“My dad’s dead. My dad is John Sweeney and he—”
“Boy, it breaks my heart to break your heart, but Big John, good man as he was, he wasn’t never your daddy. Big John didn’t know it, but another mule been kicking in his stall.”
“Stop saying that! You’re a liar!”
Mr. Morse set down his guitar and stood up. He towered over Mike, covering him with his shadow, and his eyes were fierce. He placed his hands on Mike’s shoulders and when Mike tried to turn away Mr. Morse held him fast. His gaze was as hot as a blowtorch. “Now you listen to me good, Mike, you listen like a man, not like a boy. You listen like what you hear and what you do about what you hear matters. Don’t turn away from me, son, and don’t you dare call me a liar. You don’t know who I am, boy, but I died for this goddamn town. I died for it and my memory’s been spit on for thirty years. You think a man can rest quiet in his grave when every time his name is spoke there’s a lie and a curse put to it?”
Mike stared at him, shocked to silence, confused, his mind reeling. Mr. Morse’s hands were like hot irons on his shoulders.
Mr. Morse never blinked. Not once, and his dusty eyes were filled with a weird light. “Boy, I want you to listen to me for your own soul’s sake, even though what I’m going to tell you might take away what little love for this world you got left. I know that pain, boy, and I lost my own love and most of my hope, but by God I’m standing right here. I made my choice, and I’ll take my stand, come Heaven or Hell. Now…you going to listen?”
Mike didn’t want to. He wanted to block his ears, he wanted to hit this man, to push him away, to turn and run. He didn’t want to hear anything this man had to say. Rage mingled with terror in his chest and it felt like his heart would burst. When he opened his mouth he wanted to scream at the man, to tell him to go away, to leave him be.
What he said was, “Okay.” Just that.
That agreement unmasked a terrible sadness in Mr. Morse’s face, and for a moment he lowered his head, murmuring, “I’m sorry, boy. Believe me when I tell you that I mean you no harm.”
“Okay,” Mike said again.
Mr. Morse told him everything. Mike listened, and he listened, and he listened, and then he screamed. Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free.
Chapter 15
1
“The eye is not permanently damaged,” said Weinstock, distilling for Crow and Val the information he’d gotten from the tests and the specialists. Neither Crow nor Val said anything, their faces not yet showing relief. “The orbit is cracked even worse now that it was before, but that’ll heal. So, even though we have to be very, very careful it’s better news than we hoped.”
“But…?” Val asked. “Drop the other shoe.”
“No, that’s it. You must have been moving when Boyd hit you, so you actually didn’t get as serious an injury as you might have, especially considering the preexisting damage. If you hadn’t already had an injury there, this might have been moderately minor. Of course, you have to add shock, general stress, overall trauma…and the emotional component.” He cleared his throat. “Seeing Mark and all.”
Val touched the bandage over her eye, her expression pensive.
“Damn,” Crow said with a release of tension that seemed to deflate his whole body. He leaned over and kissed Val on the forehead.
“Thanks, Saul,” Val said. “When can I get out of here?”
Weinstock shrugged. “No reason we can’t cut you loose first thing tomorrow morning.” He held up a finger. “Providing you take it easy, and I mean really easy.” He reached over and jabbed Crow in the chest. “And that means no hanky-panky for a few days, too.”
“We’ll behave ourselves,” Val assured him.
After Weinstock left Val leaned back and blew a huge lungful of air up at the ceiling. Crow crawled onto the bed and she turned to him.
“Soon as we blow this joint I want you to stay at my place,” Crow said. He didn’t mention her house or her farm—the enormity of it was always right there with them.
Val just nodded. “I think that’s best.”
There was a tentative knock on the door and they turned to see Newton peering in. “Is this a bad time?”
“For once,” Val said, “it’s not. Come in, have a seat.”
Newton was an awkward man at the best of times and in situations like this was nearly spastic. He perched on the edge of a guest chair with all the skittishness of a high school kid waiting for his prom date.
Crow handed him a juice carton. “You find out anything useful on the Net?”
“Quite a lot, actually, though at this point it might just serve as backstory since you all seem to think this is all over and done with.” He pulled a thick file of computer printouts out of his briefcase. “Aside from the ton of stuff I downloaded about…” He looked around and then used his two hooked index fingers to simulate fangs and gave Crow a big stage wink as if the pantomime wasn’t enough. “I also e-mailed Dr. Corbiel at U of P. Turns out it isn’t Jonathan Corbiel, it’s Jonatha. No ‘n,’ a woman. Like the singer Jonatha Brooke.”
“Okay.”
“We talked on the phone for a couple of hours, and I told her I was doing a book on the haunted history of Pine Deep, yada yada, and asked her if she would be willing to come up here and sit down with us.”
“Really?” Val asked. “What’d she say?”
“She said she’d love to, though she said she can’t get away until the twenty-ninth because she’s giving midterms. I know it’s a long time to wait, but in the meantime we can still tap her for info via phone and e-mail.”
“Okay, fair enough. Where are we meeting her?”
“She didn’t really want to drive all the way here, so I compromised and told her we’d meet her halfway. I set it up for the Red Lion Diner in Warrington.”
“Okay, perfect.”
2
The nurses came back, this time to change Val’s IV and fuss over her and even though there was nothing they were doing that was actually too private or official enough to warrant kicking Crow out he still somehow found himself in the hallway on the other side of a closed door. Newton gave Crow a CD with his research notes and headed home to get some rest. Crow was slouching down to the solarium to buy a Yoo-hoo when he spotted Mike Sweeney coming out of the ICU wing.
“Hey,” Crow said, “you get lost or something?”
The kid stopped walking and peered at Crow with eyes that seemed at once shocked and dreamy—the pupils were pinpoints, his eyes wide. Crow waved a hand in front of Mike’s eyes, expecting the kid to snap out of his reverie with a sheepish grin. Crow had seen him woolgathering a number of times before, but it took Mike at least thirty seconds to come back to planet Earth. Crow could see the process happen. The boy’s eyes went from blank to confused to shifty and Mike’s rubbery lips congealed into two tight lines.
“Crow?” Mike said in a voice that was unusually hoarse, the way someone sounds after they’ve been yelling.
“Yo, kiddo…what planet were you orbiting?”
“What?”
“You okay? You look like you’re out of it.”
“Do I?” Mike rubbed his eyes and then looked at his fingers as if expecting to see something on them. What? Grit? Tears?
“Mike,” Crow said slowly, touching the kid on the shoulder. “Are you okay?” He eyed the kid, looking for fresh bruises. Maybe he’d had a run-in with Vic.
“I’m good,” he said. “Just having kind of a weird day.”
“Bad weird or just weird weird?”
“Pine Deep weird,” Mike said, and when Crow continued to stare at him, he added, “Soon as I’m old enough, man, I am so out of this frigging town.”
Crow snorted. “Soon as you’re old enough, kiddo, I’ll drive you.”
3
Mike left the hospital, unchained his bike, and fled onto the back streets of Pine Deep, whisking down the crooked lanes and shadowed alleys, aware of the tourist crowds thinning as he raced toward the farmlands and the forest. He made the last turn, cutting a sharp left off Alvy Lane onto West Road and headed south, leaving the last of the houses behind and rolling through a countryside that was open and vulnerable.
Though it was mid-October it was a November-colored day. There was green, but it huddled low against the ground as thinning islands of grass in a swelling sea of brown dirt. The treetops had been blown to crooked gray sticks by the constant topwind, and invisible snakes of current leapt off the fields and snapped at him, trying to push his bike over. He kept pedaling, his eyes locked on the center of the road thirty feet ahead, his head fixed forward, and only his peripheral vision took slices of the vista to either side and fed it into that nameless place in his mind that hung suspended between the conscious and subconscious.
He had nowhere to be. Crow said that the store would be closed for the rest of the day while he got Val settled in, and Mike didn’t have to be home for hours. He was free, the time was his, but he still felt like an escaped prisoner trying to outrun…
Outrun what?
He had snapped out of the fugue in Terry Wolfe’s room over an hour ago, and much of what he had seen—
Seen
Dreamed
Imagined
—was still with him. Mike did not know how to think about what had happened there in that room; there in his head. Mr. Morse was as real to him as someone he’d actually met. He could smell the earthy stink of dirt on the man’s clothes, could smell his sweat. In his head the crystal purity of Morse’s silvery guitar notes played over and over again with such precise clarity that Mike was sure that if he had a guitar of his own he could pick out the opening of that song.
Cold wet air abraded his cheeks, making them burn both cold and hot. Despite the chill there was a trickle of warm sweat wriggling down his spine and gathering between his buttocks as his legs pumped and pumped.