The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

I looked at him without being obvious about it, then realized I hadn’t taken off my sunglasses yet, just like at the market. It could’ve been you, I thought. No reason to think so, but when a killing is never solved, a body never found, it can’t not cross your mind when you look at some people, the ones with proximity and access and history. The ones you really don’t know anything about anymore. If Ray had known where to find berries, he’d know where to bury a girl.

“Especially then,” I said.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked. “My apologies if I did.”

He sounded sincere, but I’d been hearing sincere for years. Naw, boss, I don’t know who hid that shank in my bunk. Not me, boss, I didn’t have nothing to do with that bag of pruno. They were all sincere down to the rot at their core.

The other C.O.s had warned me early on: There’ll come a time when you look at everybody like they’re guilty of something.

I’d refused to believe this: No, I know how to leave work at work.

Now it was me telling the new C.O.s the same thing.

I took off the shades. “You didn’t say anything wrong. A thing like that, you never really get over it. Time doesn’t heal the wounds, it just thickens up the scars.” I moved to the screen door and looked outside, smelled the autumn day, a golden scent of sun-warmed leaves. “It’s not like it used to be around here, is it.”

He shrugged. “Where is?”

I had him follow me outside, and turned my face to the sun, shutting my eyes and just listening, thinking that it at least sounded the way it had. That expansive, quiet sound of birds and wide-open spaces.

“When I was at the market, I would’ve needed at least two hands to count the people I’d be willing to bet will be dead in five years,” I said. “How’d this get started?”

Ray eyed me hard. I knew it even with my eyes closed. I’d felt it as sure as if he’d poked me with two fingers. When I opened my eyes, he looked exactly like I knew he would.

“You’re some kind of narc now, aren’t you, Dylan?” he said.

“Corrections officer. I don’t put anybody in prison, I just try to keep the peace once they’re there.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth, his gaze on far distances. “Well… the way anything starts, I guess. A little at a time. It’s a space issue, mostly. Space, privacy. We got plenty of both here. And time. Got plenty of that, too.”

His great-uncle hadn’t, not to my recollection. Mr. Tepovich had always had just enough time, barely, to do what needed doing. The same as my grandfather. I wondered where all that time had come from.

“How many meth labs are there around here, I wonder,” I said.

“I couldn’t tell you anything. All I know’s what I hear, and I don’t hear much.”

Can’t help you, boss. I don’t know nothing about that.

“But if you were to get lucky and ask the right person,” Ray went on, “I expect he might tell you something like it was the only thing he was ever good at. The only thing that ever worked out for him.”

The trees murmured, and leaves whisked against the birdhouse gourds.

“He might even take the position that it’s a blessed endeavor.”

I hadn’t expected this. “Blessed by who?”

His hesitation here, his uncertainty, looked like the first genuine expression since we’d started down this path. “Powers that be, I guess. Not government, not those kinds of powers. Something… higher.” He tipped his head back, jammed his big jaw and bristly beard forward, scowling at the sky. “Say there’s a place in the woods, deep, where nobody’s likely to go by accident. Not big, but not well hid, either. Now say there’s a team from the sheriff’s department taking themselves a hike. Fifteen, twenty feet away and they don’t see it. Now say the same thing happens with a group of fellows got on jackets that say ‘DEA.’ They all just walk on by like nothing’s there.”

He was after something, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe Ray didn’t know either. They say if you stick around a prison long enough, you’ll see some strange things that are almost impossible to explain, and even if I hadn’t, I’d heard some stories. Maybe Ray had heard that as well, and was looking for… what, someone who understood?

“I don’t know what else you’d call that,” he said, “other than blessed.”

“For a man who doesn’t hear much, you have some surprising insights.”

His gaze returned to earth and the mask went back on. “Maybe I keep my ear to the ground a little more than I let on.” He began to sidle away toward his aunt’s. “You take care, Dylan. Again, sorry about Evvie.”

“Hey Ray? Silly question, but…” I said. “Your Aunt Polly, your own grandma, your mom, anybody… when you were a kid, did any of them ever tell you stories about something called the Woodwalker?”