“What’s your name, boy?” Campbell said.
“Lucas.” The boy did not look up.
“How long you played?”
“I don’t recall, sir. Long as I’ve known.”
“How old are you?”
“Fourteen, sir.”
“What was that song you were playing?”
The boy, Lucas, chanced a look up at Campbell and quickly dropped his head again.
“Well, it don’t have a name. Just something I made up myself.”
Campbell Bradford leaned back and tilted his head in surprise. When he did it, the headlights caught him full in the face, and his dark eyes seemed to swirl against the brightness like water pulled toward a drain.
“You wrote that song?”
“Didn’t write nothing,” the old man said. “He can’t read no music, just plays it.”
“I wasn’t speaking to you,” Campbell said, and Lucas tensed. “What kind of song is that? I ain’t never heard the like of it, boy.”
“It’s what they call an elegy,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s a song for the dead.”
It was quiet for a moment, the three of them standing there in the headlights, silhouettes painted across the weathered boards of the whiskey-still shed, a mild wind waving the treetops that surrounded them.
“Play it for me now,” Campbell said.
“He don’t play for nobody,” the old man said, and Campbell turned on him fast.
“Am I speaking to you?”
The old man took a few quick steps backward, lifting his hands. “I ain’t meaning to interrupt you, Campbell, I’m just warning you. He won’t play in front of nobody. Won’t play at all ’cept by himself.”
“He’ll play for me,” Campbell said, and his voice was darker than the night woods.
The old man said, “Go on and play, Luke,” in a jittery voice.
The boy didn’t say anything. He fidgeted some with the violin but did not lift it.
“You listen to your uncle,” Campbell said. “When I tell you to play, you best get to fiddling. Understand?”
Still the boy didn’t move. There was a pause, five seconds at most, and then Campbell stepped forward and struck him in the face.
The old man shouted and moved forward to intercede, but Campbell whirled and struck again and then the old man was on his back in the trampled weeds. Campbell leaned into the boy, who now had a trickle of blood dripping from his lip, and said, “Let’s try this again.”
Down in the grass, the old man said, “Luke, just shut your eyes. It’ll be like playing in the dark, nothing to it. Shut your eyes and play, boy!”
Lucas shut his eyes. He brought the violin to his shoulder and then the bow, which shook violently in his hand, and began to saw across the strings. At first it was a terrible wreck of a song, no note clear for the shaking, but then his hand steadied and the melody stepped forward and rang out into the night.
He played for a long time, and nobody said a word. The old man got to his hands and knees in the dirt and then crawled hesitantly to his feet, watching Campbell, who snapped his head in the direction of the shed. The old man went inside and came back out with more jugs, eight in total, and then he carried them down to the car and loaded them inside. All the while the boy played, eyes closed, facing away from the light.
When the old man had made his final trip, Campbell said, “Enough,” and the boy stopped playing and lowered the instrument.
“How’d you like to make a dollar or two doing that?” Campbell said.
“Aw, Campbell,” the old man said, “that really don’t seem like a good idea.”
Campbell turned and looked at the old man and whatever argument might have come died a quick and trembling death.
“I got a liking for that song,” Campbell said, “and I’m going to bring him down in the valley to play it.”
He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a handful of money and passed it over to the old man.
“There. Five extra dollars in it for you. Satisfied?”
The old man rubbed the money with a greasy thumb and nodded and put it in his pocket.
“You play that song,” Campbell said to the boy, “and you play it right, and there’ll be some dollars for you, too. Go on and get in the car.”
“When you bringing him back?” the old man asked.
“When I get tired of the song,” Campbell said. “Why’s he still standing there?”
“Listen to Mr. Bradford,” the boy’s uncle said to him. “Go get in the car.”
The boy left them and went to the car without ever speaking a word. When he walked into the headlights, he took on a strange, shimmering glow, and there were colors in the light now, purple and then green and then red and…
The ceiling of the dome was back in front of Eric’s eyes, and he was on the balcony. There was no more car or house in the woods or boy with a violin. No more angry blows from a man he’d just heard called Campbell. The past was gone from him now. He sat up slowly and looked around him. Twisted his head right and then left and saw the whole room was empty again, and quiet, and above him the dome changed colors, a beautiful silent sentry to it all.
31
THE WIND PICKED UP while Josiah crouched in the ditch over a man he knew was dead, watching the flow of blood from the wound slow, a thick pool of it all around now, spreading so much that Josiah had to move back to keep it from hitting his shoes.
It was dark and silent and no cars would come along the road at this hour, but all the same, decisions needed to be made, and fast, because this man was dead.
The stone was going to be a problem. It would have blood on it and maybe hair and flesh and for damn sure would have Josiah’s fingerprints. He felt around in the ditch until he relocated the chunk of cinder block and then he held it and hesitated for a moment, considered tossing it into the field but decided against that. They’d bring dogs out here and find it no problem and then they’d have his fingerprints, and Josiah had been arrested enough times that matching those prints wasn’t going to be a problem.
What to do, then? What to do?
Now that he thought about it, this whole ditch was filled with evidence-there were pieces of Josiah’s shirt down there beside the dead man-and there wasn’t any way in hell he’d get all of it cleaned up. He could load the man into the van and drive him off somewhere, but that didn’t get rid of the blood in the ditch, and odds were somebody would’ve known his location anyhow.
Odds were, somebody would’ve known he was watching Josiah.
No good way to clean up this mess, then, but he could leave more of one behind. Burn this place, scorch it all, and let them sift through the ashes for evidence.
He wiped the rock down carefully on his pants and then set it on the edge of the road and, dropping onto his back, slid under the van and found the gas line and jammed his pocketknife into it. First few times it glanced off the metal, and once his hand slipped down and across the blade and opened his flesh up. First his fingerprints, now his blood. He drove the knife at the gas line again, drove it with the fury of fear and anger, and this time the blade popped through and gasoline spilled out and onto his bare chest.
The idea of trying to tip the van into the ditch and create an accident scene ran through his mind but he discarded it. There wasn’t enough time, and it probably wouldn’t work anyhow. He wrapped his hand in one of the torn pieces of shirt he still had and then opened the driver’s door and climbed inside. There was a leather case on the passenger seat, and all the way in the back he found a digital camera. He took them both-after all this risk, might as well get something out of it, and maybe it would help if the scene had the look of a robbery. Then he went down into the ditch and patted through the dead man’s pockets and found a wallet and took that, too, dropped it into the leather case as the gasoline ran through the gravel and dripped into the ditch behind him.