Written by Stephen F. Moloney
With Jeanie, Malcolm, and Tess following closely behind, Ray rushed through the door at the back of the kitchen and out into the small parking lot at the rear of the diner.
“Damnit!” he swore after quickly looking to the spot where he’d parked his car. “Yeah, it’s gone.” He turned and looked back at Jeanie and the others. “He took it.”
“I’ll put out an APB straight away then,” said Malcolm, already beginning to make a move towards jogging off towards where his car was parked at the front of the diner. “While I’m gone try and come up with a few places where you think he might try and head to.”
After watching Malcolm run off for a few moments, a frustrated Tess finally pierced the tense bubble of silence, “I can’t believe you didn’t call the cops.”
“For the last time,” said Ray, trying his utmost to stay calm. “I wanted to, but the only way I could get him to stick around was by promisin’ him that I wouldn’t do that.”
“You still should have called them,” replied Tess, her voice clipped and terse as she, too, tried to maintain her composure.
“And what?” asked Ray, getting even more defensive. “Just break his trust?”
“YES!” barked Tess, finally unable to hold her frustration any longer. “That’s exactly what you should have done! Because we’re talking about a fourteen-year-old kid! And a vulnerable one at that! I mean, for crying out loud, he’s still grieving for his mother!”
“Woah, what?” said Ray, any and all frustration he was feeling instantly evaporating.
“He didn’t tell you?” Tess replied, her frustration, like Ray’s, fading as she saw the look of genuine concern suddenly plastered across his face.
“No, not a word. I mean, he mentioned his mom, like once, but …. but I never got the impression that she’d passed away.”
“Well, look … don’t beat yourself up,” said Tess, her spiky demeanor softening with each passing second. “Ever since she died, Oscar’s way of dealing with it has been to … well, not deal with it; to the point where – when he does actually bring himself to mention her – it’s like he’s pretending everything’s still fine and that she’s just … somewhere else.”
Tess turned and looked off towards the street at the front of the diner to see if there was any sign of Malcolm returning. She ran her hands through her long, brown hair, pulling it back and away from her face as if it was preventing her from getting the deep, cleansing breath her lungs were crying out for. “Thing is, you can’t really blame him either, I guess …” she continued, letting out what little breath she’d managed to harvest from the pleasantly mild night air in an exasperated sigh. “I mean, to find her like he did? That’s nothing a child should ever have to deal with.”
“Oh my God, the poor kid,” said Jeanie, sounding as though her heart was breaking.
“Yeah, he’s had it rough,” said Tess, an air of sadness creeping into her voice. “Too rough, really.”
“And I’m guessin’ his father isn’t around?” asked Ray, soberly, as he continued to try and process everything he’d just heard. “Seein’ as … Oscar –” After a week of referring to him as ‘Mustang’ or just ‘kid’, to now call him by his actual name, the one he’d been so protective over – and now Ray knew why – felt oddly alien; as if they weren’t even talking about the same kid. “Has been with a foster family?”
“No, no he’s not,” answered Tess, the words sharp and concise. “He left when Oscar was very young, so … his mother was all he had – well, apart from his grandfather, of course, but he lives in Texas.”
A lightbulb suddenly went off in Ray’s head.
“In Houston?!” he asked, rushing to get the words out of his mouth.
“Uh, yeah …” said Tess, confused, but recognizing from the excited energy now radiating out from Ray that he’d obviously had an idea. “How did you know that?”
“Mustan-” Ray caught himself before he could finish. “Oscar mentioned Houston when we first met!” he continued, hurrying to vocalize the thoughts his brain was now churning out as if not doing so would see them vanish. “I offered to drive him to wherever he was trying to get to while we waited for his car to be fixed and he said Houston!”
“So you think that’s where he’s going to try and get to?!” said Tess, her spirits buoying as she boarded Ray’s train of thought.
“It has to be!” he said, suddenly so energetic he felt as though he were back in the army and about to head out on a mission.
“Then we need to tell Malcolm!” said Jeanie, the sense of urgency after spreading to her as well. “Get him to close the roads or something!”
“That’s an idea, for sure,” replied Ray, making a concerted effort to calm himself down as his mind continued to race. “But I don’t think he’s headed for the state line just yet.”
“Why?! Do you think he’s gone somewhere else first?!” asked Tess.
*
As the headlights from Malcolm’s car crept around the corner and slowly illuminated the front of Teddy’s garage, Ray was relieved to see that his car, as he’d predicted, had, indeed, been abandoned outside the front of it.
“Is that yours?” asked Tess, throwing the words over her shoulder and into the back seat where Ray and Jeanie were both huddled in the space in-between the two front seats in order to see out through the windshield.
“Yeah, that’s it,” confirmed Ray, his eyes already darting around the exterior of the garage for signs of Mustang. “And the engine’s still runnin’ too, so I’d wager he’s still here. Hey, Malcolm, kill the lights for me?”
As asked, Malcolm quickly shut off his headlights, allowing the darkness to once again swallow up Teddy’s garage and claim it as its own.
“Alright, well, wish me luck,” said Tess, quickly unbuckling her seatbelt and popping open her door, causing little lights dotted around the roof of the car to burst into life as a result.
“Actually …” said Ray, seeking to get Tess’ attention just as she had one foot outside the car. “Do you mind if I try talkin’ to him?”
From the expression on her face as she turned around in her seat to look back at him, Ray could tell that Tess wasn’t overly keen on this particular idea, “While it’s nice of you to offer,” she said, her tone polite, yet undoubtedly stern. “I think it’s better if I go – this is my job after all.”
“And I completely understand that,” said Ray, holding up his two hands in a surrendering fashion in order to show he wasn’t trying to pick a fight. “And I’m not tryna’ step on your toes or anythin’, but I was in the military for over ten years and-…”
“And that would be helpful if we were dealing with an armed terrorist right now,” said Tess, cutting abruptly across Ray mid-sentence. “But as it’s just a scared kid? I think I’ve got this.”
With that Tess pushed open her once more to go about getting out of the car – Ray, however, wasn’t finished pleading his case. “And, again, I get that,” he said, his voice once again stopping Tess from what she was doing and drawing an increasingly agitated-sounding sigh from her in the process. “And you’re totally right, he is scared – but I don’t think we can ignore the fact that one of the things causing that fear … is you.”
Before Tess could unleash the tirade of a rebuttal that had instantly sprung to mind upon hearing that, Ray quickly moved to clarify what he meant, “And when I say that, I don’t mean that he’s scared of you as a person; I think he’s just scared of what you represent. I mean, he ran away from this foster family for a reason, right? So, if you go in there right now, all he’s gonna be thinkin’ is, she’s gonna try and bring me back to Florida – and I know that’s the aim, ultimately, but if you let me talk to him I might be able to get him to agree to go back as opposed to … you know … havin’ Malcolm here go in there and slap a pair of handcuffs on ‘im.”
“I dunno …” said Tess, clearly still not crazy about the idea of having Ray go talk to Oscar instead of her, but considering it because of the validity of the argument he’d just made.
“Look, if I can just say something?” said Jeanie, politely interjecting. “While I do think Ray was …” She paused as she cycled through her vocabulary in order to find the right word to describe him. “Well, an idiot for not telling someone about Oscar …” Though he felt like interrupting with a smart comment, given she sounded as though she was on the verge of actually backing him up, Ray decided it best to keep his mouth shut and just let Jeanie speak. “After watching the pair of them together for the last week … well, I just think if anyone can get through to him right now? Ray’s got a pretty good chance.”
With Jeanie’s glowing endorsement still ringing in her ears, Tess could only turn her attention back out through the windshield of Malcolm’s car as she considered her options. Ever since Oscar had gone missing a month earlier, she’d been a wreck wondering what had happened to him. She’d had kids in her care runaway before, of course – it somewhat came with the territory given where she was based in Orange County – but normally these amounted to nothing more than a few hours on the lam and ended when their “rations” of a single bottle of water and a granola bar had been revealed to not be as substantial as they’d first thought they would.
With Oscar, though, he’d been different. He’d gone to school as normal on that fateful day in mid-April … and then just never came home. “He’ll be fine,” Tess had said so confidently as she clutched the cup of coffee his nervous wreck of a foster mother had politely offered her when she first came over to their house the day he went missing. “Trust me – just give it a few hours and, before you know it, he’ll be walking back in through that door.”
Except he didn’t come walking back through their door a few hours later; head hanging sheepishly down into his chest, eyes firmly locked on his sneakers as he awaited the inevitable barrage of “Do you know how worried we were?!” and “Don’t you ever do something like this ever again!” – the mandatory sentence for pulling such a stunt. Instead, as it transpired, Oscar had driven halfway across the country in a Ford Mustang she’d yet to discover the provenance of; broke down in the middle of Louisiana; slept in said Mustang for a number of days; then crashed with a former soldier turned caddie in a trailer park wherein he wound up adopting the moniker of ‘Mustang’ to avoid detection.
In other words, given the absolute mess everything had become and how far she had travelled in order to find him, Tess was having a hard time not seeing how she had anything to lose by giving Ray a shot at trying to talk Oscar round.
“Alright …” she said, closing her door before turning to look warily back at Ray. “You’ve got five minutes.”
*
“Can I just ask you something real quick?” said Maggie, swatting away yet another insect with distinct boundary issues.
“Yeah, sure,” replied Ray, continuing to look thoroughly unbothered by the greater number of bugs that appeared to be present in this particular section of trees. “Fire away.”
“How did Tess know where Mustang was? I mean, you said that she mentioned he’d been missing for a month by then, right?”
“Correct.”
“So, how did she go from obviously not having any leads as to where he’d gone for four weeks to suddenly make the journey from Florida to …” Maggie gestured around at the dense thicket of trees she and Ray were walking in single-file through. “Well … here?”
“I wondered the exact same thing actually,” said Ray, dipping his head beneath a branch jutting out from one of the trees. “And, believe it or not, it was all down to that putt he made to win a hundred bucks off Byron.”
“Seriously?” said Maggie, her far smaller size affording her the luxury of being able to walk just clean underneath the exact same branch. “How so?”
“Well, you’ve gotta understand how big a deal that putt was,” he explained, glancing momentarily back at Maggie before returning his attention to the narrow, worn path they were following. “I mean, in the days after it? Mustang and that putt were the talk of the Creek.”
“Really?” said Maggie, smiling at the thought of the distinguished members of Crescent Creek having animated conversations about Mustang’s putt in their private ‘Members Only’ bar like a bunch of school kids in a gym locker-room; the heady aroma of cigar smoke and straight bourbon replacing that of sweaty socks and too much spray deodorant.
“Oh yeah!” continued Ray, suddenly sounding quite proud. “Like, there were arguments over whether or not his putt was the greatest ever struck on the final green at the Creek. Those who’d actually been greenside to see him make the putt in person became like resident tour guides whenever they went out playing on the course, walking their playing partners through the exact ‘ins & outs’ of the putt. And, not only that, about three days after he’d made the putt? Denby actually had to put a notice up in the locker-room telling people to clear the 18th green as soon as they had finished playing because delays were starting to happen as every group that came through were holding up the group behind them by trying to make ‘Mustang’s Putt’, as it became known.”
“Did it work?”
“Well, it was a notice from Denby …” said Ray, again sneaking a peek back over his shoulder at Maggie, except this time that devilish grin of his had returned to his face. “So … no.”
“Alright then,” replied Maggie, smiling at Ray’s bottomless enthusiasm for anything that might have annoyed Mr. Denby in the past. “So where does Tess enter the equation?”
“Ah, well, remember how I said that Byron had told his buddies to record Mustang’s putt?” he said, his attention now firmly squared back on where he was walking as they entered a particularly narrow section of the path where the undergrowth on either side was making a valiant effort to reclaim its lost territory. “You know, so he could put it on his Instagram?”
“That actually reminds me as well,” said Maggie, a question she’d previously wanted to ask now, once again, front and centre in her mind. “What is Instagram? I was wondering when you mentioned it earlier but I forgot to ask exactly what it was.”
“Ah it’s nothin’ important,” replied Ray, dismissively waving his hand. “It was just this app that used to be around back then where you put up pictures and videos.”
“Really? Just pictures and videos?” asked Maggie, her tone equal parts surprised and sympathetic. “Wow, things really were basic back then, huh?”
“Anyway,” continued Ray, interrupting Maggie before she could begin to further lament his more youthful years. “After doin’ as he’d asked, a video one of them had taken of Mustang makin’ his putt wound up gettin’ posted online and it blew up.”
“Something Byron, I’m sure, was just delighted with,” quipped Maggie, surprising herself at how much the thought of Byron Ballas being shown up made her feel oddly happy.
“Oh he was furious,” confirmed Ray, the smile on his face evident even though his back was to Maggie. “There was even a big inquisition into whose video it was and how it had ended up gettin’ posted.”
“Did he find out who it was?”
“He did …” answered Ray. “Turned out one of ‘em had sent the video to a cousin of theirs and then they’d uploaded it – meanin’, try as he might, there was no way for Byron to get the video taken down. By that stage, though, it was already too late ‘cause within a few hours the video had already gotten like half a million views and been shared just as many times.”
“So I’m guessing, then, that Tess obviously saw this video and recognized Mustang?” asked Maggie, attempting to fill in the pieces.
“Yep,” replied Ray. “Now, if we’re gettin’ into specifics, I think it was actually one of his foster parents who saw the video and then told her about it? But, either way, yeah, the video is what ended up leadin’ her here – speakin’ of which …”
After spending the last fifteen minutes or so winding their way through the trees directly behind his cabin, Ray, his t-shirt now sticking to his back with the height of sweat, turned around and looked at Maggie, “So are we.”
“At the clubhouse?” she asked, the sudden excitement making her forget the fact she felt disgustingly sweaty herself. “Really?”
“Take a look for yourself,” said Ray, smiling as he stepped to the side and pointed loosely off at the large, rusted gate embedded into the end of the treeline just a short distance ahead of where they were standing.
Not needing a second invitation, Maggie quickly squeezed past Ray and began to make her way towards the gate. The closer she got to it and the better the view she managed to get through the branches which had begun to grow across it, she could tell that she was once again looking out at the road into the Creek where she had been following behind Mr. Duggart in her car earlier that morning, except now she was much further up along the track. After carefully side-stepping a small collection of poison ivy protruding out from the base of it, Maggie came to a stop next to the gate, the very top of which stopped just short of her neck – the curse of being small, she thought to herself – and placed her two hands on one of the delicate-looking rungs running horizontally across it. It felt as though one good squeeze would see it turn to dust in her hands, such was the level of rust that had infected it.
“Given I’ve baked cookies with more structural integrity than this …” said Maggie, turning around to look back down the path at Ray with a wry smile on her face as she wiped her hands together in order to rid them of the flakes of rust that had stuck to them. “Is there any way to open this gate as opposed to trying to climb over it and … you know … risk it disintegrating beneath me?”
“See that rope right there?” smiled Ray, pointing out the frayed piece of rope fixed to a small piece of wood just off to the right-hand most side of the gate. “Just pull it up over that bolt and it’ll swing back.”
After following his instructions to the letter, the gate, as advertised, swung creakily back on its equally rusted hinges until it clattered into a tree and came to a stop.
With the way now clear, Maggie walked out through the opening in the treeline – following the trail of trampled down grass from where Ray obviously walked every time he came through this way – and immediately found herself confronted with a high wall stretching from the treeline to a large, imposing entrance-way in the middle of the road; one framed either side with two tall pillars capped with a pair of matching stone sculptures depicting two fearsome alligators with lengths of broken chain links clamped in their jaws – an ode, Maggie recognized, to the club crest of Crescent Creek.
Whilst running her hand along the cool – though severely cracked – plaster covering it, Maggie walked the length of the wall until she reached the entrance, the feel of the exposed grit on the road there an odd, though welcome, sensation beneath her feet. The increased traction she suddenly had, however, quickly faded in interest as Maggie rounded the nearest pillar of the entrance and caught her very first glimpse of the famous Crescent Creek clubhouse in person – and what a sight it was.
Sitting at the end of a long, straight avenue lined either side with the most magnificently gnarled Live Oak trees Maggie had ever seen – each of them contorted in such a manner that they each loomed over the avenue to form this other-worldly looking tunnel of twisted bark and lush, green foliage – the former plantation house turned clubhouse, it’s columns, porticos and open galleries surrounding it’s two floors a whitewashed vision of times long since passed, seemed to almost be gleaming in the bright afternoon sunshine washing over the Creek. And it took Maggie’s breath away.
“Nice to see the old girl still has the ‘wow factor’ even after all this time,” said Ray, finally joining Maggie after deliberately hanging back in order to let her enjoy the experience of laying eyes on the clubhouse for the first time without the pressure of having him standing next to her.
“It’s unbelievable …” said Maggie, her voice barely above a whisper as she continued to let the vista before her soak into her memory. “Just … yeah, unbelievable – there’s no other word for it.”
“Yeah, she’s a looker alright,” replied Ray, himself taking a moment to drink in the sight of the dappled sunlight filtering down through the canopies of the trees and casting perfect leaf-shaped silhouettes across the avenue. “And just wait ‘til you see inside.”
“Are you serious?!” asked Maggie enthusiastically, her head snapping up towards Ray like she was a child after just being told there was a chance she might get to go for ice-cream. “We can go inside?! Like, really?!”
“Of course,” smiled Ray, finding Maggie’s enthusiasm infectious. “I mean, we’ll have to feed Lola first …” He leaned slightly down so that he was closer to Maggie’s height. “She tends to get a little pouty if I’m late,” he said, lowering his voice jokingly as if to ensure he wouldn’t be overheard by Lola. “But after that?” he continued, standing back up straight and returning his voice to its original volume. “I’ll give you the full guided tour.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Maggie, smiling from ear-to-ear at the prospect of seeing the inside of the clubhouse as she and Ray began to walk in through the entrance, the grit and gravel crunching beneath their feet. “And on the way, you can finish telling me what happened after Tess said you could go speak to Mustang.”
“Oh yeah…” replied Ray, sounding like a long-lost memory had suddenly popped back into his head. “I’d completely forgotten we were talkin’ ‘bout that. So, where was I?” He paused for a second as he tried to remember where he’d left off in his story. “Oh, ok …” he said, finally remembering. “So, I get out of Malcolm’s car and make my way up to the door of the garage …”