The Fool Killer's Cache: Chapter 23

Will Allen Dromgoole arrived on the first crisp morning of the season. The sun hovered above the ridge, lighting the red leaves like old coals, and the air had that bright, knife-clean edge only Tennessee could muster before the frost. He set one polished shoe in front of the other with care, feeling the pinch of his best socks at the ankle, and let the rest of Morristown come into focus.

He’d been gone four years — long enough for a man’s sins to age into legend, and his legend to go sour in all the ways he suspected it might. Will was older now, and stiffer, his silver hair fully surrendered to white and his spectacles held together by a new twist of wire that pinched above his right cheek. He wore a wool suit cut for autumn, the dark blue of it setting off his hands, which had gone paler and more veined than he remembered. The notebook was already in hand, pen clipped to the spine, thumb marking the page where his train musings had trailed into nothing but ellipses.

Main street ran three blocks, and Will counted every one, the heels of his shoes tapping out a message of intent. He took stock: the bakery now wore a shingle advertising “Spiced Melungeon Loaf” in two languages. Someone had set up a stall outside the dry goods store, selling woven willow baskets and little jars of river-amber honey, the labels handwritten in a script both looped and angular. Across the road, a cluster of schoolchildren chased a dog up the walk, the hound dodging among the legs as deft as a billiard ball. Will clocked the children as mixed, the oldest a sandy-haired boy with the frame of an eventual linebacker, the youngest a girl whose skin glowed nut-brown, her braids trailing ribbons that flashed as she ran.

Further along, the diner had a new paint job, and through the window Will could see half a dozen men and women inside, clustered in threes and fours, the booths no longer segregated by custom or stony habit. Even the courthouse, which had once loomed as a whitewashed scold, now looked less severe — someone had planted a ring of asters at its base, their purple blooms the only riot left in town.

It was all exactly what he’d expected, and not at all.