailer had puzzled her, but she saw now she had been wrong. He hadn’t been dead. He was as alive as she was—if the tenuous connection she had to the earth around her could be called
life
.

One of Bud’s employees was probably dead, and she might as well have killed him herself.