Chapter Twenty-Three Sad Willy
TWENTY-THREE SAD WILLY
Strangers. Strangers had come to town. Too early for hunters. Late leaf peepers, maybe? A couple out for a fall drive, an authentic New England experience? Disappointed to find they’d arranged the trip too late, that the trees were bare?
Could be.
But he didn’t think so.
These didn’t feel like your average tourists (not that many came out to Boone’s Ferry, not unless they were lost anyway).
No, they weren’t tourists. He was sure. It was the way they were hunched over the table, talking seriously. The woman, she looked worried, frightened, even. Her eyes kept darting around the room like she was expecting someone or something to come jumping out at her.
It felt important, them being here. Him seeing them. Like that was why he was in the pub, right now, at this moment. It was to see them.
Had they been sent here? Sent here to help him with his plan? To help him save the girl? Stop the knackerman?
Or were they just going to make everything worse, throw a wrench in the works?
Willy looked up, over the door to the kitchen, saw Denise on the old wall phone in there, talking animatedly. She had her eye on the strangers the whole time.
Willy knew exactly what she was doing. Sounding the alarm.
The whole town, it was connected like one big web.
Denise was just giving one of the threads a little tug, but that little tug would be felt all over town.
Soon everyone would know about the strangers.
Hell, they probably already did. The phone lines were probably buzzing as soon as an unfamiliar car was spotted coming over the pass and down Main Street.
Willy finished the last of his burger, wiped his bearded chin with a paper napkin. Then he sucked down his bourbon, slid off the barstool.
“Thanks for the drinks, boys,” he said, nodding at the others.
“Anytime, Sad Willy,” they all said, and he could tell they meant it.
Real polite. Kind, even.
Everyone in town felt bad for Willy, bad enough to buy him a drink when he asked, keep him supplied with tobacco, drop food off for him if he started looking thin.
Would they still if they knew the truth? If they knew what he’d done?
Willy walked by the table the two strangers were sitting at but was only able to catch one word: coincidence.
He took that as a sign.
“Coincidence,” he repeated to himself as he walked away from the pub, down to his camp by the river. “Coincidence.”
It bobbed around in his brain like a ping-pong ball going back and forth, back and forth.
Sometimes, like now, he talked to his wife. Back in his old life, he knew if something was troubling him, he just needed to bring it to Anna, to talk it over with her and she’d help him make sense of it.
“What do you think, Anna, is it a coincidence?”
Was it just a coincidence that these people had come to town now, when the mark had been left on the Fitzpatricks’ door?
The first mark that had been left in two years.
He thought back to that day, and he could still feel the heat of the fire on his skin, hear his wife screaming as she fell through the floor.
No such thing as coincidence, Anna whispered softly in his ear now, her breath chilling him.
And she was right.
Anna was always right.
There was no such thing as coincidence.
Not in Boone’s Ferry.
So it was also no coincidence that when he got back to his camp sometime later, he found a brand-new unopened bottle of Old Crow bourbon waiting for him, a crisp twenty-dollar bill beneath it.
He knew who it was from.
And he knew exactly what it meant.
What he should do, he told himself, was take that bottle and smash it. Take the twenty bucks and leave it on one of the picnic tables outside the factory for someone else to find. A symbolic gesture to say he was done with the whole thing.
But when he hefted the bottle of Old Crow by the neck, he felt that old, constant thirst, the thirst that could never be quenched, the thirst that made him ache to his very bones.
The crow on the label looked at him, turned its head a little. Just a sip. Just one sip, it said in its raspy bird tongue.
He cracked the top, put his lips to the neck, and drank.
The warmth flooded into him, and as he drank he promised himself, promised the crow, promised Anna, that he wouldn’t forget his plan, his big idea. He wouldn’t let them down.