Bitch Creek (19 page)

“Why don't you loosen your tie,” said Calhoun. “Relax, listen to the birds sing.”

“I don't like this any more than you do,” the man said. “If it was me, I'd just leave you alone. But that's not going to happen.”

“They're afraid I'll remember something,” said Calhoun.

The Man in the Suit shrugged.

“I don't,” said Calhoun. “I don't remember anything.”

“Good,” said the man. “Best all around.”

“What if I do remember something?”

“Best if you don't tell anybody.”

“You don't want me to tell you?”

“Don't tell anybody, Stoney. Especially me.”

“How do I know what it is they don't want me to remember?”

“You'll know.” The man shifted in the rocker so that he was peering into Calhoun's face. “But you've got to give me something now and then. That way, I drop in occasionally, you update me, and I leave. If you don't, if you get hard-assed with me . . .” He waved his hand in the air and slumped back into the rocker.

“I told you I was going to shoot trespassers,” said Calhoun.

“Good,” the Man in the Suit had said. “Paranoia is good. Okay. What else've you got for me?”

Calhoun went out onto the deck. The Man in the Suit was sipping a Coke that he'd helped himself to from the refrigerator. He put the shotgun shells on the table and arched his eyebrows. “Well?”

“I was some kind of cop, wasn't I?” said Calhoun. He noticed the bulge of the shoulder harness under the man's jacket.

“I'm not at liberty to say.”

They'd done this dance before, but Calhoun wanted to reaffirm it. “But you are at liberty to say if I'm wrong.”

The Man in the Suit smiled. “Sure.”

“You aren't saying I'm wrong.”

“No, I'm not saying that.”

“But if I was wrong, you'd say so.”

“Yes. We've already established that. Now tell me. What makes you think you were some kind of cop?”

“Nothing specific,” Calhoun said carefully. “We've got a murder up here, and it just feels ... I don't know. Familiar.”

“Familiar? How so?”

Calhoun remembered a dark classroom, pictures of faces flashing on a screen, a feeling of intense concentration, of being tested and challenged, of wanting something very badly. There were other images . . .

Better not to share too much of this with the Man in the Suit.

He shrugged. “Just that old déjà vu shit. Like I might've investigated murders before. Nothing I could pin down.”

“What have you remembered since last time?”

Calhoun shook his head. “Those quick memory flashes. They come and go before I can store them away. They don't stick.”

“You've got to give me something, Stoney.”

“What've you got for me?”

“You've got to be patient.”

Calhoun said, “I'm finding that I don't forget a damn thing since . . . since the hospital. Everything's like a movie in my head, and I can rewind it and replay it, slow it down and stop it and study every frame. We've had this murder—”

“I know about the murder,” said the Man in the Suit.

“What do you know?”

“You found Lyle McMahan's body. They're looking for a man named Fred Green.” He shrugged.

Calhoun reached over and gripped the man's wrist. “What else do you know?”

“Nothing, Stoney. Really. It's got nothing to do with us.”

Calhoun stared at him for a minute, then slumped back in his chair. “I still get those—those ghosts,” he said. “The day before I found Lyle, I saw a naked body drifting down my creek.” He shook his head. “I think it was Lyle.”

“A ghost, huh?”

“Yes. An apparition. When I found Lyle, I thought I was seeing another one.”

“You believe Fred Green killed him?”

“What do you know about Fred Green?” said Calhoun. “Goddammit, if—”

“It's unrelated,” said the Man in the Suit. “We don't know any more about Fred Green than you do. I know about the murder because it's my job to know about you.”

“I came up here because I didn't like you people snooping around inside my head.”

“I know that, Stoney,” he said. “We've been through all that. We've got an understanding, you and I.” He lifted his Coke and took a sip. “And I'm sorry about Lyle.”

Calhoun nodded. “Only other thing I can tell you is that I've found I've got a talent for sketching. I drew a picture of Fred Green for Sheriff Dickman, and damned if it didn't come out looking exactly like the man. I guess I was taught how to do that, huh?”

The Man in the Suit smiled. “I'm not at liberty to say.”

“Tell them that I don't remember anything about the man who saved my life or what I was doing with him or where we were. Nothing. Tell them they've got nothing to worry about.”

“Good.”

“I want to know about my parents,” said Calhoun.

“I understand. Maybe another time.”

They sat there on the deck, both of them staring off into the woods, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable. After a couple of minutes, Calhoun said, “You're from the government, not the hospital.” He continued to gaze into the distance. “Right?”

The Man in the Suit did not turn his head. “I'm not at liberty to say.”

After the Man in the Suit left, Calhoun went inside. He reloaded the Remington—two shells in the magazine and one in the chamber—and made sure the safety was on. He fed Ralph and heated a can of spaghetti for himself.

Then he put on some music and sat with his anthology. He began reading Faulkner's “The Bear,” a helluva good story, and one he knew he'd read before.

But his mind kept wandering. What if Fred Green had come up here from Calhoun's previous life, the one he couldn't remember? What if Lyle was dead because of something Calhoun had done before the hospital?

The Man in the Suit had denied it. But Calhoun knew he lied. They lied to each other. That was part of their understanding. They mingled lies in with some truth and left it up to each other to figure out which was which.

If it turned out that Fred Green had any connection whatsoever to his unremembered life, Calhoun swore to himself that he would shoot two people dead. First, Mr. Fred Green. Second, the Man in the Suit.

Around midnight he went outside to keep Ralph company while the dog sniffed around for good places to lift his leg, and as he was standing there enjoying the aroma of the piney woods and listening to the creek and watching clouds skid across the face of the moon, he suddenly saw Kate with her telephone wedged against her neck. She was gazing up at the ceiling. There was a smile on her pretty face, and he knew that everything was okay with her again.

He smiled, called Ralph, and went inside. He picked up the telephone, hesitated, and put it back on its cradle. No sense spoiling a good thing.

C
ALHOUN BROUGHT
R
ALPH TO THE SHOP WITH HIM
the next morning, as he often did. Kate liked having Ralph there. She said it gave the place a kind of homey atmosphere that put customers at ease and encouraged them to spend money. Besides, Kate liked Ralph.

It was a Saturday in June, the busiest day of the week in the best month of the year for all kinds of fishing in Maine, so he got there a little before six. He turned the sign around so that it read
OPEN
and filled a bowl of water for Ralph. He threw one of his old sweaters in the corner and told him to lie down and take it easy. The customers liked seeing Ralph lying there, looking bored, and Ralph liked watching the customers out of his half-lidded eyes. Calhoun thought every fishing shop should have a bored bird dog lying in the corner on a ratty old sweater.

He found the NPR station on the radio and sat at the fly-tying desk to make some more sand eel flies. Stripers crashed sand eels along the beaches at night in June, and the shop's supply of fly-rod imitations was running low. He'd been experimenting with a design that used flexible nylon tubing and synthetic hair and Krystal Flash.

Customers began wandering in almost immediately, and between selling flies and giving away the locations of hotspots and other hard-earned lore, he had barely managed to turn out a dozen flies in the couple of hours before Kate got there.

She came to the desk and picked up one of Calhoun's sand eels. “Looks pretty good,” she said. “How's it behave in the water?”

“Lyle tried some last week,” said Calhoun. “Did real good with 'em, he said.”

“Busy so far?”

He shrugged. “Gave away a lot of wisdom. Didn't sell a helluva lot.” “I'm real sorry, Stoney.”

He looked up.

“About how I behaved yesterday.”

He nodded. “Lyle said they were gobbling sand eels on those mudflats along the inside of Swan Island about an hour into the incoming last week. Just at dusk. You know those mudflats I mean?”

“I get scared sometimes,” she said.

Calhoun stroked the tail of the fly in his vise. “What do you think?” he said. “Maybe needs a bit more flash?”

“Some guys came in yesterday morning,” she continued. “They wanted to go trout fishing on the Kennebec up around Bingham, below the Wyman Dam. They'd heard it's really hot. Hell, it
is
hot. Everybody knows that. It would've been a good trip for us. Three lawyers. Well-connected local lawyers. First thing I thought was, well, I'll give these boys to Lyle.” She shook her head. “It would've been a great trip for Lyle. I can't believe it, Stoney.”

Calhoun didn't look up. He didn't want to see Kate's face right then. “I would've taken them,” he said.

“See, that's it. You weren't here. And—and neither was Lyle. Just me. I was the only one here. So what did I do? I called around, found a guide over to Santo's for those lawyers.” She sighed. “I hate giving business away. We're not doing so hot, you know.”

“I've been telling you,” he said. “I've got money. Make me a partner.”

“You're not going to bail me out, Stoney. I've got to make this work.”

He took the finished sand eel from the vise. “It wouldn't be bailing you out, honey. It'd be an investment for me. A good investment.” He clamped another hook in the vise. “They keep putting money into my account. You know that. It's just sitting there.”

“Invest it in something good, then,” she said. “Not some stupid business that's gonna go belly-up.”

“We aren't going belly-up,” said Calhoun.

“Walter fell out of his wheelchair yesterday,” she said. “Speaking of going belly-up. When I got home, he'd been lying there all afternoon. Couldn't get up, couldn't even get to the phone. He looks up at me and says, ‘Kate, I wet my goddam pants. Will you please for Christ's sake put me away.' ”

Calhoun looked up at her. “Are you thinking of putting Walter in a nursing home or something?”

She shook her head. “That's not what he meant.”

“Let me buy in, Kate,” he said. “Then we can hire somebody to mind the shop once in a while. Do some advertising. Get a new sign for out front. Free you and me up so we can do more guiding. Maybe even take a day off occasionally. Actually go fishing. Hell, when was the last time you and I went fishing?” He shrugged. “Give you some time with Walter. If we pump some capital into the shop, you can pay more attention to Walter.”

She shook her head, turned, and started for her office in the back. Then she stopped. “You don't get it, do you?”

He smiled. “I never pretended to get it, honey.”

She stood there for a minute with her hands on her hips, frowning at him as if he was somebody she thought she'd seen somewhere but couldn't remember where. Then she went into her office.

A little after noon, Calhoun asked Kate if she wanted him to go get them some lunch. She was at the counter talking with a couple of young guys who Calhoun figured would just as soon stand there all afternoon flirting with her, making her smile, and she glanced up at him and said, “No,” as if he'd asked if she wanted him to chop off her thumb.