Ella broke her attention away from Croon and scrutinized the sudden arrivals in her hands.The first card was dated last night, and right there at the top was time-stamped:
CROON, D.– 21:56 IN
CROON, D.– 09:02 OUT
And exactly the same times on the other card, dated two nights ago.
Ella stared at the numbers.She could feel Ripley beside her, reading over her shoulder, arriving at the same place Ella was already standing.
Darryl Croon had clocked in at the construction site at 9:56 PM on both nights, which meant that on the night Amber was strangled at ten and Rose was killed around midnight, Croon was working.And on the night Eddie Foxall was beaten to death in his sunroom, Croon was doing the same thing.
But she couldn’t afford to fall apart now.Not in front of Croon, who was watching her with an avidity bordering on obscene, like he was just waiting for her to admit she’d been wrong.
Because last night’s clock card was evidence that Croon was not their killer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Earl Parsons sat in his lock keeper’s hut and listened to the bayou do nothing.
He didn’t have much to look at anymore.In here was cinder block walls and a tin roof that leaked when it rained.He sat at a desk with a logbook he was supposed to fill in every time he operated the lock, which these days meant he filled in maybe two lines a week.
The shelves behind held the tools of a trade that the world had no practical need for anymore. Grease guns, spanners, a coil of heavy chain, replacement pins for the gate mechanisms that he’d ordered three years ago and never needed.
The canal lock itself sat thirty feet from the hut’s door.The whole thing was a simple affair.There were two wooden gates, a sluice mechanism operated by a hand crank, a short stretch of channel connecting the bayou to the drainage canal that ran south toward the parish line.In the old days, Earl had opened and closed those gates a dozen times per shift.Barges moving aggregate, flat-bottomed boats hauling timber, and sometimes even the occasional recreational sailor who’d taken a wrong turn and needed help getting back to open water.Earl would crank the sluice, watch the water level rise or fall, guide the vessel through, log it, and wait for the next one.
That was twenty years ago.Maybe more.He’d stopped keeping close count of the years around the same time the years had stopped offering him anything worth counting.
Now the canal was silted up on the south end and the parish had been talking about dredging it since before the last election and the election before that.The boats didn’t come this way anymore because there were easier routes.The lock sat there with its gates closed and its mechanism stiff and its wood going soft in the wet heat, and Earl sat in his hut beside it like a lighthouse keeper on a coast where the ships had all gone home.
He didn't mind.That was the thing people didn't understand about Earl Parsons.They assumed the isolation would drive a man crazy, and maybe it would drive most men crazy, but Earl had never been most men.He'd grown up the youngest of six on a farm outside Thibodaux, where the nearest neighbour was four miles of cane field away.Silence was an old friend that he welcomed, and he'd done so his whole life.
Besides, the bayou was never truly silent if you knew how to listen.The water spoke to him daily.Sometimes he’d hear wood pigeons in the cypress trees or dragonflies hitting the surface of the canal and pulling away again.If you sat still long enough, the whole place opened up and talked to you, and Earl had been sitting still in this hut for two decades, so by now the bayou told him things it didn’t tell anyone else.
Or at least it used to.
Lately, the sounds had started running together.The pigeons blurred into the water and the water blurred into the wind and sometimes Earl would sit at his desk and realise that ten minutes had passed and he couldn’t account for any of them.There were little gaps everywhere, like someone was taking a hole punch to his day and removing circles of time that he couldn’t get back.
Early onset, the doctor had said, which Earl thought was a stupid term for something that was happening to a man of seventy.Seventy was too late for plenty of things.
Earl had told the doctor he was full of it, though he’d used a shorter word than that.He’d refused the pamphlets and refused the referral to the memory clinic.He didn’t need someone in a white coat telling him what was wrong with his own head.He knew what was wrong with his own head.He was getting old and his brain was getting old with him, and that was the deal you made when you stuck around long enough.Some parts wore out before others.His knees had gone first, then his hearing, and now his memory was following them down the same road, and all three of them could go to hell because Earl Parsons was still standing, mostly.
Earl looked over to the corner of his desk where his pill organiser sat among a clutter of amber bottles and crumpled instruction sheets.Seven compartments, one for each day.The labels were medical gibberish he’d never been able to pronounce and had stopped trying to.He knew the pink one was for his heart because it was the same colour as the diagram on the box.The yellow ones might have been blood pressure or they might have been for his knee pain.He’d known at some point.The knowledge had been in his head and now there was a hole where it used to be, and the hole was shaped exactly like the thing he’d forgotten, which meant he could feel its absence without being able to fill it.
Earl picked out Tuesday’s compartment and tipped the contents into his palm.He looked at them for a moment.Then he chased the lot with a mouthful of water.
Done.Life went on.
He eased back in his chair and looked out through the filthy window at the canal.The water was flat and brown and going nowhere.He spotted a heron on the bank, and Earl watched it for a while.For exactly how long, he couldn’t be sure.
A knock at the door.
Earl sat up.He turned his head and listened.It could have been a branch dropping on the roof.It could have been a nutria bumping against the hut’s foundations.His hearing wasn’t what it was, and the things he heard weren’t always the things that were happening.His hearing had been one of the first things to go when he hit sixty.Could be a delivery, or the supervisor from the parish, probably come to drop off Earl’s weekly check.He didn’t trust bank accounts, he said, not that Earl had ever had one.Occasionally a fisherman wandered up from the bayou to ask about water levels or bait shops, but they never knocked.They just appeared at the window and scared the life out of him.
Earl pushed to his feet, shuffled to the door and took a moment to shake the fog from his head before turning the knob.But then he opened it to find himself staring a whole lot of nothing.
The path leading from the hut down to the canal was empty.The levee road beyond it was empty.The bayou sat there doing what it always did, which was nothing at all.
‘What in the blue blazes...?’
