Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith (25 page)

“Are we racing?” I saw the competitive glint in her eyes. She’d been running seriously for several years, since she turned thirteen, and she’d been dancing her entire life. She was in great shape, but this was the first time she’d ever asked me to race.

“Do you want to race?” I said.

“Depends.”

“On?”

“On how mad you’ll get when I beat you.”

“Care to put your money where your mouth is?” I said.

“How much?”

“Five bucks.”

“Deal. How far are we racing?” Lilly asked.

“Up to you.”

“Three miles. How much of a head start do I get?”

“Who said anything about a head start?”

“C’mon, you’re a man, Dad. And a jock. You’ve been running your whole life.”

“I’ll give you one minute.”

“Five.”

“Three.”

“Okay. Three.”

“We run to the oak on the bluff and back. That’s three miles, right?”

“Right.”

Thirty minutes later, Lilly and I were standing on a ten-foot-wide trail that ran along the northern bank of the Watauga River, also known as Boone Lake. The trail was developed for recreation by the Tennessee Valley Authority and wound for five miles through a wooded area on property owned by the TVA. It was only a couple of hundred yards from our house, so we’d both run the trail a thousand times. As we stood there stretching, she reminded me so much of her mother—beautiful, strong, and intelligent. I wondered briefly where she’d be in five years, ten years. I hoped she didn’t stray too far.

It was perfect on the trail. No one was around, the breeze was still blowing, and the temperature was climbing along with the sun. I put my finger on the stopwatch on my wrist.

“Ready?” I said.

“I apologize in advance for the embarrassment I’m going to cause you,” Lilly said.

“Five … four … three … two … one … Go!”

Lilly took off, and I pushed the button on the watch. I stretched some more and bounced around, watching her disappear around the first bend as I waited for three minutes to elapse. Two minutes into my wait, I heard what sounded like an animal growling, followed by a piercing scream. It was a woman’s voice, not that far away, coming from the direction Lilly ran. I listened intently.

Lilly?Was that Lilly?

The woman screamed again, and I heard another sound. A bear? A dog? Coyote? I took off down the trail as fast as my legs would carry me. I heard it again, but this time the voice was screaming for me: “Dad! Help me! Dad!”

I rounded the first bend and headed up a small rise, my lungs already burning. As I topped the rise, I caught a glimpse of her. She was on the ground, about a hundred yards in front of me, just to the right of the trail. She was screaming and crying and poking at something with a stick.

“Lilly!” I yelled. “I’m coming! Hang on!”

“It’s trying to kill me!” she screamed.

As I closed in on her, I saw the dog. It was a Doberman. And then I saw the blood on Lilly’s face. Her jacket was ripped and her exposed shoulder was bloody. She was swinging a small tree limb in her right hand, desperately trying to keep the dog at bay. I kept running and started looking for a weapon.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Here! Here! Come get me!” The protective parental instinct had taken over. I wasn’t thinking about anything but getting the dog away from my daughter. Even without a weapon, I headed straight for it with absolutely no idea what I’d do when I got there.
Kick it,
I told myself,
punch it, pick it up and smash it against a goddamned tree if you have to.

The dog moved towards Lilly. Thirty yards. She swung the stick she was holding and the Doberman yelped and backed off a little. About fifteen yards short of Lilly, I spotted a thick branch beneath a white oak. I grabbed it up, still running. Then I was between Lilly and the dog. Lilly was crawling backwards, crying. The dog lowered its head and snarled; its canines looked like white spears.

The dog lunged and I brought the tree limb down hard on the top of its head. The oak limb was a perfect club, between three and four feet long and hard as steel. My hands buzzed from the shock as the blow drove the dog’s snout into the dirt beside the trail, stunning it. It snarled again and tried to get up, but then staggered forward and collapsed. I looked at the dog for a brief second, and then I turned and looked at my daughter, who was cowering near a bush. She was covered in blood. I turned back and raised the limb. Brought it down hard. Again. And again. The dog’s head became a bloody mass of hair and brain matter. I dropped the club and rushed to Lilly.

“It must have come from under that bush,” she was saying, pointing to a nearby laurel. “I didn’t even see it until it knocked me down.”

Terrible thoughts were racing through my head.
The dog is rabid. Lilly’s been infected. She could die.
Then I thought of the morning at Marie Davis’s house, the look on the TBI agent’s face after he’d seen the Dobermans out back. Natasha. Could she be lurking out here in the woods somewhere? Did she sic her dog on my daughter?

“We need to get you to a hospital,” I said as I quickly tried to examine the bite marks. Her forehead was streaked with red. “Did it bite you on the head?”

She nodded. I parted her hair and could see a gash in her scalp.

“Where else?”

She pointed to her shoulder, about three inches from her neck. There were at least two puncture wounds near her collarbone and more on her forearm.

“You did good fighting him off,” I said. “You did good, honey. You’re going to be fine now.”

I picked her up off the trail and put her arm around my neck.

“Can you walk?”

She nodded.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Sunday, November 2

The lights were bright, the floors clean, and the smell antiseptic as the doctor in the white coat looked at us sympathetically. His name tag dubbed him Ajeet Kalam. He looked to be in his late thirties, very slightly built, with a roundish face, small teeth, and suspicious dark eyes. His accent told me he was born in India.

I was standing next to a gurney on which my daughter was lying. She’d been sedated, but she was awake. We’d been in the emergency room for three hours, and I was afraid the Indian doctor was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

“It’s good that you brought the dog with you,” he said.

“It wasn’t much fun going back there and dragging him out,” I said.

“It was a female, actually.” I hadn’t bothered to look, and I really didn’t care. “How did you kill her?”

“I bashed her head in with a tree limb.”

“A violent way to die,” he said wistfully.

“I didn’t exactly have the time or the means to do it more humanely.”

“Rabid dogs are a terrible problem where I come from. They kill tens of thousands of people every year. Especially in the poorer provinces.”

Another time, under different circumstances, I might have been sympathetic to the public health problems in India, but at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less.

“Do you have the test results?”

He nodded his head.

“And?”

“The dog wasn’t rabid,” he said. “Lucky for you.”

There was a collective sigh of relief as Caroline, Lilly, and I realized that Lilly wouldn’t have to undergo the painful treatment for rabies.

“So what’s the plan?” I said.

“You look familiar to me,” the doctor said. “Have we met?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I can’t put my finger on it. It seems I’ve seen you recently. Perhaps on television?”

I shook my head, but he looked at me more closely. I could see he was about to put it together.

“Can we get back to my daughter?” I said.

“The crazy woman!” he said triumphantly. He pointed at me. “The crazy woman! You are the lawyer the crazy woman yelled at on the television!”

“Please,” I said.

“Do you know what she was saying? It sounded like a bunch of babble.”

“I think she was trying to put a curse on me,” I said, immediately wishing I could grab the words out of the air before they reached his ears.

His voice lowered and his eyes widened. He spoke slowly. “Ah, a curse. Very dangerous. Very scary for you, no?”

“No. Not scary. Now, if you don’t mind—”

“Right.” He looked as though he’d just awakened from a dream to find a young girl lying on a gurney. “How did you come across the animal?”

“We were jogging,” I said. “We were going to race. She went out first, and I heard her scream… .”

He looked down at Lilly, then back at me.

“Perhaps it is the curse,” he said. “Perhaps you should be more vigilant.”

“Is there anything else you should be doing?” I snapped. The look on my face must have told him not to mention the curse again, because he quickly got back to the matter at hand.

“I’ll give her an injection that will help fight infection,” he said. “And I’ll prescribe some pain medication. The stitches will dissolve, but you need to take her to her doctor in ten days or so, just to make sure everything is healing properly.”

“Can we take her home now?”

“You can. The test is very reliable, but I want you to keep a close eye on her for a few weeks. If there is any sign of headache, fever, irritability, restlessness, or anxiety, you must bring her to the emergency room immediately.”

I patted Lilly on the hand and reached down and kissed her on the forehead.

“You’re gonna be fine,” I said, as much for me as for her. “You’re gonna be fine.”

“If you will excuse us, the nurse and I will go ahead and give her the injection. You can come back in about ten minutes.”

I winked at Lilly, took Caroline’s hand, and walked out of the room, down the hall, and through the automatic doors that led into the sunshine.

“What’s this about a curse?” Caroline said after we stood in silence for several minutes. “I thought you didn’t know what she was saying.”

“It’s nothing. Really. Don’t worry about it.”

“What ever happened to being open and honest?” she said. “I thought you weren’t going to hide things from me anymore.”

In years past, I’d made a habit of keeping things from Caroline, things I didn’t think she needed or wanted to know. But last year, shortly after my mother’s death, I’d finally opened up to her. I told her about Sarah being raped when we were children and about my shame in being unable to defend her, about my terrifying experiences in the military, about the mayhem I witnessed every day at work, about the frustration I felt at being raised without a father. The conversation seemed to lift a psychological burden I’d been carrying for years, and I’d promised to tell her everything in the future.

“I’m not hiding anything,” I said. “I just thought you had enough on your mind. Besides, I’m not taking it seriously.”

“Who told you she put a curse on you?”

“It was just some old guy who came into the coffee shop the other day.”

“So tell me about it.”

“I’ll tell you on the way home. Let’s go get Lilly.”

A nurse brought me a wheelchair, and I rolled Lilly out to the car. During the drive home, I told Caroline and Lilly about the old man who came into the coffee shop Friday morning. I left out the part about one of us having to die, and I didn’t say anything about Natasha’s Dobermans.

“Did he tell you his name?” Caroline said.

“I didn’t want to know his name.”

“Do you think he was some kind of Satanist?”

“I got the impression that he used to be. I guess he’s seen the light.”

“Doesn’t it scare you?”

“No. It doesn’t scare me. And it shouldn’t scare you either. Don’t even think about it.”

As we pulled into the driveway, it was strange not to be greeted by an overly excited German shepherd. Rio had been gone for only two days, but already I missed him. Since Jack had moved out, Rio had become my closest male companion.

I parked Caroline’s car in the garage and helped Lilly out of the backseat and upstairs to her room. Caroline walked back towards our bedroom. Just as we got to the top of the stairs, I heard Caroline yelling my name. The urgency in her voice told me that whatever had alarmed her was serious. I told Lilly to go on to bed and that I’d check on her in a few minutes.

I took the steps two at a time and walked quickly through the house. Caroline was just coming through the bedroom door. All of the color had drained from her face. Her left hand was covering her mouth, and with her right she was pointing towards the bedroom.

“What is it?” I said.

“The bathroom.”

I walked through the bedroom and into the bathroom. I saw it as soon as I stepped through the door. On the mirror above Caroline’s vanity, scrawled in what appeared to be red lipstick, was,
“Ah Satan.”

There was only one explanation.

Natasha had been in my house.

Sunday, November 2

I called Fraley, who came over immediately. While I was waiting for him, I searched every nook and cranny of the house. Outside of the message in the bathroom, there was no sign of Natasha. Fraley dusted the vanity and the mirror for prints but found nothing, took a few photographs, and then the two of us searched the house again. When we were finished, we stood in the driveway beneath the bright sun.

“What are you going to do?” Fraley said.

“I don’t know. At least the dog will be back tomorrow. No way she gets in the house if Rio’s here.”

“She’s just trying to scare you.”

“Yeah? Well, she’s doing a pretty good job of it. I don’t know why in the hell I got back into this business. I should have gotten a nice, safe teaching job somewhere.”

“And miss all this fun?” Fraley said. “Relax. We get through the hearing, you go see Boyer and make your deal, and then we’ll get her psychotic ass off the streets for good.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Sit up every night with a shotgun?”

“You’ve got some options. Your daughter’s going back to school, right? You and your wife can move in with her mother until things calm down, or maybe you could ask the sheriff to put some guys out here until we can get her picked up.”