Читать книгу Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 7-9: Buried Alive, Her Last Scream, The Killing Game - J. Kerley A. - Страница 40

“Here’s my plan,” Cherry said as we climbed into her ride. “The FBI’s back in the picture tomorrow and I’ll be running errands for Dark Lady Krenkler. I’m going to drop you by your cabin so you can check on your doggie. Then we’re going to my place for supper.”

“I don’t know if I should—”

“The hell with the world, Carson. I want to stay up in the sky a while. Have supper with me.”

She’d never used my first name. I can’t explain it, but at that moment I would have jumped headlong from the nearest cliff had she asked.

“The sky it is,” I said.

Mix-up wasn’t at the cabin, but I hadn’t expected it. Cherry gave me directions to her place and boogied. I showered away the day and changed into a fresh white cotton shirt, barely used cords, brand spanking new socks. I put out fresh food for Mix-up and changed the water. When I looked into the woods and felt my gut begin to hollow out, I took a few deep breaths and thought of Cherry beside me in the sky where she had felt free, at least for a few minutes.

When I drove off for her home, directions in my lap, I passed my brother’s home. He was on the porch and reading a newspaper. He didn’t look up.

I twice passed the drive to Cherry’s house and would have taken a three-fer if I hadn’t finally swerved into the gravel drive I’d initially thought an ATV trail. Unruly vegetation bordered the lane, as though Cherry enjoyed making visitors brush shoulders with nature. I followed the track several hundred feet, stopping in a graveled parking strip at the rear of a two-story log cabin with a steep metal roof of green. I pulled next to Cherry’s cruiser, beside it her muddy and jacked-high Jeep.

“Come on ’round front,” I heard Cherry’s voice yell.

My heels found limestone slabs forming a walkway to the front of the cabin, passing a massive stone chimney set against square-cut logs chinked with gray caulk. Looking ahead, I faced a breathtaking mountain panorama of verdant forest studded with massive rock cliffs and outcroppings. The impression was of rock-hulled ships pressing their bows from beneath the green.

I turned the corner to find Cherry above on the cabin’s broad porch, drifting lazily in a swing, one hand on the chain. Music fell from the open windows, a woman singer with a plaintive voice singing a rock song rooted in madrigal. Cherry wore a dress, white and simple, the neckline square and open, the hem at her knees. The effect was limited by a ball cap touting Ruger firearms, but it still took a second to start breathing again.

“How about a cool brew for a warm day?” she asked.

“Sweet idea.”

She padded inside, her feet bare, her sandals beneath the swing. I returned to inspecting the view. The cliff’s edge was directly before Cherry’s porch, twenty feet of scruffy grass ending in a dozen feet of dark sandstone. Beyond lay only air.

I crept as near the edge as my skittish heart allowed, looking far down into dense treetops parted by a slender thread of creek. Adjoining cliffs rose from the valley, sheer cuts of sandstone between hillsides angled just enough to hold vegetation. I found myself holding my breath as if underwater, not knowing why.

“Watch that first step, Ryder,” Cherry’s voice called from behind me. “The second one doesn’t show up for four hundred feet.”

I returned to the porch, where Cherry was setting down a tray with sandwiches and bottles of beer. “I was sure I had some duckling à l’orange left over from yesterday,” she winked. “But all I found was sandwich stuff.”

“You really ought to put a barrier at the edge of the cliff,” I suggested, picking up a half-pound of roast beef and cheddar on rye. “A fence or a rock wall or something.”

“I know where the edge is,” she said. “And a fence would block my view.”

“It’s a helluva view. I’ll give you that. And a real fersure log cabin.” I tapped my knuckles on the door frame, as solid as concrete.

“Built thirty-three years ago by Horace Cherry, my uncle on my father’s side. My father passed away when I was seven. Horace never had kids, and always took a shine to me. When he died, three years back, he left the place to me, knowing I loved being here as much as he did.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“I have a lot of relatives, but I was an only child.” She smiled wistfully. “I’m the last Cherry on the tree.”

“Everyone around here seems someone’s kin in some way.”

“When there’s only a few dozen families who inhabit a three-county area for the first hundred years after a place gets settled, everyone’s kin to everyone’s kin, in some way or another. That’s changing, but not as fast as everywhere else. A writer once called Appalachia the most foreign of American cultures.”

“Foreign?” I said. “Isn’t it Scots-Irish, mainly?”

“And English, and plenty of Germans. Yeoman farmers, back in the old countries, people who knew farming and animal husbandry and pulling food from land that blunted plows and busted the spirits of lesser folk. It’s not foreign because the people are so different from the rest of the country, but because they’re similar to the way they always were. They’re only foreign in time.”

I took a bite of my sandwich. “Are you foreign in time?”

“I grew up with people who have never been out of the mountains, never will. Not even as far as Lexington. There are more of them than you’d think. I’ve been to college, spent a few months traveling abroad. Even been to New-freakin’-York and Los Angeles. I like big cities. But I love it here, too. So I guess I’m sort of suspended between two worlds. Come on inside, Carson. Let me give you the tour.”

I followed her into her home, basically the floor plan of my cabin back at Road’s End, just fifty per cent larger. There was a living area with vaulted ceiling, a half-loft above, a door at the end leading into an upper bedroom.

The wall open to the high ceiling on the fireplace end of the living area had been plastered or dry-walled and painted a creamy white. Ditto the wall beside the stairs to the loft. The seamless white formed the background for dozens of items from photographs through old advertising posters to antique tools. A tan and red-banded hat of straw centered the collection. Arranging a sizeable number of items on a surface is difficult – it’s composition – but Cherry had an eye for balance.

I studied the tools, odd assemblages of wood and leather and metal. A couple of them looked cruel, almost threatening. “I’ve never seen tools like these before,” I said. “What are they?”

She padded over and stood at my side, beer bottle in hand. “I have no idea. They were in Uncle Horace’s shed. I suppose they have something to do with horses. The hat’s his, too; he wore it everywhere. Here’s my favorite picture—”

She pointed to a photo of a pretty young girl, eight or nine, standing beside a barrel-chested man with waxed dark hair. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, dark bolo tie, and the same tan hat hanging on the wall. He was grinning like he’d just won the lottery.

“Uncle Horace and you?” I asked.

“Yep. That’s Uncle Horace in most of the shots.”

I studied another photo, Horace Cherry bedecked in an ice-cream suit with cocked and jaunty hat riding his crown. His smile seemed radiant and boundless, the young Donna Cherry at his side looking heartbreakingly innocent.

“He always wore the suit, right?” I asked, knowing it was a uniform.

“With the hat atop his crown everywhere he went. He was a dandy. It was funny.”

Something in the photo started to make me uneasy. Something in the eyes perhaps. Or maybe it was the age of the photo, a darkening of the shadows.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea.” Cherry crouched to reach into a low cabinet, pulling out a squat brown bottle. I tried not to notice the way her dress hugged her body. She shook back her hair and studied the bottle’s yellowed label as she stood. I saw her nipples buzzing against the fabric of her dress like anxious bees. I wanted them to carry honey to my tongue.

“It’s some kind of special cognac,” she said. “A gift from Uncle Horace years ago. He said to have a sip on special occasions. Want a tipple to celebrate your first skylift ride? All in all, you liked the trip, right?”

“It was wonderful,” I lied, feeling a smile rise to my lips as I moved a half-step closer to Donna Cherry. My knees loose with the promise of honey, I started to reach for her hand.

And stopped. Froze with my hand suspended in midair. I couldn’t tell if the hand was part of the me I knew as me or the priapic rogue my brother kept telling me was me. Was it me interested in Cherry or was it he, the broken me? From nowhere my brother’s mocking voice rose unbidden in my head.

“Part of your childhood damage manifests in a shy roguish charm you use to warm yourself with temporary lovers, Carson …”

I realized he’d said those things knowing I’d hear them at moments like this. I’d forgotten how consuming was his need to affect others from a distance. To keep a tight chain.

“Wait here a second,” I told Cherry.

“Uh, Carson, did I say something?”

“You’re fine. I’ll be right back.”

I walked outside, close to the edge of the precipice, where I crouched and found a round chunk of sandstone. I mentally mapped my position, turned to the general direction of the hollow, trying to aim my eyes directly at my brother’s cabin, visualizing him sitting on the porch. I side-armed the stone high and away in his direction and closed my eyes. I pictured the rock traveling five or so miles, falling from the sky like a meteorite and smacking my brother dead-center in his forehead, knocking him backwards in his chair, newspaper fluttering down on his startled face.

“Keep your hands outta my head, Brother,” I said, backing my symbolic missile with the most potent digital icon in American culture.

When I stepped back inside I felt fifty pounds lighter, like a leaden yoke had melted from my shoulders. “Pour the cognac,” I said, stepping to Cherry and no longer wondering who was talking.

She lifted a perplexed eyebrow. “Are you all right?”

“I had a simple ritual to perform. Like an exorcism.”

“Uh, do you always—”

I pressed my finger to her lips, stilling them. The sensation of warmth was exquisite. “My own small skylift ritual. I had something bothering me, but it fell away.” I withdrew my finger, reluctantly.

“When you put it in those terms, I think I understand.” She lifted her glass. “Shall we drink to solving the case?”

“No,” I corrected. “Let’s drink to us.”

We clicked glasses. The cognac was dizzying in my head, distilled manna aged in oak and leather. We next raised our glasses to the tan hat of our cognac-giving benefactor, Horace T. Cherry, staring dark-eyed from the photo centering the wall of pictures and weird objects. We set the glasses on the table and sat on the couch, almost touching. I’m sure I heard her bees buzzing.

My cellphone rasped from my pocket. I rolled my eyes and answered.

“This is Heywood Williams,” an elderly male voice said, loud, like a guy with hearing problems. “I’m manager of the Pumpkin Patch Campground. We got a dog running loose around here matches the description on a poster one of the Woslee cops dropped off.”

“The dog’s a big guy?” I asked. “Kinda odd-looking?”

“I guess. Odd looks different to different people. Big ol’ boy. Friendly.”

I took the address, clear on the other side of the Gorge. I’d already had several calls, able to figure out it wasn’t Mix-up by questioning the caller. But this call had promise.

“I heard,” Cherry said as I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “Go, Carson. I hope it’s Mix-up. But even if it isn’t, I’m still hopeful, right?”

She stood on her toes and gave me a millisecond’s kiss on my lips, more dizzying by far than the cognac.