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  “Loosen up, hon,” she said, pushing back her hair and flashing her feline eyes, practically purring for him. “That was Alicia. Dex won’t mind.”

  “Didn’t they used to date?” Wendy asked.

  “Everybody’s had a ride on the Dex-go-round,” Amy said. “Nobody takes it personally.”

  “Well, Louise might,” Bobby said.

  “Okay, Dad. Jeez. I didn’t know we invited Preacher Staymore and the church choir.”

  The truck cab was quiet for a second, but then Bobby spoke up. “Here’s where it happened,” he said, and all eyes shifted to the bridge as they drove past it.

  “I want to look,” Amy said.

  “No way,” Bobby said, speeding up. “We’ll lose Dex.”

  Ronnie glanced at the moon-dappled river. No mist tonight. At least I get to worry about girls instead of ghosts.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Bobby wasn’t sure what time the party got out of hand. Maybe it had started out of hand.

  He’d been trying to take it easy with the drinking, but Amy kept plying him with gossip, and he couldn't care less about Stribling’s hemorrhoids or Whizzer Buchanan’s armed robbery charge or the rumors over whether Cheyenne Busby was pregnant. Alcohol helped. In between spouting pointless stories, Amy had been busy texting out invitations to the party until it seemed like half the senior class had found the five-bedroom mansion on the hill. Bobby had thought Dex would be pissed, but apparently he enjoyed playing the big shot. By the time Brett and Melanie showed up, it had been at least an hour since Dex and Louise had locked the door on one of the bedrooms.

  Bobby glared at Amy, although her pretty face was swimming a little in his vision. “You invited her?”

  Amy giggled and fluttered her thick eyelashes. Alcohol seemed to energize her instead of slow her down. “Why punish Melanie just because she’s dating that jerk? She’s one of us. She belongs here.”

  Bobby didn’t know who the “us” was. A few nerds were sitting on the floor, sharing a joint and watching a Star Trek movie, while some of Bobby’s jock friends were manning the refrigerator, which had miraculously filled up with Busch Light and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Five or six kids, dressed only in their underwear—probably just a few drinks away from nudity—were splashing around in the hot tub on the deck. Floyd and Jimmy Dale were boozily debating whether Metallica qualified as a hair-metal band. Wendy had thrown up seconds after their arrival and was now snoring at the far end of the couch where Bobby and Amy were sitting.

  Ronnie was across the room in a beanbag chair, still working on the same can of beer he’d been holding for the last hour. It had to be as warm and flat as horse piss by now.

  He noticed instantly when Melanie came into the room, almost like he had some invisible antenna that zapped his brain whenever she passed within a hundred yards. Bobby had already put Melanie out of his mind—even with all her yakking, Amy was looking better and better as that crop top slid up her belly—but he wasn’t sure he had much of a mind left.

  “So are you going to show us now?” Amy asked. Bobby realized that she was talking to him.

  “Show you what?”

  “Where you wrecked.”

  Bobby reached for his drink. The ice had melted and the whiskey in the glass was the color of corn syrup.

  Damn, I must have zoned out for a minute. Or longer.

  “Come on,” Brett said, suddenly right beside him. “Don’t be a pussy.”

  Melanie hovered behind Brett, alert and nervous. Bobby could barely stand to look at her. Just like his mom, she didn’t have the guts to stand up for what she believed. But then again, maybe Bobby had no idea what she believed.

  “Leave him alone,” Ronnie said from his beanbag. “He’s a little wasted.”

  “Okay, Captain Obvious, but it’s not your call.”

  “We’re all too wasted to drive,” Ronnie said.

  “Melanie’s not. But that doesn’t matter anyway. We don’t need to drive. It’s a straight shot down to the bridge. We could walk there in, like, five minutes.”

  Jimmy Dale dropped down beside him on the couch and punched his arm. “Hey, dude, it’s part of rock-n-roll lore now. Like when Jim Morrison rolled up on that truckload of dying Indians when he was a kid. Plus you guys found that Absher dude there. When The Diggers are big time, the YouTube crowd will eat this story up. The drummer who came back from the dead. We’re talking a million page views, yo.”

  Dex strolled back into the living room, tucking his T-shirt into his jeans, obviously having caught wind of their conversation. “Yeah,” Dex said. “Any of you bitches got a cell phone? We can take a band picture at the crash site.”

  Bobby was lightheaded, but he wasn’t sure whether it was from booze or fear. He looked right at Melanie. “What about you? Do you want to see where it all went down?” Somehow it seemed important, essential to know what Melanie really thought.

  She bit her lip and nodded. Her eyes were dewy, and that stung him a little. Brett didn’t even notice the play between the two of them. Ronnie did, though, and he gave a shake of his head as if to say “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  But maybe it didn’t matter. Ghosts, pillars of ash, death crashes—he was leaving it all behind soon. All this shit was a bridge, a way to get from here to there. And once he was there, none of the here would matter anymore.

  So why not play the game within the game?

  He swayed to his feet and everyone in the room broke into applause. Dex said, “Let’s fire one up for the road,” but Bobby was already heading out into the cool night air. By the time he’d walked down the deck stairs, he was no longer wobbling. The stars veered and wheeled overhead, the moon a fuzzy wedge of hard milk, but he focused on the ground in front of him. Dex moved ahead of him, guiding him to a trail that he called a “natural resource amenity,” and the stoned and drunk seniors trailed behind as if he were some kind of Pied Piper leading innocent children into the unknown.

  Ronnie pushed through the crowd and caught up with Bobby. Tugging at his arm, he said, “Something weird happened last night, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I think I died.”

  “Don’t joke about crap like that. You should have died, but you didn’t. And McFall came to your hospital room.”

  “Don’t start in on that stuff about the red church and the McFalls. We’re not kids anymore.”

  “You don’t have to do this. You think any of these people really care about you? They’re just out for cheap thrills.”

  “I can’t let Brett win. I can’t let Melanie win.”

  Ronnie stopped in his tracks, but Bobby kept going, determined, almost eager now. Something had happened at the bridge. He’d undergone some sort of transformation, and maybe visiting the scene would help him fill in the gaps.

  The group emerged from underneath the trees, and there it was ahead of them, just across the highway. The river slipped silently over rocks, winding toward the bridge fifty yards ahead. Bobby wondered what they would do if headlights approached, or if the sheriff made one of his increasingly frequent patrols of the area. But he didn’t care about consequences anymore. In a way, nearly dying had given him a blank slate.

  And then they were at the head of the bridge, staring off into the path of the wreckage. “Here’s where it happened,” Bobby said, like a celebrity host on a reality show. The moonlight revealed the scarred bark of the damaged trees and bits of broken glass and sheared metal glinted among the weeds.

  “Look at these ruts,” Floyd said. “You musta gone airborne.”

  “That’s some serious Evel Knievel shit, dude,” Jimmy Dale said.

  “Where did Ronnie find the dead guy?” Amy asked. Dex pointed down to the water’s edge on the other side of the bridge.

  Bobby walked away from the group and went to lean over the bridge railing, gazing downstream. Mist hung over the river, but tonight it was just mist. It didn’t try to twist into shapes and figures, and no faces coalesced in the gloom. Ronnie ca
me up beside him but didn’t say anything, just stared off in the distance, where the mist, the river, and the mountains all merged into diffuse and endless gauze.

  Behind them, the other kids were swapping theories on how Bobby had survived, with Jimmy Dale offering “Good karma” and Brett deeming it “Dumbass luck, and he’s got the dumbest kind of all.” But they soon grew bored, and Floyd asked if anybody had brought beer.

  Bobby spit into the water, watching it arc out and down, making a little plop that was instantly swallowed up as if it had never been.

  “So, who’s going in?” Brett asked.

  “Going back, you mean?” Dex said. “I’m ready. Louise will wonder where I went, and we left Wendy passed out with all those psycho jocks around.”

  “Not back. I mean in.”

  ”Into the river? You’re crazy.”

  “You rock jocks think you’re hot shit. But let’s see whose balls are the biggest. Bobby? You coming in?”

  “No way,” Bobby said without turning. “Quit showing off.”

  Brett unbuttoned his Van Heusen shirt and tossed it onto the asphalt as if he didn’t give a damn that it cost as much as a working-class guy’s salary for a day.

  “Cool it, Brett,” Melanie said, clutching at his arm. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Sign says no swimming,” Jimmy Dale said with a stoned snicker.

  Brett kicked off his shoes, and then fished out his wallet and handed it to Melanie. “If I don’t make it, this is yours. It’s all you’re after anyway.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” Bobby said.

  Brett clenched his fists and squared off to face him, and Bobby thought, Here we go, time for me to beat his ass and get it over with, but instead Brett climbed up on the rail and wobbled drunkenly.

  “Get down from there before you fall,” Melanie said. “Please.”

  “Who’s coming with me?” Brett said, finally getting the attention he’d been craving all night. Maybe all his life.

  “Let’s go back and get a cold one,” Dex said.

  Brett wailed out the chorus of “Comfortably Numb,” strutting and strumming in mockery of Dex, and then dove into the darkness with a loud whoop.

  Bobby heard Ronnie whisper, “Not again.”

  “That’ll sober him up,” Floyd said as the splash erupted against the million gurgles and trickles and the never-ending wet laughter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Ronnie knew what he wanted, but he didn’t yet want it badly enough.

  Larkin McFall needed to have a long talk with that boy. Ronnie’s problem was simply a matter of perspective. His head had been scrambled by too much church, and he suffered from a morbid sense of morality. Well, he’d learn soon enough.

  McFall was here to give people what they wanted. And was that really so wrong?

  Everybody else had figured it out, including Bobby. Well, almost everybody. Heather Fowler was proving to be a stubborn thorn in his side. At least Sheriff Littlefield was drying up like a scarecrow in the sun, gutless and stiff, just waiting for retirement.

  Brett Summers’s life was insured for two million dollars. Max Summers was a man who liked to cover his bases—after all, it was the family business. So Larkin looked at this as a win-win. Everyone would live happily ever after, except for Brett, who would never know the difference.

  Besides, Brett’s mother had been a Matheson, so his bloodline carried plenty of blame.

  As McFall rose from the hidden, cold depths of the river, down where the ancient springs seeped from deep beneath the granite, he considered grabbing a rock to bash in Brett’s skull, as he’d done with Darnell Absher. But that would be duplicating a pattern, and he wasn’t ready to show his hand. Not yet.

  Maybe, like Ronnie, he took more joy from the tease than the conquest. The game within the game.

  But he didn’t tease Brett. He just grabbed the boy’s ankle and pulled him to the bottom. Brett kicked and squirmed, then flailed, but he might as well have been pounding mud. Bubbles escaped from his lips as he screamed, but the noise would be lost on the churning surface of the river. They’d find his body miles downstream—another tragic death blamed on alcohol and the recklessness of youth.

  In death, Brett Summers would live on as a morality tale that parents would tell their children.

  Max Summers would have a little extra cash, perfect for investment in local real estate.

  Ronnie would be Melanie’s comfort in a time of shock and sorrow.

  And McFall?

  It was a job well done, and sometimes that was enough in itself, even for someone whose work was never finished.

  EPISODE FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Ronnie didn’t see Brett’s ghost until the end of June, but there was plenty to keep the living busy in the meantime.

  Pickett High’s two hundred and ninety-three seniors graduated in the shadow of their classmate’s tragic death, already scattering onto different life paths that would rarely cross again. Two weeks later, forty rounds of the major league baseball draft came and went without Bobby Eldreth’s name being called. The Minnesota Twins inquired about a freelance contract, but Bobby wasn’t willing to throw away his college eligibility for a mere $20,000 nonguaranteed. Even Elmer supported that decision, grimly holding out hope that Bobby would have a stellar freshman season at Appalachian State, raising his stock for the next draft.

  Sheriff Frank Littlefield investigated Brett Summers’s drowning, and was relieved to rule his death an accident. He had grounds to charge several of the kids at the party with underage drinking, misdemeanor possession of marijuana, and maybe even reckless endangerment, but he felt the community would best be served by letting the tragedy float downstream as fast and as far as possible. The sheriff shifted his energy to investigating a rash of meth labs in the western end of the county, while dodging Cindy Baumhower’s relentless pursuit of a long-term relationship.

  Heather Fowler took a sabbatical during the first summer session at Westridge University, using the time to plant a small, organic garden in her backyard. The month opened hot and humid, followed by two weeks of rain that caused her tomatoes to blight. She attended the regular commissioner and planning board meetings, voting with the majority and making no comment at either. She hiked to the top of McFall Meadows twice with Susan Barinowski, discovering the second time that a section of the new fence had been removed.

  Larkin McFall, Logan Extine, and Bernard Gunter laid plans to expand the development across an additional four hundred acres that had been purchased by McFall, bordering on Riverview and the Blackburn River. Wally Kaufman’s bulldozer pushed the ashen remains of the red church into a small ravine, where it was buried in topsoil planted with fescue and clover. Foundations for the first six houses had been poured, and crews were already pounding the wood framing into place. David Day and Elmer Eldreth were among the men working on the initial house, which would serve as a sales model and office.

  And Blackburn River flowed on.

  #

  On June 29, Ronnie helped Bobby install a white picket fence around the old graveyard, which would have been a fine time to see a ghost. The work was conducted under high clouds and the azure sky looked like it rose all the way to the edge of the universe and beyond. The boys straightened the grave markers as best they could, and Stu Hartley slapped mortar between the broken wedges to patch headless angels and marble lambs. Ronnie kept turning around to stare at the gouged brown ruts where the church had stood, as if the building’s shadow still fell over him, Archer McFall’s red eyes watching him from the dark well of the belfry.

  Ronnie was driving a galvanized finish nail into a post when Bobby said, “Hey, look at this.”

  During the downstroke of his hammer, Ronnie shifted his eyes to Bobby, who was pointing at something in the middle of the graveyard. The hammer missed the nail and bounced off his thumb. He grunted, sucking on it to keep blood from pooling in the bruise. “Gee, thanks,” he mumbled around his thumb,
dropping the hammer.

  Stu Hartley croaked out a laugh and slung some leftover mortar around the gate posts. “Frigging rookies,” he said. “Don’t know why McFall don’t hire real carpenters.”

  “Maybe he needs some workers who are actually sober,” Bobby said, shutting Hartley up fast. The man cocked one bloodshot eye and rolled his wheelbarrow over to a water bucket to clean out the cement, muttering under his breath.

  Ronnie squeezed his throbbing thumb as he walked over to where Bobby stood in front of a marker. He recognized it before he even got there, because it was near where he’d found Boonie Houck’s body. Deathboy’s first corpse, where it all had begun. With each step, Ronnie was afraid the ground would open up and pull him under.

  “Samuel Riley Littlefield,” Bobby said, reading the name engraved in the granite slab. “Dude was only eleven. Wonder if he’s related to the sheriff.”

  “He was one of them.”

  “One of who?”

  “The ghosts who went into the river.”

  Bobby wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Come on, Ronnie. I thought we’d agreed to let sleeping dogs lie. And sleeping dead people.”

  Ronnie shrugged. “This place doesn’t bother me in the daylight. Especially now that the red church is gone.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said, his voice trailing away as he looked over at the patch of mud where the church had stood. “I know what you mean.”

  Pointing the handle of his hammer at the gravestone, Ronnie said, “Samuel was the sheriff’s little brother. He died at the church. Broke his neck during a Halloween prank. That’s why the sheriff gets so paranoid about this place … about the whole McFall property.”

  “Well, you can’t blame McFall for what happened to Brett after the dance. He was drunk and acting like an idiot. Hell, you could even say he had it coming, and I wouldn’t argue with you.”

  “You’re just pissed because he was with Melanie that night.” Ronnie hated saying her name, since it hurt both of them. She’d been avoiding everyone since Brett’s funeral. Ronnie figured she felt guilty. “Nobody deserves to die young.”