Page 51 of The Villains of Winter

James needed to be thorough.

He needed to memorize his murder alibi.

​​ CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

KNOX PEARSON HAD WRITTEN THEM to meet him in a strange location.

The taxi cab’s scraped yellow paint strobed beneath highway lights. Hours before midnight, the taxi’s worn tires peeled onto the curb of a rowdy street of massive fraternity houses over-spilling with drunken students on the lawns. Tipsy snow angels were formed by freshmen underneath the dreamy, bright street lamp lights. Snowmen with beer cans for hats and bottle caps for noses decorated the slew of riotous fraternity houses.

There were lines of students with suitcases, packed to head home for the holidays.

A surge of panic rose in Elliott’s chest, realizing how over-crowded it was. This wasn’t a remote farm. However, Knox had written to them to meet him there.

Hundreds of chipper students wandered the icy streets in shorts and frayed holiday sweaters; they rollicked together as they linked arm in arm, frolicsome as they sung in the snowfall. Across one street, heavy metal was blasting on the stereo with shredding guitars, raw vocals, and head-splitting drums that nearly drowned out the Christmas-lit sorority house adjacent to them with bright pop music belting out down the street. Elliott and James glanced at each other. “Why did he want to meet here?”

In Arkansas, they blended right in as college students. Their faces were young and their overcoats covered their old Cambridge attire.

The cheap Christmas lights wrapped around the packed fraternity houses, snaking around the yards of plastic beer pong tables, students pouring out through into the backyard where seniors were leaping off the roof into half-frozen pools.

On the other end of the road, a Chevrolet Silverado approached them with a dented bumper.

For a moment, Elliott didn’t recognize him. Knox Pearson had an overgrown beard and bushels of unkempt hair that almost reached his shoulders. His knuckles were knotted from hard labor. The truck was an unmarked vehicle.

He appeared twice their age.

His eyes lit briefly on them. Then, he reached across the passenger seat and opened the door, spilling out a stench of gasoline and smoke. “I needed to be certain that it was really you that had written that letter to me. I needed to see who you were before you ever saw me. I would’ve left if there was a fed here instead.”

For years, Knox believed that the ruling of the Newton incident had been an oversight. He feared the vehicular manslaughter charge wouldn’t remain overturned and the law enforcement officers would be looking for him. That they’d come to bring him to justice for losing control of the truck in that rainstorm.

Knox hadn’t even known that James’s father enrolled him at Æscwulf College. The two men hadn’t seen each other since they were sixteen.

Knox had only written twice in five years.

Once to mention he was hitched to Sarah Chen.

Then to announce he had a son named Zeke.

“Did you write to me because of Finch…Did he…?” Knox started but he couldn’t get the words out. His roughened voice thinned out. “Is he…?”

“He’s alive. It’s not about him,” James answered and Knox’s shoulders visibly unknotted and relaxed. He seemed able to breathe.

“Good.” Knox glanced over James in silence, analyzing him after half a decade apart. James had never written to him at all. Although James never said it out loud, and he’d never admit it even to himself, he blamed Knox for incinerating everyone’s future when he lost control of the vehicle in the winds and rains. If Knox never had removed his hand, their lives would’ve been entirely intact.

James’s mother would’ve never been dead.

James’s grandfather would’ve never been dead.

James would’ve never attended Æscwulf College.

​​ CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“WE WILL BE APART FOR a while. Will you be alright?” James’s words found Elliott in the dark of Knox’s cramped, dusty hen house that had to work as a split bedroom for the night. Knox hadn’t told his wife they would have permanent company. He needed to find a way to deliver the news to her. “Are you awake?”

Elliott mumbled, “I’m awake. I can’t sleep at all. Are you alright?”

“I’ll be fine when this is over.” James pulled the tatterdemalion curtain that separated the two of them within the straw-strewn grounds. A few hens and chicks clucked around them; the reek of horse manure was as thick as a hand on their skin; the freezing wind rattled the worn floorboards and clattered the thin chicken coop walls.

Elliott tightened the overcoat around himself.