CHAPTER 17
CARL
Carl had trouble sleeping. He’d turn out all the lights downstairs and go around to every window and door, looking outside for a minute or two, each view framed a little different but all the same: dark road, dark field, dark hills. Nobody out there, no thing, nothing. He didn’t know what he expected to see. Joe Bill Sump dragging himself up half-eaten from a hog trough, or his bones all split up like kindling from a long fall down Devil’s Throat? Carl didn’t know where Crete had taken him, where the body was, if there was anything left of it, but Joe Bill was dead and Carl had killed him. The scene replayed in his dreams on an endless loop, a record stuck on a tuneless refrain. His arm pulling back like a piston and shooting forward to smash the words out of Joe Bill’s mouth. The burst of numbness in his knuckles as they struck the jaw with a sharp crack. Joe Bill’s head hitting the wall. The sudden absence of Joe Bill despite his body on the ground. Ransome buzzing in his ear, Get your truck, go! And then he was running, because there was something more important than Joe Bill, and that was making sure Lila was okay.
The guilt didn’t seep in until later, not until she was under his roof and healing and he knew nothing would hurt her, and then he felt sorry that he’d killed Joe Bill, because he hadn’t meant for it to happen. He also felt guilty for being glad Joe Bill was gone. How could Carl have gone around every day doing normal things, knowing what Sump had done and what he still might do? Knowing that he somehow could get to Lila? He didn’t have to worry about that now, and freed from worry, he had plenty of room for guilt. He could carry that weight. But it made it hard to sleep.
Crete knew how to dispose of a body. He and Carl had learned from their dad and grandpa, growing up. Dad preferred the respectable way of laying a body to rest, digging a proper grave and tamping it down nice and smooth before the family arrived to mourn. But that wasn’t always what the job called for. Sometimes measures had to be taken to keep things quiet, hidden. The spirit’s fled, Dad would say. Nothing left but a body, and a body without a spirit’ll fall apart whether you help it along or not. Sometimes you did things that disrespected the body, and that was just part of the job. There wasn’t any way around it.
So Crete had taken care of things. He’d always been a good big brother, protecting Carl from bullies, dragging him out of the river when he got swept up in the current. He made it clear they were there to help each other, it was what brothers did, and he led by example. Joe Bill was gone and so was his truck, and Crete wouldn’t say where. Better you don’t know, he said. He’d kept Joe Bill’s wallet and license plate, and though he didn’t say why, Carl knew. So Crete would have something over him if he needed it. He’d always had that seed of distrust in him, even when it came to his brother. I owe you, Carl had said, and he meant it. He promised Lila that Sump would never touch her again.
CHAPTER 18
JAMIE
Jamie knew the guy in the white van, the one Lucy had seen at Doris Stoddard’s—though even if he hadn’t, he would have lied and said he did, made up a story, anything to keep her with him, alone and in arm’s reach. She’d found Jamie at his fishing spot on the river, and he knew in order to do that, she first would have had to hunt down Gage in whatever hole he was crashing and convince him to give her directions. It was good that she’d gone to some trouble. It meant the information was valuable. Through his years of dealing and bartering, Jamie had developed a knack for knowing how far somebody would go to get something. He could stare right through a person’s eyes to the scale that seesawed in the brain, weighing wants and needs, balancing desire against guilt and pride. Lucy had agreed to his terms without argument. He couldn’t believe his luck, that by virtue of the very life he led, he had something she needed. People needed him all the time in various sharp-edged ways, but not people like Lucy. Lucy would never stumble over him in some dark corner, press her tits in his face, and beg to blow him for meth.
He’d gotten close to her at the bonfire, as close as he’d ever been, near enough to taste her breath. He’d mentioned Cheri partly to get her attention, but also because he’d been spooked—the memory of it choked him, the rasp of Cheri’s breath as she splashed by, looking right past him without seeing, as though he were the ghost—and he wanted to share it with Lucy, that feeling of not knowing whether he was real or the world around him was real or if anything was real. He knew Lucy would believe him, that she would somehow understand, because he imagined her privy to that spectral world, the realm of unknowable things that existed beyond an invisible sieve, and maybe if he tried hard enough, he could break apart into tiny pieces and sift through to the other side.
Lucy had pounced on his story, questioning, prodding, taking it seriously, like he’d known she would. But he hadn’t been prepared for her anger. He hadn’t thought to help Cheri as she fled down the river. If anything, he would have asked her for help, asked how to get where ghosts go on earth, how to stay and watch and haunt without anyone knowing he was there. He hadn’t expected Lucy to get so caught up in Cheri that he wouldn’t have the chance to tell her the other, more important story: that he’d met Lucy’s mother at Ralls’ grocery when he was twelve, and she’d cast a spell on him, held him in thrall all these empty years until Lucy emerged from the void.
Back then, Jamie was the runt of the Petree clan, the scrawniest of all the boys. That was before he got into his present line of work and started benching cinder blocks, before people stopped calling him skinny and started calling him wiry, which was what you called skinny people you didn’t want to mess with. He’d tried to sneak out of Ralls’ with a Mr. Goodbar stuffed down his pants, but Junior Ralls had grabbed him by the shirt collar, his calloused knuckles scraping the back of Jamie’s neck. Jamie played dumb, which wasn’t much of an act; as a kid, he often didn’t know what people expected of him or how he’d failed to meet their expectations, which he inevitably seemed to do. Junior shook Jamie back and forth, hissing in his face, Answer me, boy, why you think your white-trash ass can get away with stealing.
Then an angel appeared, the lights of the dairy cooler bending around her like an aura. She looked right into his eyes, and he saw himself mirrored there, a stupid kid with a candy bar sticking out of the waist of his hand-me-down Wranglers; his mom would never buy him a Mr. Goodbar no matter how hard he begged, because her holy-roller stepfather had whipped her into believing everything good was evil, including chocolate, soda, and birthdays. The woman, Lila, paid for the candy, allowing Junior to pluck the coins from her outstretched palm. Junior let go of Jamie’s collar, and Jamie saw the way the grocer gawked at the woman, his mouth gone slack, and he knew Lila’s power wasn’t in his imagination. It slowly came to him that she was no angel. Angels didn’t show so much cleavage or smile at the likes of him. No, she was something else entirely. Long hair gleaming like a blackbird’s wings and eyes like a wolf’s, sharp and beautiful and full of secrets. He’d jacked off to that image uncountable times. He had run straight home from the grocery store, in fact, and humped the bathroom rug. Later, when he learned her name, he’d moan it in time with the stroke of his hand. Lila, Liiilaaa. Savoring the undulation of the tongue, the exotic taste of her name in his mouth.
His mother heard him and thought sure he was possessed. She started telling people that Lila Petrovich, the trampy new waitress at Dane’s, was some kind of old-world witch. Beneath that disguise of comely flesh and shiny hair, she was probably covered in hundred-year-old wrinkles and warts. The witch had done something to her boy, had crept close enough to enthrall him, and now he was trapped in her magic, helpless as a fly in molasses. Jamie had believed it, too. Lila had cast a spell to make sure no other woman would ever measure up. And none had, not until Lucy arrived at the bonfire, grown up, blood and flesh warming the shape of his memory, her eyes identical to Lila’s save for the way they assessed him. He longed for her to look at him the way Lila had, to take him in, but Lucy’s eyes locked him out.
He’d started dreaming of Lila again the night he met Lucy at the river party. She was so real in his dreams, as she always had been, but now she didn’t smile and hold out her hand, as she had done so many times in the past. She was trying to tell him something that he couldn’t understand, her words rising soundlessly like bubbles underwater. Her eyes, though, were clear as ever, and when he looked into them, he was twelve years old again, and she was saving him from Junior Ralls, his scrawny body flooded with relief.
Lila was the one in his dreams, but when he woke, it was thoughts of Lucy that lingered. He’d been trying to figure out how to see her again ever since the party. Now Lucy had hunted him down, tracked him to this remote fishing spot, and stood before him on the riverbank, her arms crossed over her chest, waiting. She had questions for him, about Cheri and the van, and they had struck a deal. I’ll tell you what I know, he’d said. If you kiss me. One kiss. I start it, I finish it.