Rather than driving straight to the cemetery, I drove in a haphazard spiral, following, as best I could, the path Nick had shown on the map. I passed the dentist's office at the edge of town where a crew in lime green vests were tossing burnt siding in a dumpster. Ten minutes later, I noticed a house with boards over the windows and black scorch marks scarring the yellow paint.
There was nothing remarkable about the neighborhood. The houses were neither big nor especially small. Lawns were mowed short and littered with bicycles and basketballs. The Honda fit right in.
I passed the building infested with salamanders and shivered to think the little monsters might still be in there. And, somehow, I suspected that Nick wouldn't even object to me calling them monsters. Sometimes a person's got to say it like it is.
As I drew closer to the cemetery, the lots grew larger. Occasional businesses, mostly of the industrial variety, popped up between homes.
Finally, I parked at the curb in front of a discount auto insurance place with peeling tint on the windows. For lack of anything better to do, fighting hard against imposter syndrome, I strolled up to the door and pulled it open. An electronic chime announced my presence in the dim lobby. The building smelled vaguely of air freshener and mold. Peeling laminate covered the floor. A poster with a picture of a vehicle smashed into the stem of an enormous wine goblet warned me to "drive aware, not impaired."
I had a sudden craving for a glass of wine.
A gorgeous young woman with an enormous afro and one arm in a sling slid a frosted glass window aside. "Can I help you?"
After a moment of fumbling, I managed to get my badge out of my pocket. I flashed it in her direction. "Agent Nowicki. I'm looking for a fugitive that may have been seen in this neighborhood."
Her brows shot upward. "Here? Geez, that's what we need, right? What do they look like?"
Uh... he's kind of ephemeral and made of smoke. Except sometimes he possesses people so he might look like my co-worker or any member of the road crew that recently passed through. Hard to tell, really.
I decided not to say that.
"He's known for adapting his appearance," I said. "I was just wondering if you've noticed anything strange."
She rolled her eyes. "Strange is the norm around here. If things were straight, I'd be worried."
"I don't follow."
"Well, for starters, the guy who owns this building—I'm pretty sure he's in the mafia or something. And if he is, he's right out of the Hollywood playbook. It's ridiculous. He shows up on the last day of every month to collect the rent in this big black Cadillac and he wears those velvet jogging suits and sunglasses, you know what I mean? Always has some young blonde thing with him, but never the same one twice, and he makes a point of never wanting anything other than cash, nothing bigger than a twenty. My boss packs up the rent in banded stacks of cash and he's always sure to be away at some important meeting when it's time to pay."
"That is weird," I agreed.
"Yeah, well, that's the least of it. The kids around here seem to think there's something cool and sexy about sneaking into a cemetery after dark to drink and smoke and have sex and God knows what else."
"You see them over there?"
"Not me." When she shook her head, the gold earrings that dangled from her ears brushed over her straight, narrow shoulders. "I'm out of here at six every night, but I see the beer cans and condoms and such. And at least twice, they hung a dead cat from that iron fence."
I recoiled at the thought.
"I know, disgusting, right? What kind of sicko does that?" She said. "Then there's the hermit down there in the purple shack. How that place hasn't already been condemned or just collapsed in on itself is beyond me. I swear it must be held up by magical wishes and unicorn tears."
That had to be the holy woman Nick had told me about. I didn't tell the lady that the house might actually be held up by magical wishes and unicorn tears. I wasn't sure if unicorns were real or if they cried. Golly, there were so very many things I wasn't sure about all of a sudden.
Focus.
"You know the lady who lives there?" I asked.
"Ain't nobody know her, assuming it's a her. She gets everything delivered and never comes out 'cept to snatch her grocery bags off the porch, but you hear clanking and banging in her garage all hours of the day and night. What's she building in there? I think we have a right to know."
"Maybe she's really into crafting," I suggested.
"With chainsaws?" She shook her head. "Anyway, you want to know about crazy, you're going to have to be real specific about what kind of crazy you mean."
"The kind of crazy that blows things up," I said.
"Nah. Nothing like that. Not around here. We're a quieter, more residential version of crazy in these parts."
"What happened to your arm?" I asked.
Her smile faltered. "Fell down the stairs. I'm pretty clumsy, I guess."
Having seen my "clumsy" mom "fall down the stairs" more than once over the years, my heart recognized the lie and ached for her. I wrote my number down and passed it to her. "If you ever fall again, and you need help getting up, you call me." Then I thanked her for her time and stepped back into the cool air that stank of automobile exhaust and stagnant water in the storm drains. Across the street, the branches of the old oaks in the cemetery waved in the breeze. I navigated the cracked, crooked sidewalk past a two-story house with peeling white paint and a confederate flag in the window.
It always shakes me a little to know some portion of the country longs to split in half so they can own their fellow humans. What would people like that say if they knew people like Nick lived among them? Nothing good, I'd wager. The more I thought about it, the more sense their obsession with secrecy made.
A self storage unit stretched along the next several lots. Poison ivy clung to the surrounding chain-link fence—probably a more effective deterrent than the rusty barbed wire at the top.
The holy hermit's house sat haphazard as a child's wooden blocks. The top, slightly larger than the bottom, canted forward dangerously on two rotten pillars. The whole thing had been painted lilac at some point, but the years had worn purple to near-gray and the paint peeled in great, dry flakes. A crumbling picket fence, maybe three feet tall, stretched from the brick wall of the storage unit, across the front lawn, to the sheet metal wall of the sign factory on the other side. Scraggly grass nearly as tall as the fence filled the space except for a narrow brick walkway that led to three brick steps.
The porch was as immaculate as the yard was messy. Bright crimson mums bloomed in shiny black pots on either side of a screen door that hung lopsided on ancient hinges. A floral pattern rug, crimson and black, stretched over the floorboards. Apparently, one of the aforementioned deliveries had been recently made. Two paper grocery sacks sat there, full to overflowing.
I slowed and pulled my phone from my pocket, pretended to be texting while taking a quick string of pictures to examine more closely later.
Don't go to the holy...
What if this was exactly where Nick didn't want me to be?
A person smarter than me might have put that together before they were in the holy woman's front yard. I turned to jog across the street in order to put some distance between her and me, but realized just as I stepped off the curb that the other side of the street was the cemetery.
Don't go to the holy ground?
I tripped over my feet and narrowly avoided being flattened by a Ford F-150 driven by an old man who honked and screamed something about drinking in the daytime.
I jumped back onto the sidewalk and happened to look up just in time to see the holy woman's screen door swing shut. The grocery sacks had disappeared.
Trying hard not to look drunk, I hustled back to the Honda, slipped in behind the steering wheel, and pulled the door shut. Safe behind the tinted windows, I opened my phone and scrolled through the pictures. At first glance, they yielded nothing more than I'd already noticed, but I zoomed in as far as my phone would allow and scanned across the upper-story windows, covered with floral print curtains, along the clogged rain gutters where baby trees had begun to sprout, and across the porch.
There, on top of the grocery sack, was a can of baby formula.
My hands tingled and all the blood ran from my face. If a baby wasn't worth dying for and killing for, what was?