been all along, but their words sounded as distant and meaningless as the drip of rain from the trees. She couldn’t seem to make sense of anything, so she stopped trying. “Doesn’t matter,” she whispered to herself. “The wind knows.” Her shoes began to sink into the watery soil. “The pines know.”
“Shit, it’s like his stomach was bit out.”
Feeling a dim sympathy, she glanced at the young trooper beside her. Vaguely, she became aware of Barry’s voice, somewhere off to the side, on the edges of the crowd. Swirling, all the voices drifted away from her again, and there yawned a cathedral quietness, swelling with the rush of wind, punctuated only by damply muffled footsteps and splashings. Sand shifted and yielded underfoot, the earth soft as seaweed, soft as ruptured entrails, and the deep whirl pool of silence broke only upon the sharp, liquid twittering of the birds. She realized that Steve was beside her again, that he was asking her something. “It looked like Wallace,” she told him, knowing he wouldn’t understand. “Lying there in the mud. I thought it was Wallace again.” Dizzy, she leaned on a police car, wondering how she hadn’t heard the birds before. “And the crickets on him, moving, like Wallace was still moving when I found him. Only I didn’t know what to do. Not then. I would now.” Her voice trailed off, and she wondered if he’d heard her, if she’d even been speaking aloud.
She tried to walk away, conscious that the sand made no brisk noise underfoot, just this rotten, mushy sound. The pines whispered. She looked for the birds but couldn’t see them any more than she could the toads. She wanted to call out to someone. To Barry, yes, Barry. Always so forceful, he would help her. People milled all around, but her throat felt dry, and the small sounds she made and the sounds made by the other people seemed muffled to the point of muteness. Yet the wind held many voices, gently hissing ghosts among the trees. They pleaded with her, surrounded her with their desperate longings.
Barry appeared to be questioning a bald, muscular man with a red face. A trooper kept interrupting, while another muttered something.
“We was gonna come back with a tow.” Only Athena really listened, heard the words and understood. “It got so dark,” the man kept saying. “We couldn’t, the rain, it come down so hard we couldn’t see.” The young trooper she’d first noticed stood by one of the blue-and-whites, trying to radio for instructions, and before long, she’d heard enough to piece together some of the facts: car pool of construction workers; late shift; short cut. “It just, the road, it washed out from under us. We got stuck.” It was widely believed that the area was riddled with car thieves who used these back roads, so they’d left one man behind with the car while the others had hiked to a farm house. The bald man looked as though he’d been sick. “We just wanted a tow. We tried to come back. We did.”
“Are you all right?” Steve stood beside her. “Doris just told me what’s, I mean, who’s in the rig.” He stared at her. Too closely. “Athena, what can I say? Can I do anything? I’m so shocked, so sorry. Doris said something about dogs. Lord, that’s awful.”
“Hey, ’Thena!” Putting his notebook away, Barry approached. “How’d you get here?”
“Leave her alone,” Steve said.
“What’s your problem?”
Doris and the trooper wheeled up the litter, and the sound of the invisible surf boomed louder than it ever had in Athena’s ears. The night tide. Only it was morning. Mourning. The tips of the pines vibrated, describing circles that grew ever smaller. Athena shut her eyes and knew the sea swirled all around her, knew the breeze that whipped through wet branches carried a faint tang of salt spray.
In erratic bursts, the radio warned that power lines, downed by the storm, remained potentially deadly, and a phone number kept repeating through the static. “Fat lot of good that number’s going to do,” Doris muttered, switching it off. “Damn phones are down too, lot of places.” She kept turning to look at Athena. Through the rearview mirror, Athena watched the police car that followed them; she imagined she could make out the faces behind the windshield, imagined she could hear their voices.
“I handle all emergencies well, don’t I? And I don’t cry. Did you know this? I never cry. Not even as a child.” When finally she began to talk, her words rambled uncontrollably. “And my aunt used to tell me my mother wouldn’t nurse me, that she said it hurt too much.”
“What, honey?”
They reached the metal bridge, and the tires moaned across the grating, the water high beneath them. Athena glanced down. Black and skeletal, a grove of dead trees rose from the river, and scattered patches of high ground had become islands. She faced front again: distant and engorged, low hills swelled with evergreens.
“’Thena, I want you to understand this. If you ever need anything, you just have to call me.” Singing tires threw water, and the water threw a mist behind them, and a whistling rattle pounded through the rig when she dropped the clutch.
“It’s not my fault.” The words bolted out. “God help me, I’m relieved he’s dead. That’s all I feel. Relief. But I didn’t want him to die.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I didn’t! It’s me. Don’t you see? It’s me it’s after.”
“What are you talking about, honey? What’s after you?”
“It’s just letting me know it sees me, trying to hurt me through them, to get me to stand still and face it. At night. I’ve always known that. I’ve felt it.” She seemed to be having trouble breathing. “What’s wrong with me? I don’t even feel sad. My husband’s brother. Everything they always said about me is true. I can’t even feel. I think I heard him cry out. God, I think I heard him in the storm. Just at the end. When he died.” Turning around in the seat, she faced into the rig. “Two of them back there. Right behind us. Look.”
“Stop it now.”
“Two corpses. Did you see them, Doris? Did you see how they looked?”
“I saw.”
“When it didn’t get me, it had to go after somebody else. But why…if it already had Lonny…?” She watched the road for a moment. “Maybe now it’s rained, the murders will stop.” Her eyes glittered like jagged bits of glass. “Maybe now it won’t need blood.”
“Athena.”
“I’m going to kill it. What ever it is. I am.”
Doris only nodded. Collapsing barns began to pass in fields, yellowed from the recent heat, now thickened and sodden, and the matted grasses at the sides of the road could have concealed lions, whole prides of them. “You poor kid. Talk it on out, honey. Go on.” But Athena had apparently lapsed back into silence. The distant, mournful thump of gunfire drifted across the meadow. They skirted a ragged group of children who stood in the road to gawk at Asian workers laboring in a flooded cranberry bog. “Funny how things change,” said Doris. The children turned to stare at the rig, a few even giving chase. “I’ve been seeing workers get off the farm-labor buses for twenty years now. Used to be all blacks they brought in. Then Puerto Ricans mostly. Now are all you see is Vietnamese or Cambodians. I guess they’re right at home out there.” She glanced at the woman beside her.
“I wonder what’s happened to Barry and Steven. I can’t see them anymore.” She turned to Doris, shocking her with the sharp emptiness of her eyes. “You have to help me. I know you’ll help me. You always do.” She pointed back at the strapped and sheeted mounds. “The one from the car. It’s the same. The same as Lonny. Everybody is going to blame it on dogs. I’ll need evidence. When we get to the hospital, I want you to be the one to examine the bodies. You understand? Will you do this for me?”
The dirt road had emptied onto a paved one, slick and puddled, but Doris drove no faster. “There are a few markers I could call in, I guess. I guess it depends on where I take you. Which hospital. Maybe I could at least observe some preliminaries.”
Everything on the road changed; now beautiful homes alternated with hovels. The ambulance crept along, and Athena stared out the window. She watched a slanting shack go by and noted the absurd debris that littered the yard: old washing machine, bits of farm machinery, giant plastic squirrel. And everywhere the rusting cars. Then a mansion with smooth lawns and unbreached walls slid into view. Another hut sagged open, roof flopping, one wall having caved in beneath the weight of garbage that spilled out like entrails. “Isn’t that funny?” Two-lane blacktop, recently resurfaced, ran clean and straight. “It’s almost like seeing two centuries at once.” Her voice gentle and wondering, Athena jerked her head from side to side. “Don’t you think? Like different times overlapping. So many layers.” She caught her breath, as though from a sudden pain. “I thought it was Wallace, you see. Just for a second. On the ground. Like before. I guess I never noticed how much alike they looked.”
They passed another ruined structure. A blank fabric, the sky jealously absorbed all light, suffusing little on
