MELISSA! YOU IN THERE?”
The pounding on the door woke Melissa from a fitful night’s sleep. She rolled over and saw the alarm clock. It was so late, later than she usually slept, but the poor night’s rest coupled with the room-darkening blinds of the hotel room had not prompted her inner timer to go off. She sat up in bed and ran her hand through her hair. Her head hurt as if there were too many thoughts crammed into too little a space.
“Melissa?”
The pounding continued.
She walked to the door and peered through the peephole. The fish-eyed lens distorted Lila’s face in a grotesque way. She opened the door.
“Good, you’re here,” Lila said. “I got Haywood over in the diner. He said he’d love to talk with you.”
Melissa looked past Lila to the outside world. It was gray and cold, a bitter rain dropping from the skies onto the asphalt parking lot. Her thoughts quickened at hearing the man’s name.
“Give me a minute,” she said. She walked to the bathroom, put herself together, and stepped back out. She put her coat on and her hood up and stepped out the door.
Lila walked with Melissa across the parking lot of the motor lodge and through the front door of the diner. The chef called out to her in Chewbacca-like noises, and Lila waved off the words with a discourteous shrug. She pointed toward the back booth to a man sitting by himself. His cell phone rested on the table, along with a plate of burnt eggs and toast. Melissa walked over to the man cautiously, wary that he might turn and attack her at any moment, but he just sat motionless, his eyes ever vigilant on his phone.
“Are you Haywood?” Melissa asked, doing her best to calm the tremble in her voice.
Haywood looked up at her absentmindedly, but his gaze quickly focused when he saw the woman standing before him. He stared at her, looking as if he’d seen a ghost. It occurred to her that she looked a lot like Michael, easily passing as his sister. As nervous as she was, she nearly laughed at the thought of how it must have unnerved the man.
He cleared his throat. “Melissa Sullivan, I assume?”
Melissa nodded.
“Lila told me about you. Please, sit down. Can I get you something? Coffee?”
“No . . . I know what they do to coffee around here.”
“Smart choice.”
Melissa sat down and the two looked at each other for what seemed like an eternity. Neither one flinched at the other’s gaze, sizing the other one up and coming to the quick conclusion that they were of equal fortitude.
“I guess there is no easy way to start this, so I’ll just jump right in with both feet,” Haywood said as he pushed his plate aside and slipped his phone into his pocket. “Lila said that you were asking after Michael.”
Melissa wasn’t in the mood for idle talk. “Was that you following me in the truck out at my brother’s house?”
Haywood was taken aback. “Me? No.”
“Someone you know?”
“Earl and Frank. Yeah. But they were not there to scare you. I asked them to go up to your brother’s house to make sure everything was alright. They aren’t the brightest of people, and so they probably thought you were up to no good. Dim-witted as they are, they thought they were doing right by following you back to town.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Believe what you want.”
Melissa stared at Haywood, but his steeliness was impenetrable. “Were they part of your group? The group who kidnapped Michael?”
“Now hold on, that’s a pretty big accusation.”
“One of your lackeys has already been talking. I wouldn’t think that the accusation should surprise you.”
“You mean Kyle, don’t you? Down at South Falls? He’s half comatose, drugged up on painkillers. He probably knows who the second gunman was on the grassy knoll. I wouldn’t trust his word on anything at the moment.”
Lila stepped over with a glass of water and some toast, setting it down in front of Melissa. She appeared to do it more as an opportunity to snoop than to be gracious, but the ice-cold countenance of the two conversationalists had her heading back to the kitchen at a quick pace.
“So, you see anything interesting at Michael’s house?” Haywood asked.
“It was practically destroyed. Falling down.”
“A house is a reflection of the soul.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that your brother is a lunatic. Now, you might have some romanticized memory of him, but us here in Coldwater, those who have lived with him the past little while, know where he comes from, where he’s been, what he’s done, well . . . wouldn’t expect anything less of him if he chose to live in a junk pile.”
“It looks like he lives in the trailer behind it.”
Haywood shrugged as if that piece of information had little bearing on his opinion.
“Why do you consider him a lunatic?” Melissa asked.
“Because that’s what he is. Tell me, what did you see out there, besides a fallen-down old house? Did you see anything . . . unnatural?”
Melissa thought about the wasted earth around the cabin, the absence of any living thing forming a buffering circle around her brother’s house. The retreating nature. The place felt like an open grave and its lingering absence of life still shaded the corner of her heart.
“You did, didn’t you? You saw it. You felt it even. Now you are starting to understand, just a little bit. So, before you sit over there and sling any more accusations around, let me tell you some more.”