“It’s too bad. You both had the chance to be close again.”
To my own surprise, I had to fight back tears. “Jodie?” I said. Distant.
“What is it?”
“I need to tell you something.” Like a fading star, my voice wavered. “It’s about Kyle. About what really happened.”
She pulled closer to me. I could feel her warmth. “Good,” she said. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Perhaps the only event of any significance during our last remaining days in Westlake, Maryland, occurred two nights before Jodie and I were scheduled to drive out to California where we had a nice little apartment waiting for us just outside San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. I’d spent the last month packing our belongings and stowing much of them at a personal storage facility in town. Since the day Elijah’s body had been extricated from the wall, Jodie had refused to return to the house, not even for a minute. I couldn’t blame her. So we sustained at Adam and Beth’s house for the remainder of that month while I scrambled to secure a new life for Jodie and me somewhere far, far away from Westlake, the house on the lake, and the tragic memory of the Dentmans.
Utilizing my remaining college contacts, I got in touch with an old acquaintance. He was a screenwriter in Los Angeles and, for the better part of our phone conversation, confessed to me that he was jealous to the point of clinical depression of his pseudonym’s success. Nevertheless, the conversation proved profitable: he knew of an apartment that had recently gone up for rent, and the owner of the complex owed a friend of a friend of a friend. The prospect of leaving the cold winters behind for the West Coast pleased Jodie, which meant it pleased me, too.
Two days before our scheduled cross-country drive, I sat at the bar at Tequila Mockingbird for the final time while I waited for Adam to meet me after his shift. I had a map spread out before me, and I was tracing possible routes with different color markers. The plan wasn’t to rush things. It was to use that time to strengthen what had weakened between Jodie and me over the past couple of months.
“Here,” Tooey said, setting a fresh pint in front of me. “On the house.”
“This actually looks good,” I commented, picking up the glass and examining it in the light. “I think you may have mastered the recipe.” I took a sip. “Wow. It’s great.”
“Thanks. It’s Sam Adams.” Leaning over the bar, he peered down at the map. “California, huh?”
“I can hardly believe it myself. I’ve never even seen the Pacific Ocean.”
“Fell in love with a woman from California once.”
“Yeah?”
“Name was Charlie. Funny name for a chick—Charlie.”
“What happened?”
“She lost her mind.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. She was convinced time was changing.”
“Times are changing,” I informed him. “Didn’t Bob Dylan tell you?”
“Not times, Travis. Time.”
“I don’t follow.”
“She became convinced that each day was getting shorter by thirty seconds. That in two days, it would be a minute earlier than it was two days before at the exact same time. If you can wrap your head around that.”
I whistled.
“She seemed very concerned about it,” Tooey said. Then he leaned closer to me, like a conspirator. He was staring at something over my shoulder. “Have you noticed our friend there at the back of the room?”
I started to turn my head.
“Don’t make it obvious,” he warned, then slipped farther down the bar.
Taking a long swallow of my beer, I casually rotated around on the barstool.
David Dentman sat alone at one corner of the barroom, perched buzzard-like over a pitcher of beer. He wore a red and black flannel shirt, the sleeves cuffed to the elbows. The skin of his face seemed to be dripping off his skull and into his beer, and there was a bristling sheen of beard at his jaw. Sensing my eyes on him, he glanced up and stared me down.
Discomfited, I turned away.
My mind returned to that evening in the cemetery—the way he’d looked standing over his nephew’s grave. Now, despite all that had been revealed, I found that my impression of the man remained unchanged. Something about him was innately wrong.
“Glasgow.” Dentman’s baritone voice punctured me like an icy quill. “Travis Glasgow. Glasgow the writer.”
I swiveled around on the stool. “David,” I said, nodding. We could have been old acquaintances. And in a way, I guess we were.
“Come here,” he said. “Sit down. Have a beer with me.”
“I’m waiting for someone, thanks.”
“Be a sport, Hemingway.” His gaze was shackled to mine. I couldn’t turn away. Haunted, he was a shape without substance: a hollowed husk.
Also, he was grinning at me.
It took a fair amount of willpower to get off my stool and cross over to his table. It was the perilous trek around the ridge of a great mountain. A few lumberjacks shooting pool paused to watch me while on the jukebox someone was attesting to the fact that his gal was red hot.
As if by design, a single chair stood empty across from him at the opposite end of the table. Without a word, I pulled the chair out and dumped myself into it.
“That’s the spirit,” he said humorlessly.
“I’m buying this round.”
Dentman eyeballed me like I was a Thanksgiving turkey. “Your face healed up okay.”
“No worse than it was before.” When I realized I was rubbing my cheek, I quickly dropped my hand. “Anyway, I’ll consider it a going away present.”
“Shots,” Dentman said. “Bourbon.”
I motioned Tooey over to the table. He’d been watching me since I sat down. “Bring us a bottle of your nastiest, angriest bourbon.”
In under a minute, Tooey returned with two shot glasses and a dark carafe shrouded in dust. He unscrewed the cap, then set the bottle and the glasses on the table. “I brought glasses. Unless you two want to drink this shit out of an ashtray?”
“Thanks,” I said. “We’re good.”
When he walked away, he did so with the uneasy gait of someone who feared he might get shot in the back.
Dentman squeezed the bottle. I expected it to shatter. He filled both shot glasses, spilling much, then picked up his glass, scrutinized it. “Here’s to world peace.”
Together we downed the shots. It tasted like piss spiked with lighter fluid. I felt my insides tremble.
“I’m sorry for what happened,” I said once the sinister aftertaste had faded.
“Ain’t for you to be sorry about.”
“You didn’t let me finish,” I said. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family. But I still don’t trust you.”
“That’s good,” Dentman said, “because there’s still a part of me that wants to smack your face around to the back of your head.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “We should have toasted to friendship.”
To my astonishment, Dentman laughed. It was a low, drilling, lawn mower sound, much like the engine of his pickup, but it was a laugh just the same. After the laughter died, he said, “I suppose I owe you a bit of gratitude.”
“How’s that?”
He made a clicking sound at the back of his throat. “My sister, she needs me. She needs me to look after her. She isn’t well.”
I wondered if he had any idea I’d been watching his testimony through the two-way mirror.
“Our mother died when we were very young,” Dentman said. “Car accident. I guess I don’t remember her much.” Very sober, he looked straight at me—through me, I would have bet. “My father was a bad man.” Slowly, he shook his massive head, as if trying to shake the memories loose. “What was your father like?”