23. Doug Has to Think (D1)

__ Douglas' car was an old yellow Datsun, "Like the one Chris McCandless had," he said as the vehicle rumbled away from the Psychic Parlor and forged into the dark raining blackness of the bizarre morning.
__ Ardy looked over at him and smiled, studied the lines of his face, the handsome profile so determined but also boyish and innocent despite the previous night's horrors. "I'm sorry, Doug. I know this is where I usually nod and say, 'oh, yeah,' but I don't know what you're talking about." She giggled.
__ Doug was embarrassed. "I'm I always like that?"
__ She said, "I always liked that you talked to me and gave me the time of day, but I don't know half the stuff you talk about."
__ "You mean like 'Star Wars' and 'X-Files' and stuff like that?" His smirk was understanding. "I figured."
__ "Hard to find girls who'll listen to ya and know what you're talkin' about, huh?"
__ He shrugged, "Yeah, you can say that. I'm kind of a geek at heart I guess." He took his foot off the gas. The car was cruising to a four-way stop. "Which way?"
__ Ardy glanced out the window. "Oh, straight for quite awhile."
__ Once they were through the intersection, Doug was silent. Ardy scooted over toward him and rested her head on his shoulder. "It's okay. I am too."
__ "No you're not," he smiled. "How could you be?"
__ "Hey, just because I don't know Luke was Leia's father doesn't mean--"
__ "Vader."
__ "What?"
__ "Darth Vader. Actually, Anakin Skywalker was Luke and Leia's father. In Episode Five, The Empire Strikes--
__ "What?"
__ Ardy was giggling uncontrollably, clutching her stomach to stave off the cramps of hard laughter.
__ "C'mon, what?"
__ "Y-You are--." She wheezed and laughed out loud.
__ Her laugh was light and infectious. Doug stole glances at her. Something about her look, beaten, bruised, cut, scraped, haggered, weary-eyed, but laughing as hard as she was, made his heart leap. He couldn't help laughing himself.
__ "I'm sorry," he said at last. "I'll stop."
__ "Promise me," Ardy said, finally catching her breath.
__ Doug glanced at her. "Yeah?"
__ "Promise me one day you'll show me all five of those Star Wars movies."
__ Doug roared with laughter. Now it was he who was clutching his gut.
__ "Now what?"
__ "There --" gasp "There are six movies, not five."
__ As the yellow Datsun vibrated a swath through the black rain, Ardy and Doug laughed and slapped each other's knees.
__ For one brief moment they forgot about the night, and the mission they were on.


__ R. Lee Munson's car rocked like a heavy boat on rough seas. Branches and twigs tinked and clicked and scraped against the side as he coasted through the deep dark Palley's Woods.
__ "Got t' be here somewheres."
__ He stopped at the site of an overturned wheelbarrow, left rusted and forgotten for decades. He remembered it. And now the memories of Clye's murder. The sign on the door, "Clyde R. Morrow, Attorney." The choking, the struggling, the dragging of the heavy sack of concrete that was a lifeless human body.
__ Munson left the car running but put it in park and set the brake. "I come back for ya, Clye. We gotta get things straight between us before I die again. And I imagine you too."
__ He got out of the car and went to the trunk to get the shovel and spade. The rain was pelting hard and there were wide puddles of mud and stagnant rivers of dark water in twin lines where his tires gouged through the forest. It was going to be tough getting out of here, but maybe, he thought, Clye will help push me out. His laugh was dry and humorless.
__ Stopping, his hand on the open trunk, R. Lee turned and looked into the deep blackness of the woods -- like Hell. Lonely, cruel--,
__ "Don't." He winced against the memory and cried through a prayer, "Oh, please God let her be comin'. Let Ardy be comin' to save me."


__ Palley's Woods stretched like a pulled-apart horseshoe around the northern side of Covert, Indiana, a snaking dark forest that was the outskirts to everything else. Baseball fields, farmland, a truck stop, abandoned old homes from the last turn of the century, were all dots around the periphery of the inverted green scar. There were creek tributaries that wound through it, a few old wells covered in old planks of plywood, thick bramble factories, poison ivy-oak-sumac stretches, felled trees, car parts, trash bags, and more than a few bodies.
__ Munson's victim wasn't the only one to call Palley's Woods home. There were a handful of mob-hit dumps from the late 1920's, now just skeletal fragments lost to all but legend. One little girl and a little boy, one lost in a well and another torn apart by a leopard that got loose from a traveling circus. Another was a hiking accident and two were drownings in what the locals called Puma Pond (it had been a long standing argument to change the name "Cause o' that boy that puma et.")
__ The pond, and the spiderweb of creeks meandering through and around it, all fed Lyle River. The Lyle twisted down from Covert and got lost in lakes somewhere south in Brown County below all the covered bridges and in the clefts of the hills down there.
__ While the trip from Ardy's Psychic Parlor to the side of Palley's Woods where Clye was buried in a shallow grave wasn't a far one, it was now an immense distance.
__ Doug stopped the car put it in park. He clicked on the brights. "Is it gone?"
__ Ardy leaned forward and squinted through the brief window of clarity offered by the Datsun's wipers. "I can't tell, but I wouldn't do it, Doug."
__ "Only one way to be sure," he said and got out of the car. A blast of hot summer rain sprayed in and brushed Ardy's cheek.
__ "Be careful!" she called just as he slammed the door. He gave her a thumbs up through the window to show he heard.
__ Doug stepped carefully up to the first couple of planks of the wooden bridge over Lyle River. A few steps beyond, the Datsun's headlight beams were swallowed by blackness. A roar like rapids hissed and threatened from that dark. It sounded only inches below the bridge's -- what was left of the bridge's planks.
__ Doug turned back to the car and got in. He was soaked through his polo and his hair was plastered to his forehead.
__ "It's gone, isn't it?"
__ "Yup. No other way around is there?"
__ Ardy groaned. "Not unless we turn around, go through town, and try to catch Route 6 on the far north side."
__ Doug craned his neck to look into the black sky. According to his watch it was after 8 a.m. "In this weather, it would take us almost an hour to get around to the other side."
__ "Do we have a choice?"
__ "I have to think."