The Narrows(49)

He went over to the goat with the sheared horns. He had expected to find them crudely broken; instead, they looked as though they had been liquefied, allowed to dribble to mere nubs, then turned solid again. Melted, almost. To Minsky, who stood on the other side of the fence, Ben called, “Did you do something to the horns?”

“Not a blessed thing,” Minsky responded, his hands hanging over the railing of the corral. He exhaled a tired-sounding breath.

Ben stood. “I guess you think some bear or coyote did this,” he said flatly.

“Heck, no,” Minsky said. “I know who did this.”

“Please don’t tell me it’s Porter Conroy,” Ben said.

“Porter?” Minsky sounded incredulous. “Christ, no.”

“Then who did it?”

“Some boy,” Minsky said. “Got a face like a vampire.”

“Ben!” Mel Haggis shouted from outside the pen. He had both hands cupped about his mouth. “Hey, Ben! Let’s chitchat inside, okay? We’re freezing our tails off out here!”

Minsky sighed with great aplomb. “I’ll put some coffee on,” he said, turning and kicking up clods of mud as he sauntered back toward the house.



6



“Past week or so I been hearin’ noises just outside the house at night,” Minsky explained while Ben sat across from him in a wingback chair in the old man’s parlor. Both Haggis and Platt loitered in the hallway, half listening and dripping rainwater onto the carpet. They all held steaming cups of freshly brewed coffee. “In the mornings, I can tell someone’s been in the yard. There’s things moved around, some plants trampled, that sort of thing. Down at the barn one morning, it looked like someone tried to get in the night before. The doors were pulled outward but still locked, so ain’t no one gettin’ in or out, but someone sure as hell tried.”

“When was this?” Ben asked.

“The thing with the barn was sometime last week. Don’t recall the exact night.” Minsky leaned forward in his chair, the mug of coffee held between his knobby knees in two hands. “Other times, I’ve heard this, well, sort of scraping noise against the windows.”

Ben nodded, prompting the old man to continue.

“Then, two nights ago,” Minsky went on, “I’m sitting right here watching the tube, and I hear someone outside walking around the wraparound porch. I mean, I hear the boards a-creakin’ sure as I’m sitting here talkin’ to you fellas. I go out and check but don’t see nothing. I go down by the barn, too, because I don’t need nobody messing with my livelihood. But the barn looks fine so I come back up to the house.”

Minsky set his coffee mug on a nearby end table. The old man’s hand trembled as it retreated into his lap.

“But I’d left the door to the house open, and when I come back in, I’m suddenly sure whoever had been outside was now inside. Well, I get the Louisville from the hall closet and go through the house, knocking the Louisville against doorframes and peeking under beds and those sorts of things.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “I was in there when I heard the door slam against the frame and footsteps racing around the porch.”

“Jesus,” Haggis said from the doorway.

Minsky nodded. “I hurried back in here and that’s when I saw the face.” He pointed to a window beside an antique mahogany cabinet which housed a prehistoric Zenith. “Right outside, pressed right against the glass, lookin’ in at me.”

“Who was it?” Ben asked. “Did you recognize the person?”

“Well, see, he disappeared just as quick, and I didn’t get a real good look. But it was a young boy.”

“A boy,” Ben echoed.

“I could tell that much.”

“Could you describe him?”

“Well,” Minsky said, his eyes shifting uncomfortably about the room now. He was lost in recollection and, judging by the pained expression on his face, Ben didn’t think the old man liked what he saw. “He was white. Like, pale.” Those unsettled eyes finally settled on Ben. “He looked like a corpse, Sergeant Journell.”

No one said a word for several seconds. From out in the hall, Ben could hear a grandfather clock mocking the silence.

“I thought it might’ve been a prank, seein’ how close we are to Halloween,” Minsky went on eventually. “But after I seen my goats this evening…well…I don’t know nobody thinks somethin’ like that’s a prank. Back in my day, we strung toilet paper in people’s trees and lit bags of dog shit on fire on their front porches. You hear what I’m saying?”

“I do,” Ben said after sharing a look with his two officers in the doorway.

Minsky leaned closer to Ben in his chair. This close, Ben could see the large pores in the man’s thick nose, the network of red threads in his eyes, and the peppery tufts of hair that sprouted from the man’s ear canals like kudzu. “You tell me, Sergeant Journell,” said Minsky. “What kind of kid does somethin’ like that to goats?”

Ben could only shake his head. He had no answer for the man.





Chapter Seven


1


Monday was Ben Journell’s day off. He spent the morning jogging along Full Hill Road, crossing from shoulder to shoulder in the spot where Maggie Quedentock claimed to have struck a pedestrian with her car last Friday night. All evidence, or lack thereof, led to the fact that Maggie had most likely hit a deer which then bounded far off into the woods. It was even probable that she had hit nothing at all, that she had enjoyed a few too many drinks at Crossroads on someone else’s tab and nothing more. The dent in the car’s hood and the broken grille, which he had observed when he showed up on scene, could have been there all along, as far as Ben knew. And to top it all off, the guys over in Cumberland probably thought he was an overreacting moron.