He stood on the foredeck and looked across the marsh into gray light fading toward a black as lush as velvet. No stars or moon, no lights.
Sometimes he could he see lantern light from a fish camp a quarter mile downstream, but the old man who used the camp walked with a cane and listened with a hand behind his ear. A lucky old man: Had he been a threat, Mr. Cutter would have syringed a heart attack into the old man's veins like he'd done to the grinning pervert he'd sent Caulfield.
The depraved monster had approached Mr. Cutter at a bar when he was shadowing Nelson. It had been wonderful to lure him, inject him, push the simple explosive device into him with a broom handle. It was delightful what one could create with the powder from three shotgun shells, a sawed-down flashlight tube, a spark-trigger, a foot of monofilament, and a treble fishhook.
"My fingers? Where are my fingers?"
Willy Lindy smiled at his recollection of Caulfield's first and last autopsy. The devious young pathologist had tried to steal Mama's ordained job from her the one that brought her back to Willy.
Now he was safe in his own world. Made even safer by the rain. The universe had given him his boat back, returned Mama, and now protected him from the outside world, allowing time. Time for Willy, time for Mama. Two weary travelers united in atonement, when sins of the past would be clarified through the revelation of image, redemption washing their souls in scarlet waves, leaving them safe and alone and together forever.
He heard Mama making noises in the engine room below. She'd want to know what was going on. He'd best go and tell her.
Show her.
"Cars! Watch out!"
I was halfway across, muscles screaming and burning, eyes blinded by grit and garbage, when the uprooted stump tumbled over me. It was the size of a car, its root system clutching as it rolled me under, roots like pliable iron, inescapable, like being welded to the face of a locomotive high balling beneath an ocean. I ripped and clawed at the tendrils surrounding me, pulled, tore. Screamed in my head.
A roar of bubbles, distorted sounds. The burn of fingernails peeling away.
The stump shuddered and spun and jammed me like a dredging shovel into the thick muck of the bottom, sponge-soft at the top, thick and sandy beneath. Mud filled my mouth and nose and ears as I waited for the crush, an orchestral roar blaring in my head. I skidded along the bottom with my final taste of life pouring from my lungs, thinking, My last moment: bubbles across my face.
The stump shuddered again, and rotated upward, taking forever before it broke the surface. Rain and beautiful air, me sucking it past the mud and sand, choking, vomiting, but air. I screamed at the clutching roots, wrenched. The stump rolled me slowly toward the sky as my hands scrabbled to discover where I was bound.
The shoulder rig, my mind screamed… tangled.
I fought the binding with torn fingers. Then heard the sound of splashing carrying through the rain. I saw Harry in the river, a dozen feet from shore, sixty from me and moving away, white plumes rising as he slapped the water. Seeing me overtaken by the stump, he'd dived in, found attempting to swim is more destructive than not swimming at all.
"Go back!" I screamed. "Harry, stop!"
I watched in horror as the current sucked him out into the main channel, spinning, splashing, choking. The stump rolled me down toward the water again.
"Hold your breath and float," I shrieked. "Your body wants to float."
His head disappeared, but broke the surface seconds later, ten yards farther downstream. He was slowly rotating, as if in a whirlpool, moving away. He went under again.
After that only flat and relentless water.
I cursed and wailed and tore at the harness straps, the water rising up my legs. It was just straps now, the Beretta scraped away by the bottom. My torn hands couldn't work the release, fingers like smoke at the ends of my arms. Water raged across my chest.
The knife was still at my waist. I fumbled it loose, pressed it between my palms, and sliced furiously at the straps.
At my neck, water…
A snap of nylon and water filling my mouth again…
Free. Floating in the river, gasping, the stump tumbling to the depths, roots slashing the surface. I felt the thunder of its crushing skid against the bottom.
When I spun toward the far bank the knife fell from my bleeding fingers. I struck out wildly for it, catching the grip across my palm.
I couldn't grasp it, could never hold it as I swam. I was gasping and shaking too hard to clamp it in my teeth. Kicking hard, treading water, swirling downriver, I angled the point between the flesh and the meat high on my thigh, jammed my palm against the pommel, and thrust.
The knife slid into me and stuck hard.
I howled like a man possessed by whirlwinds and swam past anything I ever knew as pain, reaching the far side of the river bleeding, rigid with cramp, blind with mud and rage. I cried until my eyes cleared and crawled in the mud and watched the river roll by, now just a rumbling sheet of dark water. The pictures in my head were cold enough to ice the river, crust the black marshes with frost. The world was black and white and the only light came from drifting filaments at the farthest reach of the sky, faint capillaries of waning lightning.
I slipped in the mud that squirted between my toes, fell to my knees. I threw back my head and screamed. Then, rising against the rain, clad in only a muddy twist of cloth, my knife in the scabbard of my flesh, I stood and started upriver. I was no longer a Ryder or a Ridgecliff or any name patched over a human being, I was a blazing creation of hate and vengeance and white-hot fury, and in my mind one burning picture: wiring Willet Lindy to a tree and making the evil bastard squeal and squeal until tube worms and black honey poured from his belly like a river.
"Did you think you could sneak up on me, Mama?" "Will? Will, what's going on? Let me go, Will." "Could you see me from where you were, Mama? Did they have windows there?"
"Will, I'm not your mama. Look at me, Will. It's Dr.
Davanelle."
His mouth at her ear, he could have bitten it off. "Did they tape the windows there, Mama? Did they have the black tape where you were?" He couldn't help himself, he licked her ear and almost swooned with delight.
"I can't feel my hands or feet, Will. Please let me up."
"I've still been good, Mama. I've been clean. Sometimes I make the pee-pee, but I've tried. I made something else, Mama, I made a magic secret. Remember our magic secrets, Mama? The ones I couldn't say?"
"Will…"
"I made magic pictures to show you how I am inside now, Mama. Watch, Mama. You me and the pictures. We'll watch the pictures and then I'll get the bad girl out of you, Mama. I promise I will."
One more little flick of his tongue at her ear.
"I love you, Mama. Yes, I will."
There was nothing to explain where I was. No map or GPS, no moon or stars. All I had was the sound of the river at my right arm and the suck of the mud at my feet. Insects covered me like a cloud and I stopped to coat myself with muck, but the rain washed it away. Pain sang from my hip and I eased the knife from my flesh in teeth-clenching increments, a warm flow of blood behind it. I flexed my fingers and realized my grip was returning. I looked down at my bare, muddy feet and was grateful that years of barefoot beach running had callused the bottoms at least I could walk. A building poked from a small copse and I crept to it, my steps muffled by the rain and the water racing through the brush. A fish camp, deserted, little more than the tree house of my youth, a tarpaper roof amplifying the fall of the drops into a drum like sound. It occurred to me that I'd heard the camp well before I'd seen its hazy outline, my ears picking up the sound of the rain on the roof from thirty yards' distance. I moved past the camp, then paused and listened. Rain on water and leaf and grasses, a solid hiss of monotone rain. I no longer heard the rain against the tarpaper. But I had heard the difference.
I walked on. One hundred trudging paces. Stopped.
Nothing. The same flat hiss. Another hundred paces. Listened. And again moved on.
Stopped.
I heard it. A brown cricket chirping in a field of black ones, or a cornet hidden behind a blare of trumpets. Something in the sound had changed. In front of me, behind, I couldn't discern. I stood like a blind man smelling smoke in a tinderbox forest, moving up a few feet, back, sensing the change, the direction, sifting for discrepancies. It seemed to be off my right arm, slightly ahead. I turned that way and walked.
Mama had known what the magic pictures meant. It was deep in her disguised eyes, the ones she'd painted green instead of the gray ones she used to wear every day.
Let me listen to her now. Lying.
"I'm not your mama, Will. I'm Dr. Davanelle. Ava Davanelle. We work together at the medical examiner's office. Remember? Stop and try to remember, Will. It's all there if you try and remember."
He's never heard Mama use a scared voice before. She was trying to keep it flat, ironed down, but that scared sound was making tiny wrinkles.
"I remember, Mama. It's in the pictures. They're history pictures, the secrets. Did you see me grow up to be a big boy? Did you see my muscles grow?" He pointed to the gray screen of the paused television.
"Yes, Will, but that's not you "
"I saw you come back and I knew you were mad at me still but I'm going to clean the bad girl out of you forever, Mama and "
"Will, you'll get in trouble, in terrible trouble. You can stop this now."
" then we can do it all over again, Mama, right this time, like the just-people that everyone gets to be, I want to be just-people, Mama, and you want to be just-Mama."
"Oh, Will, please…"
"I'm strong now and I can get the bad girl out of you."
He walked to the canvas bag he'd brought with them. He removed a few bright tools from the morgue, things they'd never miss, so it wasn't stealing. He arranged them on a clean white towel in a shining silver tray and proudly showed them to her.
He reached down and eased a strand of hair from her eyes.
"Don't cry, Mama, pain makes us pure."
Another sound entered the one I was focusing on. I ran ahead a few paces and saw shoreline, lapping water. That was the new sound: I was following a channel angling from the river, an anchorage perhaps.
I stepped back and focused on the sounds in the rain again, heard a rhythmic tapping, and followed it to wooden pilings at the channel's edge, tubular ghosts slapped with waves, invisible until I was a dozen feet away. Rain drummed a few remaining planks of decking on the old dock. My feet crunched rock and shell and I knew I was walking an abandoned launch ramp.
I moved from the distraction of the rain on the decking, held my breath, closed my eyes, and again became a listening machine. Another sound somewhere to the right, thin and hollow. I wished for a bolt of lighting, a moment of moon-glow, anything to pierce the black. The sound disappeared once, but I backed up until I heard it again. I angled to the left and kept walking.
Until I saw the light.
I wiped the rain from my eyes and it remained: a strip of horizontal moonbeam hovering in the air. In the trees? No, my mind cried: in the faint outline of an old shrimp boat against the gray-black sky, its outriggers like raised spears and the hiss of rain on its wooden body a soft wail from deep within a mine.