The Narrows(18)

“No. It wasn’t a deer, Cal.” She felt a strange relief about having to convince him of what, only moments ago, she hadn’t been so sure of herself. Even more peculiar was the laugh she felt threatening to burst from her throat. Was she out here losing her goddamn mind?

“Well, Maggie, there ain’t nobody out there.”

“Did you look in the woods?”

“I did. It’s dark and I don’t got a flashlight but I didn’t see nothing. Didn’t hear nothing, either.”

“The person…was still alive,” she said. Closing her eyes, she could see the split-second glimpse of the face, white as the moon with small, dark eyes. “He crawled over there into the trees.” She pointed.

With his hands on his hips and the John Deere cap now stuffed in the rear pocket of his dungarees, Cal turned back around and surveyed the dark and vacant roadway. “Out here?”

She clutched at one of his forearms with both hands. “What do you mean?”

“Who’d be walking all the way out here at this hour?”

She didn’t care if it didn’t make sense or if Cal f*cking Cordrick thought she was out of her mind. She closed her eyes and could clearly see the accident over and over, vivid as a film projected onto a screen.

In a small voice, she added, “I think it was a child.”

Cal sighed and turned back around. He was maybe just a few years older than Maggie, but in the false light of crisscrossing vehicular headlamps he looked ghastly and no younger than a mummy exhumed from an ancient tomb. Again, he raked one thumb along his bristling chin. Car exhaust veiled him like mist.

“Christ,” Maggie moaned. Her knees gave out and she felt herself go down, the world becoming a pixilated grid of smeary light, like looking at the world below from the window of an airliner. “Jesus Christ, Cal.”

Cal Cordrick grabbed her and held her upright. He smelled of camphor and Old Spice. Faintly of bourbon, too, she thought. That kid in the road…

“Hang on there, Maggie. I’m sure Evan can—”

“He’s on the night shift tonight,” she whimpered into Cal’s flannel shirt. She was gripping him as if letting go would cast her off the face of the planet.

“Okay,” Cal said. There was an exhausted gruffness in his voice. His breath settled sourly against her face but she hardly noticed. “Do you think you can drive? I can follow you back to your—”

Trembling, Maggie Quedentock released her two-handed grip on Cal’s shirt. Her body numb and her bones as reliable and sturdy as rubber bands, she sank slowly to the pavement. A high-pitched whine began trilling from her throat.

“I think maybe we need to call the police,” Cal said.



2



It was midnight. Sergeant Benjamin Journell of the Stillwater Police Department stood in Porter Conroy’s field beneath a moon that looked like a skull cracked in half. What had been mild weather earlier that afternoon had turned frigidly cold in the wake of the day’s thunderstorm, and he wished he’d brought his parka from his cruiser.

Ben was thirty-five, unmarried, and he possessed a smooth, clean face and youthful eyes that made him look more like an Ivy League fraternity boy than a police officer. Ben had joined the department the day after his twenty-third birthday, when it became clear to him that, having spent his entire life living in the rural western Maryland town of Stillwater, his career choices were cripplingly limited: he could either join the police department or toil away at one of the various factories around town. And while he certainly possessed an affinity for the job, it sometimes seemed like he had just opened his eyes one morning and found himself in uniform. The department had been larger back then and he had found the anonymity of the khaki uniform with the numbered badge at the breast comforting and, sometimes, even freeing. He’d grown up in Stillwater, knew pretty much everyone straight out to the Cumberland Gap (which made the job easier), and he had always considered himself to be one of those rare individuals who found contentment in mediocrity.

He’d gone to college just outside of Baltimore, in Towson, where he’d been an average student. Debt piled up, but it had been Ben’s father who had paid the bills, and the old man never said boo about it. Ben had majored in criminal justice and minored in English literature, a combination that granted him a wealth of diverse friends, and he had been groomed for lofty aspirations upon graduation—aspirations he most likely would have followed had his mother not passed away immediately thereafter.

So he had returned home to Stillwater and to the Journell family farm. Ah, Stillwater! The town existed only because a foolish man named Jeremiah Barnsworth had stumbled upon its crooked valley bookended by two grand mountains back in 1829, arriving just in time to witness a vista of black, stagnant water after one of the great floods had drowned the land. Why Barnsworth had thought this land would be the perfect location to establish some semblance of civilization, one can only wonder. Who proudly plants a flag at the center of decimation? Yet, still waters run deep, as they say, and Barnsworth—who had been a drunkard, a gambler, and a career adulterer, according to some of the descendants of families who had actually known the man—had created a town.

Nearly two centuries after Barnsworth’s usurping of the land, twenty-one-year-old Ben Journell had returned from college to bury his dead mother and attend to his heartbroken father. Four years spent at Towson, and returning to Stillwater had been like returning to youthful memories—the type of memories that are so distant that they might have never happened to begin with. Yet he’d returned, and the hot summer dust rolled up off the roads as he drove back into town, the dust settling at the back of his throat and the smells of the land—the farms with their pig shit and chicken coops and tractor fumes, mingled with the brackish stink of the Narrows—practically clawing at his lungs. Remember me, remember me! Stillwater cried, as if to forget where he came from was to lose some important part of himself. Remember me, remember me! Indeed, how could he forget?