BANGING NOISES. And water. The banging of small fists against glass. But today it was louder than usual.
Then I heard my name. Not the word “Dad,” which I usually imagine Jonas screaming as the car gets pulled down the Tullumy River, but my real name.
“P.T.,” I heard. “Paul Thomas Marsh.”
I rolled over and stared at the wood floor in my son’s room. Heard the sound of Remy hollering. Banging at the front door.
A bottle of Dewar’s was capped closed and half-full beside me. I rolled it under Jonas’s bed and stood up. I was still in yesterday’s clothes. I focused on the positive: less laundering of pajamas.
I walked to the front door and swung it open.
Remy’s eyes moved over me. “Jesus,” she said. Scanning my place like I’d trained her to. “I thought you were dead or something.”
She was dressed in a white blouse and tan slacks that showed off her long legs. Walked a few feet in and sniffed.
“What’s wrong?” I said. My head was pounding from getting up too fast.
“You tell me, partner,” she responded. “I called your cell ten times. And your place smells like ass.”
I moved into the kitchen for ice water. Looked at the clock: 8:03 a.m.
“Kendrick’s elbows were broken,” I said.
“Yeah, you called me at four a.m. and told me,” Remy said. “Then again at four-thirty.”
I didn’t remember doing this. I rubbed my face to wake up.
“What’s on the docket today?” I said.
Remy glanced under the dining room table at a bottle of cheap Russian vodka. “Aircraft cable,” she said.
The sun through the kitchen windows was unbearable.
“That’s what was wrapped around the tree where Kendrick was abducted?” I asked.
Remy nodded. “Three vendors in town sell it. One’s off SR-902. About two miles from Harmony.”
I sat down at the dining room table. Our house was small. “Cozy” was the word people used. Lena and I had bought the place from an old couple who retired to Florida.
The kitchen, living room, and dining room were one big space, and Lena had filled them with antique furniture she’d bought secondhand on trips into the country with her twin sister, Exie.
Remy picked up a dirty plate from the kitchen counter with her thumb and pinky.
My partner had this way about her. She was a tomboy—tough, didn’t take shit from any guy—but was also probably more woman than a man like me could handle.
“Geez, boss,” she said, “you ever heard of a cleaning lady?”
I grabbed the plate from Remy and put it in the sink.
Most of the antiques Lena had bought were currently functioning as wardrobe racks. When I wasn’t working, I’d wear the same five or six T-shirts, hanging them over old glass sewing tables or cherry wardrobes filled with antique silver platters.
“These vendors,” I said. “They work with the airport?”
“No, the name ‘aircraft cable’ is misleading,” Remy said. “The stuff’s mostly used in factories. For lifting equipment. I called a guy already. He’s waiting on us.”
Purvis stumbled out of Jonas’s room, and Remy crouched to massage the wrinkled fur that crowded his face.
Bulldogs rest constantly. But Purvis hadn’t been sleeping in there to be close to me. A year had passed, and he was still grabbing at the corners of Jonas’s comforter in the morning. Waiting for his best friend to come home.
“Ten minutes,” I said, and Remy told me she’d wait outside. I turned on a hot shower and let it warm my skin.
Water. Pounding fists. Screaming.
I have too much information on how everything happened last December to my wife and son. And not enough on why. The battery in the old Jeep had failed. The roads were slick. There was my father-in-law. Called to help. He arrived, but made things worse.
Before anyone knew it, my wife’s car had slid off the road into the Tullumy River and was pulled under in seconds. The car was carried downriver with my wife and son trapped inside.
I got dressed quickly, putting on a tan sport coat over black slacks and a white collared shirt. Crouching down, I rubbed the whitish-pink fur on Purvis’s face, right near his jawline. He huffed, and I moved outside, putting the mess of the past out of my head.
As I drove, Remy told me about a piece of news that was trending in Harmony. Two dozen kids had been sent home from Paragon Baptist with bloody noses, and no one knew why.
“That’s Kendrick Webster’s school, right?” I asked.
Remy nodded. “It’s weird, huh?”
“Schools are like petri dishes,” I said. “We saw it with Jonas at preschool. One kid would get sick. Then suddenly they were all sick.”
I pulled off SR-902 at Stanislaw Avenue. We veered off the main road and down a one-way street, parking in front of a place called A-1 Industrial. It had a big metal awning with four trucks under it. Each was wrapped in neon green vinyl.
Inside, we introduced ourselves to Terrance Clap, who Remy had spoken to by phone. He was north of seventy, carried an extra fifty pounds in his gut, and wore a green railroad-conductor-style hat.
“We don’t get many visits from the po-lice.” Clap smiled, standing behind a counter that ran the length of the place. His voice was deep, and it dipped down at the ends of sentences.
Remy showed Clap a lead of cable that we’d cut from the forty-foot piece found at Kendrick’s abduction site.
“What can you tell us about this, Mr. Clap?” she asked.
Clap pulled a stool under him. His gut rested atop the counter, and he used a magnifying glass to inspect the cord.
“Well, it’s aircraft cable, just like I guessed by telephone.” He looked more to me than Remy. “Five-sixteenths of an inch.”
“And what’s that traditionally used for?” I asked.
“Well, that could vary,” he said. “Could be for marine or construction. What are y’all fixin’ to build or lift?”
I squinted at Clap. Remy had told him by phone that this was a criminal investigation.
“We’re not trying to build anything,” I said. “This cable was used in a crime. We’re trying to find out the type of person who’d have it handy.”
Clap scrunched up his brow. Behind him were rows of shelves stocked with supplies. “Someone done choke a body with this?” he asked.
“We can’t discuss the details,” Remy said. “Do you sell this cord here?”
“Oh, sure,” Clap said. He waddled between two aisles and came back with a wooden spool about two feet in diameter. Heaved it onto the counter.
Remy tapped at it. There was probably two hundred feet of identical cable wound around the core. “Do you keep receipts of who buys this?”
Clap hesitated, grabbing a Red Man pouch from under the counter. He threw some chew under his lip.
“We’re cash-and-carry or account, hon,” he said, still facing my way. “If it’s cash, it’s a paper receipt like this.”
Clap pulled a chunk of two-by-four from under the counter. It had a nail sticking up through the board with receipts stuck on the nail.
I took the top receipt off and read what was listed under “Name” and “Address.” Someone had written Joe. Nothing else. Just Joe. On the next one down, the name read N/A.
“You guys are pretty detail-oriented, aren’t you?” I said.
Clap held my gaze, a stupid grin on his mug.
There are times I wake up in the morning and find myself in 1896 Georgia. It’s not a bad place for me. But for my partner, it’s a foreign country. A hostile land.
We were one day into the investigation, and already the media was buzzing with threats of a federal takeover of the case. There were people on both sides of the racial divide who wanted that. Some just for the pure chaos of it.
I tightened up my face. “We got a serious investigation here, Mr. Clap, and you’re smiling like a dog with two peters. I gotta tell ya, I don’t appreciate it. Makes me think there’s all sorts of ways those trucks outside might start gettin’ tickets.”
Clap’s face became solemn.
“Couple parking tickets,” I said. “Some speeding tickets. Hell, I could see myself taking a personal interest in y’all’s business. Sales tax records. Income tax.” I held up the receipt that said “Joe” on it. “Like, you might think Joe here bought ten dollars’ worth of parts, but the state insists it’s a hundred because there’s more tax on a hundred bucks. Turns out the state likes money.”
“Why don’t we start over,” he said flatly.
“Yeah, let’s do that.” I held up the lead of cable. “How do you describe this stuff?”
“Well—”
“Oh, and look at my partner when she asks you a question.”
He looked at me a minute, and then let it go. “We call that a seven-by-nineteen,” he said. “You got one cluster of nineteen strands of cable and ’round it are six other clusters.”
“And the folks who buy it,” Remy asked. “What are they buying it for?”
Clap turned to face Remy.
“It holds weight,” he said. “Gots what we call a low fatigue rate. The main use is pulleys. Sheaves.”
“What’s a sheave?” Remy asked.
The old guy walked over to a box on a shelf and pulled out one of those wheels that have a groove set into them. I’d seen them before, but never knew the name.
“A guy who buys seven-by-nineteen,” Clap said to Remy. “He repairs industrial machinery. Owns a crane. Works a well. You gotta move something heavy, then you need your cable, your pulley, your sheave.”
“What about a tow truck?” I asked. “It’s got a winch, right? Sort of the same idea?”
Clap’s fingers drummed a beat near his belly button. “Now, tow trucks, they got a specific-size cable. That’s not my line of business, but yeah, I guess it’s the same principle.”
I bit at my lip, thinking over the connection that Abe had already found. Vaughn McClure, whose house Kendrick had left from, had a tow business. And Stormin’ Norman Towing was owned by StormCloud, the neo-Nazi group.
“So if I’m a pulley guy,” I asked, “or a tow guy. Would it be normal for me to have forty feet of this in my truck? For emergencies?”
Clap shrugged. “Reckon that stands to reason. Although the tow guys—I think they use a three-eighths inch, ’stead of a five-sixteenths.”
Even better, I thought. The size wound around the tree wasn’t normal for tow trucks. So if we found it in the back of Vaughn McClure’s truck, it’d be more damning.
Then I thought of something I hadn’t considered.
I thought of Kendrick, strung up in that tree. And the “how” of it. That maybe having this type of cord in your trunk had a different intention, outside of knocking Kendrick out at that ditch.
“This system you just mentioned,” I said to Clap. “The pulley, the sheave. That would be perfect if I needed to pull something of weight up into, say, a tree, right? I could wrap a cable around a branch, run it through that sheave—”
“Now you’re thinking,” Clap said. “That way a job that would normally take two people working hard—with a pulley system, you do it real easy like, with one guy.”