The same Faith Hill song John Fuller would play when he called Blake late at night, when he was afraid whispering sweet nothings into the phone would be overheard by his parents, and so he let the music do the talking for him by turning the volume most of the way down and pressing the receiver’s mouthpiece right up to the stereo. Only a few people on earth knew John used to do that for him; Caitlin was one of them. And she is standing on the back porch now, a shadow silhouetted by a few dim lights she’s just turned on in the parlor behind her. He can’t see her expression through the shadows, but it looks like she’s waiting to see if they’ve noticed her.
“Caitlin…,” he calls out to her, and a few seconds later, she’s moving toward them.
When she’s within a few yards of the gazebo, she says, “You should go, Nova.”
“Where’s my dad?” Nova demands.
“Not here. Seriously. You should go.”
“We ne—no. We need to talk,” Nova says. But her words are shaky, and the glances she’s casting between Blake and Caitlin’s approaching shadow suggest that she’d like nothing more than to take off running. “We need to talk about what’s going on here. I’m not letting my daddy come back here, unless I know what—”
“I know you hate me, Nova. I know you always have. I know it never seemed like enough, the things I did for your father. For your family—”
“For us?” she asks, angry at the insinuation. “What the hell are you—where is my father?”
“—but trust me. I’m trying to protect you here. I am. Truly.”
“There’s nothing you can protect me from, Miss Caitlin.”
“Really? Want me to tell you what we did to those three boys who cornered you that day you were walking home from school? The ones that touched you even after you begged them to stop?”
Nova is visibly stunned, lips hanging open like a grouper’s as she seems to mentally reach for the memory while recoiling from it in the same instant.
“Sure, you’re a big girl now with a lot of opinions and college professors filling your head with all kinds of fantasies about how things are. About how they should be. But it wasn’t your father who walked those boys to the parish line and told them what would happen to them if they ever came back to Montrose Parish. It was mine. And he had friends with cop cars. So believe me when I tell you my family’s done more for you than you’ll ever know. And believe me when I tell you it’s time for you to leave.”
“What about me?” Blake asks, taking a few steps forward, hoping to see the expression on Caitlin’s face. No such luck. But he can see the outline of the pistol she’s holding in her right hand. “Why do I get to stay?”
Caitlin doesn’t answer, and the weight of her consideration sits over them all. Blake hears Nova’s sharp intake of breath, senses the start of a diatribe. “She’s got a gun, Nova,” he whispers. But apparently not quietly enough, because the next thing Caitlin says is, “I’ve got a lot more than a gun, honey.”
There’s that hard edge again. What had she said to him then? All you know is flesh and bone. It’s not just hard; it’s confident, knowing, self-satisfied… three things Caitlin has never been in her entire life.
“Fine. Come inside,” Caitlin finally says. “Both of you. Come inside and meet the man who really killed John Fuller.”
23
The attendant is still stewing over the rich bitch in the BMW X5 who told him to fuck off when he hears a sound like a fantail boat coming right up the highway toward the gas station where he works. The nearest fingers of swamp are too far from his little island of harshly lit concrete for a boat to sound this close. So he just sits there, blinking at the glare outside, cursing the way it masks the highway and the surrounding night sky.
He’s about to leave the register and investigate when the sound gets abruptly—and violently—louder, like a chain saw revving up. It’s a buzz that reminds him of bee swarms he’s seen on nature shows, but there’s another undertone to it, a clicking that sounds almost like his mother’s press-on nails rapping against the edge of the table.
If his mother were a giant and her nails the size of butcher knives.
When the handle of the far gas pump is ripped from its holder and slams to the concrete, he figures the whole thing is a trick of the wind. But everything else outside is ghostly-still, and a few seconds later, he can make out the swarm of insects covering the fallen gas pump as if the rusted metal handle were coated in some sort of irresistible nectar.
Within seconds, a veritable second skin of insects coats the fallen pump. They’re coming so fast and furious from the darkness beyond the station’s island of light that he can’t actually see them. He can’t tell them apart either. Are they termites, roaches, cicadas? He’s had creatures of all shapes and sizes slither and dart across his outpost in the late hours of the night, but never something this immense and angry.
Then they’re rising into the air in several slender fingers that seem positively elegant in comparison to the thickening mass below that gave them birth. He feels his jaw go slack and hears the magazine slap to the floor at his feet.
An impossible shape is assembling beyond the glass, but one that seems vaguely familiar. It is like the finest of pencil drawings, only each pencil stroke has its own violent and barely controlled interior chaos.
The shape is over five feet tall now. And in its details he can see the woman’s skinny neck and sloping shoulders. The rest of her is a mix of suggestions, as if the bugs have latched on to lingering threads of soul and dead skin and made the best version of her they possibly can. Then the shape turns its hollow head in his direction, and he sees writhing knife slashes suggesting the woman’s wide, furious eyes and her snarling mouth. And with a voice that consists of a great swelling and fragile modulation of the grinding chain saw sound coming from the entire cloud, the ghost composed of insects snarls, “Fuck off!”
Then, as if in response to the attendant’s strangled, terrified cry, the cloud disperses, and he sees the tail end of the thick fingers as they take to the night sky beyond the gas station’s lonely glare, and the ghostly impression of the girl in the BMW X5 has departed on a swarm of tiny wings.
24
The first thing Blake sees in the front parlor is Caitlin’s iPhone glowing in the dock atop one of the antique end tables. The dock is connected to the stereo speakers throughout the first floor, so her phone must be the source of the Faith Hill song that’s threatening to knock him into the past. There are bloody fingerprints on its screen.
Caitlin adds to them by turning the music down, and in the ensuing quiet he can hear Nova breathing next to him. The rush of blood in his ears gradually takes on the rhythm of a desperate, deafening pulse. It seems his every thought, his every breath, is now devoted to assuring himself that Caitlin has completely lost her mind and slipped into a world of self-inflicted violence and delusions.
Then he sees the overturned wing chair, the bloodstained sofa cushions in a tumble on the floor. This evidence of a recent struggle guides his attention to the fat man crumpled in a fetal position on the floor next to the flipped-up edge of the Oriental rug, the same man Caitlin is now standing over. She’s also pointing a gun at his head. The man’s black outfit looks like a trick-or-treater’s idea of a cat burglar costume, save for the silver duct tape that binds his ankles and wrists.