“We’ll need to be gone before nightfall, then,” Owen said. “McGrath and his sons will come down about sunset. They’ll be set up in the inlet, waiting to unload. They’ll be watching everything. That old bastard doesn’t miss much.”
“By the time he gets there, the place will be empty. So, sure, he’ll know something’s up, and what’ll he do? Go looking for Wade. And find his body.”
“Then shit’ll get going fast,” Owen said, taking one hand off the steering wheel and rubbing it over his chin, a nervous gesture.
“What’s to get going? They’ll come looking for us. We’ll be gone.”
“Yeah, we better be. Just where in the hell is it you think we’re going?”
“Does McGrath have a boat that can handle open water?”
“No.”
“All right. You and Rebecca will leave in the boat that day, then. That way if McGrath or one of his sons is keeping an eye on you, they won’t be able to follow anyhow. You know a port town you can get to easy enough where I can pick you up in the car once Wade’s been dealt with?”
“There’s Yankeetown.”
“That’s what we’ll do, then. You take the boat there and wait on me. We’ll use this car at first, but we’re going to have to switch it up fast. All that time you spent at Raiford talking to big-shot cons, you actually learn how to steal a car?”
“I can steal one, sure.”
“Good,” Arlen said. “You’ll need to steal a couple before it’s done.”
Owen didn’t answer.
“You having second thoughts?” Arlen said.
Silence.
“If you are,” Arlen said, “you might think about that box we dug out of the sand again. And you might think about your father.”
This time Owen turned to look at him, and his eyes were steady. “I’m not having any second thoughts.”
“All right.” Arlen turned and let the wind blow into his face and said, “You know where Solomon Wade lives?”
“Yes.”
“Take me there now.”
“Why?”
“I can’t just drive up and kill him,” Arlen said. “It’s going to require the right opportunity. I expect I’ll have to spend a good bit of the day following him. He live alone?”
“He’s got a girl. I don’t know how much she’s there, though.”
“We’ll need to know,” Arlen said. “I’m not hurting anyone else. He’ll need to be alone when I come for him.”
He had a sudden vision of the sheriff of Fayette County and Edwin Main approaching in the night, Arlen standing there at the window watching them come, waiting on them.
“Yes,” he said, “he’ll need to be alone when I come.”
40
THE HOUSE WAS A sprawling plantation-style place about a mile outside of High Town, resting at the end of a long drive bordered with cypress trees. Lights glowed inside a broad expanse of glass that made up one side of the front of the home. Behind it was a carriage house, Wade’s Ford coupe parked in front, along with another car. Arlen didn’t see the second vehicle clearly at first, but then Owen Cady said, “Sheriff is here,” and he remembered it well, remembered sitting in the back with handcuffs around his wrists and a notion that all he needed to do was weather a little bit of a knockabout and he’d be back on the road to Flagg Mountain soon enough.
It was a memory so strong and so strange it seemed the property of another man. Arlen would never see Flagg Mountain again. What had seemed reasonable once was gone now, taken from him by circumstances far from his control. He wondered if Wallace O’Connell and the other men from that train had felt similarly when they realized the hurricane was upon them. He wondered if any of them had remembered him, remembered that night at the station platform when he’d urged them to get off, assured them that danger lay ahead.
They’d all been heading toward powerful storms, he realized. His had just been longer coming, that was all.
“I don’t like sitting here,” Owen said. “They know this car; hell, it’s his car. One of them sees it out here, what are they going to think?”
They were parked in the darkness a good quarter mile from the house, nobody was going to see them, but Arlen had no reason to hold him here either, so he told him to go ahead and drive away.
“Awful lot of house,” he said as they cruised by for the final time, Owen keeping the headlights off.
“Was the owner of the timber company that built it. He was the richest man around for miles in his time. Now Wade is.”
So it went. Legitimate work disappeared and what stepped in its place were the likes of Solomon Wade. Arlen wondered what the locals thought when they passed by the place. Probably felt broken, helpless, the way Thomas Barrett seemed to. Arlen wondered what they’d think when Wade was dead. Would any good come from it here, or would another like him simply fill the void?