“Anyway,” Anson went on, “Justin proposed to her after six months’ courting. They got married, both of them nineteen. Rented a house not far from here. We helped out with the rent money. Things were fine.”
He paused, perhaps savoring the last good memories he had.
Then quietly he added, “Not long after he wed Kaylie, Justin got some new friends. Guys he’d met at the hardware store. They persuaded him to buy a rifle and take up hunting.”
“You and Regina didn’t object?”
“ Regina did. I held my tongue. The sport’s not for me, it’s true. I can’t see what pleasure a man can take in blowing some dumb animal’s brains out. But there are those who like it, and I’ve known plenty of them, and mostly they’re fine. Mostly. There are a few, though, who maybe like it too much. Like it in an unhealthy way.”
“Justin’s friends were like that?”
“No, not at all. Far as I know, they were decent fellows. Couple of them were Justin’s age, and the others were older. They all were married, raising families, holding down honest jobs. They could go in for their weekend adventures and come back Sunday night ready for the next day’s nine-to-five.”
“Then what was the problem?” Shepherd asked, already knowing the answer.
McMillan tossed back another gulp of root beer, and then the answer rushed out of him in a spill of words.
“Problem was Justin himself. He got a taste of hunting wild game, and it was like he was a starving man who’d gotten hold of a bone. The more he gnawed at it, hungrier he got, till he couldn’t ever get his fill. Justin took to hunting in a way that wasn’t natural, or maybe it would be fairer to say — wasn’t civilized. It was more than sport to him. It was something ugly, born of the same wildness that had made him start fires and heist the neighbors’ jalopies. He’d pushed it down, covered it over, tried to stamp it out, but some things you can’t hold down forever. They come out in a new disguise, and worse than before. Not wildness anymore. Sickness.”
Shepherd let a moment pass. A fly traced lazy loops around his head, drawn by the root beer’s sugary scent. He brushed it away.
“Sickness is a strong word, Anson,” he said quietly.
“Then you tell me what to call it when a man starts drinking blood.”
Shepherd blinked. “Say that again.”
“He’d heard some hocus-pocus nonsense about how you could absorb the strength and courage of the animal you killed by drinking its blood. Heart blood, the richest kind. He came back from the woods one night with a gutted bobcat slung over his shoulder and his mouth stained bright red. Kaylie told me that one.”
“So Kaylie saw it? Not you?”
“She saw it, right. And she saw other things too. She told me. Sometimes she cried when she talked about it. Justin had put up gun racks in the garage, and he’d hide away in there, seated in a folding chair, polishing the goddamned things, babying them like they were living creatures, while all around him were relics of the animals he’d killed — antlers of a mule deer, skull of a bobcat, hide of a javelina. He had this tape of Indian chants, which he played on a cassette player, the volume so high it would make your ears bleed, Kaylie said. And sometimes at night he would sit there stark naked, with candles lit, and take blood he’d saved from the hunt, blood in jars, and smear it on himself like war paint….”
A shudder moved through him and escaped his body as a sigh. He looked toward the bruised patch of sky where the sun had been, moisture bright in the corners of his eyes.
Shepherd shifted in his chair. “Did anyone else see all this? You or Regina or anybody at all?”
“No. No one else.” Anson sighed. “I know what you’re driving at, Roy.”
Shepherd said it anyway. “It’s possible Kaylie hallucinated these incidents, if her mind was already unbalanced.”
“Sure. That’s what the sheriff and his boys told me too, after Kaylie shot Justin and got arrested for it. They said it must be all in her mind, and to prove it they went into the house and searched the garage.”
“And?”
“They found Justin’s guns and trophies, but nothing more. No jars of blood, no cassette tapes of Indian chants, not even any candles.”
“That seems to undermine Kaylie’s story, doesn’t it?”
“They thought so. I don’t. The stuff disappeared, I don’t know how. But if Kaylie saw it, then it was real. I can’t explain its absence. Well, I can’t explain why owls hoot, or what makes the desert smell of wood smoke after a summer rain. There’s plenty I can’t explain, but I know what I know. The problem was never with Kaylie. It was Justin, always.”
“If you knew all this, why didn’t you get help for him?”
“Psychiatric help? Personally, I’ve never bought into that headshrinking stuff, and I still don’t. But Regina had a different view of things. She talked to a doctor, for all the good it did. You’ve met the gentleman. Dr. John Cray.”
Shepherd sat very still.
“Cray?” he said quietly.
“The Hawk Ridge Institute is the only psychiatric hospital in the area. It was the logical place to go. Cray was the director even then. Regina had a meeting with him. She told him everything about Justin — the car theft, the fires, the shoplifting, and now this new strangeness in his life, the hunting. She hoped Justin could be treated as an outpatient, but she was prepared”—Anson hesitated, the words painful to utter—“she was prepared to have him committed.”
“Did Kaylie know about that meeting?”
“No. We never told her. She had enough to deal with as it was. Anyway, nothing came of it. Cray promised he’d consider the case. But he never called us, and when Regina telephoned him, he was always out, or so his secretary said.”
“Why would he give you the runaround?”
A shrug. “I always figured it was because Justin didn’t have any insurance. Goddamned institute needs to maintain its profit margin, after all.”
“You could have tried somewhere else. There must be a few psychiatrists in private practice around here, or a psychiatric ward in a local hospital….”
“Regina talked about it. I believe she would have found somebody, in time. But there wasn’t time. Justin died too soon. Less than two months after Regina’s meeting with the good Dr. Cray, our boy was dead.”
Twilight had passed by now. The sun was long gone, and even the mountains had vanished. There was only darkness.
“Do you know why Kaylie shot him?” Shepherd asked.
“I can only make a surmise. Way I figure, Justin got crazy and violent, and Kaylie had to kill him in self-defense. She ran away for no good reason — she was in shock, not thinking straight — a scared girl, nineteen years old, out of her mind with panic. The cops caught her, and after that she was the one at Hawk Ridge.”
“Under Cray’s care.”
“Yes.”
“He treated her personally.”
“So I was told.” Anson looked at him. “You find some significance in that?”
Shepherd didn’t answer. He studied the dark.
“Roy?” Anson pressed. “Just what are you thinking?”
Shepherd thought for a moment longer, then asked, “Do you know how we arrested Kaylie?”
“The newspaper said she was on the grounds of the institute. I don’t know why she would go there. It’s one of the things I wanted to ask her, but they won’t let me in to talk with her.”
“She was stalking Cray.”