The Narrows(50)

It was on his third pass around the bend where the supposed accident had taken place that something occurred to him. He paused beside a stand of leafless trees and checked his pulse while his breathing regulated. Overhead, predatory birds circled like tireless acrobats. Full Hill Road ran from midtown straight up into the undulating foothills, which was where Ben stood now. After looping around a few remote farmhouses up here, the road continued toward the mountains where it eventually denigrated to a muddy service road dead-ended into the trees. Though he wasn’t sure on exactly which street the Quedentocks lived, he knew they were somewhere around midtown. Crossroads—the tavern Maggie had claimed to be coming from—was only a few blocks outside midtown. What in the world had she been doing way up here?

A squirrel loped out into the middle of the roadway. It stood abruptly on its hind legs, its hands held together before it in a mockery of prayer, and surveyed its surroundings. When it spied Ben, it froze, though its tail continued to twitch spasmodically.

Was he reading too much into Maggie Quedentock’s statement? Should he swing by her place later, ask her a few more questions? He supposed he could, although that wouldn’t help alleviate the thing that was bugging him, even more than the rash of mutilated livestock. Eleven-year-old Matthew Crawly was still missing and, with each passing day, the outcome became bleaker and bleaker.

When he returned to the old farmhouse on Sideling Road, he took a long shower, dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and made himself a hearty breakfast of four scrambled eggs, sausage links, toasted Italian bread, and strong Brazilian coffee. Outside, the temperature simmered at around the seventy-degree mark so he carried his breakfast to the back porch that overlooked the southern field. The air smelled swampy from the previous night’s storm and large black crows drank out of puddles in the marshy topsoil. When he was a boy, this field had brought forth countless crops, lush and Edenic in all its greenness. Now, it was a desolate, barren landscape, the only foliage being the spiraling helixes of vines that grew around the fenceposts. Somewhere over time, the soil had adopted a grayish hue, and looked no more fertile than a sand dune. The previous spring, overcome by grief at the loss of his father, Ben had planted some seeds: cucumber, tomato, squash, parsley. Nothing unmanageable. Yet the land had yielded nothing. Some nights, he would dream of the seeds hatching just beneath the soil, the tendrils of their fragile roots seeking out one another like hands uniting, until they formed a firm network under the earth. In these dreams, vines like the tentacles of a giant squid would burst from the ground in a shower of dirt and stones and engulf the farmhouse, wrapping it up like a gift. Then, gradually, the farmhouse would be pulled down beneath the ground, Ben still inside it, screaming, until only the stone chimney protruded from the dirt. And after time, even that too would be sucked down until nothing remained except a flat, empty, desolate plot of land.

After breakfast, he read a book for a bit, but he became too antsy as his mind began to wander and he found himself rereading the same paragraphs over and over again without retaining any of it. Finally he closed the book and went to the bedroom down the hall that, in his youth, had belonged to him. Since then, he had fashioned it into a comfortable little home office, completed with a handsome desk, two leather chairs studded with brass tacks, and a bookcase containing various law books and awards. Some of his father’s medals from Vietnam hung on the wall in shadow boxes.

There was a Rolodex on the desk. Ben flipped through it until he found the card he was looking for. He punched the numbers into his cell phone and waited.

“Lieutenant Davenport,” said the man on the other end of the line after a series of rings.

“Hey, Paul, it’s Ben Journell over in Stillwater.”

“Hey, buddy. How’ve you been?”

They engaged in idle chitchat for a few minutes before Ben asked about the mountain lion.

“Damnedest thing,” Davenport told him over the line. “I mean, it didn’t really look that big when you just saw it out walking, but when you see it up close, well, it’s something else, man. Teeth like carpentry nails.”

“So the rumors are true. Eddie La Pointe told me about it but I didn’t really believe him.”

“Oh, it was true, all right. Damn thing had everybody talkin’, and half the town scared to go out after dusk.”

“It still doesn’t?”

“Not no more,” Davenport said.

“You mean the thing’s dead?” Ben asked. “You guys killed it?”

“Three days ago,” said Davenport. That would have been on Friday. “Wasn’t us, though. We just responded to the call after it had been shot. Turned out the damn thing had gotten into someone’s garage through an open window, but got stuck and couldn’t get out. Some locals went out and fired a few rounds at it with a goddamn Glock, of all things.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, well, I’m guessing they didn’t want to mess it up too badly, figuring they’d take it to a taxidermist and have it stuffed or whatever. Either way, by the time we got there, the sucker’s days of digging through people’s garbage cans was over.”

“Had it been attacking any livestock?”

“Livestock? No, man—just knocking over Dumpsters and shit. Pulled some dead rabbits out of a trap, too, I think. They’re actually pretty timid and don’t like to get too close to humans.” Davenport cleared his throat. “Why? You got livestock being killed out that way, Ben?”