Authors: Phillip Depoy

A Minister's Ghost (13 page)

BOOK: A Minister's Ghost

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“Uh-huh.” He shrugged.

“I'll see myself out.”

I turned to leave.

“So, okay,” he mumbled. “I hope you find out what happened to Tess and Rory, and stuff.”

I stopped.

“I never told you their names.” I turned.

He froze.

“Yes, you did.” He stared hard at the countertop in front of him.

“You knew them,” I said firmly, taking a step his direction. “You knew Tess and Rory. No point in lying about it, I can find out. That's an easy thing to check, you understand.”

He fidgeted for a moment, then his shoulders sagged.

“Of course I knew them,” he whined. “Damn.”

“So why did you lead me to believe you didn't?”

“I don't know,” he said defiantly, an imitation of a movie tough guy.

I took a quick step in his direction, growling, a generally threatening gesture coming from a large man with an expensive vocabulary.

“Listen, you little gob of spit,” I snarled. “I've had a terrible day, I'm really hungry, and I don't care what I do to you. If you know something about Tess and Rory, tell me now. Do you understand?”

“Christ.” He was startled, dropped the plastic garbage bag and took a dance backward. His breathing had increased and his eyes were wide.

“Why did you pretend not to know the girls?” I demanded.

“Because I thought I might get into trouble,” he answered immediately, a high school kid again.

“Why would you get into trouble?” I moved another step in his direction.

“Because I sold some ecstasy to Nickel Mathews,” he blurted out in a stage whisper, “on the night the girls died!”

Nine

All the way home I tried to calm down, wondering why I'd lost my temper so suddenly, why I'd used such a disgusting phrase to threaten Andy the drug-dealing filmmaker; and what to tell Skidmore about the boy. I'd simply left him standing in the lobby of the theater and lumbered away without any further conversation. I was so stunned by his revelation, I had no words. Cherubs were selling drugs in the local movie house. The war between the forces of light and the powers of darkness was over: the night had won.

As I drove, these thoughts gave way to a quiet desperation, a melancholy meditation on my own weltschmerz, which quickly moved to a great world-loathing, an existential nausea.

I generally loved to think of Blue Mountain as a world apart, a safe haven, a place where the reality I saw on the network news, in movies, or on television programs didn't really exist. I often convinced myself that I lived in Mayberry, or Brigadoon.

But twenty-first-century America would not covenant such places. I realized with a cold certainty that there were no places left in America untouched by dark matter. True innocence, like my
genuine
folklore, had turned to a quaint notion for addled academics. People like me were outdated archaeologists crawling over ancient tombs, lost souls who longed for a time that was, I concluded with great certainty, gone forever.

Autumn sun sank low behind blue pines on the ridges all around
me. An aching amber light filled the road, the grass, the air rushing past my speeding truck. I saw in that light the twilight of our civilization, a pale fire burning out. I had an apocalyptic vision to match anything in Hiram Frazier's nightmares. I saw an angel standing in the sun. With a loud voice it called to all the birds, “Come! Gather for the great supper, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men.” And all the birds were gorged with that flesh.

At least that's how I remembered the quote from Revelation. When in doubt, Revelation is the book of the Bible for harsh depression.

Alas, neither the image nor the contemplation did anything to assuage the pangs of my stomach. Appetite always belies the greater philosophical concerns, or mine does, at least. Since I wasn't certain how to proceed, food was obviously the answer.

I had a fleeting urge to drive to the Methodist church, see if any food was left there. I was still dressed for it, and I'd had some of the best meals in the world at family reunions in that church. Any church homecoming in our town was nothing more than an excuse to eat. Ordinarily all the good cooks in a family or the church or the entire county would indulge in a kind of friendly competition to see whose dish was the best.

For some reason I recalled a day from the previous April, the Carter family reunion, Girlinda's clan. Sky bluer than a china plate, air rich with honeysuckle, the yard at the side of the Methodist church was cluttered with table after table of unbelievable food. My eyes were desperate pirates after treasure, roving over those dishes with an abandon that might have been illegal.

Then I saw Melissa Mathews standing over one familiar-smelling dish, staring down at it.

“Is that rabbit stew?” I asked her.

She looked up.

“Uh-huh,” she said, smiling. “Fresh. My cousin Nickel got this rabbit just yesterday out in back of my house. He didn't even have to
shoot it. Got this rabbit by chunking rocks at it. So it don't have no shot-up taste. I cooked it myself. Have you some.”

“I don't know.” I peered at it dubiously. “What about that over there?”

I pointed to another big stew pot beside her elbow.

“That's the venison,” she said, “which Uncle Hulitt got last year, but we froze it right after because didn't nobody want to eat it, you know, on account of Uncle Hulitt's funeral.”

I nodded. Hulitt had accidentally shot himself after shooting the biggest deer of his hunting life. He'd been so excited about the kill that he'd dropped his rifle and it went off. He died before the deer did. I decided against the venison.

“I remember Hulitt's hunting accident,” I said. “You didn't bring any of that pig foot this year, did you? You know you're famous for it.”

“Shoot.” She grinned. “I think you're the only one that eats them.”

“I tried the first one last year because you told me it'd come from a pig that wore a lucky rabbit's foot around its neck. I thought it was a funny thing to say.”

Melissa laughed then, and the sound of her laughter was like water over round rocks in a cold stream, music from nature, not a human sound at all.

“It worked for a good while too,” she claimed, barely a smile on her face. “She was one lucky sow. We put off slaughtering that pig until the day she got caught rooting around in our corn patch. She rolled around so that the rabbit foot fell off from around her neck. I don't know how she got it around her neck in the first place. Pig ain't got no elbows, so I don't hardly see how she could reach way on around her back like that.”

Melissa's chestnut hair always seemed just-washed, her eyes were shy but her posture was bold, and her lips were never far away from a smile. She was only a few years out of high school; dozens of men had courted her. But she was a self-confessed coward where men were concerned. She could be friendly with someone who had no interest
in her, but she was terrified of any man who wanted her attention.

As a sheriff's deputy under the Maddox administration, she'd broken into a murderer's hotel room, jumped into the Nantahala River to save two elementary-school children, and fired her pistol more than a dozen times in the line of duty. But a halfhearted
hello
from a boy who was barely beginning to like, her, that would send her into paralysis.

I was clearly no threat, so she enjoyed her conversations with me, though there had only been three of them in the entire time I'd been back to Blue Mountain.

I could see why Skid might be attracted to her, though. And Skid's being married would make him an easy man for her to love.

I slowly withdrew my thoughts from the images of that lovely day and focused once again on the darkening road that lay before me.

But contained in my muddled Remembrance of Aprils Past was a nagging image, one that haunted. I saw Nickel Mathews, cousin to a law-enforcement officer. A boy who would throw a rock at a rabbit was someone who might feed drugs to a couple of sweet young girls.

When I finally pulled up in front of my house, I had decided what to do. I bounded up my front steps and through my front door, not even bothering to close it behind me. It would only take me a moment, I reasoned, to pick up the phone instead of heading to the refrigerator.

I dialed quickly.

“Sheriff's Office,” Melissa said.

“Hello, Melissa. It's Dr. Devilin. Is Skid in?”

“No, sir,” she said hesitantly, “but he said when you called to patch you through to his car. Can you hang on a minute?”

“Of course.”

Before I could ask how Skid knew I'd be calling, a silence on the other end told me I was on hold.

A black wind took hold of the tops of trees, rattled them like
snare drums. Dark clouds were rolling in once more, and it looked as if a heavy rain was imminent.

“Damn it, Fever!” Skid's voice jumped through the phone lines. “I told you to stay clear of all this mess with the Dyson sisters.”

“I'm not sure what you're so mad about,” I shot back, “especially after I helped you out at the church, but that's your business at the moment. I have some information.”

“Mr. Dyson is very upset,” he began.

“He's upset with you, Skid.” I told him, voice several notes higher. “Now, listen: the usher at the Palace theater, his name is Andy something.”

“Stop,” he demanded. “I'm telling you as the
sheriff
, you have to quit looking into this business any further, or I'll take action.”

“Shut up, Skidmore,” I bellowed. “Andy sold ecstasy to Nickel Mathews, and Nickel Mathews was with the girls on the night the girls were killed. Ecstasy, Skid. A serotonin-raising chemical compound. Is that something you already knew, or am I, in fact, giving you important new information?”

My face was hot and I realized I was gripping the phone like a barbell.

I rarely found myself that angry more than once a decade, and my steam had risen twice in one hour that afternoon. I'd gotten almost that angry with Andy Newlander. What was the matter with me?

My ire did, however, have the desired effect. Skidmore was silent.

“Also did you know that someone besides you,” I pressed on, “found Mr. Millroy and got the results of the coroner's investigation? The same toxicology report?”

Silence still reigned.

“Skid?”

“Andy Newlander sells drugs?” His voice was weak, absolutely exhausted.

“To Nickel Mathews,” I answered, as gently as I could with my heart still thumping my sternum.

“Are you sure?” Skid's sails were windless.

“I asked him, and he admitted it.”

“So the girls had taken ecstasy.” Skid sighed heavily. “I guess that answers most of the questions.”

“Well, we're not
certain
they took it. But Nickel could have slipped it in a drink at the movies.”

“Seems a fair guess,” Skid said, gaining strength again. “Nickel is a little piece of crap. Just the kind of boy who would do something like that.”

“I don't believe I've ever heard you say anything that bad about anyone,” I told him, covering up my amazement as best I could.

“I don't believe you ever told me to shut up before,” he countered. “It's a brand-new day.”

“Yes.” I stared out the window at the gathering gray nimbus. “It certainly is that.”

“I know I've been strange lately.”

I could tell from his voice he'd mustered most of his energy simply to produce that one sentence. He fell silent after it.

“What's going on, Skid?”

“I can't tell you everything,” he replied, stony. “But how about if you meet me over at Miss Etta's and we have a professional exchange of information.”

“Gossip, you mean,” I confirmed.

“Right,” he agreed.

“Good,” I said firmly, my mood already bolstering. “I'm starved.”

“There's a surprise,” Skid said expressionlessly.

He hung up before I had a chance to counter.

Miss Etta's was approaching nirvana to me as I drove the several miles from my house into town. I'd exchanged my dress jacket for the black leather one, but the rest of the ensemble remained: I was a patch of midnight.

Sense memory filled the air around my head with the steam of golden squash and onions, fried okra crisp as popcorn, cornbread more like cake than a bride would eat at her own wedding. I tried to
remember what day it was. Tuesday lunch usually meant Crackling Catfish, a
Good Housekeeping
Prize recipe that Etta had invented when the world was young. She'd used the money to open her dining establishment, and without any further effort on her part, she had turned from twenty to seventy-two.

When the neon of her namesake sign appeared in the distance, I almost cried.

I parked fairly close to her door; the lunch crowd was long past and the weather would most likely keep latecomers away. Miss Etta closed at 3:00 P.M. anyway, so Skid and I were likely to be her last customers of the day. Generally her business was slow on funeral or church-meeting days anyway. I could see Skid through the window, he was already seated at a table by the door.

I pushed into the place, nodded once at Etta, and sat. Skid and I exchanged looks.

Etta herself arrived a moment later to deliver silverware wrapped in three paper napkins and two indestructible plastic plates big enough to hold an entire pumpkin.

Etta was dressed in her uniform: a black print, calf-length dress, blue slippers, a man's chocolate cardigan sweater; a wiry, gray bun. She retreated without a word.

Instead of going into the kitchen right away, we sat a moment in silence.

“So,” I said finally. “How's your morning been?”

“I went over to visit Eppie Waldrup and impound the Volkswagen.

“You know that's not what I mean.”

“Yeah, Fever, I'm really sorry for the way I've been acting lately.”

“God, am I glad to hear you say that, Skid,” I exhaled. “I've been very worried about you. Everyone has.”

“Everyone has?” He seemed troubled.

BOOK: A Minister's Ghost

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