The White Road

That night a car drew up outside Elliot Norton’s house on the outskirts of Grace Falls. Elliot heard the car door opening, then footsteps running across the grass of his yard. He was already reaching for the gun on his nightstand when the window of his bedroom exploded inward and the room erupted into flame. The burning gasoline splashed his arms and chest and set fire to his hair. He was still burning when he staggered down the stairs, through his front door, and onto his lawn, where he rolled in the damp grass to quench the fire.

He lay on his back in the moonlight and watched his house burn.

And as Elliot Norton’s house flamed far to the south, I awoke to the sound of a car idling on Old County Road. Rachel was asleep beside me, something clicking inside her air passages as she breathed, a soft noise as regular as the ticking of a metronome. Gently, I slipped from beneath the covers and walked to the window.

In the moonlight, an old black Cadillac Coupe de Ville stood on the bridge that crossed the marshes. Even from a distance, I could see the dents and scratches on the paintwork, the brokenlimb curve of the damaged front bumper, and the spiderweb tracery of cracked glass in the corner of the windshield. I could hear its engine rumbling but no smoke came from the exhaust; and though the moon was bright that night I could not glimpse the interior of the car through the dark glass of the windows.

I had seen such a car before. It had been driven by a being named Stritch, a foul creature, pale and deformed. But Stritch was dead, a hole torn in his chest, and the car had been destroyed. Then the rear door of the Cadillac opened. I waited for someone to emerge, but no one did. Instead the car just stood, its door wide open, for a minute or two until an unseen hand pulled the door closed, the coffin-lid thud coming to me across water and grass, and the car moved away, executing a U-turn to head northwest toward Oak Hill and Route 1. I heard movement from the bed.

“What is it?” asked Rachel.

I turned to her and saw the shadows drifting across the room, clouds chased by moonlight, until they reached her and, slowly, began to devour her paleness.



“What is it?” asked Rachel.

I was back in bed, except now I was sitting bolt upright and I had pushed the sheets away from me with my feet. Her hand was warm upon me, flat against my chest.

“There was a car,” I said.

“Where?”

“Outside. There was a car.”

I stepped naked from the bed and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtain, but there was nothing there, only the road, quiet, and the silver threads of the water on the marsh.

“There was a car,” I said, for the last time.

And I saw the marks of my fingertips against the window, left there as I reached out the car, just as they, reflected in the glass, now reached out for me.

“Come back to bed,” she said.

I went to her and I held her, spoonlike, as she slipped softly into sleep. And I watched over her until morning came.





3


E LLIOT NORTON CALLED me again the morning after the arson attack. He had first-degree burns to his face and arms. He considered himself pretty lucky, all told. The fire had destroyed three rooms on the second floor of his house and left a big hole in his roof. No local contractor would touch the work and he’d engaged some guys from Martinez, just across the Georgia state line, to fix up the damage.

“You talk to the cops?” I asked him.

“Yeah, they were out here first thing. They got no shortage of suspects, but if they can make a case I’ll retire from law and become a monk. They know it’s linked to the Larousse case and I know it’s linked to the Larousse case, so we’re all in agreement. Just lucky I’m not paying them for their opinion.”

“Any suspects?”

“They’ll round up some of the local assholes, but it won’t do much good, not unless someone saw or heard something and is willing to stand up and say it. A lot of folks will take the view that I shouldn’t have expected anything less for taking this on.”

There was a pause. I could feel him waiting for me to fill the silence. In the end I did, and felt my feet start to slide as the inevitability of my involvement became clear.

“What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? Cut the kid loose? He’s my client, Charlie. I can’t do that. I can’t let them intimidate me out of this case.”

He was turning the guilt screws on me and he knew it. I didn’t like it, but maybe he felt that he had no other option.

Yet it wasn’t only his willingness to use our friendship that made me uneasy. Elliot Norton was a very good lawyer, but I’d never before seen the milk of human kindness flow from him in his professional dealings. Now he had put his house and possibly his life on the line for a young man he couldn’t have known too well, and that didn’t sound like the Elliot Norton I knew. I wasn’t sure that I could turn my back on him any longer, even with my doubts, but the least I could do was to try and get some answers that satisfied me.

“Why are you doing this, Elliot?”

“Doing what, being a lawyer?”

“No, being this kid’s lawyer.”

I waited for the speech about a man sometimes having to do what a man has to do, about how nobody else would stand up for the kid and how Elliot had been unable to stand by and watch while he was strapped to a gurney and injected with poisons until his heart stopped. Instead, he surprised me. Perhaps it was tiredness, or the events of the previous night, but when he spoke there was a bitterness in his voice that I had not heard before.

“You know, part of me always hated this place. I hated the attitudes, the small-town mentality. The guys I saw around me, they didn’t want to be princes of industry, or politicians, or judges. They didn’t want to change the world. They wanted to drink beer and screw women, and a thousand a month working in a gas station would allow them to do that. They were never going to leave, but if they weren’t, then I sure as hell was.”

“So you became a lawyer.”

“That’s right: a noble profession, whatever you might think.”

“And you went to New York.”

“I went to New York, but I hated New York even more than I hated here, and maybe I still had something to prove.”

“So now you’re going to represent this kid as a way of getting back at them all?”

“Something like that. I have a gut feeling, Charlie: this kid didn’t kill Marianne Larousse. He may be lacking in some of the social graces, but a rapist and a murderer he ain’t. There’s no way that I can stand by and watch them execute him for a crime he didn’t commit.”

I let it sink in. Maybe it wasn’t for me to question another’s crusade. After all, I’d been accused of being a crusader myself often enough in the past.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “Try to stay out of trouble until then.”

He breathed out deeply at what he saw as a crack of light in the darkness. “Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

When I hung up the phone, Rachel was leaning against the doorjamb watching me.

“You’re going down there, aren’t you?”

It wasn’t an accusation, just a question.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“You seem to feel some debt of loyalty to him.”

“No, not to him in particular.” I wasn’t sure that I could put my reasons into words, but I felt like I had to try, to explain it to myself as much as to Rachel.

“When I’ve been in trouble, when I’ve taken on cases that were difficult, and worse than difficult, I’ve had people who were willing to stand alongside me: you, Angel, Louis, others too, and some of those people didn’t survive their involvement. Now I have someone asking me for help and I’m not sure that I can turn away so easily.”

“‘What goes around comes around?’”

“I guess so. But if I go down, there are things that need to be taken care of first.”

“Such as?”

I didn’t reply.

“You mean me.” Invisible fingers traced thin lines of irritation on her forehead. “We’ve talked about this before.”

“No, I’ve talked about it. You just block your ears.”

I heard my voice rising, and took a deep breath before I spoke again.

“Look, you won’t carry a gun, and—”

“I’m not listening to this,” she said. She stormed up the stairs. Seconds later, I heard the door to her office slam shut.