Chapter Four

It was another warm night in Kept Creek. The cicadas hummed their endless staccato, the crickets joining in a creaking harmony. There was the occasional bird calling fretfully as they roosted for the night, and the old juke-box at Henry's Bar crackled and popped a worn track lamenting lost love. A few stragglers made their way through the full parking lot to the door, and the still night air carried a much faster tune from a more youthful bar a few streets away. The simple fact that it was Friday was enough reason to celebrate for most citizens. "Most" did not include David Daugherty.

He sat hunched over the blueish screen of his laptop, tapping fiercely on the flat keys. He had hardly stepped away from the computer for close to two days, researching anything that he thought remotely relevant. The more he searched, the more disturbed he felt. Kept Creek wasn't much more than a blip on the immensity that was the internet, but information could still be found with enough determination. The more he learned about the town, the less he understood.

Even after nearly four dozen hours, he'd only found two articles that mentioned anything beyond basic location and population statistics. The first article was strange. It was a piece from a newspaper in Montgomery about the rising divorce rate. He almost hadn't read it, but he'd been desperate for any mention of Kept Creek. The journalist had gathered divorce statistics from every town within an hour's drive from the city, which was an impressive feat of journalistic duty on its own. The strange part was that there had never been a divorce in Kept Creek. Not a single one. What was stranger was that there couldn't have been a divorce in Kept Creek, because in the last century there hadn't been a single marriage. People didn't even file their taxes together. Kept Creek had been thrown out of the larger statistics for the article as an outlier, but the oddity was enough to warrant its own paragraph.

If only that article had been the only thing he'd found. The next relevant web page was buried in the back of the search engine. It was more than ten years old and vague enough to frustrate, but what information that could be gleaned from it nearly made David vomit. In the early 2000's, there was a murder in Kept Creek. A young woman was found stabbed in the woods, leaving behind a devastated fiancé. The article didn't go into any more detail, but David didn't need it. He didn't need it to say that the stab wound was in the lower stomach. He didn't need it to say that it had taken at least an hour for the blood loss and organ damage to kill her. That the body was found underneath a giant, flowering dogwood with the knife lying a few feet away. He didn't need any more information to know that he was dealing with one of two options. First, there was a killer with a very particular type of victim. Second, there was a copycat killer basing his work on the last atrocity that Kept Creek had seen.

It answered so many questions. Locals, particularly the older locals, remembered the last murder. They'd heard of a stabbing in the woods and made the same connection as David: that the two killings had been the same. They fit together to make a pattern of violence. No, that was wrong. A serial killer wouldn't wait a decade between kills. Maybe he was drawing connections where there were none. He didn't have the details of the previous murder, just that it was a stabbing in the woods. There were an awful lot of woods around the tiny town. There were a lot of hunters that carried knives. The first one could have been an accident, and even if it wasn't it was most likely unrelated.

Though it was possible that someone decided to copycat the first murder, it was also possible that the people who'd been privy to confidential information were simply relatives of cops with big mouths. David slammed his laptop shut and jumped away as if it'd caught fire.

He was jumping to conclusions, he wasn't sleeping, he wasn't working. Was he loosing his mind? As if in answer to his query, a sound rang out like the bells of judgement. He flinched as if to jump out of his skin, only to feel deep relief almost immediately. After days of sitting in silence, his doorbell seemed preternaturally loud. He stood in place, unsure whether he was going to answer the door. It could be the Sheriff. He tread carefully through the wrecked living room towards the door. It struck him that he'd trashed the living room. He hadn't even noticed, hadn't given his surroundings a passing thought. He opened the door, but it wasn't the Sheriff.

"Hey, Dave," The warm brown eyes of Geordi Raines met him instead of Hubbard's piercing blue.

"Mr. Raines," David was surprised, but not shocked. Raines was the math teacher at KC High. He was probably picked by the staff to check up on him.

"Geordi," Raines crinkled his eyebrows in a confusedly negative reaction.

"No, you had it right the first time; I'm David," As soon as the words slipped out, David realized his own stupidity. It took all of a week for him to forget how to socialize with another human.

"I meant you should call me Geordi," His smile reached all the way to his eyes in a way no one could fake. The man was either very easily amused, or had a strange sense of what was funny.

"Sorry, of course," Why was he here? "How can I help you... Geordi?" David watched as his coworker's eyes travelled from his rat-nest hair all the way to his dirty socks, only to flicker to the filthy living room behind him.

"You need to get out," Geordi rubbed his hands together as if preparing for a very difficult endeavor.

"What?" This meeting wasn't making any sense.

"Listen, Dave, I know you ain't been here long, and I know you ain't the most... outgoin' type..." Geordi seemed to be choosing his words very carefully, but David simply listened in amazement. He'd spoken with Geordi Raines in between classes at the high school, and the difference was astonishing. Mr. Raines the teacher spoke clearly and in something that could almost be called non-regional diction, with only the slightest lilt to betray his Kept Creek upbringing. Geordi the man in a Johnny Cash shirt on his doorstep spoke in the same drawling manner as the rest of the town. It felt like a let-down, like the one person he'd met here that didn't give in to dropped consonants and swinging vowels had suddenly drunk the Kool-Aid.

"I got somethin' on my face?" Geordi ran his fingers along the outer edge of his mouth, and David realized he'd been staring. He rubbed his tired eyes for what felt like the hundreth time that day and shook his head. Geordi crossed his arms in front of him and arranged his face into a look of determination, "Yeah, you need to get outta here for awhile," Geordi side-stepped David and entered the living room, carefully walking around a throw pillow that had somehow landed on the floor, "Tell you what," He clapped his hands together, "You hop in the shower, and be quick mind you, and I'll put this room to rights. Then we're goin' out," David opened his mouth to argue, but suddenly Geordi was pushing him from the room, "Nope! I don't wanna hear it! You get cleaned up, you smell like the south end of a northbound dog," It took David a moment to process the statement, and by then Geordi had navigated him into the bathroom and slammed the door between them. The separation did nothing to stop Geordi from speaking. David admitted defeat and his current lack of hygiene. He turned on the shower and jumped in. From the living room he could hear Geordi moving around and releasing a steady stream of words.

"You're goin' through it, Lord knows I know it, but that don't make it right for you to give up on your day-to-day matters," There was the thumping sound of something heavy being dropped, "So tonight you're gonna talk to people, and get your pain out in the air so it stops festerin', and prob'ly drink 'til you don't know which way's up," The crack of wood against human body was followed by a sharp intake of breath and a quick swear.

David wasn't sure if Geordi was cleaning the living room or dropping small grenades in it, so he hurried through his shower. He rushed through the door that lead to his bedroom and pulled on clean clothes from his dresser before returning to the living room. He stood, frazzled and confused, in the doorway staring at the spotless place. Couch cushions had been returned to their rightful places, knick knacks had been arranged, trash and debris had disappeared, and dirty clothes had been gathered into a pile in the corner.

"Ready?" Geordi smiled that genuine smile of his and clapped David on the shoulder.

"What was that banging sound?" David couldn't meet Geordi's level of enthusiasm.

"Oh," Geordi's ears turned slightly pink, and half of his crooked grin hitched even wider over his face, "Your coffee table put a little hitch in my giddyup," He laughed at his own misfortune.

"It did what?" David blinked in confusion. Geordi simply motioned to his shin, experimentally rubbing his hand over what was most likely a goose-egg from running into the furniture. David nodded his understanding and found himself being ushered out through the door. He barely had time to grab shoes.

Inside of Geordi's bright green SUV, David noticed large cases filling the vehicle. Geordi saw David's gaze and tapped his hands excitedly on the steering wheel.

"Most of that's not mine," He laughed, "It's for the show tonight,"

"Show?"

"Yeah, I'm helpin' out. My daddy's gettin' arthritis, so I've been fillin' in for him on nights when that starts actin' up. You have no idea what I'm talkin' about... my daddy plays guitar with a few of his old friends every Friday down at a little bar. They're not bad," He nodded his head excitedly.

"You, uh, you play guitar?" David was starting to feel like he wasn't contributing to the conversation, but Geordi didn't seem to need much assistance in that department.

"Don't worry, the set's just about an hour. The rest of the night I'll sit and listen if you need it, or I could just keep talkin' your ear off," The man never seemed to stop smiling, and David felt his face mirroring the motion. For a brief moment he didn't feel broken. As soon as that thought hit him, he felt ten times worse. Guilt rolled over him for forgetting Brooke's death even for a second. It was still too soon, it would forever be too soon.

"It's okay to smile, Dave. Livin' ain't a crime," Geordi became very serious as he spoke, but quickly changed the subject. He rambled for the rest of the ride about which students were troublemakers at Kept Creek High, about female teachers who would kill him if they had the chance, about the tricks he'd pulled when he'd attended the very same high school several years earlier. Geordi was a font of everything and nothing, but everything he said, he said with a smile on his face and a light in his eyes.

"Look at me, talkin' ninety to nothin'," Geordi laughed loudly and freely, "Almost drove right past it," He pulled into the packed parking lot of a short, long building made of grey cinder blocks. A few middle-aged men milled about by the front door, smoking and gesticulating widely as they talked. It was very obviously a bar, and according to the faded blue paint on the front, windowless wall it was called Henry's. David was unsure if he felt comfortable entering the place, it had an air of disrepair and ill-repute. It just looked so redneck, with the parking lot filled with rusted pickups (at least one had antlers roped onto the hood), the painted name on the wall was underlined with a twirling lasso, and the bright red plastic bucket filled with sand near the front door was clearly a make-shift ash tray. David didn't have long to stand in his uncertainty before the men by the door came barreling over.

"Well, shit, took you long enough!" One shouted to Geordi, who simply shrugged and opened the trunk. They all started grabbing equipment out of the SUV and carrying it inside.

"'Scuse me, Son, couldja get my amp?" A gentleman that had to be mid-seventies was suddenly at David's shoulder. He nodded and struggled as he carried the heavy box inside. How had his day brought him here? Carrying a senior citizen's amplifier into a country bar was not something he'd ever anticipated while he'd lived in California.

"Psst!" Geordi appeared next to him, whispering as they entered the crowded, smoke-filled bar, "Old people like to talk, so don't pay 'em no mind if they start spoutin' nonsense," There was an ominous quality to the words, a nervousness that Geordi hadn't displayed throughout all of his talking so far. Whatever discomfort David had felt leading up to that point was immediately doubled.

What was he doing here?