All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 120

120

A little over a thousand miles away Patch walked past opulent Charleston mansions, stood before each and looked at the detail, imagined them in the right colors, maybe before they’d been altered. He buzzed the gates and strolled the allée, breathing the heaven scents. He was met by a housekeeper who told him the same blessed family had lived there near a hundred years.

“I got a letter from here a few years back. A girl named Mya Levane’s parents wrote it.”

The housekeeper hustled him out into the street and closed the door behind herself. Told him that Mya’s body had been found six months

before.

“What happened to her?”

She softened a little, smiled and touched his arm. “Nothing you want to know about, son.”

He spoke a little about Grace; she stopped him and told him that Mya was not his girl, that she had been across the border in Mexico at the time.

An hour later he walked into the Bank of South Carolina. He left with a thousand bucks, gave all but two hundred to a cluster of homeless people by the Ashley River. A girl no older than fourteen hugged him for a long time.

He rode a bus through the night, through a landscape that morphed from sunset burned over the Blue Ridge Mountains to a night sky that chased every hint of life from lush hills.

He did not sleep, just kept a hand on his scar, his mind drifting back from one lifetime to another. His eye, when he caught the passing of lonesome trucks’ light, saw through a fifteen-year-old lens, like it did not

carry the haunt of the hunt, the hungry stab of a million fruitless hours. He wondered how it would end. What would be his last roll, when the curtain would fall, the interested long since departed. His mind settled on Eloise Strike, her father Walter. Something about the man, maybe the strength, told Patch they might have been searching for the same girl. It was a hunch. It was all he had.

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