CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SATURDAY

An all-day rain has set in by the time Gray rouses himself. He’s been awake since five and finally surrenders to consciousness at seven.

He knows he is badly out of his element. Whatever awaits him beyond the mailbox bearing the word “Quick” hand-painted in red letters probably will require more from him than he is sure he can deliver. It was one thing to strongarm the fat man at Lost Treasures into giving him a name. Getting the person who sold him the ring to tell him where and how the hell he got it seems a lot dicier.

For one of the few times in his life, Gray wishes that he was in possession of a firearm.

He avails himself of the motel’s indifferent breakfast, which he immediately feels turning into trouble in his digestive tract.

He makes a call to Betsy before he checks out and tells her that he plans to meet with the man who sold his high school class ring.

“By yourself? Does he know you’re coming?”

Gray is silent.

“Damn. You’re not going to do it yourself? Please, get some help.”

He wonders if he needs the kind of assistance people usually refer to when they urge a friend to “get some help,” the kind that requires counseling and/or drugs. He is not feeling quite himself today. A more sane person would be going to someone with a badge and a gun right now, but Gray doesn’t think he is being paranoid when he distrusts authority at this point.

He tells Betsy not to worry, that he has it under control.

Which he knows damn well he does not. He doesn’t even know if he’s on a path leading anywhere except a dead end. Maybe the boy, this Nubby Quick, found the ring somewhere. But whatever the answer, Gray knows he has to follow that ring as far as he can.

It’s the only path he knows to resolution, which he’s more than ready for, whatever the outcome. And it’s the only thing left of Annie. He wants to know, once and for all, the size and shape of this ghost that has followed him for more than half a lifetime.

GRAY IS on the road by nine. The windshield wipers on his Camry need replacing. Their efforts to brush away the pelting rain leave large streaks that he tries to see through and around.

He passes through Sykes again, then misses the turn to the farmhouse and mobile home that was so evident to him in yesterday’s sunshine. A driver in a pickup so jacked up that the headlights blind him tailgates him and sits down on his horn when Gray slows down and seeks to find a place to turn around.

On the second try, he sees the mailbox. He pulls onto a rut road whose tracks are filled with red, muddy water. Driving by the farmhouse, he sees that it is abandoned. Some of the windows are covered with plywood. Some are open to the elements. An old chimney leans away from the house, defying gravity. As he drives past, he sees that a large sycamore has fallen on the back of the structure and lies there undisturbed, as if it is, like the old place itself, exhausted.

Looking through the streaks on his windshield, Gray can make out a car in the little driveway that encircles the mobile home. The hood is a faded red; the rest of the car is a dull yellow.

There is a light on inside the trailer. He has been wondering if the fat man might have given Norville “Nubby” Quick a heads-up on his coming.

“Last chance,” he mutters to himself as he stops the car in front, but he knows he’s not going to back away now. Forward seems like the only option.

He didn’t think to pack an umbrella, and he gets more or less soaked running from the car to the front door and then waiting for whoever is inside to answer his frantic knock. He can hear heavy metal pounding away inside, so loud that he can feel its vibration on the flimsy door.

The music drops to bearable levels, and the door opens. The man who answers, a boy really, looks like he just woke up. Dope smoke hangs in the air.

“Yeah?” he says, opening wide enough to size up his visitor.

“I’m looking for Norville Quick.”

“Who’s asking?”

Nubby Quick is a skinny kid. Gray figures he’s probably still in his teens. He has sallow yellow hair, black at the roots. His eyebrows and nose are pierced. His pipestem arms are a graffiti wall of tattoos. He looks like he might weigh 140 pounds soaking wet, which is his visitor’s condition right now.

Gray can’t think of a graceful way to get the conversation started.

“I think you took something of mine,” he says to the boy, whom he hopes doesn’t have a gun, or at least that whatever firearm he has isn’t on him at the moment.

“The hell you talking about?”

“This.”

Gray holds up his left hand. He tried on the ring after he bought it from Dot Gaines and saw that it still fit, maybe better than it did when he was eighteen. He figured, what the hell, might as well wear it to the day of reckoning.

The boy tries to close the door, but Gray sticks his foot inside and pushes his way in.

“Get out of my house,” Nubby Quick says, and when he takes a swing, Gray understands the nickname. His left sleeve is empty.

A two-armed kid might have been able to take him, but Gray manages to wrestle him down onto a charmless, stained couch after absorbing only a glancing blow. The brief scuffle leaves him sucking wind, but he is in control.

“You’re trespassing!” the boy shouts and tries to reach for the phone.

Gray feels like a bully. He was anticipating a confrontation, but he wasn’t expecting his adversary to have only one arm.

“I don’t want to cause you any trouble,” Gray says when the kid finally stops yelling. “I just want to know where you got the damn ring. I lost it a long time ago. I want to know how it wound up with you.”

Nubby denies knowing anything about the ring. He seems a little on the dim side, but he appears to figure out eventually that there is no doubt that he is the one who sold the ring and whatever else he brought to Lost Treasures.

“Look,” he says, “I just found it, OK? Don’t know what the hell you care anyhow. It’s just a damn high school ring. Won’t worth much, I can tell you that.”

“And you found all the other stuff you sold at that store, too, I guess. Listen. I don’t care what you did to get the ring. I don’t care if you stole it off a blind man. But if you don’t tell me where it came from, then I will, as God is my witness, go straight to the sheriff’s office, and you can explain to them where you got all that stuff.”

If there is a gun in the trailer, Gray doubts that Nubby is fast enough to get it before he can stop him.

The boy seems to be considering his options. Gray isn’t interested in telling him the real reason he wants to know where he got the ring. He doesn’t want to reveal that he has far more serious legal problems than his young captive does.

The rain hammers the trailer’s living room. It seems to have turned from a steady downpour into a monsoon. Nubby starts to get up, but Gray pulls him back down.

“Just you and me,” he says. “Tell me where you got it, and I promise you your name won’t be mentioned.

“Besides, you don’t have a lot of choices, do you? You have to trust me, whether you like it or not.”

Finally Nubby starts talking. And when he does, he can’t seem to stop. Gray wants to tell him that he probably doesn’t have much of a future as a criminal, if a sixty-seven-year-old, out-of-shape ex-teacher can sweat the truth out of him so easily.

It wasn’t the first time he had stolen. He says he felt like he was entitled to something, “on account of the arm and all.”

He lost it when he was six years old. He and some other boys were out playing. There was a railroad track behind the house. Nubby points backward, indicating that Gray could see where it was, if the trailer had a window that wasn’t rendered nearly opaque by dirt and grime.

“Ain’t nothing there now. The railroad cut off that line five years ago, even took up the tracks, but there was a train there that day, I can tell you that.”

They liked to play chicken with the Lexington and Saluda engine that came by twice a day, once coming and once going. One of the older boys dared Nubby, who was still Norvie then, to stand until he told him to move.

“It was like a initiation. I reckon I was a little too brave.”

He tripped when he tried to jump, and the train passed over his left arm.

“I like to of bled to death,” he says.

He never finished high school and has been drawing benefits from the government for years.

“And then, last year, Momma passed.”

As far as Gray can tell, without getting any further into Nubby Quick’s life story, there wasn’t any “Daddy” around, so he was on his own.

He knew a woman who had been his teacher in the ninth grade.

“She treated me right, didn’t act like I was a retard or something.”

The woman had even invited Nubby to her home a couple of times, enough for him to see that she had a lot of nice things lying around.

He further saw that she didn’t lock her doors.

“She said it was a good neighborhood, that they looked out for each other. She ought to of been more careful.”

So, one day last winter, when Nubby was trying to think where he could lay his hands on some much-needed cash to pay the guy to come and refill his oil tank, he thought of Mrs. Goforth.

“It just come to me,” he says. “The way she didn’t lock the doors, and how she was gone all day. And I remembered that the house had a bunch of big old trees around it. Made it hard to see from the road. And there weren’t no neighbors right beside her place.”

Her house was in the next town over, five miles away. Nubby went over there on a rainy December morning “sorta like this,” and waited at the 7-Eleven down the road until he saw her car pull out of the driveway. Twenty minutes later, he drove up, walked in, and took what he could carry.

“Couldn’t take any big shit,” he says, pointing to the empty sleeve, “but there was a lot of stuff that looked like it might be worth something. That ring was in a old box in a closet in her bedroom. There was some stuff in there that looked like it might be worth something. The ring, it just happened to be in there. I didn’t get but five dollars for it.”

He said he took his haul to the fat man at Lost Treasures because “me and him, we had kind of a business relationship, you might say. I reckon he’s the one that told you where he got it.”

Gray doesn’t say anything about that, but he reassures Nubby that he won’t tell anyone how he found out where the ring came from. He doesn’t know just yet how he’s going to make that happen, but a promise is a promise, even to a thief.

Nubby asks for permission to smoke. Gray tells him to go ahead. He can see the cigarettes and lighter on the counter next to the couch.

Nubby lights up using his one hand. It seems to calm his nerves a little. He turns to Gray, pointing with the lit Camel.

“What I want to know,” he says, “is why you give a shit about that ring. I mean, everybody gets one, everybody that gets through twelfth grade anyhow. You must hold a hell of a grudge. That ring must be …” Nubby tries to do the math, then adds, “… old as shit.”

Gray figures he has nothing to lose in putting the fear of God in Nubby.

“It has to do with a murder,” he says. “I can’t tell you any more than that.”

Nubby seems impressed.

“No shit? Man, if it’s that important, I should of asked for more for it.”

Despite the fact that Nubby Quick is a petty criminal who is inevitably going to wind up as a ward of the state in the near future, Gray feels for him.

“Out of curiosity,” he asks, “why are you living in this trailer when there’s a house next door?”

Nubby snorts.

“Did you see that fuckin’ house? Best thing that could happen to it would be if it was to burn down.”

“But couldn’t you fix it up?”

“With what? Man, you must live in some world where money grows on trees. I could sell the land here and get a few thousand, maybe, but then where the hell am I goin’ to live? This land is all I got.”

Gray gets up to leave, keeping an eye on Nubby to make sure he doesn’t try to stop him or maybe go for a gun.

The boy laughs.

“Don’t worry, man. The gun’s in the bedroom, and I ain’t ever fired it except to kill snakes.”

On the way out, Gray reaches in his wallet and hands the kid a twenty. Nubby acts like he doesn’t want to take it, but when Gray assures him it’s money well-earned for the information he gave him, he puts it in his jeans pocket.

Gray shuts the door and makes a run for the car, getting soaked again in the process. Before he starts the car, he hears the head-banging music blare out again from the trailer’s thin walls.

HE HAS lunch at a fast-food joint and pays for a second night in the motel. The clerk seems surprised that he’s back. Gray supposes most travelers don’t rent their rooms one night at a time.

He has Nubby Quick’s former teacher’s address. He is able to find out her full name, Isadora Goforth, by Googling her last name and address. He calls the number listed but only gets an answering machine.

He drives back past Sykes and turns off at a sign that says, “Red Hill, 3 miles.” The relentless rain has slacked off somewhat, and he finds the mailbox with “Goforth” on it as he enters the town limits of a place that looks to be no bigger or better-appointed than Sykes.

He turns into the driveway and sees no car. Nubby Quick was correct in his assessment of the house. Despite the fact that it is in the town limits, the lots on both sides are empty, and someone has planted bamboo. It looks as if she is living in a clear spot inside a jungle. It must have been, as Nubby surmised, an easy place to break into.

No one answers when he knocks. When he checks the door, he sees that Isadora Goforth has decided that her neighborhood is not quite as crime-free as she had thought.

Back at the motel, Gray calls Betsy and tells her what he’s found out so far.

Then he calls Marcus Green. The lawyer picks up. From the street noise, Gray deduces that the lawyer is in his car.

“Man,” Green says, “where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you and nobody answers.”

Gray apologizes and figures he must have accidentally turned his cell off or muted it.

“You need to get back up here,” the lawyer says. “They’re looking for you. I think you’re going to need a lawyer soon.”

The last thing he does before he falls asleep is to call his old editor. He tells Corrine Manzi what he found out.

“And you promised this guy you wouldn’t drag him into it? How are you going to not drag him into it?”

“It was the only way I could find out what I needed to know. I’ll figure some way to keep him out of it.”

“Why? He sounds like a scumbag loser.”

“I promised.”

He can hear Corrine sigh.

“You’re not in a position to be doing people favors right now. You need everything you can muster, underhanded, devious, whatever, to get out of this.”

“They might be coming for me anytime now.”

“Well, let me check around. Red Hill isn’t that far from Charlotte. Let me see what I can find out.”

“Just make sure you don’t tell her about the break-in.”

“That’s going to be tough. Let me think about it.”

Then Gray drops off to what he thinks now might be his last sleep outside captivity.