I took a bite of my sandwich. “Are you foreign in time?”
“I grew up with people who have never been out of the mountains, never will. Not even as far as Lexington. There are more of them than you’d think. I’ve been to college, spent a few months traveling abroad. Even been to New-freakin’-York and Los Angeles. I like big cities. But I love it here, too. So I guess I’m sort of suspended between two worlds. Come on inside, Carson. Let me give you the tour.”
I followed her into her home, basically the floor plan of my cabin back at Road’s End, just fifty per cent larger. There was a living area with vaulted ceiling, a half-loft above, a door at the end leading into an upper bedroom.
The wall open to the high ceiling on the fireplace end of the living area had been plastered or dry-walled and painted a creamy white. Ditto the wall beside the stairs to the loft. The seamless white formed the background for dozens of items from photographs through old advertising posters to antique tools. A tan and red-banded hat of straw centered the collection. Arranging a sizeable number of items on a surface is difficult – it’s composition – but Cherry had an eye for balance.
I studied the tools, odd assemblages of wood and leather and metal. A couple of them looked cruel, almost threatening. “I’ve never seen tools like these before,” I said. “What are they?”
She padded over and stood at my side, beer bottle in hand. “I have no idea. They were in Uncle Horace’s shed. I suppose they have something to do with horses. The hat’s his, too; he wore it everywhere. Here’s my favorite picture—”
She pointed to a photo of a pretty young girl, eight or nine, standing beside a barrel-chested man with waxed dark hair. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, dark bolo tie, and the same tan hat hanging on the wall. He was grinning like he’d just won the lottery.
“Uncle Horace and you?” I asked.
“Yep. That’s Uncle Horace in most of the shots.”
I studied another photo, Horace Cherry bedecked in an ice-cream suit with cocked and jaunty hat riding his crown. His smile seemed radiant and boundless, the young Donna Cherry at his side looking heartbreakingly innocent.
“He always wore the suit, right?” I asked, knowing it was a uniform.
“With the hat atop his crown everywhere he went. He was a dandy. It was funny.”
Something in the photo started to make me uneasy. Something in the eyes perhaps. Or maybe it was the age of the photo, a darkening of the shadows.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea.” Cherry crouched to reach into a low cabinet, pulling out a squat brown bottle. I tried not to notice the way her dress hugged her body. She shook back her hair and studied the bottle’s yellowed label as she stood. I saw her nipples buzzing against the fabric of her dress like anxious bees. I wanted them to carry honey to my tongue.
“It’s some kind of special cognac,” she said. “A gift from Uncle Horace years ago. He said to have a sip on special occasions. Want a tipple to celebrate your first skylift ride? All in all, you liked the trip, right?”
“It was wonderful,” I lied, feeling a smile rise to my lips as I moved a half-step closer to Donna Cherry. My knees loose with the promise of honey, I started to reach for her hand.
And stopped. Froze with my hand suspended in midair. I couldn’t tell if the hand was part of the me I knew as me or the priapic rogue my brother kept telling me was me. Was it me interested in Cherry or was it he, the broken me? From nowhere my brother’s mocking voice rose unbidden in my head.
“Part of your childhood damage manifests in a shy roguish charm you use to warm yourself with temporary lovers, Carson …”
I realized he’d said those things knowing I’d hear them at moments like this. I’d forgotten how consuming was his need to affect others from a distance. To keep a tight chain.
“Wait here a second,” I told Cherry.
“Uh, Carson, did I say something?”
“You’re fine. I’ll be right back.”
I walked outside, close to the edge of the precipice, where I crouched and found a round chunk of sandstone. I mentally mapped my position, turned to the general direction of the hollow, trying to aim my eyes directly at my brother’s cabin, visualizing him sitting on the porch. I side-armed the stone high and away in his direction and closed my eyes. I pictured the rock traveling five or so miles, falling from the sky like a meteorite and smacking my brother dead-center in his forehead, knocking him backwards in his chair, newspaper fluttering down on his startled face.
“Keep your hands outta my head, Brother,” I said, backing my symbolic missile with the most potent digital icon in American culture.
When I stepped back inside I felt fifty pounds lighter, like a leaden yoke had melted from my shoulders. “Pour the cognac,” I said, stepping to Cherry and no longer wondering who was talking.
She lifted a perplexed eyebrow. “Are you all right?”
“I had a simple ritual to perform. Like an exorcism.”
“Uh, do you always—”
I pressed my finger to her lips, stilling them. The sensation of warmth was exquisite. “My own small skylift ritual. I had something bothering me, but it fell away.” I withdrew my finger, reluctantly.
“When you put it in those terms, I think I understand.” She lifted her glass. “Shall we drink to solving the case?”
“No,” I corrected. “Let’s drink to us.”
We clicked glasses. The cognac was dizzying in my head, distilled manna aged in oak and leather. We next raised our glasses to the tan hat of our cognac-giving benefactor, Horace T. Cherry, staring dark-eyed from the photo centering the wall of pictures and weird objects. We set the glasses on the table and sat on the couch, almost touching. I’m sure I heard her bees buzzing.
My cellphone rasped from my pocket. I rolled my eyes and answered.
“This is Heywood Williams,” an elderly male voice said, loud, like a guy with hearing problems. “I’m manager of the Pumpkin Patch Campground. We got a dog running loose around here matches the description on a poster one of the Woslee cops dropped off.”
“The dog’s a big guy?” I asked. “Kinda odd-looking?”
“I guess. Odd looks different to different people. Big ol’ boy. Friendly.”
I took the address, clear on the other side of the Gorge. I’d already had several calls, able to figure out it wasn’t Mix-up by questioning the caller. But this call had promise.
“I heard,” Cherry said as I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “Go, Carson. I hope it’s Mix-up. But even if it isn’t, I’m still hopeful, right?”
She stood on her toes and gave me a millisecond’s kiss on my lips, more dizzying by far than the cognac.
The Pumpkin Patch Campground was twenty minutes distant. I drove past the campground sign, pumpkin-shaped and promising hookups, fire pits and a dumping station. Mr Williams was reading a newspaper in a folding chair beside a small wooden kiosk where guests checked in. He was somewhere in his seventies, wearing a pumpkin-colored porkpie hat and Bermuda shorts.
“I’m sorry,” Williams said sheepishly. “The dog belonged to a group of campers. I hadn’t seen it when they checked in.”
He pointed to a bright recreational vehicle across a small park area. The family – husband, wife, three smallish kids – were still setting up, the husband on the roof of the vehicle