Chapter 23
Childe Howard stared into his cereal bowl and yawned. Under the table, Darwin lay across Kiddo’s feet, stealing their warmth without an ounce of remorse. Loraine padded by on the way to the coffee maker and kissed her son’s head between corkscrews of hair. She poured herself a cup of high-octane sludge and looked out the kitchen window into the woods. A blue jay perched on a branch and scolded the world because the world was drab and the jay was pretteh, soo pretteh.
“Mom?”
Loraine turned, “Yes, my son, my boy, my light?”
“What’s evil?”
“Whoa,” Loraine held up her hand and took a pull from her coffee mug. “Okay, try that again.”
Kiddo smiled a little. “Seriously, what’s evil?”
“That’s a pretty heavy thought for a twelve-year-old.”
“How come you’re not answering?”
He’d lopped off the ‘g’ in ‘answering’. Her only boy was turning into a Kentuckian. Loraine pulled out a chair and plopped her butt down. “I don’t know, Kiddo. Maybe because it’s not such an easy question to answer.”
“The crazy religion people on TV and on-line talk about evil all the time. They all pretty much say that the other people—the ones not with their church or whatever—are evil.”
“Uh-huh,” Loraine said. “And what do you think of that?”
“They’re all bozos.”
“Indeed, bozos.”
“Some of ‘em even talk about it like the Devil’s this monster that’s waiting to get us if we do the wrong thing.”
“And what do you think of think of that?”
“I used to not think there was one.”
“Used to?”
“Yeah, I figured that it was like one of those fairy tales that have messages hidden in them. You know, to teach kids stuff?”
“Morals.”
“Right, that like if you told someone that the Devil was going to come get them if they didn’t go to church or whatever that you could get them to go more often.”
“Well, some of those fanatics—bozos—believe that.” Loraine sipped her coffee. “But there are a lot of people out there who think that organized religion was all started as a way to control people. Back in the olden days priests were as powerful as kings, sometimes even more powerful. They would tell the people all kinds of garbage to keep them under control and keep the money coming in. They even had this thing where a person could buy a kind of get out of hell free card.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, yeah. It was called a Plenary Indulgence. If you paid enough money, one of the big priests would write up a slip of paper forgiving you for just about any sin.”
Childe stared back into his cereal for a moment. “So, does that mean there are more rich people in heaven than poor people?”
“Your logic’s dead on, boy o’ my heart, but I’m willing to bet that if there is a heaven it’s the exact opposite.” She looked at her son. He looked so much like his damn father when he was troubled. “What’s going on, Honey? What’s with all this evil stuff?”
Childe thought of that day in the woods. Magic was real. Monsters were real. Something bad was coming. He was glad Darwin was on his feet. “Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“If you’re killed by an evil thing, does that mean you go to hell? Like if a vampire kills you by sucking all your blood you come back as one?”
“Who have you been talking to? Is it that Charlotte Najarian?” Loraine scowled, she knew she should have home schooled him; it was just that she wanted him to make friends. That and she could barely handle her times tables let alone the quadratic equation.
“I haven’t been talking to anyone,” Childe said. Which was technically true because the spider couldn’t talk out loud.
“Is it because of what happened in the woods when we found the Amazing Ninja Dog?” She broke eye contact to sip her coffee. “Because you know what Constable Will said about that: It was just a big spider web, probably an orb weaver just like what we looked up on-line.” They had found examples of enormous webs on the Internet and if she stretched her mind a little bit, she could believe that what they saw that day was just a particularly impressive example. It felt a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
“I dunno’, I guess it’s that.” He gave her a smile he hoped would disarm her. “I was just wonderin’ was all.” He took a bite of cereal and opened his mouth. “See food.”
Loraine sat back. “You should give it a few more chews, I think. Makes it a little mushier. Close your mouth, disgusting child.”
“Gahhhh.”
She gave him a look and Kiddo’s mouth crunched shut. He chewed behind a big old grin. “So,” Loraine said, “you’ve got what, three more days of summer vacation? What’s on the docket for today?”
“I think me and Howard—“
Loraine held up a finger. “Howard and I.”
“I think Howard and I might bum around a little, maybe play some X-box or something.”
Loraine genuflected. “Use the farce.”
“Always.”
* * *
This was going to be a big day for T.R. He peeled himself out of bed and walked to the bathroom. The Jeans had banged the screen door on their way to work less than an hour ago. Usually, that meant he had another few hours in bed during summer break, but sleep was a buzzing, painful joke now. He gripped the edges of the sink and stared at the wraith in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken. His skin was sallow, marked by the occasional eruption of dark red acne. There was a ripe one on his chin, but he didn’t care. Let them cover him. He was a monster. Might as well look like one.
He had about nine hours to figure out how to kill his parents. T.R. was tall like his father, but hadn’t yet filled out. His mother came up to his nose and ran about one-forty. She’d be easier to handle, but not by much. The only way to take them would be by surprise or with a gun. He had a decent .22 rifle in the closet from back in the days when his daddy used to take him hunting. There was that time the two of them had perched in a tree stand for the better half of a cold October day—Tommy Ray had been maybe ten years old. Tommy’s gloves were too thin and his fingers started to hurt. Daddy had held them in his big rough hands and breathed hot air on them until it was better. They didn’t see a single deer that whole day, but had come home rosy cheeked, hungry and happy. T.R. blinked at the face in the mirror. Was he crying?
He wiped an arm across his face and walked down the hall. Pictures of young Tommy and his proud, serious parents hung along the wall. Every year they made him drive an hour each way to the Sears to get those damn things taken. T.R. peered at himself at age eight—big head, stupid bowl cut, bad striped shirt. His mother’s hand was draped casually over his little shoulder. She had pink nail polish. He felt another hot tear push out and splash his bare foot.
T.R. grimaced and let his head fall back. How was he going to do this? He looked back at the picture and gasped. It had changed. It showed a young boy cowering behind a half-opened bedroom door. His mother sat up in bed frozen in mid-yell, her face all sharp angles, one breast flopping out from behind the sheet she used to cover herself. His father was charging across the room at him; below his hairy belly his erect penis jutted like a javelin. T.R.’s head started to buzz. The next picture down the line was of him even younger, standing in the downstairs parlor with a big wet patch on the crotch of his jeans. He must have been five or six here. He remembered it now: This was the day that he pissed his new Toughskins. His mother had been visiting with a friend and made him stand in the parlor while they finished their coffee because he was a bad boy. Every now and then one of them had looked over at the bad boy and made a tsk of disgust. Tears had rolled down his face like rain but he never made a sound.
The buzzing grew louder, a platoon of wasps crawled the gray matter tubes behind his skull. T.R. slid down the wall and hugged his boney knees to his chest. He rocked back and forth and waited. Aft
er what felt like a year the buzzing quieted and he stood up. His mind was clean and cold again. He dared a look at the portraits on the wall. Normalcy had returned to the pictures but his hesitation had not. The gun then.
“It doesn’t have to be quick, though,” he said to himself.
* * *
Amy James walked with a jaunty little skip down George’s street. Her backpack bounced along behind her. It was easier to be jaunty without the combat boots. She’d eschewed them today in favor of a pair of bright green Chucks just like Will’s black ones. (Maybe if they ran into each other later they could screw wearing just the Chucks. She laughed at loud and a crow cawed at her from the crown of a spreading oak.) It was a gorgeous summer morning, about seventy-five degrees and clear. The weather in these mountains was so gentle compared to the Rockies, but the Appalachians were much older, settled. In geological terms the Rockies were still in their adolescence—all full of piss and vinegar. The Appalachians were in their dotage.
She stopped in the middle the street and put her hands on her hips. She scanned the surrounds in a 360° swoop. These gorgeous old Victorians might survive her plans, but if that remarkable diamond pipe had thrown arms up into other sectors of the mountain and the surrounding hollows, Shard was gonna get scraped clean off the map, gorgeous Victorians and all. If not, maybe she’d buy George’s place or that blue one with the screened porch and the nice gardens. Who lived there, she wondered. And did that awesome antique pick-up truck parked out back come with it?
She was getting ahead of herself. None of her fantasies would come true unless she got a partner to run some serious legal interference. Thus, this little trip. She strode up George’s front walk and rang the bell. Oh, cool! She hadn’t noticed the stained glass door with the violent bible scene the last time she was here. She was squinting in at the leaf covering Eve’s crotch when the door opened.
Amy straightened and smiled. “Just the woman I was hoping to see.”
“Not like this, I imagine.” Erica ran a hand through tangled hair. She’d only just rolled out of bed still wearing her clothes from yesterday. “George isn’t here. Well, he is, but he’s dead asleep. I think he was up all night.”
“Yeah? Good party?”
“No, nothing like that. He’s just not feeling too well.”
Amy caught something there, but let it go. She whipped off her backpack and unzipped it. She plunged both hands into the swirling elbows and emerged with a bag of Starbucks Sumatra coffee and a big Ziploc bag full of blueberry muffins. “Just baked them myself this morning. The blueberries are from the woods near my rig, if you can believe it, and I’ve been saving the coffee.”
“Ohmygodcomein.”
Ten minutes later they sat at the kitchen table eating warmed-up muffins and blowing steam off strong coffee. (Erica had slipped upstairs and into a crimson silk bathrobe. The last night’s clothes thing just wasn’t working for her.)
“These muffins are awesome,” Erica said. “You made these?”
“Uh-huh…What’s funny?”
“Oh, you just don’t seem the domestic type.”
“Now don’t judge on appearances alone. The James women are all bad-asses in the kitchen. It’s a genetic thing. Like cancer.”
Erica swallowed with visible pleasure. “I’m going to have run twenty miles to make up for the pounds I’ve put on since I got here, but damn these are good.”
“What are you talking about, nutcase? You’re a supermodel stick.”
“And you are one hot little suicide chica. Show those tattoos to our friendly neighborhood Constable yet?”
Amy leered. “Every last one of them.” She sipped her coffee and peered over the rim. “You and the innkeeper seemed to have a little som’in, som’in going back and forth during dinner the other night. What’s up there?”
Erica sat back and pitched her voice lower. “That obvious?”
“What? You got crush on him. What’s the big deal?”
“I’m here on business and that’s going to be over in a week or so.”
“So? I’m probably leaving, too, but I’m still having fun where I can find it.”
“Probably leaving?”
Amy waved her off. “More girl talk now. Business talk later.”
“I’m afraid there’s not much to tell.” Erica glanced over her shoulder toward the back stairs. The door was closed. “George has been a perfect gentleman. Frankly, it’s getting kind of annoying.”
Amy darkened a little, hesitated. “You, uh, you’re not worried about the drinking thing?”
“Noticed that, did you?”
“He wasn’t all over the place or anything. In fact, he holds it really well, but he must have polished off a couple bottles of wine all by himself over dinner, and when I met him he was in the holding at cell at Will’s jail.”
Erica sighed. “I am worried about it. I’m sure that’s why he hasn’t tried to push our friendship into anything more, but I think he’s stopping.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, he’s had less and less every time I’ve been around him. In the last couple of days, I only caught him taking these little medicinal sips from a flask every couple of hours or so.” She sat up a little straighter. “I’m not stupid, Amy. My father had a problem and I know very well that George could be putting away gallons behind my back and covering it up. Career drunks are great at that kind of thing, but I’m just not getting that feeling from him.”
“You think he’s doing it for you?”
“I hope not.”
“Because you’re leaving.”
“It’s that, yeah, but you know you also just can’t do something like that and tag it to another person. That has to be for yourself or it messes up all kinds of stuff. I mean, as soon as I’m out of here, what’s he going to do if all this is for me? He’ll have lost his reason for not drinking and start right back up again, and probably twice as hard.”
“What if you had reason to stay in Shard? A professional reason.”
“I can’t imagine what that would be. Most of the properties around here are abandoned and have technically become public domain because of that and the safety issues. Blackstone can just buy those up from the county for a buck a piece. And most of the people who still live around here are practically begging to get out.”
“Really? The people I’ve run into have seemed really happy here. I can’t imagine Will wanting to leave.”
“He’s different, true, but I’ve been doing a lot of knocking on doors and most of these hicks—you’ll pardon the expression—would take a small settlement to get moving on. They won’t tell you that on the surface, Southern pride maybe, but I can feel it. I just have to get the right angle.” She mused a little, going into full Mendez business mode. It was like Erica had a chess computer hardwired in her head that had just whined into life. “I think tax relief might do it. A lot of these houses pull more tax value than the people here can afford to pay. Combine that with relocation to an area with a decent chance of employment and they’ll go. Anyway, whatever angle I use, my part in this should be over in another week or so, so I really don’t have a reason to stay.”
“What if I gave you one?”
“What do you mean?”
Amy sat back. She affected chilly ease, but if her hands hadn’t been wrapped around her coffee mug they would have been shaking. “We both work for the same master, right?”
“Well, Blackstone’s one of my firm’s largest clients, but there are several—”
“Not really what I’m talking about. We both work for men who pay us money and dictate our limits. They say jump, we jump, etc.”
“Okay, sure.”
“And we do this because they control the purse strings, right? If you could have an almost unlimited amount of money, you wouldn’t work for these people, right?”
Erica smiled and squinted at this funny-smart punker girl. “Where are you taking me with this?”
“Gimme’ a second, gimme’
a second.” Amy smiled and sipped her coffee. The caffeine was melding with her natural jitters now, giving her a nice little high. “Just answer me una pregunta: How much money would it take for you to quit?”
“I know the figure exactly, as a matter of fact.”
“This,” Amy said, “does not shock me. So how much?”
Erica laughed; it lit her like wildfire on a hillside. “Fifty million.”
Amy laughed with her, but her heart was racing, racing. “Oh, is that all? Why that number?”
“Because I could sock away half of it and live very, very well on the interest alone and use the rest toward a foundation, toys, travel, what have you. Fifty mill is a nice sustainable number without drawing too much attention to oneself.”
Amy just stared at her.
“What?” Erica asked. “You’re freaking me out a little.”
Amy placed both palms flat on the kitchen table. She had this crazy little gleam in her eye. It wasn’t a warm glint, but like the light off the edge of something metallic. She measured each word, “What if I told you I had maybe five percent of your magic number in my backpack right now?”
“Amy, I don’t…”
Before Erica could finish Amy pulled the softball-sized diamond out of her bag and plunked it down on the center of the table. The room rang with silence.
Erica looked at the opalescent rock. It was almost perfectly spherical and milky white. “Go ahead,” Amy said. “Pick it up.” Erica reached forward and wrapped her fingers around it. It was cold and heavy. She held it close to her face. “I don’t get it,” she said. “How’s this worth a million dollars?”
“It’s not yet. You have to cut it first.”
Erica’s eyebrows furrowed. “You mean it’s—.”
“A fucking diamond, yeah.”
Very slowly, Erica placed the huge stone in the middle of the table. “Um.”
“Yeah, um.” Amy was sitting forward now, gripping the edge of the table.
“Where?”
“The mine. I went into one of the shafts a little way and found this cavern that’s completely independent of the shaft system itself. It’s about twenty meters below it. There’s a rhyolite pipe that’s capped off with these.”
“Wait, there’s more?”
“Baby, there are hundreds this big just on the surface of that deposit.”