HAYWOOD WATCHED THE PARAMEDICS load up Old Man Jackson into the back of the ambulance. It had been an hour since he and his men had discovered the body, but it took that long for the county sheriff to arrive. Haywood made no mention of Michael to the officer. For all intents and purposes, it was a scene of an old man simply giving up the ghost at his appointed time. The sheriff left the parking lot behind the ambulance as escort down to South Falls.
Haywood stood alone again.
The fact that it took so long for authorities to arrive was one of the graces that Haywood found in Coldwater. It was a village where a person could be left alone, unhindered by overruling bureaucracy and authority. A man could burn a brush pile in his yard without getting ticketed, check out the max horsepower of his car on a back road, howl at the moon at night if that was his pleasure, and not worry about a policeman showing up at his door. The joke was, you could get a pizza delivered before police would respond to a 911 call, and that was how most residents preferred it. Sure, there were always issues between neighbors, but disagreements were settled over a beer at Gilly’s.
Haywood was seen by most people as the mediator of the town. He had spent most of his life here, except for the four years he was downstate at the university. His family had money the same mysterious way that rich people in small towns seem to have it. When he came back to Coldwater, he took over his father’s machine shop. His ability to manage a business, coupled with the fact that he was boss to several of the townsfolks, lent to him the air of an arbiter.
He was not the law in the village, some backwoods Boss Hogg looking to strip-mine Coldwater, but he saw it as his obligation to keep the peace where he could. His neighbors often followed his lead and direction, assuming he knew best.
Now, standing outside of Jackson’s, looking down the road that was edged by the creeping forest, he grew small inside. Michael was out there, lurking or running, he did not know. His decision the night before had begun to haunt him. Standing in those same woods, the men laying Michael in the pine box, the dirt shoveled into the grave by the glow of a half-dozen flashlights. He could feel it creeping in . . . slowly at first, tickling its way through his stomach into his throat. Guilt. The guilt of burying a man alive.
They had been too decent to shoot Michael. The suggestion was circulated several times, but no one came forward offering to pull the trigger. Perhaps Haywood should have done it. Perhaps, as unspoken leader of Coldwater, he should have taken up the call and executed Michael. Been done with it. But no, he knew—deep down inside, he knew—that he was not capable of doing it. He could not shoot a man in cold blood. So the men decided to leave Michael to fate, and now fate had released him back into the world.
Haywood could feel the forest eyeing him like a jury of angry trees.
He felt exposed in the parking lot, so he collected himself and got into his truck to await his men’s return.
Guilt was a horrible thing to bear, but fear was just as bad. Before last night, he and his neighbors suffered the latter. Now they had to shoulder both.