the mud and watched the river roll by, now just a rumbling sheet of dark water. The pictures in my head were cold enough to ice the river, crust the black marshes with frost. The world was black and white and the only light came from drifting filaments at the farthest reach of the sky, faint capillaries of waning lightning.
I slipped in the mud that squirted between my toes, fell to my knees. I threw back my head and screamed. Then, rising against the rain, clad in only a muddy twist of cloth, my knife in the scabbard of my flesh, I stood and started upriver. I was no longer a Ryder or a Ridgecliff or any name patched over a human being, I was a blazing creation of hate and vengeance and white-hot fury, and in my mind one burning picture: wiring Willet Lindy to a tree and making the evil bastard squeal and squeal until tube worms and black honey poured from his belly like a river.
'Did you think you could sneak up on me, Mama?' 'Will? Will, what's going on? Let me go, Will.' 'Could you see me from where you were, Mama? Did they have windows there?'
'Will, I'm not your mama. Look at me, Will. It's Dr.
Davanelle.'
His mouth at her ear, he could have bitten it off. 'Did they tape the windows there, Mama? Did they have the black tape where you were?' He couldn't help himself, he licked her ear and almost swooned with delight.
'I can't feel my hands or feet, Will. Please let me up.'
'I've still been good, Mama. I've been clean. Sometimes I make the pee-pee, but I've tried. I made something else, Mama, I made a magic secret. Remember our magic secrets, Mama? The ones I couldn't say?'
'Will…'
'I made magic pictures to show you how I am inside now, Mama. Watch, Mama. You me and the pictures. We'll watch the pictures and then I'll get the bad girl out of you, Mama. I promise I will.'
One more little flick of his tongue at her ear.
'I love you, Mama. Yes, I will.'
There was nothing to explain where I was. No map or GPS, no moon or stars. All I had was the sound of the river at my right arm and the suck of the mud at my feet. Insects covered me like a cloud and I stopped to coat myself with muck, but the rain washed it away. Pain sang from my hip and I eased the knife from my flesh in teeth-clenching increments, a warm flow of blood behind it. I flexed my fingers and realized my grip was returning. I looked down at my bare, muddy feet and was grateful that years of barefoot beach running had callused the bottoms at least I could walk. A building poked from a small copse and I crept to it, my steps muffled by the rain and the water racing through the brush. A fish camp, deserted, little more than the tree house of my youth, a tarpaper roof amplifying the fall of the drops into a drum like sound. It occurred to me that I'd heard the camp well before I'd seen its hazy outline, my ears picking up the sound of the rain on the roof from thirty yards' distance. I moved past the camp, then paused and listened. Rain on water and leaf and grasses, a solid hiss of monotone rain. I no longer heard the rain against the tarpaper. But I had heard the difference.
I walked on. One hundred trudging paces. Stopped.
Nothing. The same flat hiss. Another hundred paces. Listened. And again moved on.
Stopped.
I heard it. A brown cricket chirping in a field of black ones, or a cornet hidden behind a blare of trumpets. Something in the sound had changed. In front of me, behind, I couldn't discern. I stood like a blind man smelling smoke in a tinderbox forest, moving up a few feet, back, sensing the change, the direction, sifting for discrepancies. It seemed to be off my right arm, slightly ahead. I turned that way and walked.
Mama had known what the magic pictures meant. It was deep in her disguised eyes, the ones she'd painted green instead of the gray ones she used to wear every day.
Let me listen to her now. Lying.
'I'm not your mama, Will. I'm Dr. Davanelle. Ava Davanelle. We work together at the medical examiner's office. Remember? Stop and try to remember, Will. It's all there if you try and remember.'
He's never heard Mama use a scared voice before. She was trying to keep it flat, ironed down, but that scared sound was making tiny wrinkles.
'I remember, Mama. It's in the pictures. They're history pictures, the secrets. Did you see me grow up to be a big boy? Did you see my muscles grow?' He pointed to the gray screen of the paused television.
'Yes, Will, but that's not you '
'I saw you come back and I knew you were mad at me still but I'm going to clean the bad girl out of you forever, Mama and '
'Will, you'll get in trouble, in terrible trouble. You can stop this now.'
' then we can do it all over again, Mama, right this time, like the just-people that everyone gets to be, I want to be just-people, Mama, and you want to be just-Mama.'
'Oh, Will, please…'
'I'm strong now and I can get the bad girl out of you.'
He walked to the canvas bag he'd brought with them. He removed a few bright tools from the morgue, things they'd never miss, so it wasn't stealing. He arranged them on a clean white towel in a shining silver tray and proudly showed them to her.
He reached down and eased a strand of hair from her eyes.
'Don't cry, Mama, pain makes us pure.'
Another sound entered the one I was focusing on. I ran ahead a few paces and saw shoreline, lapping water. That was the new sound: I was following a channel angling from the river, an anchorage perhaps.
I stepped back and focused on the sounds in the rain again, heard a rhythmic tapping, and followed it to wooden pilings at the channel's edge, tubular ghosts slapped with waves, invisible until I was a dozen feet away. Rain drummed a few remaining planks of decking on the old dock. My feet crunched rock and shell and I knew I was walking an abandoned launch ramp.
I moved from the distraction of the rain on the decking, held my breath, closed my eyes, and again became a listening machine. Another sound somewhere to the right, thin and hollow. I wished for a bolt of lighting, a moment of moon-glow, anything to pierce the black. The sound disappeared once, but I backed up until I heard it again. I angled to the left and kept walking.
Until I saw the light.
I wiped the rain from my eyes and it remained: a strip of horizontal moonbeam hovering in the air. In the trees? No, my mind cried: in the faint outline of an old shrimp boat against the gray-black sky, its outriggers like raised spears and the hiss of rain on its wooden body a soft wail from deep within a mine.
CHAPTER 36
'Willy? Willy?'
'Don't talk to me. I have things to do. You can't talk to me.'
'Don't you want to talk to the bad girl again, Willy?'
'Mmmmmmmmmmm. Mmmmmmmm.' Lindy put his fingers in his ears and hummed louder.
He'd tried this a long time ago but Mama ran his fingers through the stove flame and told him that's what happened to fingers that got caught in ears.
'You were so good to her, Willy. What if Mama lied and the bad girl was really the good girl?'
'That's a lie! MMMMmmmmmm.'
'Did the bad girl ever make you do things you didn't want to do, Willy? Or did the bad girl make you feel good?'
He shouldn't have reminded her about the bad girl in her. She was trying to use it against him.
'It wasn't good, Mama. It was sickness coming from me. Mmmmmmm.'
'You were going to cut the bad girl from Mama, Willy? Are you sure?'
'Mmmmmmmm. Mmmmmmm.'
'Maybe you wanted to cut Mama out of the bad girl.'
'You're crazy! That's why you're bad, you lie.'
'Take these stupid ropes off me, Willy. Come curl up with the bad girl. Your bad girl, Willy.'
