Devoted(39)

During his first year on the job, Carson worked eighty-hour weeks and thrived on the schedule, which allowed him the forgetting that he sought. Year by year, he remained busy, but he settled into his position with confidence and pleasure. Born and raised a city boy, and black, he had expected that adjustment to this rustic environment would be taxing, to say the least; but it was smooth beyond all expectation. He enjoyed the modest scale of life here, the majesty of the Sierra Nevada, the natural beauty. He loved that deer sometimes wandered along Main Street as if they were tourists who were curious about the ways of Pinehaven’s inhabitants, loved even the nasty but industrious raccoons that worked assiduously to defeat each new and more complex latch that he installed on the lids of his trash cans. The people were not as he had been warned to expect. For forty years or longer, in most of the country, there had been a sophistication and fair-mindedness in rural counties and small towns about which many city dwellers and members of the media seemed clueless. Carson was happy here, charmed by the quiet flow of events, grateful to be free from the metropolitan bustle that made life a competitive marathon race without end.

In the past year or so, a disquieting change had come slowly to Pinehaven County: occasional outriders from MS-13 and other Central American gangs, scouting for opportunities like remote and easily concealed locations for meth labs, checking out the strength and determination of local law enforcement. There had been incidents between them and a few deputies, nothing too alarming. But a pretty teenager, Jenna McCall, had vanished without a trace; she’d been a good student, a devoted daughter, not the kind of girl who opted to be a runaway. And Jimmy Talbert, thirteen, had been riding his bike on an unpaved forest-service road when he’d been struck by a hit-and-run driver and left to bleed to death. There hadn’t been a case of hit-and-run in Pinehaven County in thirty-six years. So everyone had suspicions informed by common sense.



Carson Conroy’s suspicions and fears failed to prepare him for the condition of Justine Klineman’s corpse.

The morgue had two autopsy tables, each with scales and sink, and the woman’s companion, Painton Spader, occupied the first. He had been shot four times point-blank with hollow-point rounds. The devastation to flesh and bone were only what could be expected.

Initially, Carson thought that Justine had likewise been shot, and that wild animals, perhaps coyotes, had savaged her after she’d been left for dead. When he could not find a bullet wound, he looked for evidence of knife work, but he found none. Her skull remained intact; no blunt instrument had put her down.

Only when the likeliest of weapons had been ruled out did he, of necessity, look more closely at her face. Little was left of it. She might have been a beauty once, but there was no way to know from these remains. Most of her face had been eaten, as had one of her breasts and part of the other. Carson had seen many gruesome things in his profession, and the horrors to which victims were vulnerable had long ago ceased to chill him. However, a chill climbed his spine now and fluttered through him like some insect horde. The bite marks along the perimeter of the remaining tissue were not those of an animal; they had the curvature and tooth pattern of the human mouth.





37



By the time Megan read three chapters of the novel and finished the glass of cabernet, Woody had still not appeared in the kitchen.

When he seemed to have difficulty returning from one of his deeper retreats, she could sometimes encourage him with music. He liked to listen to her play the Steinway and always watched her as if amazed that she could conjure music from its keys.

Sometimes she left a handwritten note for him. A recent one had asked, Would you like me to teach you to play the piano?

He never answered that one or any of the others, but she hoped one day he might. Exchanging notes would not be the same as two-way speech, but it would be a more satisfying form of communication than she’d yet enjoyed with him.

She went along the main hallway to the living room and turned on the lights. At the piano, Megan halted at the sight of all the silver-framed photographs lying facedown on the lid.



Verna Brickit polished the silver and glass once a week. But she’d never before left the photographs like this. Nor would she. Verna was meticulous almost to the point of obsession.

Woody must have done this. But why? The obvious answer seemed to be that the sight of his father in all those photos had suddenly pierced him. After three years, she’d thought he had accommodated himself to the loss, but evidently not as much as she had believed. He was a genius, and people tended to think that geniuses were less emotional than other people, but she knew this was not true of him; he felt things profoundly. Sometimes she wondered if he remained silent because he feared that, if he dared to speak, his long-repressed emotions would erupt with volcanic power, that he would be unable to control them and would say things that would shock by the very rawness of the passion with which he said them.

She left the framed photos as they were and didn’t raise the piano lid. She would ask him about the pictures later.

She sat on the bench and put up the fallboard, uncovering the keys. Flexed her fingers.

The dozen or so songs Woody liked the most, each of which he could listen to over and over for hours, were a varied catalogue. While the words had meaning for him, Megan suspected that the melodies were what spoke the most directly to his soul.

After considering choices, she played “Moon River,” and that beautiful melody, drenched in yearning and gentle melancholy, flowed through the living room and into the hall and up the stairs, perhaps to call the boy out of the shell in which he had closed himself.