“Taithering’s dead,” he said.

I nodded.

“Tell me how it happened,” Jeremy’s voice was a ragged whisper, sorrow or anger or a mixture of both. I recounted the story. It took under a minute. My brother stood and walked to the nearest candle, on a tabletop. He stooped to blow it out, as if there was too much light in the room.

“Why did Taithering kill himself, Jeremy?” I asked. “Was it shame?”

“William didn’t make it all the way to redemption, Carson.”

“But that’s what he did with the beating: danger, destruction, display. A symbolic way of gaining the upper hand. That’s what you said.”

Jeremy continued to the next candle, on a counter between the living space and the kitchen. He snuffed it dead between spit-wet fingertips, moved down the counter and extinguished another.

“I said it’s what William started. He wasn’t finished. Taithering saw himself as insignificant, Carson. A man without significance can’t judge whether his private symbolism holds the potency to shatter the past. Even though he’d handled everything in his ritual correctly, the presence of risk, the destruction of the face, the public display, Taithering was lacking the final element.”

Jeremy walked to the fourth and fifth candles, on a shelf beside the stairs. Blew them dead. The only lit candle was the shivering taper on the table at my feet. Jeremy stepped back into the shadows. Outside, in the forest dark, barred owls were calling one another through the trees.

“What the hell element was left?” I asked.

“The validation of a higher authority.”

“Are you talking about God?”

“I’m talking about judgment from a guide who knows the forest, Carson.” He held his hand out into the light, thumb to the side like an emperor. He turned it down, then up.

My brother’s remarks were typically cryptic, and anger welled in my gut, at my brother and at myself. Yet again I was asking a mentally ill man for insights into the mental conditions of my fellow humans, again sucked into a world where image and symbol thudded together like blind whales in a black sea.

I stood, shaking my head. The past twenty-four hours had been nightmarish.

“I’m going back to Mobile,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m going home, Jeremy. I’m packing tomorrow, leaving the following morning.”

A long pause. “I bought you more time, Carson.”

“Ask for your money back, Jeremy. I’m gone.”

For the second time in the evening, I retreated from another human being, this time gladly. Back at the cabin I showered off the day and started to gather my belongings, but weariness overcame me like a wave and I fell asleep on the couch, a pile of clothes and a dog at my felt.

Morning brought the rude awakening of a siren outside my window. I bounced up to the window, saw Cherry behind the window of another cruiser, same color and vintage, like the Kentucky State Police had cornered the market on dark Crown Vics. Mix-up and I stumbled to the porch as Cherry cut the siren. I stared through hazy eyes and pushed hair from my face.

“Jeez, what now?”

“Sorry about the wake-up,” Cherry said, stepping from the cruiser. “Something’s happened and I thought you should know,” she said. “Zeke Tanner’s gone missing.”

My mind’s-eye showed me two medics leaning back from a corpse, putting away the cardiac paddles.

“Gone? Uh, isn’t he dead?”

“The state’s forensics people were sending transport this morning, taking him from the funeral home to the morgue in Frankfort. When the funeral director went to prepare the body for the trip, it was gone. A window got busted for entry.”

I shook my head; weirdness piled on weirdness. Cherry said, “Right now I’m running up to the funeral parlor to get a statement.” She nodded toward the passenger seat. “You in?”

“I’m planning to head back home. I’m packing today and leaving tomorrow.”

She looked stunned, caught it fast. “You’re booking in the middle of the battle?”

“This isn’t my war, Cherry.”

She pushed a half-smile to her face and shot a thumbs-up. “Gotcha. I understand. I’d do the same thing.” The smile started to waver.

“Maybe I could use a break from packing,” I said.

*   *   *

The owner and director of the funeral establishment was Harold Caldwell, a portly man in his fifties with a fleshy chin-wattle bobbing above blue tie and white shirt. Though the parlor air seemed as cool as the storage units, he was sweating as I re-questioned him about the lost body. Caldwell was one of those folks who, when rattled, find security in detail.

“What time did you notice Mr Tanner’s disappearance, Mr Caldwell?”

“Like I told Detective Cherry, I always stop at McDonald’s for breakfast, carry-out, coffee, two Egg McMuffins and a—”

“Time?”

“Six fifteen. I came early to prepare the papers for the transport. There are seven forms to fill out, the one for—”

“Who was the last person here last night?”

“Wendell Nockle. He’s the janitor, or I guess today they’re called maintenance staff or—”

“Nockle left when?”

“He always leaves at seven thirty. Blanche’s Diner closes at eight. They always save Wendell a piece of pie. Apple. Or banana cream. Or cherry. I don’t mean you, Detective Cherry, I mean cherry like in the pie filling—”

I dismissed Caldwell before he started in on the fifteen-bean soup.

“You come up with anything?” I asked Cherry, the detective, not the filling.

“The parking lot’s in back. It’s not well lit, nor openly visible from the street. The perp could park back there, grab the corpse, drive away. All without arousing attention. It’s flat-out dead around here after eight at night, nothing to do.”

I studied the surroundings from the parlor parking lot, saw the backs of a couple warehouses, an antique store, a used-car lot. But less than the distance of a football field, I saw the rear of a small trailer park. There were a lot of windows faced this way.

Stanton was in the county adjoining Woslee and Cherry had a far better relationship with the cops than with Beale. Three uniformed patrolmen were happy to go door to door in the park, asking if anyone happened to be watching the parking lot behind them last night. They got a hit: a man named Gable Paltry.

Mr Paltry was a sallow and skinny man in his mid-sixties with a brown theme - brown eyes, brown teeth, thinning brown hair, brown scrofulous patches on his cheeks. His sleeveless T-shirt was stained with something brown, as were his pants. His shoes were brown. He was dipping snuff or chewing tobacco, and when we entered his living room he spat a thick glob of something brown into a paper cup.

“I’ll deal with Mr Charm,” I whispered to Cherry.

“I owe you one,” she said.

The guy looked sad when Cherry claimed she needed to make a call and peeled away. I pulled a chair close as possible without getting into the splash zone, pulled out my notepad.

“I saw a semi-rig,” Paltry wheezed, looking past me, hoping for another shot of Cherry. “It was red, old. Silver trailer. Sometimes drivers pull off the highway and use the lot to snooze. I saw me a big RV pull in there and stop. Stayed maybe ten minutes. Light color. Had bikes and crap roped to the back. A barbecue grill tied up top, too.”

A vacationer, I figured, checking a map or grabbing a quick snack and a few minutes of respite from the nighttime drive. Like the semi driver, probably.

“Anyone else?”

“Yeah. A couple parked back there, man and woman. It was maybe one in the a.m. She had red hair, but I couldn’t see much of the guy. They were there a half-hour or so and never got out of the car that I saw.”

I looked over the distance to the funeral parlor. Imagined it at night.

“You said she was a redhead, Mr Paltry?”

“Kinda long hair. Had on one of those tight tops. Halter top, pink. She was on the side facing me, passenger. She had a pretty decent set of—”