Page 14 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“Possibly something he was paid to say.”

“Possibly. A heart attack wouldn’t be right for a man as young as José. Nobody would believe suicide. Any accident—a fall down the cellar stairs, a house fire—would be suspicious. But if an accident occurred in front of a thousand witnesses, who would question it?”

Vida gives voice to her latest insight: “If it was murder, they needed the fall to hide the truth. If a nerve toxin killed him, they had to be sure he didn’t simply drop to the stage, but took a more dramatic tumble. When the dart hit him, someone on the stage must have put a hand on his back, pretending to steady him, but shoving him toward the stairs. The dime-size bruise could be dismissed as a consequence of the fall—unless someone looked too close.”

Anna continues to stare at the forest that received the lion into its boughed and ferny gloom.

“Will you be all right?” Vida asks.

“I don’t like myself right now—being scared. But it would be worse to stay here and pretend things are like they always were.”

“If your father didn’t perform the postmortem, then he must have falsified the autopsy report.”

“When I found the puncture, I went down the hall to his office. Door was closed. I heard him on the phone, arguing with someone. He sounded more afraid than angry. He kept saying Aubrey this and Aubrey that. Only man I know by that name is Aubrey Norland.”

As the crimson light retreats and the sky darkles, the air is no colder, but Vida is chilled. “José’s attorney.”

“My father wanted Norland to forge some document showing José specified cremation. My father was part of this vicious business, but he hadn’t thought what might happen. Now he began to wonder how long a nerve toxin might be detectable in the flesh of the deceased. Weeks? Months? Years? From what I heard, Aubrey Norland refused the request and assured my father that no one would exhume the body.”

Anna moves to the head of the porch steps, beyond which the land—and more than the land—is fast fading into darkness. Though she has a friend and a destination in Texas, she looks lost.

“Your dad is well respected,” Vida says. “On the town council. President of the local Better Business Bureau. Why would he involve himself in something as terrible as this?”

“He’s made a nice living, doing what his father did before him, but he’s never happy. He’s distant, keeps himself to himself, so I don’t really know him. But one thing Idoknow is he always wanted something more, bigger, better. Maybe he didn’t even know what that was, but as the years went by, especially after Mom died, he wanted it with growing desperation. Suddenly Kettleton isn’t a backwater anymore. It becomes a center of action, an ocean of money washing up around it. Some saw how they could scoop up buckets of it. This kind of money doesn’t just buy cooperation. It buys souls.”

Vida says, “José never accused any of them of being bought, never so much as implied it. He based his case entirely on facts.”

“Yeah, but to some people, the truth is a gun to their heads.”

“I’m so sorry,” Vida says. “This isn’t easy for you.”

“Whatever else he’s been,” Anna says, “he was my dad. But now.”

“I’m sorry,” Vida says again, at a loss for words.

“I can’t look at him anymore.”

Anna descends the porch steps, and Vida follows her to the motorcycle. “How many people were involved in this?”

“I don’t know. And you don’t want to know. Just stay away from Aubrey Norland. I felt I had to warn you. In fact, stay away from town, like you did before José. Make your life here.”

Vida persists. “The boys who threw the bottles weren’t charged with even just a misdemeanor.”

“If charges had been brought, even as juveniles, there would be a court proceeding. They couldn’t risk an investigation, testimony under oath, none of that. So it had to be that this was just boys being boys, didn’t mean to hurt anyone, basically good kids, sorry as hell for the prank they pulled, no reason to ruin their lives.”

As Anna pulls on her helmet, Vida says, “Seems the district attorney must be one of them, maybe the sheriff.”

“There’s no way of knowing. It’s not everyone in Kettleton. It’s a small group. But no way to know who’s corrupt, who isn’t.”

Vida persists. “At the graveside service, somebody said one of those boys is Morgan Slyke. He lives with his parents on Long Valley Road, ten or twelve miles from town. Goes to Long Valley High.”

Reflected in the face shield of the helmet, the last crimson light in the sky masks this woman’s face and confers on her a new and less lovely identity, as though she isn’t just a mortician but instead some blood-smeared Presence that has come from the far shore of a river where gondolas carry passengers in only one direction and gondoliers like her pole their way back to this world alone.

“Yeah. And another of those boys, Damon Orbach, is the son of Perry Orbach, largest landowner in the county. Don’t be stupid, Vida. Nothing you do will bring José back. With billions of dollars on the line, there’s no justice except the kind that can be bought.”

Vida says, “Truth can’t be repressed forever. It’ll come out.”

“But if it does, most people will still believe what isn’t true, because the truth is heavy to carry compared to the lightness of a lie.” Anna reaches into a pocket of her jacket. “I don’t know what this means.” She withdraws a folded slip of white paper. “I considered not giving this to you. I came here only to warn you not to trust anyone. I don’t want to inspire you to do anything foolish. But it was in the pocket of the shirt José was wearing that day. It was his ... and he was yours ... and so.”

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