Cold Dead Past (7 page)

             
                                          CHAPTER 12

The first thing Jay noticed the next morning was that he had had his first good night’s sleep in weeks.  No dreams.  No Frank staring up at him with those fear-filled eyes and clawing at the ice.  The second was Meg, her arm draped across his chest, soft and warm, and her cheek snuggled up against his shoulder.

He smiled as he ran his hand down her back and along the soft curves of her hip, the skin dappled by the morning light and shadows.  He wasn’t sure whether he had made a mistake staying over.  Maybe it wasn't wrong since he still had feelings for her after all this time. She had made it equally as obvious to him that she felt something for him.

He would have liked to just stay there in bed with his arms around her, feeling her warmth against his skin, listening to her breathe, and thinking about the possibilities.  The news that he saw the previous night precluded that, though.  A quick check of the clock on the nightstand said it was eleven-fifteen.  Half the day in bed and he needed to get downtown to see Gary about the man that they had pulled out of the alley.

He untangled himself from her and sat up on the edge of the bed.  A short scan of the scatter of clothes on the floor and he found his briefs.  As he was pulling them on, Meg woke up and, moving over beside him, slipped her arms around him.

She kissed his shoulder and asked, "How are you feeling?"

"I’m great.  It was great.  I just… It’s late and there’s something I have to do."

"Not even time for breakfast?"

She kissed him on the shoulders and the nape of his neck, but he pulled himself away.  He sorted through the mix of their clothes on the floor until he found his pants and shirt.  As he zipped up his pants, he turned to her.

"You don’t know how much I wish I could stay," he said, "but there’s someone that I have to meet.  Some business."

Meg lay back in the bed, a disappointed look on her face.  Jay buttoned up his shirt and slipped on his shoes.  He knew that look.  Then she tried her pouty look, but this wouldn’t wait.

"It’s really important," he said. "Please believe me when I say that I would love nothing better than to stay here with you, but this won’t wait."

 
Jay leaned down to kiss her and she pulled him back onto the bed, not content to take no for an answer.  He slipped loose and smiled down at her.

"I promise I’ll call.  It’s just that I have to get this out of the way."

Meg rolled over with her back to him.

"Okay," she pouted. "Fine."

But as he went out the door and on his way, when she knew he wouldn’t see, she looked back over her shoulder.  There was a twinkle in her pale blue eyes as a broad smile crossed her lips.

When he stopped by the sheriff’s office looking for Gary, a deputy at the front counter had told him he could find him at Riley’s 50s Cafe. Jay looked up at the sign across the front with its girls in poodle skirts and wondered just what had become of his old hometown.

When he stepped through the door, though, he found himself perfectly at home.  Mike Riley had opened the place in the fifties. The decor had already been dated when Jay and the others used to stop in on the odd Saturday afternoon for burgers and fries.

The long counter with the stools bolted to the floor was still there, as were the red leatherette booths with stainless steel tables covered in green Formica.  They’d just been refurbished and the old linoleum tiles on the floor had been replaced with a new black and white checkerboard.  The jukebox at the back of the cafe had been replaced with one that played compact disks. It was loudly blaring Chubby Checker’s "Twist".

Gary was sitting by himself in one of the booths near the door eating a club sandwich and reading a newspaper.  He folded the paper up and put it aside when Jay took a seat across from him.

"Afternoon," said Jay. "I stopped over at the station and they told me you were over here."

Gary’s face looked drawn.  He had dark circles under his eyes and rubbed them as he spoke.

"I was just about ready to head home.  It was a rough night.

You want anything?"

"Just a cup of coffee, thanks."

Gary turned to the counter and caught the matronly waitress’ attention with a smile.  She came over to the booth and pulled a pad from her apron with a flourish.  A pencil magically appeared from behind her ear, where it was buried in bleached-blonde curls.  Jay could see some gray roots and figured that the restaurant wasn’t the only thing here that could be said to have a nineteen-fifties theme.

"Can you get my friend here a cup of your dee-licious coffee, Frieda?"

Frieda just giggled as she scribbled the order on her pad and loped back behind the counter.

"I saw the news," said Jay.

"That was a real mess."

"Have you guys got any leads at all?"

Gary took a drink of his coffee and stared into the cup as if to scry an answer.

"I wish we did."

Frieda returned and set Jay’s coffee down in front of him.

"Do you handsome men need anything else?"

Jay shook his head and she ripped the check off the pad and set it on the table.  He reached for it, but was just beaten out with a quick grab by Gary.

"I’ve still got the faster hands.  I’m getting this one.  You can treat me when I get to your neck of the woods.  How’s Meg?"

"Uh…fine."

Gary Laughed and took another drink from his cup.

"She told me you were coming over for dinner.  She was real happy about that."

Jay pulled his coat off and let it slide down behind him.

"It’s a little warm in here," he said, as he grabbed the sugar dispenser and poured a long stream into his coffee.

"It might be none of my business, but she was real hurt when you broke up.  I wouldn’t want her to be that way again."

Jay stirred his coffee and took a sip.  He didn’t feel like getting sidetracked into this discussion.  Not when the events of the previous night had seemed to make the past irrelevant.

"You know, about the other night, what exactly happened?"

Gary shifted uncomfortably in his seat and looked from side to side.

Leaning across the table he said, "It was an old drunk.  Some garbage men found him stuffed in one of the cans in the alley next to the Longbow."

"I heard that much on the news."

Gary leaned back and said, "Well, that’s all I can say.  Except that he didn’t die from natural causes."

"And what about Jack Hauser?  Tommy said something about him being messed up."

Gary leaned back, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He thought for a moment as he lit up and took a drag on the filter tip.  He exhaled a plume of smoke before he said, "There’s no relationship between the two.  No one had seen him around for a few days.  When the feed man brought by his order, he went on ahead to put it in the barn and found the body lying at the bottom of the ladder to the hayloft.  We figure that he fell and broke his damn neck and some raccoons or something got to him.  What are you so curious for?"

Jay took another drink of his coffee.  Was it really as simple as Gary had laid out?  But he remembered how small towns can be.  Simple country folk led more complicated lives than city folk ever imagined.

"I just thought that it was kind of strange that a town this size would have two people die and have their bodies muilated."

Gary picked up the restaurant checks and slid out of the booth.

Standing over Jay as he pulled on his coat, he said, "There’s nothing strange about it.  You writers have got a little too much imagination."

Gary turned and walked up to the counter to pay the bill.  Jay lazily ran his fingertip around the rim of his cup, deep in thought.  Maybe Gary was right, but he had this itch that he couldn’t quite scratch.  He wanted some fresh air, anyway, and taking a little drive would be good for him.

             
                                          CHAPTER 13

Jay almost missed the entrance to the driveway into the Hauser farm.  Usually, when they were kids, he would take the shortcut and walk across the fields.  He sat in his car, looking down the long ribbon of gravel, toward the house and outbuildings.  They looked like they were about to be squashed under the low, gray clouds boiling across the valley from the east.  He shifted into drive and rolled on through the gate.

He pulled to a stop in the lot in front of the barn.  Jack’s ratty old pickup still sat where he’d parked it the day he had died.  Jay stepped out of the car into silence broken only by the occasional call of a crow off in the nearby woodlot.  The hog pens and corral were empty.  Someone had thought enough, at least, to cart off the livestock.  He pulled up his collar to ward off the chill and walked over to the barn.

When they had played here as kids, it was always painted a bright red with white trim.  Now the paint was peeling and chipped and in some places it was worn down to the weathered wood.  Jack’s dad would never have let it get into this kind of shape.

He was surprised to find that no one had bothered to put a padlock on the barn door.  That already told him much about what he’d find inside.  It was obvious that someone had already been out and picked the place clean of anything valuable.  Probably Jack’s sister, Janice.  She’d never been one for the farming life and more than likely would be putting the place up for sale as soon as the probate court gave the okay.  Meanwhile, it never hurt to have a lot of un-inventoried goods that you could sneak past the tax man to make an extra couple of bucks.

He took a look back at the spot behind the house where Mrs. Hauser used to hang out her washing.  It was filled now with old car parts.  Jay peered through one of the windows.  The room was bare.  It was his guess that either Janice had been around with a moving van or Jack had stripped the house bare in an effort to pay the mortgage. No farmer who was doing well would have allowed the place to get in such a state of disrepair.

There was a small door cut into one of the large barn doors and when Jay grabbed the latch in his hand and pulled it open, there was a loud creak that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand up.  He peered inside.  It was murky, dim, the only light admitted through the open door and the split and warped seams in the walls.  He threw the door open wide and stepped in.

It looked just as Jay remembered it.  As his eyes adjusted, he glanced down at the rough plank floor.  It was covered with muddy footprints.  They were recent, as the ground outside had been frozen solid right up until a couple of days before.

He was startled by the sudden rustle of feathers as a couple of doves, disturbed by his intrusion, cooed and flew up into the rafters from one of the stalls.  He could feel his heart skip a beat.  It was too dark to get a good look at the hayloft from the front of the barn.  His eyes shifted warily from side to side as he walked toward it.  The only sounds were the whistling of the wind outside and the creaking of the old wooden floor.

At the bottom of the ladder to the loft, he pulled a flashlight from his pocket and switched it on.  He played the beam along the base of the ladder and discovered he was standing in a large, irregularly-shaped, ochre-colored patch of dried blood.  Jay quickly jumped up onto the bottom rung with both feet.  He hung onto the side with his free hand as he slipped the flashlight back into his coat pocket.

The ladder shook as Jay climbed.  He could hear ominous cracking noises with each step up.  At the top, he wrapped an arm around a rung to brace himself and brought the flashlight back out of his pocket.  Here, at just about eye level with the floor of the loft, all he could see at first were some old bales of hay.

They smelled of mold and were scattered across the dark space that ran to the back of the barn.  If there were any place in the barn where he would find evidence of the raccoons that Gary had been talking about, it would be up here.  They liked to be up high.  Jay heaved himself up onto the floor of the loft.

He rose to his feet and noticed some pellets of scat.  They skittered across the floor like pebbles when he kicked at them.  When he stepped on one, it crumbled into dust.  If there had been a varmint living up here, it hadn’t been around for a long time.

He was about to head back down the ladder when the flashlight beam caught a tuft of hair.  As Jay approached it, he could see a trail of more leading toward a pile of loose straw near the front of the loft.  Not just tufts, but what looked like patches of hair that had been ripped out, skin and all.  It was as if someone had been peeling an orange and carelessly dropped the peels as they walked.  He couldn’t tell what kind of animal the fur was from until he reached the end of the trail.

There, in a nest of straw, was the body of a cat, looking like it had been ripped apart and skinned.  The cat’s guts, all shrunken and dessicated, were piled next to the body.  It looked for anything like someone had laid them out in an exploded view, like those sets of instructions for a piece of furniture from Ikea.

When he looked up, Jay came face to face with something even more gruesome.  Arranged on a bale of hay were the heads of a dozen animals in various degrees of decomposition. It was like some gorey trophy collection.

"Raccoons, my ass," he said, under his breath, as he cringed and began backing away.

"Raccoons don’t set up trophy displays," he thought to himself, "or lay their kills out neatly to show off to the neighbors."  No animal did.  He wondered whether Gary had been up to see this and how he would explain it away if questioned.