Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(72)

The Ohio troopers knew the area, and they were out there patrolling it, cruising the back roads, looking for a campfire in the woods. Huston would need a fire tonight to keep him warm. If, indeed, he had any intention of lasting through the night, which DeMarco doubted. The troopers had DeMarco’s phone number and were supposed to call him if they spotted anything. A light in an abandoned building. A solitary pedestrian. A body in the water.

DeMarco kept his window rolled down despite the chill. He liked the vague scent of water in the air, the damp scent of night. He thought it might be nice to live up there, so close to the water. It might be nice to have a boat that he could motor out a mile or so and shut off the engine and listen to nothing but the water, feel nothing but the movement and the low lap of waves.

He laid his head back against the headrest and turned his face to the open window and closed his eyes. Christ, he was tired. Now that he admitted it, he could feel the heaviness in every limb. His neck and shoulders ached, his spine felt stiff. The air smelled of concrete and water.

When the phone rang in the distance, he thought he was at home and tried to push himself up out of his chair. He rammed his chest into the steering wheel and that brought him awake. Now he thought the ringing was coming from the public phone mounted on the corner of the building, so he threw open the door and stood and only then felt the vibration in his pocket. But by the time he had his cell phone out, the call had gone to his voice mail. The number looked familiar, but he could not remember whose it was. He immediately tried to call it, but it went straight to voice mail without ringing, and when he heard the greeting of “Hi, guys, this is Danni,” he hung up and waited for the beep that would tell him that Danni had completed her message to him and hung up. He did not bother then to listen to her message but called her back. She answered on the first ring.

“He just called me!” she said. “Just three minutes ago, he called me.”

“Thomas Huston called you?”

“Yes. Didn’t you listen to my message?”

“No, I didn’t want to wait. What did he say?”

“The first thing he did was to ask if I like poetry. Then he recited a poem for me.”

“‘Annabel Lee’ again,” he said.

“What?”

“The name of the poem he recited. ‘Annabel Lee.’”

“No, he said it was called ‘The Lake.’ And that’s what it was about. The loneliness of the lake.”

“Danni, listen. Was it about anything else, anything having to do with death?”

“I think so,” she said. “There was something about a grave in it.”

“Do you have a computer?”

“Yes.”

“Can you go to it now? While I have you on the line?”

“Sure, it’s right here.”

“Okay, go online and see if you can find a copy of ‘The Lake’ somewhere.”

“I don’t even know who wrote it,” she said.

“Try Poe. Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Okay, give me a minute.”

DeMarco walked from one side of the parking lot to the other. He returned to his car, stood there a moment, then started walking again.

“Okay, I have it,” she said.

“Read it to me.”

She did so.

“That last part,” he said. “Starting with the word death. Read that part again for me.”

This time she read more slowly. “‘Death was in that poison’d wave,/And in its gulf a fitting grave/For him who thence could solace bring/To his lone imagining/Whose solitary soul could make/An Eden of that dim lake.’”

When she finished, he told her, “Thank you, Danni. Now tell me anything else he said.”

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“It means he hasn’t killed himself yet, not as of four minutes ago anyway. So I need you to please just think hard and answer my questions now, okay? Did he say anything else or did he just recite the poem?”

“Yes, he said, uh…he said something about seeing the whole way across the lake. About being able to see the lights in Canada.”

“He said he could see them from where he was?”

“No, he said he’d be looking at them in a few minutes. He said there were no stars out tonight because of the clouds but he was near a place where he could…how did he put it…‘ascend to the heavens’ I think. That was it. He said he could ascend to the heavens and from there look down on the lights in Canada as if they were stars. So that he would have to come down to them to get to heaven. It just made no sense to me, and the way he sounded, his voice was so low and tired or something. It’s hard to explain.”

“You did fine,” he told her. “You did wonderfully. I have to hang up now, but if he calls back, you try to find out exactly where he is, okay? And then you call me immediately.”

“I will,” she said.

He hit the End button, then brought up his call log for the telephone company’s number. Then he realized that it would take several minutes to get the necessary information from them, so instead, he pocketed the phone and hurried into the convenience store. In addition to the middle-aged female clerk behind the counter, there was a thirtysomething male standing at the dairy cooler, half a gallon of chocolate milk dangling from his hand while he studied the display of Ben and Jerry’s pints, and a teenage couple loading up on chips and Slim Jims.