Rally must have taken them, Edmund thought. He assured the sheriff that he would do everything in his power to cooperate with the investigation—even allowed the fat Adolf Hitler lookalike and a couple of his Gestapo to take one more look in the cellar that evening. And then, much to Edmund’s surprise, in the weeks that followed the whole thing just “went away.”
But then there was the problem of Rally—a problem that resolved itself much more quickly and, for Edmund Lambert, much more satisfactorily.
“I want to talk to you in person,” Edmund said on the telephone the day after the funeral.
“About your meeting with the sheriff?” Rally replied. “You didn’t tell him I was involved, did you Eddie?”
Even though Rally was over eighty, upon his return from Iraq Edmund was surprised to see how frail and skinny he’d become since last he saw him—three years earlier, on a random visit to his boyhood home. And he looked skittish, too; his once bright, smiling eyes all wide and pink and seemingly incapable of holding Edmund’s gaze for long.
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Edmund said. “Don’t worry about that. But I want to talk to you about the General.”
“The who?”
Edmund was silent for a moment, then whispered, “C’est mieux d’oublier.”
More silence, this time from Rally.
“When you coming by?” the old man asked finally.
“Now.”
“Makes sense,” Rally said, distantly. “I reckon it was only a matter of time.”
Edmund noticed the tension in his voice was gone—he sounded more like the Rally he used to know—but before Edmund could respond, Rally hung up.
Edmund arrived at Rally’s twenty minutes later.
The old man lived alone in a double-wide on what he often bragged added up to ten acres of “primo farmland.” Most of the land, however, was uncultivated, and the trailer itself was set back about a hundred yards off the road against a thick swath of trees. For as long as Edmund could remember, Rally had said that someday he was going to build his dream house there. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it, Claude Lambert used to say. But for some reason, the old man never seemed in much of a hurry to get out of his trailer. Edmund suspected this was because Rally thought he didn’t need a house when he already had the Lamberts’ to hang around in.
Edmund parked his pickup beside Rally’s, his headlights scattering the more than two dozen cats that the old man allowed to roam free amid the junk that littered his property—old auto parts mostly, including the shell of a beat-up Chevy Nova propped up on cinder blocks. Some of the cats, Edmund knew, were former residents of his grandfather’s tobacco farm; others, most likely their offspring. Rally had often adopted them over the years, more so after Edmund joined the Army and Claude Lambert’s health began to decline.
There were no more cats now on the tobacco farm.
Edmund smiled at the memories of what he used to do to the cats way-back-when before his anointing. How stupid he’d been back then; how blind to the messages that were right there in front of him. And now, the fact that Rally’s cats were gathered out front to greet him when he arrived, well, surely this must be a message from Nergal, too.
Edmund exited his truck and climbed the three rickety steps that led up to Rally’s screen door. The inside door was open a crack, and Edmund could see a light on in the living area. He knocked. No answer.
A pair of cats began meowing and rubbing against his legs.
Edmund knocked again. “Rally?” he called. “Hey, Rally, it’s Edmund.”
No answer.
Edmund kicked the cats away, opened the door, and stepped inside.
He took in everything in less than a second. Nothing much had changed in the years since he last visited Rally’s trailer with his grandfather—the mess, the odor of mildew and burnt frozen dinners and motor oil, the junky sixties-style furniture, the racing pictures on the walls and the model automobiles on the mantel above the propane fireplace.
No, the only thing that was different was Rally himself.
The old man sat slumped in his La-Z-Boy—the shotgun still propped between his legs, his brains blown out all over the wall behind him.
Time suddenly slowed down for Edmund Lambert—his heart pounding, a faint ringing in his ears as the room grew brighter, the colors and outlines of the objects around him more vivid. He felt numb—just stood in the doorway, staring at the grisly tableau for what seemed to him both an eternity and only a matter of seconds.
Then Edmund heard what sounded like a clicking, and felt his legs carrying him forward as if controlled by someone else. He stopped at Rally’s feet.
The blood was still trickling from the old man’s nose, but Edmund knew that trickle would have looked quite different a few minutes ago. He had witnessed a similar suicide in Iraq; an insurgent who, rather than be taken alive, stuck the muzzle of a .45 in his mouth and blew out the back of his skull. The blood from his nostrils had gushed like a pair of fire hoses, his body deflating like a balloon. It had been the same for Rally, Edmund could telclass="underline" the lower part of the old man’s face and neck, his chest and the right side of his coveralls all soaked with blood.
But where was that clicking coming from?
Edmund peered around the side of the chair and discovered two large cats lapping up the blood that had run down between the cushions and out from underneath the recliner. The cats didn’t even bother acknowledging him, and Edmund stood there watching them for some time.
Edmund turned back to Rally and caught something out of the corner of his eye—on the end table, under the lamp, on the opposite side of the recliner.
It was his grandfather’s old medicine bottle. He recognized it immediately—M-E-D-I-C-I-N-E the label read, yellowed and peeling up at the corners. The cap was still on, but Edmund could tell by the way the lamplight filtered through the glass that the bottle was empty. It stood atop a stack of old-fashioned, composition-style notebooks. Edmund recognized those as his grandfather’s, too.
Edmund picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and sniffed.
Licorice and Pine-Sol. Absinthe?
But the other batch of that stuff, Rally said in his mind, well, let’s just say you could use it for more important reasons other than just drinking it for fun. We’d been close to getting the formula right for a long time.
The formula. E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L
And then Edmund saw it.
The name patch on Rally’s coveralls—on his left pocket, the silver stitching against the dark blue background.
The silver stitching that spelled out Gene Ralston.
G-E-N-E-R-A-L-S-T-O-N
The first seven letters. G-E-N-E-R-A-L
But how could that be? Rally was not the General!
C’est mieux d’oublier.
His mind suddenly racing, Edmund backed away from the bloody corpse, bumped into a chair, and stood staring at the patch in a daze, his breath coming in little puffs.
Gene Ralston = G-E-N-E-R-A-L? he asked himself over and over. No, that couldn’t be it! Rally was not included in the formula! Rally was not part of the equation!
Edmund dropped the notebooks and the bottle on the floor and fell back into a chair—closed his eyes and tried to focus on the image of the silver stitching in his mind.