Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [52]
"Jesus, Walter. I am —"
"I don’t want your apologies or your pity," he whispered. "I’m going with you. That’s what I came to tell you. We’re gonna bury Orson together."
The kids had reached the white Cadillac. We stopped ten feet from the end of the driveway and Walter turned to me. "So when are you leaving?" he asked.
"A day or two. I’ve gotta go before my mother’s discovered."
His eyes softened. "Andy, I want you to know that I am s —"
"And I don’t need your pity," I said. "It won’t help either of us do what we have to do."
He nodded and looked over his shoulder at Jenna and John David. The umbrella cast aside, they were throwing gravel from the driveway at my mailbox, and coming nowhere close to hitting it.
21
THE eve of my departure for Vermont was our thirty-fifth birthday, and Orson mailed me a handmade card. On the front, he’d designed a collage out of photographs, all taken in the sickly orange light of his shed. There was a head shot of Shirley Tanner’s boot-bruised face; a full body shot of Jeff in a hole in the desert; Wilbur on red plastic from the waist up — inside out.
Below the colorful collage, scrawled in Orson’s unmistakable hand: "What do you get for the guy who has it all?" On the inside he’d written, "Not a goddamn thing. A big happy birthday from Shirley and the Gang."
Woodside is a foothill community in midwestern Vermont, isolated from the major cities of the North by the Green Mountains in the east and New York’s Adirondacks in the west. On an autumn day, it’s quintessential American countryside, breathtaking in its open vistas of rolling hills, endless mountain chains, and a quaint college town tucked into a vale.
According to the gas station attendant, we were three weeks late. Then the forests had been burning with the brightest color in thirty years. Now, the leaves brown and dead, few remained on the trees, and the blue sky gleamed awkwardly against the winter bleakness of the countryside. Vermont in November smacked of the same stiff beauty as dolling up a corpse for its wake.
Beyond the outskirts of Woodside, on the fringe of the Green Mountains, Walter and I approached the inn. Heading up a long, curving driveway, I saw a large white house perched halfway up the mountain. There was movement on its wraparound porch — empty rocking chairs swaying in a raw breeze.
Walter pulled his Cadillac into the gravel parking lot adjacent to the sallow lawn behind the house. There were only seven other cars, and I felt relieved to be outside of Orson’s town. We’d almost stayed at a motel in downtown Woodside because of its proximity to the college campus, but the risk of running into Orson was too great.
Hauling our suitcases up the front porch steps, we collapsed into a pair of rockers. The mountainside fell away from where we sat for a thousand feet, and the late-afternoon sun shone on the forest of bare trees in the valley below. Naked branches moved with the breeze, and I imagined that three weeks ago the sound of chattering leaves had filled the air. Across the valley, which extended twenty miles west, I could see into New York State, and the grander mountains of the Adirondacks that stood there.
Wood smoke scented the forest, and sitting in the cold, listening and watching, I sensed Walter’s restiveness.
After a moment, he said, "It’s too cold to sit out here. I’ll check us in." He stood up and lifted his suitcase off the porch. "You just gonna sit there?" he asked, walking toward the door.
"Yep."
Our room was at the end of a creaky hallway on the second floor. There were two double beds, placed on opposite sides of the room, a dormer window between them, from which you could view the mountains. The ceiling slanted up on both sides and met in a straight line, which bisected the room. Two paisley love seats