EIGHT YEARS LATER AND IT WAS STILL HAPPENING. HADN’T stopped. And now Fielding had seen it. Had witnessed it. Was now part of it.
That night he couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t get the image of the charred girl out of his head. He watched television for a while. When that did nothing he drank half of a fifth of whiskey and when he still couldn’t sleep he drank the other half. Even with his eyes open the image preyed on him. He went to the front door and locked it. He locked the back door. He went to his room and laid atop the sheets and looked at the swirling ceiling and listened to the rain. Then he got up again and washed his face in the darkness and went downstairs and started some coffee, knowing what he was about to do.
He went back upstairs to his room and knelt down and reached under the bed and when he felt it he pulled out the small case and set it on the bed and flipped one silver latch then flipped the other and opened the case and looked down at the .45 Ruger. He hadn’t looked at it in years. Hadn’t even thought about it. But here it was. Like an old acquittance he was afraid of. He had fired it only a handful of times and then only at targets. He didn’t care for guns other than for hunting and even then saw them only as a tool like a shovel for digging a hole. And as he looked at the gun, a hole was all he saw. He was climbing down into it again.
Yer a goddamn fool, he said.
Then he lifted the gun out of the case and opened the cylinder and found it empty and closed it again and stuffed the revolver in the small of his back and took out the box of bullets and closed the empty case and slid it back under the bed. He went back down into the kitchen and filled a thermos with coffee and went out to his truck.
The freeway was all but empty at that hour. A semi here and there. A delivery truck. He drove the speed limit, maybe a little under. He had no rush in getting back out there. Any excuse to turn him around he’d take. But there were no excuses and it was easy as an invitation. He followed the same route he and Batey had taken earlier. The rain was still falling but the wind had died. Nothing looked the same in the dark. Nothing ever did. Driving out he knew he was looking at the fishing harbor only because of a red navigational light that lit up and went out every few seconds. Farther out, across the water, a lighthouse was flashing.
At the same place as before, Fielding pulled over and parked the truck on the grass of the shoulder and turned off the engine and sat there looking out the window at the yellow tape blocking the boardwalk. He reached for the thermos and opened it and poured a cup then closed the lid and set it on the seat beside him and blew away the steam from the hot coffee. He looked at the tape again. Nothing moved out there. If it weren’t for the newness of the tape and what he had seen earlier it would almost look abandoned. As if the tape were there to keep people off a crumbling structure. And in a way it was. It was all rotten.
Now’s the time to leave, he said. Could just drink yer coffee and go home. No one would fault yeh for that.
He did drink his coffee but he didn’t go home. He looked at his watch. It read 2:37 a.m. He blinked. His eyes were heavy from all the evening’s whiskey. He took a deep breath in and let a deep breath out. Then he clicked on the dome light and reached for the glove box and took out the flashlight and set it on the dash and then took up the box of bullets and broke open the cylinder of the gun and loaded it one bullet at a time then closed the cylinder and set the gun on the dash next to the flashlight. He sat there looking at the gun. What it stood for, what it was capable of. The reason he had brought it in the first place. Then he grabbed the gun and opened it again and dumped the bullets out and put them back in the box and closed the gun and set it in the glove box. Then he grabbed the flashlight and clicked it on and opened the door and stepped out of the truck.
He listened for something to make a noise out there. Twenty-four hours ago some teenager was set on fire in some kind of twisted ritual. Twenty-four hours ago was not the past but the present and to be alone with all those ghosts made him uneasy. He looked past the tape to the boardwalk where it cut through a hedge of dune grass and knotweed. Looked past it to where the boardwalk ended and the sand met the water. He listened. Only the rain on the hood. The rain over the ground. A buoy somewhere out in the water with its lonely bell clanging in the swell.
He ducked the tape and walked to the end of the boardwalk. He stood there like someone might on the deck of a ship looking down into a dark ocean. To go any further would be to step from the earth, to set into motion a series of events with irrevocable consequences. To step from this world into another. Into oblivion.
Waves spilled along the shoreline. They tumbled small pebbles and the pebbles rolled against each other like a heavy sigh. He trained the flashlight downward and he swung it around looking for something. Anything.
Yeh ain’t a detective, he said to himself. What’re yeh doin out here? Yeh don’t even know what yer lookin for.
He walked over the sand toward the site. Wet nests of eelgrass and driftwood. Old shells breaking under his boots. He shined the light at the charred remains. The body had been taken away by the coroner earlier that day. There was a tent set up over it all to protect any evidence from the rain and there was tape around the whole thing.
He walked toward it. It was difficult going. The rock and the sand giving way under his heels. When he got to the tape he stopped. He knelt down to duck it but thought better and stood and shined his light. The crude bed where the young woman had lain was just as he had seen it. He watched it as if something might move. Watched as if something within the taped-off scene might tell him what the world was or would one day be, give any explanation whatsoever, but there was nothing.
He looked at the burned wood and at the small cairns erected over the sand and the flashlight threw the shadows of them out beyond the tent where the shadows of the cairns and the shadow of the burnt pyre were being rained upon. Quite often the white of a breaking wave would rise up and crash on the shore in the yellow light of the beam and wash over the rocks and then go dark. That’s where he was looking when he saw something. Marks over the sand. Indentations like boot prints. He went around the tape and shined the light at them. They looked new—not just looked, they were new. The rain hadn’t gotten to them the way it had with the others. The boot print a size fourteen or fifteen and made by someone tall. The stride was long. The prints came out of the darkness from down the beach and under the tape to the back of the pyre and stopped there like their maker had forgotten something. Then they turned around and went back the way they had come.
He felt like calling Batey. Get him out here to let him know he wasn’t just seeing things. Fielding looked down the beach. Looked behind him. Everything was dark and there wasn’t a pay phone for miles. He was alone in this.
He knelt and looked for any discerning quality in the sole of the boot but there was none. Just a flat print. Still kneeling he shined the light in the direction of the retreating prints. The rain falling through the light was caught for a moment and each drop was a perfect sphere. Looking off into the night, Fielding said: Whoever yeh are, yeh ain’t no beachcomber out for a midnight stroll.
He thought about what he was going to do. Clicked off the flashlight to judge any light farther down the beach but there was no light. He stood there thinking. Then he clicked the light back on. A pair of burning yellow eyes stared back at him through the rain, startling him to the point that he fumbled the flashlight and dropped it in the sand. He picked it up and leveled it at the eyes again. Only a raccoon and Fielding said, Yeh little bastard.
It did not move.
Git, he said, waving his hands at it.
The animal lumbered off and Fielding was left alone again.
This ain’t yer business, Fielding said to himself.
But the image of the burned corpse flashed in his mind again and it was the innocence that had been scourged out, the terror the poor girl must have felt, that made him turn once more to where the boot prints led.
Goddamnit, he said.
He began to follow them.
Had gone nearly a quarter mile when the tracks veered away from the water and up through the dune grass. Fielding stopped. He shined the light behind him to settle the notion that he was being followed. But there was nothing behind him but his own tracks.
He followed the boot prints up through the dune. The grass was tall as his waist. Anything could be hiding in there. Fielding stopped and listened. There was nothing but the rain. There was no wind and no cars out on the road and even the buoy far out in the water had seemed to cease its clanging. There was only the rain in the grass. Fielding kept on.
The trail narrowed and looked rarely used. Looked more like a game trail. But there was no game out here. And that fact brought Fielding no comfort. The trail led into dune grass that grew to Fielding’s shoulders and the bushy tufts were heavy with water and leaned in submission.
The tall grass ended abruptly along with the trail. It was like coming to a wall. Fielding stopped and shined his light about. He shined it behind him thinking he had made a wrong turn. The boot prints he’d been tracking simply vanished. In front of him was a thick hedge of salal and scrub pines with tortured limbs. Beyond that was the macadam of the road. He pushed through the hedge with more than a little effort and stepped finally onto the pavement.
Back up the road he could faintly make out the dark shape of his truck. The tent over the crime scene was hidden behind the dune. Standing there in the road he felt like he’d imagined the whole thing, like he had been tracking the boot prints of a phantom. He looked up at the rain breaking away from the dark firmament. It collided with his eyes and made him squint against it. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of a big-block engine starting up and tires trying to grip the wet asphalt and when he turned he saw a car with its lights off peeling toward him and at what seemed the final moment Fielding leapt off the road. He gathered himself up when he heard the car pass and he watched it race off down the spit. About a mile away its headlights came on and then the car disappeared.