0Title: The White Horse (5/?)
Author: klmeri
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Characters: Kirk, Spock, McCoy
Summary: Jim Kirk was a strange man. A silent man. No one knew much about him or, if they did, were not willing to say what they did know, especially to the town’s newest magical occupant. Not that Leonard McCoy cared. He had an old curse to track down and unravel by the year’s end. Meanwhile a killer was tracking him. AU.
Previous Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
or at AO3
Leonard took a deep breath and knocked on a door. After a moment of waiting, he nervously checked down the empty hallway, drew in another mouthful of air, and called a name in his softest voice before knocking again. The door opened a crack to expose a long chain and the suspicious eye of someone behind it.
“How did you know where to find me?” asked that eye’s owner.
Leonard held up a wrinkled blue envelope. “I took a leap of faith your return address wasn’t a lie.” A second passed, then another, while Leonard received a baleful glare. He figured he ought to be polite. “Can I come in?”
The door shut, and there came the sound of the chain being removed. When it opened again, a young woman with folded arms blocked the entranceway. “I don’t know that I want you in my house, Leonard McCoy.”
“Christine…”
“Don’t ‘Christine’ me. I think I have the right to slam this door in your face.”
A low-burning anger flared. “Damn it, woman, just let me in!”
Her chin came up. “No.”
The elevator dinged at the end of the hallway, and Leonard put his back to that direction without thinking, the line of his shoulders curving in tightly.
The woman he was arguing with, after observing this reaction with sharp blue eyes, surmised rather unsympathetically, “So you’re in trouble.”
“Chances are I’m going to prison for murder.”
Her look shifted toward speculation. “Did you murder somebody?”
“No.”
For a second, Leonard thought he’d lost his chance entirely, but Christine glanced away before releasing a long sigh through her nose, the kind that said why do I even know you? and took a step back from the door.
“I guess we have something to talk about, then,” she said before disappearing into her apartment.
Relieved, Leonard followed her. Being out of the public eye, despite that no one in this city was currently interested in watching a stranger like him or knew yet that they should be interested in his activities, eased some of the tension in Leonard. The darkness of Christine’s living room made him feel even more secure. That darkness must have suited her too, because she reached for a lamp but seemed to think better of turning it on at the last second and shifted to face him in the dark. A streetlamp from beyond the windows gave just enough light to illuminate the outline of her body.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” she said.
“And you’re frankest woman I ever met. Thanks for letting me in.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
He gave a slight nod. “I know.” As his companion’s eyes glinted in the dark, his unease returned. “Can you turn on the lamp?”
“Afraid?”
Leonard laughed softly. “Only in that I can’t tell if you’re planning to knife me or not—but I doubt I’d see it coming anyway, if that’s what you were set on doing.”
Christine switched on a table lamp. “I wouldn’t kill you, Len, but only because your daughter is still fond of you. On the day that’s no longer true…” She smiled too sweetly at him.
Leonard looked away, thinking that if Joanna died he would be grateful to have someone put him out of his misery. He forced himself to return his gaze to Christine.
She wasn’t smiling anymore. “You look like shit.”
Leonard rubbed his eyebrow with a thumbnail and answered vaguely, “I’ve had better days.”
Suddenly, Christine’s body angled away from him. Her admission was abrupt. “Same.”
That was when he saw what he should have noticed right away: the circles under her eyes, the deep grooves of her cheeks, the jut of her collarbone. A loose-knit sweater exposed her shoulders in a such way that signified she had lost weight since last time they had seen each other. Christine had always been petite in size but now she looked frighteningly frail.
Like Jo.
Leonard set aside any negative feelings and focused on his concern. “Is the insomnia back?”
Christine hugged her middle. “It’s Jocelyn. She’s been haunting me lately. I didn’t know why until…” She turned to him, her gaze both pained and accusing. “Until I heard from your father,” she finished.
Fuck, Leonard thought. He didn’t know what to say.
“You should have told me.”
Christine sounded like she hated him.
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not! Did you think it would be a kindness to call me the day after she died—or not call me at all? Well, fuck you. I’m her godmother.”
“Fine,” Leonard snapped back, head jerking up, “I didn’t want to! But let’s get something straight, Chris. I may be the world’s biggest bastard but I’m also Joanna’s father. I told you from the start it wouldn’t do you any good to keep in contact with us.”
Though he half-expected the slap to his face, it still made him step backward in surprise. Christine’s fingers curled into a fist as if she intended to full-out punch him in the second round.
He caught her wrist and held it fast with the warning, “That’s enough.”
“Let go!” she cried, tearing at his fingers. “Why did you have to come into our lives, Len? Why?“
He lowered her arm and, after some reluctance, let go of her wrist. “I used to ask myself that a lot but since Jo came along?” He shook his head. “I can’t regret it. I’m sorry, Chris, I am—” Christine’s eyes squeezed shut. He waited until she opened them again to speak. “—but you can’t hold me responsible for Jocelyn’s death.”
Seeing the resignation in her eyes was worse than seeing the hatred.
“I don’t blame you,” Christine said. “Not anymore. I just… Joanna is all that’s left of my best friend, and you weren’t going to tell me I might lose her too. For that, you are a bastard.”
“I’m sorry,” Leonard said again.
Christine wrapped her arms back around her middle and crossed the room. “I guess you might be here a while. Do you want something to drink?”
“Water’s fine.”
Leonard stood awkwardly in her living room until she came back. He looked at the bottle in her hand.
“What?” came the challenge.
“That’s not water,” he remarked dryly.
Christine held out a glass to Leonard, which was actually filled with tap water, and twisted the top off the bottle once one of her hands was free. “The whiskey’s for me.” True to her word, she took a swallow straight from the bottle, not sputtering afterwards with the practice of someone long used to the whiskey’s burn. They both sat down on the floor, out of a half-forgotten memory.
Leonard was already regretting his choice of beverage. He drained his glass in hopes Chapel would take pity on him and share. Now that he thought about it, he surely could use the liquor. Being sober didn’t seem to have any advantages over being drunk.
“Nope,” commented Christine, as though she could read his mind. “The last time we got wasted together…” She made a face.
“The sex wasn’t that bad.”
“What the hell do you know? You don’t remember it.”
It was the first and only time they had slept together. Leonard had woken up the morning after in a small room at Ole Miss in confusion, vaguely certain since he wasn’t a student he wasn’t supposed to be on campus, much less in a girl’s dormitory, and missing his pants. Then his night of heavy drinking had made itself known with a terrible vengeance: he’d wound up on his knees puking for an hour straight in the communal bathroom, to the disgust of several young female college students. That was how he met Jocelyn. She had laughed at him, kindly bathed his sweaty face and asked him his name (because apparently her roommate Christine had no clue). Later—after nearly two years of on-and-off dating—Jocelyn came to him with the news that she was pregnant.
It wasn’t a romantic story by any stretch of the imagination, not with either woman, but at least some of the memories were good ones. Once upon a time, Leonard had had a girl would hold his hand in public and flip her long hair at anyone who looked askance at the scar on his wrist; and once upon a time, Christine—like Jocelyn—had been another person he could talk to.
He didn’t know what they were now, except temporary drinking buddies.
Leonard gave her the most pathetic expression he could muster. Christine rolled her eyes but lifted the whiskey bottle in his direction. He took it with a heartfelt “Thank you.”
“I want you gone in the morning,” she said as he took off the cap.
“I will be,” he promised.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her mouth and stood up. The light from the table lamp cast a strange shadow across her face. “I’ll be going down to stay with Joanna for a while. I’ve already put in for leave from work.”
Leonard didn’t say anything because Christine wasn’t asking for his permission and they both knew it. She turned and walked away, and he watched her go.
It was the ache in his heart that made him call out at the last second: “Hey, Chris!”
She paused in the archway between the living room and hall with a surprisingly tolerant expression.
“I ditched my phone. Tell my dad that, and not to worry. I’ll try to find a way to let him know how things are going.” After swallowing hard, he added quietly, “And tell Jo I miss her.”
Christine watched him for a long moment, then asked, “Do you know where you’re headed?”
He ran a hand over his face but said, “There’s a map—somebody I have to follow.”
“Even when your child needs you? How is anything more important than her?”
Leonard didn’t reply, and he had the feeling Christine judged him based him on his silence. Nonetheless, she didn’t press the matter and left, he presumed, for her bedroom, where no doubt she would lock herself in for the night. He poured a generous amount of whiskey into his glass, drained and refilled it twice.
The ache at his temples was a warning that his body hadn’t had a drink as strong as this in a long time. Alcohol always messed with his magic. Up to his late twenties, that hadn’t been reason enough to limit his intake. His mindset had changed once Joanna was born, and he kept to one or two beers or a single shot of the harder stuff. But tonight Leonard didn’t want to go easy on himself, or be fair. He didn’t want to think beyond how much was left at the bottom of the bottle. With every swallow, the whiskey burned a smooth path to his stomach and made him feel warm from the inside out.
Hours later, he woke up face-down on a rug which hadn’t seen a vacuum in a while. The taste in his mouth was foul. Beside his left hand was the empty whiskey bottle; in front of his nose was the crumpled blue envelope he thought he had hidden in an inner pocket of his jacket. Because it looked strange even to his bloodshot eyes, he reached for it. The thing turned out to be full of cash.
Leonard rolled onto his back and pressed the envelope against his forehead. After facing Christine’s anger last night he hadn’t had the heart to ask for money like he had originally intended, but of course she would have known that’s what he wanted. Friends who were no better than strangers didn’t show up in the middle of the night just to say howdy-do. People who couldn’t be bothered to say “thanks for sending my kid birthday and Christmas cards every year” didn’t visit out of the kindness of their hearts.
He sighed and made a silent promise. Christine Chapel wouldn’t be just another name on a long list of debts he owed. He would pay her back someday.
The voice in his head, whether a product of his drinking or just his nature, was much more cynical than the one in his heart. Yeah right, it said, and just who are you trying to fool?
Everyone, he countered, and let it go at that.
Leonard cleaned himself up without making too much of a mess of Christine’s bathroom and left the apartment building as inconspicuously as could be managed. Once securely in the car he’d traded for his truck on the way out of North Carolina, he pulled a burner phone out of the glove box and dialed a number he rarely used.
His contact answered on the fourth ring, like always: “So you’re driving past a graveyard. How many dead people are in there?”
Leonard rolled his eyes and answered obligingly, “I don’t know, how many?”
“All of them!” There was a peel of laughter from the other end of the line.
“Where the fuck are you getting your jokes, Scotty?”
“Joke-a-pedia dot com. Like Wikipedia, only funnier.”
Despite himself, Leonard felt his mouth stretch in a smile. “It’s been a long time, I guess. How’re you doing? How’s Keenser?”
“Longer for you, methinks, if word on the street is anything to go by. I’d say I’m shocked to hear from you, my friend, but… yeah. And don’t ask about Keenser. I loathe Keenser right now.”
“You always do.”
“People say that to me all the time! You know what? I’m not making this shit up, man, he’s a little fuckin’ demon—like literally. Little. Fucking. Demon. One day I was shaving in front of the mirror and the bastard popped right up in the glass with his fugly black eyes and scared the shit of me. I almost slit my own throat!”
Leonard’s smile turned into a grin. “That was probably the point.”
“Hardy-har-har. Here’s a grand idea: why don’t you swing by this way? I got a poltergeist I can lend you for your truck.”
Leonard cleared his throat. They would wander farther off-track if he didn’t get to the point. While he considered Scotty to be the closest thing he had to a real friend, part of the reason why they never talked too often was that it kept them on good terms. “You said something about ‘word on the street’. How bad is it?”
There was a moment of silence. Then, “I was just trying to think up an accurate comparison and couldn’t. It’s that bad. You know the guy who’s after you is a Fed, right?”
“It was kinda hard to miss. He even parted his hair straight down the middle.”
Scotty snorted. “They think they’re the Men In Black, when really—”
“No,” Leonard interrupted firmly, “we are not bringing up aliens.”
“You take all the joy out of these discussions.” There was a pause. “But you know they’re real, right? Like if I can be haunted by a demon from the underworld, and you can make people grow back thumbs, why can’t there be life on Mars?”
“Shut up, Scotty. Tell me about Spock.”
“That’s a contradiction. Am I supposed to shut up or talk?”
“Damn it, man!” Leonard growled over the line. “Is the son of a bitch following me or not?”
“You can’t tell?”
“I don’t know,” said Leonard, glancing in paranoia through his rearview mirror. “More ‘n more, I get this feeling that he’s standing right around a corner or in the next room. I can’t sleep because if I do, it’s like something latches onto me. Maybe a tracking spell or some shit. You know his father did that kind of thing for pay. So, how close is he?”
“Hold up, I’m working on it. I’d tell you how I can oh-so-brilliantly hack into a federal GPS database but you wouldn’t understand it. Ah, here we go. S-p-o-c-k, Spock Sss—heck no, what I’m not even gonna try to pronounce that last name. Or is it first name? One can never tell these days.”
“Scotty.“
“Right. Got his agent number. A few clicks, and…”
The line grew so silent, Leonard checked his phone to make certain they hadn’t been disconnected. “Scotty?” he called, feeling his stomach do an unpleasant flop.
“This is not good,” came a mumbled response. “Oh, this is not good.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t find him.”
Leonard gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “What?”
“He’s off Fed-radar.” For the first time, Montgomery Scott sounded nervous. “Look, when I heard about—about the thing, I did a little checking. This guy’s cold-blooded. I mean, the kind of cold-blooded where his record shows more apprehended users in body bags than handcuffs.”
“Fuck,” Leonard said softly. Spock hadn’t seemed like a psychopath in that brief interlude at Sarek’s house. He had made tea and looked Leonard in the eyes without the usual hatred Leonard was accustomed to seeing.
That… obviously didn’t count for shit. Leonard closed his eyes. If Spock was the type of agent the government used to “clean up” the mage population, then he didn’t stand a chance. And given the fact that he had seen for himself that Spock was a child of two worlds, was able to tap into the supernatural like his father…
It didn’t bear thinking about.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” he said to his friend, voice thick with an emotion he didn’t care to name. “You, uh, probably won’t hear from me for a while.”
“Wait, McCoy—Leonard—no matter what the bullshit is going around, I know you didn’t do it. Okay, so when the bulletin says you’re a con artist, and a sometimes-thief, that’s not a lie—but you’re not a murderer.”
“Does that count for anything?” Leonard argued quietly.
Scotty’s answer was equally quiet. “I wish it did.”
“Believe me, when it finally does count, this will be a world we don’t recognize. ‘Course, I figure by the time that happens, if ever,” said Leonard bitterly, “you and I will be long dead.”
“In that case, I gonna pull a Keenser and terrify the shit out of everybody in my afterlife.”
Leonard huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh on a better day. “I’ll be right there with you, buddy. So long.”
“Yeah,” Scotty replied, and hung up.
Leonard set the cell phone down on the car seat beside him and gazed out the windshield. There wasn’t much choice now. Wasn’t much time.
He pulled out the folded paper from the glove box that had been beneath the phone and looked at it. When he had had a chance to actually inspect what he had snitched from Sarek’s house, it had befuddled him at first. He had four maps—Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa—and at least one red mark on each. There had been no discernible pattern between them until he had gotten tired of jumbling the papers around. But after Leonard had trimmed the maps and taped them together along their matching borders…
He saw it for what it was: not the mismatched circles but the trail leading up the Mississippi River.
So that’s what he had to do, follow that trail, and hope to God the one person who might have helped him, who was dead because of him, hadn’t been so crazy after all.
Leonard tapped a finger against the state of Kentucky, at a little blue splotch titled Fork Lake, and wondered what he would find there. Then he had a sudden vision of vivid green eyes and shuddered, afraid that presence was exactly what he was set to encounter.
The library was a crosshatch of faint, dusty light and smelled of wood polish. Distantly, there came the sound of a copier in the throes of printing and the creak of old stairs.
Leonard stuck an ink pen behind his ear, rolled up a much-abused spiral-bound notebook, and slapped the thing lightly against his thigh. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything else?” he asked, trying to keep his frustration out of his voice.
His companion’s eyes narrowed at him. “Where are you from?”
Leonard pursed his mouth.
“Your accent,” insisted a lady old enough to be Leonard’s grandmother, “I haven’t heard it before ‘cept on the tv. Where are you from, young man?”
“Georgia,” he replied. “At least originally, I am.”
“Iowa’s a long way from Georgia.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he muttered, then cleared his throat. “Listen, are you sure there’s nothing else you can tell me? I got…” He pretended to peek into his notebook even though he knew the number by heart. “…four dead children. That was it, just four?”
She looked him over slowly like she hadn’t been eyeing him since the moment he stepped into the building. “What’d you say this was about again?”
“A book. I’m writing a book on the Occult.” Generally, he didn’t need to offer more explanation than that to get someone talking. It was a desire many people had to link even the most mundane of daily happenings to the supernatural, a desire Leonard didn’t share or even understand.
“Is my name going in it?”
“Sure, if you want.”
“Ms. Ida Cottrill. I know you wrote it down, but let me see if you spelled it right.”
Leonard ground his back teeth, willing the return of some of his patience, and opened his notebook for her. He thought she would give it a sparing glance but the head librarian/only town historian snatched it right out of his hands. He tried to snag the thing back, but she tottered off a little ways and hemmed and hawed over the page’s contents.
“I had my suspicions those killings weren’t natural. They didn’t make much about it in the paper at the time, ‘cept to say the area was dangerous to campers, especially families with kids. News didn’t even make it all the way up to Muscatine. Though of course,” she said, casting one bright eye at him, “that was the sheriff’s doin’. He’s on the City Council over in their county now. Imagine that.”
“Imagine that,” Leonard agreed dryly. “Can I have that back, please?”
She snapped the notebook shut and laid it on the table between them. “I’m gonna ask you something, Mr. Smith.”
Leonard just looked at her, because it wasn’t like it mattered to the lady if he was okay with an interrogation. For the duration of the afternoon, she had peppered him with more questions than he had probably asked himself since he started digging into his family’s curse nearly two months ago and following a string of dots on a big map.
“In all the US, why this town?” she said before gazing pointedly at the Mark on his wrist.
Leonard ruthlessly suppressed the urge to tug his jacket sleeve over it.
“And why now, when you would’ve been a bitty thing? It was sixteen years ago.”
“I wasn’t ‘bitty’,” Leonard pointed out. “I was fourteen.” He took a minute to mull over the rest of his answer. “Listen, I’ll show you something that might help you understand—but in return, I want the names of the other three children. Okay?”
She pursed her mouth just as he had earlier. “I told you there were four, and I showed you the articles and the records. Yet you seem so sure I’ve stuck a lie in there somewhere.”
“Not a lie, ma’am, just a missing piece of the puzzle.” He flipped to the most dog-eared page of the notebook. “See for yourself.”
She leaned over the table, adjusting her spectacles as she did so, to see what he was pointing at. A chart, composed of staggering columns, question marks, and Leonard’s atrocious shorthand, was faintly visible beneath dried coffee stains.
After a moment, Ida the Librarian made a clucking noise. “You think this is a pattern?”
He admitted, “I don’t know. But I’ve been to each place, asked the same questions I’ve asked you, and there’s too much about it to be coincidence. It has to be an event that keeps reoccurring, because of something or—”
“Magic,” the woman supplied.
Leonard closed his mouth with a click. He had been going to say ‘someone’. Because only people committed serial killings, didn’t they?
That is, if the drownings were serial killings. He couldn’t be 100%-positive of that. With every answer he garnered, the mystery grew stranger, and he couldn’t yet picture how it was connected to his family or the curse-maker he wanted to find. Today he was researching the last red mark on the map, Little Spirit Lake, and coming up none-the-wiser.
The librarian pointed to a name on his chart. “Whiteside County—I have relatives over there. They always said that lake was haunted.”
Not before 1990 they wouldn’t have, Leonard thought to himself. “Seven kids drowned in three weeks. See the ones before Morrison? Same thing happened at each of those too.”
“But none of these are in Iowa.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve been making my way up the Mississippi since July.”
He had never stretched his hunting ground farther north than St. Louis, so while traveling from Kentucky to Missouri, the days had slipped past with a certain familiarity; but since crossing into Illinois, then Iowa, Leonard had grown uncomfortable and antsy. He hated and anticipated every second on the way here.
She lifted her head and looked at him to scrutinize his expression. “I have to say, when you walked in I thought you might have been one of the crazy ones.”
Leonard slid the notebook away from her and tucked it under his arm. “‘Course you did,” he said as evenly as he could manage. “Isn’t that why you made me search this library by myself, so you could stay by the phone in case you had to call the police?” He glanced away. “You’re not the first to make assumptions, lady. And as sure as the sun don’t shine in hell, you won’t be the last.”
When he met her eyes again, she was already arguing, “You can’t fault me for a natural reaction.”
Leonard’s hand may have clenched into a fist, but only for a second. There was a middle-aged man over by the window with an eye on him that didn’t look friendly. “Yes, I can.”
The woman only shook her head, as if he had disappointed her. “I’m no rights activist, Mr. Smith, and I don’t believe in it either. You won’t find a lot of that in this town, so my advice to you is don’t linger in one place too long.”
“Tell me about the rest of the children, and you won’t have to see me again.”
She hesitated. “I remember there was a boy that almost drowned. After him, there weren’t any others.”
Just one? “Did he say who tried to drown him?”
“Rumor was his wits were so addled afterward, nobody could make sense of anything the poor child said. It wasn’t even a year later, the mother uprooted them both and left town. To be honest, that was a relief for a lot of folk. That woman was as stubborn as they came—she never would say who the boy’s father was. Probably didn’t know but she acted like he mighta been sired by God himself.” She gave a huff like she might have said something humorous.
Leonard wasn’t amused. He was worn down, uncertain, and afraid and that shortened his temper and sharpened his tongue. “I guess gossip didn’t tell you where they went.”
She sat down in a chair. “Upstate. That’s all I know.”
Leonard closed his eyes. Why wasn’t life ever simple? Of course, if life could be simple, he wouldn’t be chasing a lead like this with the air of a desperate man. He tried the ploy of letting some of that desperation leak into his voice. “Ma’am, it’s important that I find ‘im. Can you at least tell me his name? Or the family name?”
“This book must be mighty special for you to go to such trouble. I told you already, it’s sixteen years over and done with. If I were you—”
“You aren’t me!” he snapped. “You won’t ever be me, or know what it’s like to be me! Now give me the fuckin’ name!”
Leonard knew in the instant she reeled back, he had screwed up. He didn’t need the fingers suddenly digging into his arm or the hot breath whistling past his ear to confirm it.
“This man bothering you, Miss Ida?” growled that voice. Leonard was jerked around to face the guy who had been watching him. “Maybe we should call the police.”
“You do that,” challenged Leonard. “Have one of your lazy-ass deputies haul his butt outta the local doughnut shop and tell him to lock me up for a casual conversation.”
The man’s jaw flexed. “I could say you attacked me.”
Leonard gave him a nasty smile. “In that case, why bother with a lie?” He twisted his arm out of the idiot’s grip and pulled back his fist.
“Mr. Smith!” shrilled the librarian.
Leonard used that second of anticipation in the air to picture actually hitting the asshole in front of him then he lowered his hand. To Ida, he said, “I was just gonna oblige him.”
Ida’s shrewd gaze burned into his. “I think you should leave now.”
Leonard let another moment pass, while the boorish man at his side waited to attack and the woman judged him, before initiating a mocking bow in her direction. “Thanks for all your help, ma’am.”
His aggressor didn’t immediately step aside, but Ida called the man sharply by first name and so Leonard was able to pass without incident. He forewent slamming his way out of the library in one final display of temper because it would bring him more attention, which he didn’t need.
On the cracked sidewalk, Leonard jammed a hand into his hair. He stewed in silence for a minute, then with a curse turned for the parking lot and his car.
There was no way he could walk into a police station and ask about a sixteen year-old case. It had already been difficult enough ferreting out information town-to-town without drawing the eyes of the law. Because the moment the law saw him, he was done for and any hope for Joanna was gone along with him.
He had made it this far without an arrest. He had to make it farther.
As if it didn’t care about his woes, Leonard’s stomach rumbled. Sighing, Leonard decided he would have to do his detective work the very old-fashioned way. There was a diner two blocks down from his motel. Maybe there, while he ate his one allowanced meal a day, he could catch the name and whereabouts of the kid who was meant to drown in a lake but didn’t.
The diner was quieter than expected for a mid-afternoon. Leonard found himself sipping black coffee at a counter beside a man who was his deceased grandfather’s age. It had been his luck to strike up an easy conversation, or the poor guy was just lonely. Now Leonard was listening very attentively to a story about a pretty thing called Winona Anne Davis and decided luck and loneliness had nothing to do with it. There was a faint sensation that drew goosebumps along his arms and made him feel as if something deeper, unfathomable, was at work.
The story did nothing to soothe his fancy.
“She and Franklin—that’s her older brother—never did get along well, but after her son had his accident, things were worse than ever. Everybody knew she blamed the Sheriff for it.”
“The sheriff or Franklin?” Leonard questioned.
“Both, or one and the same. However you choose to look at it, son.” The man scooted his mug closer to the edge of the counter, and Leonard obligingly hailed the waitress to give them refills. “See, little Jamey… Was that his name?”
Leonard shrugged and mentally prayed half the things this guy told him were true and not just the product of senility.
“Well, Jamey was on a hunting trip with his uncle when it happened.”
“You mean, when he fell in the lake.”
The man blinked at him. “He fell in? That’s not what I heard.”
Leonard hurriedly said, “Never mind,” because the story-teller tended to lose his train of thought easily. “So, I guess Winona left town.”
The old man shook his head sadly. “It was best for the boy. People in this town… they don’t do well with things they don’t understand.”
“Isn’t everybody that way?” Leonard muttered at his own coffee.
“They said that something evil must of touched his soul and that was why he was cursed.”
Leonard’s hands automatically tightened around the handle of his plain white ceramic mug. “Cursed?”
“Cursed. Afflicted bad,” explained the story-teller. “Wouldn’t no mutt come within a hundred yards of him. Animals can sense the supernatural, you know. FOX did a report on it once. Scientists made these special machines that read—”
“The kid—you were talking about Winona’s kid.”
“Oh, right. Little Jeremy. Like I said, he weren’t right after that night down by the Spirit Lake. His mama had no choice but to find a special doctor for him, and even then nobody could figure out how to fix ‘im. Soon enough, the townsfolk started acting like fools. Fear of the unknown does that to people. So she packed up and headed home.”
Leonard leaned forward without meaning to. “Where’s home?”
“Pretty little town, by the river.” The man looked away and smiled at some distant memory. “Riverside. I met a girl during the war who was from there. She wore a yellow ribbon in her hair. Other girls had those short bobs, but not her.” He breathed in deep and murmured: “‘Shall we gather at the river, where bright angel feet have trod; with its crystal tide forever, flowing by the throne of God?‘ That’s by Robert Lowery, she said—the poet, not the actor.”
“Riverside,” Leonard repeated, rolling the word on his tongue, “Riverside.” He reached out and squeezed the man’s arm in gratitude. “My thanks.”
The old man startled back to the present and looked down at Leonard’s hand. Leonard looked down, too, bemused in that instant, and saw his mistake. The brand on his skin was ugly in the brightness of the daylight.
“Sorry,” he began to apologize, because a Marked touching a common man without explicit permission was often misconstrued as a threat.
But to his surprise, the man simply covered Leonard’s wrist with his own hand and gave him a friendly squeeze in return. “You’re all right, son,” he said to Leonard. “I hope in my going-on there was something of worth to you.”
Leonard nodded. “There was, sir, probably more than you know.” And with that, he paid for both their coffees and made his plans to hit the road.
Esterville wasn’t a large town but at night the darkness made it seem like the whole of the earth. That was why its population tended to stay home after sunset, unless otherwise was required of them.
On a Thursday night, the town was particularly still, but for the occasional hurried passer-by and the meow of an alley cat. Within its small but carefully preserved downtown, a streetlamp cast a long shadow across a concrete sidewalk. The man who entered a building bearing the Town Library plaque seemed to cast a shadow that was longer.
“We close in five minutes,” warned an attendant at the soft sound of an opening door, not looking up until the newcomer approached the front desk. His eyes grew round and nervous when he saw the clothes, the posture, and the granite face. “How can I help you… sir?”
A photograph was presented to the attendant. “Have you seen this man?”
The attendant shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”
“Is there anyone else here who might have encountered him?”
“Mm, just me. Ida, maybe. She works in Reference. Should—should I call her for you? I mean, it’s late. She only works mornings because, you know, it gets dark and she’s old and doesn’t like—”
“That was quite informative, thank you” came the interruption, and the attendant shut up promptly. “It will not be necessary to contact her at this time. I will return in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.” But as the inquirer turned away, the young attendant blurted out, “Is, ah, he dangerous? The guy in the photo?”
It had to have been his imagination, the attendant would think later, that all the lights in the building flickered and dimmed as though their energy had been sucked right out of them. In any case, the electric bulbs jumped back to their rightful state a second later; he would just as quickly dismiss his unease.
“Is… he dangerous?” the question was repeated slowly, almost as if to ponder the matter was an exercise to be savored. The expressionless man’s head tilted slightly. His answer was a simple, cold “Very.”
The response left the attendant feeling extremely grateful he was not the unhappy face in the photograph because that poor soul, he decided, was about to meet a bad fate.
Outside the library, the tall, suited man drew a weathered journal from his coat and momentarily contemplated it. Once it was re-pocketed, he began to walk with apparent purpose, challenging the other sidewalk shadows with a formidable one of his own.
Related Posts:
- The White Horse (18/18) – from May 12, 2014
- The White Horse (17/18) – from May 10, 2014
- The White Horse (16/18) – from May 10, 2014
- The White Horse (15/16) – from April 4, 2014
- The White Horse (14/16) – from March 7, 2014
