The Narrows(25)

Ben parked in a spot right up front then elbowed Eddie awake. Jerking up awkwardly from where he’d been slouched, snoring, against the passenger window, Eddie La Pointe looked around, temporarily disoriented.

“Go home,” Ben told him.

“You going, too?” Eddie already had the passenger door open. The sound of crickets infiltrated the vehicle.

“In a few minutes.”

“Crazy night, huh?”

“You got it. Goodnight, Eddie.”

“Goodnight, Ben.”

Eddie slammed the door and padded across the parking lot to his car with his head down. Ben watched him drive away and turn onto Belfast Avenue before he shut the cruiser down and climbed out. Ben could tell it would be a cold winter up here in the mountains. The trees were already whispering about it and the air smelled smoky and cool. He unlocked the station doors and pushed them open on hinges that shrieked like banshees. Green-and-black checkerboard tile floors, oatmeal-colored walls, fizzy sodium fixtures in the ceiling that didn’t always work—he had become so used to this place that it felt like crawling back into the womb each time he walked through the doors.

In the dispatcher’s cubicle, he fed Shirley’s goldfish, Abbott and Costello, muttering to them as he did so. Then he went into what the guys called the “Batter’s Box,” the spacious room segregated into four cubicles where the officers sat when they weren’t out on the road. Ben unbuttoned his shirt and pulled his vest off, his undershirt matted with sweat. He hung the vest on one of the cubicle walls, directly over a stack of Eddie’s Fangoria magazines and the very slim case file on the unidentified boy whose nude body had washed up on the shores of Wills Creek early last week. To date, the boy had not been identified or claimed by anyone and, as far as Ben was aware, the pallid, hairless body still sat in a stainless-steel drawer at the county morgue over in Cumberland.

Ben continued down the hall to the kitchen, where he retrieved an apple from the foul-smelling communal refrigerator. There were photographs of some of the officers’ kids stuck to the outside of the fridge with magnets. Taking a knife from his belt, he began cutting the apple into wedges as he headed toward the two-car sally port at the far end of the station. He opened the door to the sally port and felt along the wall for the light switch, while popping one of the apple wedges into his mouth. Dim yellow light poured down from an industrial spotlight in the center of the ceiling housed in a wire casing that reminded Ben of a catcher’s mask. The port was empty—all of the officers took their vehicles home with them—and the room was as cold and as silent as a cave.

That was why he’d put the bat back here.

It was a tiny thing with short brown hair and ears like little radar dishes. It had the fuzzy face of a pig with moist, black eyes. As Ben approached the bell-shaped birdcage that sat on a shelf among paint cans and plastic quarts of motor oil, the creature inside began to twitter and chirp. It hung upside down from the perch, its tiny head bobbing and its piggish little snout sniffing the cool air.

“Hey, bud. You hanging in there?” Two days ago, the thing had gotten trapped in the sally port. He had wanted to let it go but the other guys thought it would be cool to keep the bat as a mascot of sorts, at least for a little while. Mike Keller had gone home and returned with the bell-shaped birdcage. When Chief Harris had simply grunted his indifference, more interested in his upcoming vacation with his wife than any police business, Ben had acquiesced.

So here I am now, three o’clock in the goddamn morning, sticking apple wedges into a birdcage.

He couldn’t help but smile to himself.

“There you go, buddy.” He dropped the final wedge into the cage.

The bat chirped and fluttered its wings.

Both of us trapped here in this town, he thought, surprised by the depth of his comparison. Suddenly, he wanted to release the bat into the night, but he fought off this urge at the last minute.

“Two peas in a pod,” he told the bat before shutting off the light and going home.





Chapter Three


1


From the sky, the rural western Maryland hamlet of Stillwater might appear to be a ghost town. It sits at the bottom of a river valley, bookended to the east and west by the tree-studded swell of the Allegheny Mountains. The town itself is bisected by Wills Creek, which traverses the concrete slalom of the Narrows before emptying into the Potomac River east of town. The roadways twist and wind and turn to dirt the farther out into the foothills they go. The only testament to the town’s connection with the outside world is the two-lane concrete ribbon that is U.S. Route 40, which clings like bunting to the side of Wills Mountain. This cut of asphalt runs for over two hundred miles across the state, from Garrett County straight out to Elkton, where it continues on into Delaware before it disappears completely like the vaporous contrail of a jetliner.

In the predawn hours this Saturday, the streets of Stillwater are empty and dark. Many of the streetlights along Hamilton and Susquehanna are still out due to damage from the recent storm and its subsequent flooding. The stone-fronted shops along Hamilton resemble mausoleums. The bell tower of the Methodist church on Poplar Ridge Road rises before a backdrop of stirring vermilion light that has just barely begun to bleed into the sky. A low susurration whispers through the trees as eddies of autumn wind work their magic along the empty streets.

The old folks rise earliest. These are generations of farmers and blue-collar workers who have eked out an existence for themselves—much as their forefathers had done before them—applying their brawn and discipline toward hard manual labor. Sully Goodwin rises to the horned leaves of the holly bushes scraping against his bedroom window. Since Hugh Crawly split town, Sully has taken over Stillwater’s mail delivery. Without showering, he dresses silently in the dark, his eyes still partially lidded and crusted with sleep, his mouth tasting of the foul cigars and stale beer he had the night before over in Cumberland. His mail truck sits out front of his ranch house—an old Ford station wagon with a detachable orange bubble light that adheres to the roof with magnets. When he’s done with today’s run, he’ll drop the bubble light off at Bobby Furnell’s place, since Bobby uses that same light on the cab of his F-150 when he works construction over in the Gap.