Hair of the Dog (Part 4)

I emerged into the hot fog of beer, grease, and cheap aftershave that defined Friday night at MeeMaw’s, and for a moment, I was sure the storm had arrived to knock out the electricity. The place was dim, lit by flickering candles, and strings of blinking white and blue Christmas lights festooned along the dirty junction of the walls and acoustic tile ceiling. The juke crooned out a slow country ballad in the requisite twang at full volume, and couples thronged the dance floor, swaying and groping in the summer gloom.

Trudy had abandoned her perch. I stood on tiptoe at the end of the bar and scanned the room for Nick. The bartender materialized and touched my elbow. He pointed to the line of booths along the wall where the shadows hung over candles in Mason jars as though warming themselves. Nick and Red John Kovak huddled in the corner booth, their noses over the juddering flame like crystal-ball diviners.

Kovak’s lips moved. He shrugged and made a sweeping hand gesture, then helped himself to the onion rings on the platter between them. He grinned and chewed, the unstable light striking sparks from his fiery beard. I remembered what Maudie had said about such things running in a family, and Claudia’s casual quip about distant cousins, and gooseflesh rose on my arms. Nick’s face was serious, even grim. A shiver of guilty dread rippled down my back. I made my way to the booth, weaving among the lovestruck dancers. Nick glanced up, saw me, and fixed me with a chilly, blue stare. He stood and let me slip in past him.

“Well, hey there,” Red John boomed, flashing a million bucks worth of dazzling fang, “I was just telling your friend here about how old Preston must’ve took off on a toot. Ain’t seen him for almost two weeks. I’d have said something earlier, but I figured he was holed up out at his shack with a woman. He gets up to it sometimes, the dog.”

I tried a smile, “Not much privacy there, with his aunt living with him.”

The wattage of Kovak’s grin dimmed a shade, though he kept it firmly in place, “Well, she’s got a wandering bone herself. You never know where Maudie might turn up.” He tapped the side of his head and laughed, “She’s touched, and I oughtta know. She’s my Gran’s sister.”

“You’re family?”

I shot a sidelong glance at Nick and found his gaze on me. I cocked an eyebrow at him, but his contemplative expression didn’t change.

“Yeah, I’ve been around Maudie all my life, but I wouldn’t say we’re close or nothing. She was fair scandalous in her younger days. I was telling your friend here about it.” He nodded at Nick, then slid around the horseshoe bench of the booth until his thigh touched mine. “You know, I told my Gran about you. Showed her your picture from the security camera in the store,” He reached out and stroked my hand. “Didn’t you say your people was from around here?”

I jerked my hand away as though burned. Another slow ballad tumbled out of the juke, and the couples on the dance floor swung into it without pause. Nick leaned toward me, but his eyes never left Red John.

“Let’s dance,” he said, and pulled me after him into the undulating shadows.

“What the hell was that about?” I hissed.

Nick bent and murmured in my ear, “I think Red John might be our werewolf. I asked him about the legend, and he got all squirrely. After a couple of beers—and I’m telling you that man can slam them down—he nearly talked my ear off about his family history. It’s caught up in the old stories.” He swung me into the darkness at the edge of the crowd, beyond the glowing beer signs, “It’s a family legend, not just a regional one. Get this, Preston Egolf isn’t really Maudie’s nephew. He’s her adopted son, and no love lost between him and John. Nobody knows where she got him, or how. The family’s always been afraid she kidnapped him. They’ve told everyone for the last sixty years that he’s her nephew. Now we find out Preston’s missing.”

I pictured Maudie, with her sly stare, assuring us she’d send her nephew out to the lodge in the morning, “Do you think it’s like John said, that Preston is just on a tear? Maudie didn’t say anything about him being missing.”

Nick shook his head, “Something’s not right. After talking to John, I wouldn’t be surprised to find Preston roasting on a spit somewhere. Or, more likely, carved into nice bloody steaks for the raw foodies in the family.”

“You don’t believe in werewolves any more than I do,” I said, the words lacking conviction.

“I believe in crazy. Kovak makes my hair stand on end. I’m pretty sure he believes in werewolves, and thinks he is one. You should have heard him.” He stared over my shoulder toward our abandoned booth, “I think you’d better keep away from him. He’s got an unhealthy interest.”

I shook my head, stepping back to look up at him, “I don’t think he’s the one we have to worry about. Maybe we shouldn’t have come up here in the first place.”

I wanted to tell him about the phantom phone call in Trudy’s office, and about the eerie stirring in my blood. I wanted to tell him that I’d fallen into a state of belief at odds with writerly exploration, that things had slipped dangerously sideways, and we should just leave, but he looked so severe the words died in my throat.

Nick tugged me closer, “I thought we were here to research an old monster story, maybe get some good material out of it. I feel like we’re in much deeper water; and I feel like you knew we would be.”

“No! I didn’t know it would be so… alive. I have some distant family ties here. That’s how I got interested in the first place, and it’s how Claudia found out the lodge was for sale. I told her. I didn’t think it was a big deal. The reason we’re here hasn’t changed.”

“You really are related to Maudie? And to Kovak?”

“Distantly,” I stressed. “I don’t know any of these people. It just didn’t seem important.”

Nick was silent for a long, charged moment. He turned his back on the room and scowled down at me, “Tess, we’ve been working together long enough that we should be able to trust each other. We’re partners, in case I need to remind you. There’s no place in that for keeping secrets.” He swept a hand through his hair, “Look, it wouldn’t ordinarily be a big deal, but I think we stumbled into something here. From now on, I need for you to trust me.”

Remorse raked me, and a tiny, persistent lick of anger. Trust, trust, he said, as though it were easy. As though it were nothing to yoke my fate to another’s, to count on him, to believe in him. As though those I trusted would never tear my heart out, or use my secrets against me, or leave. I looked up at Nick’s earnest face and saw hurt and concern. He wasn’t Brett, or any other self-serving pirate I’d known. He was my friend.

“I’m sorry. I do trust you. Let’s get out of here. I guess I have some other stuff to tell you.”

Nick smiled. A roar of thunder split the night above the tavern, and shook the walls. The lights went out, the music died in mid-stanza, and an ocean of rain fell out of the clouds. A few people shrieked, and then laughed. Someone began lighting more candles. Cigarette lighters flicked on in the darkness. I saw Red John Kovak filling the open doorway, silhouetted against a flare of lightning so bright the negative of his image burned on my retinas for a heartbeat. In the next instant, he was gone into the deluge. Another bellow of thunder shook us. Nick steered us back to our empty booth.

“Looks like our dinner companion took off,” he said.

“I saw him leave. I can’t believe he’d try to drive in this.”

Nicolas twirled a finger near his ear, “What’d I tell you? Crazy. What do you say we sit out the worst of the rain, then get our stuff from the lodge and blow this place. The longer I’m here, the less I like it.”

A waitress with a burning candle melted onto her tray sashayed over and set down a pitcher of beer and clean glasses.

“From Red John, hon,” she said, popping her gum at Nick, “Said he owed you.”

She smiled, pivoted on her cowboy-booted heel, and vanished in the crowd.

I poured for us both and held up my glass, “To werewolves with a sense of obligation,” I said. Nick clinked the lip of my glass with his, and we set to drinking the pitcher dry.

Over an hour later, with most of a bottle of Trudy’s fine tequila holding down our beer, we crawled along the black roads through a gauzy blur of fog and steady rain. The storm had brought down tree limbs and swollen roadside ditches with runoff until they disgorged sheets of silted debris across the pavement. Nick wove and dodged, leaning forward over the steering wheel as though his proximity to the windshield would part the mist.

“Jesus, I’m hammered,” he muttered.

I rolled my head on the headrest and tried to focus on him, “You want me to drive?”

He snorted, “You’re hammered worse.”

We bumped along the access road to the lodge, churning up and over the muddy hill in slow motion. I had just closed my eyes when the Jeep lurched to a stop.

“What is it?” I sat up, disoriented.

Nick pointed into drizzly blackness, “The lake. It’s coming up over the road.”

He undid his seatbelt and turned to rummage in the back seat, dragging forth a spotlight. He rolled down his window, stuck the light out into the night, and switched it on. Ahead of us in the hollow, fog drifted over a chill swath of lake water where the road should have been. I could hear it lapping and gurgling.

“Can we make it across?”

The prospect of having to wade through it made me shudder. I did not want the lake to touch me, not tonight. I was too tired, and much too drunk. I was about to announce this when another sound drifted through the open window. The low, mournful howl caused Nick to douse the light and raise the window. He put the Jeep in gear.

“I don’t know, but we’re going to try,” he said.

We crept up to the edge of the flood, then into it. It rose in the fender wells and dragged at the vehicle, trying to pull us out into the deep. A stiff breeze raked across the open water, carrying the oceanic sound of the lake drinking rain. Something slapped at the chop with heavy violence. Nick gunned the engine. The rear end shimmied and slid, the lake surge lifting us, and then we were clawing at the sodden clay on the far side. The lodge wavered into view, hung with fog and dark rainbows in the headlights. An old sycamore lay like a dead king in the parking lot, the long, white points of its crown stroking the cedar hide of the lodge. Nick squeezed by it and brought us to a sliding stop on the gravel near the steps, our lights pointing over the abyss of the lake.

“Look at that,” he said, “Too much more, and Claudia’s going to lose the boathouse.”

Frothing waves lifted and dropped the dock, the drums it floated on booming a hollow dirge, and drove it against the side of the small boathouse. The storm had pushed the dock sideways, making a ram of it. Several ancient kayaks, still tethered to their stakes on the rocky shore, careened and danced in the surf, earning new dings and abrasions. We climbed from the Jeep into the wind-driven rain, staring at the apocalypse of the lake. Nick dashed onto the porch, but I stayed where I was, lifting my face to the wet, letting it drive away the tequila haze. The night swooped and fluttered around me, chilled to an autumnal temperature, rich with a symphony of wild music. Standing there with the rain soaking my clothes, I understood how such a place might slip into the blood, shape the DNA, sleep in the bone. The felled sycamore rustled in its death slumber, its sodden, bat-wing leaves flapping. The wind dropped, but the rustling continued. I opened my eyes, every hair on my body at attention.

“Tess!” Nick’s voice from the porch rail above me made me jump, “You shut the door when we left, right?”

I looked up at him, at his pale face and his wet hair hanging in his eyes. He slung it back with an agitated swipe.

“Of course, I shut it,” I said, still straining my ears for furtive sounds from the downed tree.

“Well, it’s open now, and something or someone has been all through our stuff. Nothing seems to be missing, but every pack is open and rifled,” He glanced toward the sycamore, “You’d better get in here out of the rain. You’ll catch your death.”

... to be continued.