Chapter 4
And if Wayne Thorne had swung those eleven tools in the dark, the lumber mill still remembered the sound.
The morning came up the color of cold dishwater.
By seven, the Appalachian mist had condensed into a sullen, relentless drizzle that plastered sodden beech leaves against the windshield of Wesley’s Impala. Route 9 was empty except for logging tandems hauling second-growth pine down to the river landing, their air brakes wheezing like asthmatic lungs at the flashing yellow light by the feed mill.
The Black River Café sat across from the county courthouse, housed in a narrow brick storefront with a sagging tin awning and an illuminated plastic sign that had lost its *C* and its *é* during the ice storm of 2004.
Inside, the air smelled of bacon fat, scorched chicory coffee, and wet wool.
Wesley sat in a back booth upholstered in cracked green vinyl held together with black electrical tape. On the Formica tabletop, he had arranged three index cards: *Wayne Thorne (Quarry / Disciplinary), Dr. Raymond Hargrove (ME / Vietnamese Surgical Tents),* and *The Two-Minute Window.*
Beside them lay a cup of black coffee he hadn't touched.
At the counter, four men in duck-canvas coats and soiled seed-corn caps sat three stools apart, hunched over their plates like crows on a fence line. None of them had looked directly at Wesley since he walked through the door twenty minutes ago. But when he shifted his boots against the floorboards, the scrape of rubber on pine brought an instantaneous, deadening silence to the room. The clatter of forks against heavy ceramic stopped. The waitress—a woman in her late fifties with swollen ankles and hair dyed the color of a wet copper penny—paused with her Pyrex pot suspended over an empty mug.
They knew who he was. In a county with forty-eight hundred residents and one blinking traffic signal, an out-of-county state sedan parked behind the courthouse was as subtle as a flare in a churchyard.
Wesley picked up his pen, slipped the index cards into his inner jacket pocket, and stood up.
He didn't walk toward the cashier. He walked toward the end of the counter, where an old man with milky corneas and hands scarred white by hydraulic oil was buttering a cold biscuit with the flat of a butter knife.
Pete Settle was seventy-six years old. In July of 1998, he had been the sole proprietor of Settle Hardware & Industrial Supply on the river turnoff, two hundred yards from the entrance to the old St. Jude timber yard.
Wesley pulled out the swivel stool next to him and sat down.
The vinyl cushion let out a long, wheezing hiss. Settle’s butter knife didn't stop moving across the yellow crust, but the old man’s shoulders hitched an inch higher into his flannel collar.
"Mr. Settle," Wesley said evenly.
"Investigator," Settle replied. He didn't turn his head. His voice sounded like dry gravel being turned over with a flat-bottom shovel. "Hear you had Martha Cleary running up and down the cellar stairs yesterday till her hips gave out. Ain't polite to run an old churchwoman through the coal dust."
"Martha runs just fine when she wants to," Wesley said. He took a business card from his breast pocket and laid it flat on the counter next to Settle’s grease-stained paper napkin. "I have a few questions about the night of July fourteenth, ninety-eight."
Settle paused. The butter knife hovered half an inch above the plate.
Behind the counter, the waitress suddenly found an urgent need to scrub the stainless-steel backsplash of the milkshake spindle with a bleach rag. The small circle of duck-canvas coats down the counter remained completely motionless, backs turned, ears angled backward.
"Twenty-six years," Settle murmured. "That’s a mighty long reach for a county that don't pay you a salary, son."
"The State of Ohio pays me. Julian Vance was an Ohio citizen."
"Vance," Settle said. He set the knife down. He picked up his coffee mug with both hands, his knuckles bulbous and knotted with gout. When he spoke, his voice took on a strange, rhythmic flatline—a cadence that felt less like an old man remembering a frightful night and more like a deacon reciting the Apostles' Creed from memory. "A terrible, wild thing. A wandering beast out of the rain. A monster passing through the dark that had no business with this valley, took what he took, and went into the timber."
Wesley tilted his head.
The hairs on the back of his neck stirred.
It wasn't the poetry of the description; rural folks often leaned into biblical cadences when they talked about death. It was the *delivery*. Settle hadn't blinked. He hadn't paused to reconstruct the scene. He hadn't said, *Well, now, let me think,* or *God, that was a bad storm.* He had delivered the sentence in a single, uninflected breath, every syllable polished smooth by thousands of repetitions.
*A wandering beast out of the rain. A monster passing through the dark.*
It was almost word-for-word what Martha Cleary had whispered on the courthouse stairs sixteen hours earlier: *The world’s full of mean men who don't have addresses... The man who killed Julian Vance didn't have a house in this valley.*
"You saw him, then?" Wesley asked softly.
"Didn't have to," Settle said. He took a sip of his coffee. "Calloway showed us the tracks in the mud next morning. Big lugs. Dragging his left heel like a crippled boar. A rail-rider off the coal spur. We all knew what he was."
"And what was he?"
"Something not of this town," Settle said simply.
Wesley leaned in closer, his elbows resting on the worn Formica counter. "You lived two hundred yards from the mill gate, Mr. Settle. A man gets beaten to death with eleven different tools in your backyard. His skull is split from the brow to the atlas bone. The killer vanishes into the black-gum slough without a trace."
Wesley paused, letting the silence hang between them until the hum of the diner’s refrigeration unit seemed to fill the room.
"Tell me something, Pete," Wesley continued, dropping the formal address. "How many shotguns did you sell the next week?"
Settle’s thumb twitched against the ceramic handle of his mug. "What?"
"You ran the hardware store. You sold ammunition, locks, strike-plates, thirty-aught-six shells, double-aught buck. When an inhuman monster—a homicidal drifter who likes smashing college kids into pulp—escapes into the brush behind a town of four thousand people, the hardware store runs out of deadbolts by noon the next day. The women stop walking down to the post office alone. The farmers keep a twelve-gauge loaded across the gun rack of every pickup truck in the township for six months."
Wesley leaned his face right into Settle’s profile.
"I pulled your commercial tax filings from August of 1998, Pete. Your ammunition sales didn't go up by a single dollar. You didn't sell an extra deadbolt. You didn't sell an extra padlock. In fact, your sales on exterior security latches dropped sixteen percent that quarter."
Wesley’s voice was as cold and dry as a winter draught through a barn wall.
"Why weren't you afraid, Pete? Why wasn't anyone in Black River afraid that the monster in the rain was going to come back through their kitchen window?"
