Page 70 of Eldritch

He stared into his drink and finally took a sip. “He’s one of those guys who lifts other people up. Several years ago, I was married to an interior designer. We met when I was on leave for a month back home in Denver. She was the granddaughter of these friends of my parents. I guess you’d call it a whirlwind romance. I was younger, dumber, and maybe she was too. We ran off to Vegas to elope.” He paused and took another sip of his drink. He shrugged. “We didn’t know each other as well as we should’ve.”

The waitress came to take their food orders. Sybil ordered a simple hamburger and fries, and Doug a pulled pork sandwich with fries, too.

After the waitress left, Sybil waited for Doug to continue, not wanting to push him.

He said, “I went back to Afghanistan, and it took all of two weeks for her to decide she’d made a big mistake.”

“She regretted the marriage?”

“Yep. Sent me an email. I was out on a mission and didn’t even get it until a few days later.”

“That’s horrible. Were you heartbroken?”

He fiddled with the paper from his straw, but then he tossed it aside and looked her straight in the eye. “I realized almost right away that I wasn’t heartbroken. I understood we’d screwed up. It was all physical between us, and we’d mistaken it for something else.”

“I guess that was good, then? If you had been heartbroken, that would’ve been far worse.”

He heaved a sigh. “I was heartbroken a day later, though.” He must have seen her puzzled expression because he continued with, “Before I could even call her, I got an emergency Red Cross message from my mother.” He kept his attention steady on Sybil. “My wife was killed in a car crash, along with her brand-new lover, the night she’d sent me the email.”

She’d spent so much of her life absorbing people’s pain for so many years, she sometimes wondered if she had any empathy left to give. This time, the pain of his loss made an impression on her, as if she understood on a deeper level.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah. You want to know the weirdest thing? Her new boyfriend took her up to Estes Park to celebrate breaking it off with me. No one understands why, but they continued up to the area where the gigantic trees start. They crashed right in front of Clarice’s mansion...in front of the driveway, that is. Clarice found them.”

Astonishment hit her. “That’s...”

When she drifted off, not able to come up with words, he said, “Yeah. I remember her saying once that she never wanted to come up here where the trees were so strange. Said they creeped her out. I guess her parents had brought her up there one time, to see the forest. She hated it.”

A chill raced through her. “Yet she drove up there with that man.”

“I agree. It didn’t make sense. I went to the funeral, went through seeing her parents broken, and felt myself break down, too. My uncle was out of town and asked me if I wanted to stay at his cabin for a week. At first I didn’t want to…so close to where she was killed. But I decided it would help me wrap my head around what had happened. Here’s where things get even more suspect.”

A man came by with their meals, and that halted the big revelation for a moment. Throughout the brief duration, Sybil’s curiosity intensified.

Finally, she said, “You were saying things got suspect? As in weird? Depressing?”

He ate a fry before saying, “Unquestionably weird. Not as depressing as I would’ve thought. After the funeral, I felt drained. I drove to where the wreck had happened. The coroner said there were no drugs or alcohol in their blood. They ran off the road going about sixty and hit that tree to the right of the driveway.”

She nodded. “I think that’s the biggest pine tree I’ve ever seen. That and the one on the opposite side of the driveway. Like they’re part of a gateway.”

“Exactly. I stared at the tree, and it didn’t have a dent in it. I asked a firefighter I know how that could happen, and he couldn’t explain it. He’d been on calls where people had hit a tree going at least that fast and there was always some sign of it on the tree. No one knew why they ran off the road. Not a damned clue.”

“Maybe someone forced them off the road?”

“All the evidence said they ran right into the tree for no reason.”

“The man was driving?”

“Yep.”

“Maybe he had a death wish.”

“Could be.”

“All of that is incredibly sad.”

He took a bite of his meal and chewed before answering. “I was angry about everything and sorry for myself. During that time my parents and Clinton...other friends checked on me by text, email, phone calls. So I was okay. But I wasn’t. Because every night I dreamed about my dead wife. She was standing next to that damned tree all by herself and sobbing. She was screaming for me to save her. To save her and her boyfriend from a monster.”

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