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  Rachel looked at Matt in astonishment. “You did that?"

  Matt grimaced and nodded.

  "He was suspended for an entire quarter, and when Matt got home, his dad took off his belt and whipped his ass raw," Andy said. “The thing is, Matt wasn't the one who left the shit on Ackerman's desk."

  "Then why did you take the blame?" Rachel asked Matt.

  "The principal always assumed anything bad that happened at the school was Andy's fault, whether it was or not," Matt said. “I had a clean record, so I knew they'd go easy on me, but if Andy went down for this one, they'd expel him from school for good."

  "And he knew that the beating I'd get from my daddy wouldn't be nearly as gentle as the one he got," Andy said. “That's Matthew Cahill for you."

  The crowd applauded again, raising their glasses and guzzling more beer in Matt's honor. One of the loggers gestured to Matt and yelled at the bartender, "His money is no good here!"

  "That's good, because after today, I'm not going to have any," Matt said.

  Everybody laughed and headed back to their seats, except for Andy, who lingered at the bar, eyeing Rachel with curiosity.

  "Did you come down here to console us?" Andy said.

  "Just because I work in the front office, that doesn't mean I don't care about what happens in the yard."

  "That's real nice, but I'm plenty consoled already," Andy said. “My buddy Matt here, however, has hardly been consoled at all. I've never met a man more in need of consolation than him."

  "Go away, Andy," Matt said.

  Andy started to go back to his table when Rachel asked a question.

  "So who really did it?"

  Matt replied, "Did what?"

  "Left the horse manure in the principal's office," she said.

  "They never found out," Matt said.

  Andy grinned. “They knew right off."

  Matt looked at Andy with genuine surprise. “You really did it?"

  "Of course I did," Andy said. “You knew that. Who else but me would have had the balls?"

  Andy laughed and turned to share the hilarity with the other loggers, all of whom found it as wildly amusing as he did.

  Matt got up quietly from his stool. When Andy turned to look at him again, Matt hammered him in the face with a right hook that might as well have been a brick.

  The blow knocked the mug out of Andy's hand, splattering him with beer, and sent him tumbling back into his friends, who caught him before he fell. The mug shattered on the floor.

  Matt tossed a few bucks on the counter and met the bartender's eye.

  "That's for the broken mug," Matt said and walked out without giving Andy another glance. If he had, he'd have seen that the punch failed to knock the grin off Andy's face, but it did smear his front teeth with blood.

  "See?" Andy said to Rachel. “He's feeling better already."

  "You're an asshole," she said and followed Matt out the door.

  Andy watched her go, bounced back to his feet, wiped his bloody mouth on his sleeve, and turned to his friends.

  "Beer me!" he yelled, and the party continued.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Twenty minutes later, Matt and Rachel sat across from each other in a booth at the Denny's on the edge of town. They each had a cup of lousy coffee in front of them and picked at a piece of banana cream pie that looked incredible but tasted synthetic.

  "How could you not have known that Andy was guilty?" she asked.

  "Maybe I want to see the best in people."

  "Or you're blind, at least when it comes to him. What's he got on you?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Did he take a bullet for you? Give you his kidney? Or does he have pictures of you doing something terrible, like molesting little boys? Whatever it is, it must be huge."

  "It's loyalty," Matt said.

  "That's it?"

  "It's huge to me. He's my oldest friend. I'll always have his back. That's all there is to it."

  "But he's an asshole," she said.

  "Not to me."

  " Especially to you. How come everyone else can see it and you can't?"

  Matt set down his fork. “You want to know what I see when I look at Andy?"

  She nodded.

  "Terror," he said.

  They called the narrow, rectangular houses in Matt's neighborhood shotgun shacks. The four rooms were laid out in a row without any hallways. So, in theory, if all the doors were open, and you happened to be standing on the front porch with a loaded shotgun, you could fire it into the house and all the pellets could pass through to the backyard without hitting a wall.

  That was how some people thought the shacks got their name. Another theory, the one Matt's parents subscribed to, was that it came from all the impoverished people who blew their heads off with shotguns rather than continue living in those miserable dumps.

  Matt's father had remodeled their shotgun shack so extensively that it wasn't really one anymore. He'd built the place out, added a hallway, and erected a gable on their flat roof.

  But the house next door, the one that the Goodis family moved into during the blistering-hot summer of Matt's eighth year, was still the original, cramped floor plan.

  Sam Goodis, his wife, Marla, and their son, Andy, kept to themselves. Sam was a huge man, covered with tattoos, and worked as a mechanic in the railroad yard.

  In the nights that followed, Matt often heard slapping, and crying, and yelling, and things breaking in the Goodis house. He could rarely make out what was actually being said, beyond the pleading in Marla's voice and the rage in Sam's. He never heard a sound from Andy.

  Matt went to his parents about it and asked them to do something, but they told him that what happened under another family's roof was none of their business and that it was best not to mix in.

  So Matt was left to wonder why Marla was always bruised and why their son, Andy, never wanted to play and always seemed as furtive as a feral cat.

  But that changed one Sunday when Matt's parents were at church and he was home sick with a stomach flu. He was in bed, a towel laid out on the bedspread and a bucket on his nightstand, when he heard a scratching sound under the floor.

  He got out of bed, went down on his knees, and pressed his ear to the wood. And when he did, he could swear that he heard breathing.

  There was a dog in the neighborhood that liked to bring the small animals and birds that it killed under their house. The dog would gut the animals, leaving the carcasses behind, and the rotting smell would permeate the entire house for days. Matt was nauseous enough as it was without having to deal with the smell, too.

  So he got up, grabbed a flashlight and a broom, and went outside to scare away whatever animal was under their house. They'd had everything down there. Dogs, cats, snakes, rabbits, squirrels, even a rabid raccoon that his dad had to shoot.

  But he'd never heard anything breathing down there before.

  He stepped off the porch, lay down on his stomach, and peered into the crawl space under their raised foundation, sweeping the beam of his flashlight into the cobwebby darkness.

  What he saw surprised him.

  It was Andy, curled up in the deepest, darkest part, one of his eyes nearly swollen shut, blood on his cheek. Andy looked at Matt imploringly and raised a finger to his lips, mouthing a silent Shhhh.

  Matt was puzzling over it when he felt a presence looming over him. He scooted back and looked up to see Sam Goodis standing behind him, shirtless and sweaty, holding a beer can in one hand and a leather belt in the other. The belt was wrapped once around his hand, and the silver buckle dangled in front of Matt's face.

  "What are you doing down there, boy?"

  Matt stared at the buckle. There were specks of fresh blood on the hook. He swallowed hard.

  "Looking for money."

  Sam snorted and took a slug of his beer. “You think there's buried treasure under your house?"

  "I broke my piggy bank and some of the coins fell through the crac
ks in the floor."

  It wasn't entirely a lie. It had actually happened, only it was a year ago. He figured he had a better chance not getting caught in a fib if it was at least partially based on truth.

  "What do you need a flashlight and a broom for?"

  "I'm afraid of spiders," he said. “There are some big ones under there."

  "Well, now that I know there's money under your house, maybe one night I'll crawl under there and take it all for myself." Sam grinned and finished his beer. “What would you say to that?"

  "That it'd be nice if a black widow bit you while you were down there."

  Sam squatted down on his haunches, close enough that Matt could smell the beer on his breath.

  "You got balls. That comes as a surprise. Have you seen my boy?" Sam looked him in the eye.

  "Boy?"

  Matt couldn't help stealing a quick glance under the house. Andy was shivering with terror. He looked up at Sam Goodis again.

  "No, sir," Matt said.

  "You see him, you tell him he's the most worthless creature that ever crawled out of a woman's snatch."

  Sam tossed his empty beer can under the house, got to his feet, and walked down the street.

  When Matt looked back under the house, Andy was gone. For the next few weeks, every time he heard a sound under the house, he feared it was Sam Goodis, looking for his money.

  Andy escaped that beating, but there were more, for him and for his mother. The beatings went on for years, until Sam walked out one day when Andy was a teenager and never came back.

  "After that, Mrs. Goodis and Andy were on their own and my parents started looking after them," Matt said now, watching Rachel idly go after the last few crumbs of the pie with her fork. “Dad would fix things up around their house. Mom would bring them leftovers. I made sure Andy always had a friend."

  "That was very sweet of you," she said.

  "If we'd shown that concern a few years earlier, we could have spared them both a lot of pain. But we pretended we didn't see the evil that was right in front of us. We turned our backs and hoped it would go away."

  "It did," Rachel said.

  Matt shook his head. “Sam Goodis was gone, but we still felt him. He was there in the scars, the ones you see and the ones you don't. That's why Andy is the way he is."

  And that was why late one winter night, a couple of years back, Marla Goodis walked naked out onto Spirit Lake and fell through the ice, but Matt didn't tell Rachel about that.

  "You were a child, Matt. None of it was your fault. You shouldn't feel guilty about what happened."

  "But I do," Matt said.

  He was the most sensitive, caring man Rachel had ever met, and she had never wanted to make love to anyone more than she wanted to with him at that moment. She reached across the table and took his hand.

  "You don't have to pick me up in the morning for the ski trip. You can come over tonight instead." She looked him in the eye. “And stay with me."

  He smiled. “I appreciate that, but I'm real tired and I've still got to pack."

  "Right, pack, I forgot about that. I've got to do that, too." She started to withdraw her hand, but he didn't let her go. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze.

  "I'm looking forward to this trip."

  "So am I." She kissed his hand, closing her eyes and pretending the wedding ring wasn't there.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It began with a sore back.

  At first, Janey thought she'd twisted something the wrong way as she was lifting a box of school supplies out of the pickup truck. Matt was always telling her to lift with her knees, not her lower back, and she always ignored him.

  But the ache wouldn't go away. After a week or two of ice packs, massages, and enough Advil to eat away half her stomach lining, she gave in and saw the doctor, something she absolutely hated to do. She saw it as a sign of weakness, a failure of character, and an avoidable expense. But it was the only way, short of hitting up one of her drug-dealing high school students, to get her hands on some Vicodin.

  She went in for her aching back, but all the doctor wanted to talk about was some freckle he saw right above her hip. Janey found it incredibly irritating, especially when he refused to give her a prescription for painkillers until she went across the hall to see a dermatologist, an old coot with hair coming out of his ears who insisted on cutting the freckle out with what felt like a razor-edged melon baller.

  But he stitched her up, gave her the Vicodin, and sent her back home.

  Two days later, she got The Call. The little freckle was malignant.

  It turned out that the freckle was a tiny speck of an unusually aggressive, particularly corrosive strain of skin cancer that had metastasized, wrapped itself around her lower spine, and then went straight up to her brain, where it was spreading like an oil slick.

  Within just a few weeks, she was in the hospital and grim-faced doctors were telling Matt it was time to talk with Janey about her "end of life" wishes.

  She had no wishes for death. All of her wishes were about life, and the future she and Matt were supposed to have together.

  But now her future was measured in the steady drip of fluids into her IV, which was pumping her full of drugs that dulled her pain but fogged her thinking.

  She'd long since lost the will to eat and was being nourished by a feeding tube. She pissed through a catheter and crapped into a bedpan, unable to make it to the restroom any longer.

  Janey mostly slept. When she was awake, she was rarely lucid, more often dazed, incoherent, irrational, and irritable. Only occasionally would the real Janey emerge and offer him a tender smile and a look of sadness, and then she'd disappear into herself again.

  Matt spent his days sitting at her bedside, holding her hand, soothing her as best he could.

  There was a couch in the room that folded out into a hide-a-bed, but he'd usually fall asleep in his chair, still holding his wife's hand.

  As he had now.

  It was the coldness that woke him up. It was like he was holding on to an icicle.

  He jerked awake to find a doctor he'd never seen before standing on the other side of her bed, looking down at Janey, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully, her chest rising and falling with her labored, rasping breathing.

  The doctor had a jaunty demeanor, as if he was waiting for the Oompa-Loompas to finish their rhyme before breaking into song. He was wearing a round reflector band on his head, and an outrageously large stethoscope dangled from his neck.

  "Why is she so cold?" Matt asked him.

  "Perhaps because she's dead." The doctor reached into the pocket of his lab coat and then held a selection of lollipops out to Matt like a sugary bouquet. “Want a lollipop?"

  "She can't be dead," Matt said, glancing at the EKG, the little light bouncing across the screen. “Her heart is still beating."

  "Really?" the doctor put on his stethoscope and touched the diaphragm to her chest. “We can't have that."

  The instant the stethoscope touched her flesh, the skin turned black, curling back and exposing her muscle and sinew, which rapidly rotted away, revealing her sternum and internal organs, which were riddled with yellow pus.

  "No!" Matt screamed, lunging for the doctor, but it was too late. The rot was spreading up to her lovely face, devouring it, revealing her skull, eroding the bone itself, and exposing her brain, where maggots feasted on the gelatinous lobes as one writhing, squirming, squiggly mass that spewed out of her cranial cavity and over her entire body.

  Matt looked up in horror at the doctor, who unwrapped a lollipop and began sucking on it in an outrageously lewd and suggestive way.

  That's when Matt noticed the doctor's orange hair, the round, red ball on the tip of his nose, and the smile painted around his lips.

  He wasn't a doctor at all. He was a clown.

  The clown took the sucker out of his mouth. “We are going to have so much fun together, Matt."

  And that's when Matt woke up, disoriented and
afraid, his heart pounding.

  It took him a few long seconds to realize that he'd had a nightmare, and that he was in his cabin and not the hospital, and that Janey was long dead.

  So the worst part of the nightmare was true.

  He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was 4:11 a.m., several hours until dawn. But he knew there was no way he could get back to sleep now. So he got up, put on his clothes, and went out into the frigid darkness to chop wood.

  Perhaps if Matt hadn't been in such a hurry to get out of the room, and if it wasn't so dark, he might have noticed the lollipop wrapper on the floor…

  …and the maggots squirming beneath his bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  November 19, 2010

  The original lodge at Mammoth Peaks was essentially a massive log cabin with several stone chimneys. It was the only authentic building in the resort. The stores, restaurants, and condos mimicked the look of the lodge, with facades of fake stone and artificially weathered timber that might not have seemed so artificial if the real thing wasn't right next door.

  Matt and Rachel were staying in the lodge, surrounded by the natural, rustic warmth of that aged timber, in a room with a huge fireplace and a bed made of carved wood that was eerily similar to the one in Matt's cabin.

  Rachel didn't know that, since she'd never been in Matt's bedroom, and thought his discomfort was the lingering result of the embarrassing "mix-up" in their reservations that meant they now had to share a room.

  "I am so sorry about this," Matt said. “I really did reserve two rooms."

  "You don't have to keep apologizing," she said. “I honestly don't mind."

  Especially since she'd dishonestly canceled the reservation herself and was relieved when the desk clerk told them the hotel was entirely booked up.

  "You can take the bed," Matt said. “I'll be fine on the couch."

  She stepped close to him and draped her arms around his neck. “I want to sleep with you."

  Rachel could feel him stiffen up, but not in the way she would have liked. His shoulders got tight and he pulled ever so slightly away from her. She responded by pressing herself against him and giving him a deep, tender kiss.