Page 108 of Stay Buried

Ash ignored him, and he continued. “I mean, Mom didn’t ‘vanish.’ She left town, headed home. Now I can totally see why she would have been distraught—the fire, Willy’s wife dying—she probably blamed herself.”

Every fiber of Ashley’s being was telling her this was not what had happened to her mother—but she still didn’t have proof.

“After what I heard today, I think it’s more than that, I really do.”

He put his arm around her. “Okay. Let’s go get supplies and find Willy. I want to hear what he has to say about Mom. Maybe we can bribe him to tell us more with all the treats we’re bringing.”

Ash leaned into him.

THE BELLS ONthe door of Pops’ General Store jingled when they walked in. The man behind the counter called out, “Can I help you?” before their eyes had even adjusted to the dim light. It sounded like they’d just walked into his house uninvited and he was about to reach for a shotgun. He wore a flannel shirt tucked into blue work pants hikedup high and cinched around his narrow waist with a thick leather belt adorned with a gigantic silver buckle shaped like a horseshoe. Both hands were resting on the worn counter beside the register.

“Yes, thanks,” Malcolm said. He dug around in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the worn washer from Josephine’s dripping sink. “We need one of these if you’ve got one.”

The man took the washer and shuffled to the back of the store where there were drawers full of fasteners, bits and bobs of all sorts. Malcolm joined him, watching as he opened one tiny drawer after another, muttering to himself. Ashley found a root beer and looked around. The old wooden floor creaked. There was a wooden barrel of pickles, a small deli, a pizza oven, a huge display of hunting and fishing things. A spinning rack of items made at the Stoddard Factory caught Ashley’s attention: bags of wooden clothespins, red tops wound with string, cup-and-ball toys. Ash picked up one of the toys and flicked her wrist, trying to get the ball on a string into the cup. She missed by a mile, and the hard little wood ball bonked her on the back of the hand.

It took a long time for the shopkeeper to find the right washer, but once he did, he ambled back to the counter, Malcolm following.

“We also need tobacco,” Mal said.

“What sort of tobacco?”

“I’m not sure,” Mal said, which proved to be the exactly wrong thing to say, because what followed was the man pulling each and every sort of loose tobacco, both cigarette and pipe, from behind the counter and showing it to Malcolm. He clearly planned to give an in-depth analysis of each, talking to Malcolm like he was a dense child.

“Any will do, really,” Mal said.

“You’ve got to choose,” the shopkeeper said, his irritation building. “I can’t choose for you.”

“I’m buying it for someone in town, a man named Willy?”

The man frowned. “Well, Sad Willy used to smoke Camels back in the day, but now he isn’t too fussy. He’d be happy smoking butts picked up around town, but we all look out for him. Help him out. That’s theway it is around here.”

Malcolm nodded. The shopkeeper leaned over, resting his elbows on the counter, and said, a little too loud, spittle flying, “I don’t know how it is whereyou peoplecome from.”

Mal quickly selected a bright-yellow pouch of Top tobacco and a pack of Zig-Zag rolling papers. Ash added in the Hires root beer.

The shopkeeper couldn’t seem to work the credit card machine, and when Mal tried to help, explaining that he was putting the card in upside down, the man fumbled and dropped Mal’s card on the floor behind the register. He took a long time recovering it, bending in slow motion, grabbing at his back as if it pained him.

“We’ll just pay cash,” Ashley said, putting a twenty on the counter. The shopkeeper picked it up and studied it a long time, as if it might be counterfeit, before opening the register and counting back their change.

When all was said and done, their little pit stop at the store had taken nearly half an hour.

They left the store and headed straight for the bridge.

“Pops was something, huh?” Mal said.

“If you call being a total asshole ‘something,’ then yeah,” Ash said, laughing.

They made their way down to Willy’s camp below the bridge. At the factory across the river, a few workers were on break outside, sitting at picnic tables. Some were playing cards, some were smoking. They cast their eyes at Ashley and Mal, then looked away. No one approached, no one called out to see who they were or what they were doing at Sad Willy’s. Malcolm raised a hand to wave, but no one waved back.

Willy was not home.

“Guess our man is on walkabout,” Malcolm said as he eyed the empty bedroll.

“When I saw him earlier, he did say he had something to do.” She looked across the river at the factory workers. “Let’s just leave the stuff and get out of here. These guys are giving me the creeps. It feels likethey’re trying too hard not to look at us.”

“Maybe it’s like what Josephine said. Outsiders make them nervous,” Malcolm said. “Let’s get back to the motel, sort through the trunk a bit more. Then maybe we can bring it over to Josephine’s later. You see how excited she got about Frankie’s diaries? It would mean a lot to her, plus she’ll recognize some of the people in the photos, some of the names in the documents.”

They got to the Deer Run Motel to see that there was a sign in a clear plastic protective envelope hanging in the office window: a watercolor of a man in waders standing in the middle of a turquoise stream, holding a fishing pole. On the end of his line, a strange silver-and-blue-scaled fish with bulbous eyes and a mouth more like a bird’s beak was leaping from the water, a hook in its lip.GONE FISHINsaid the sign.