Art's Blood (47 page)

Elizabeth hesitated, berating herself for not having thought to call her daughter sooner. “Oh, Laurel sweetie, I’m so sorry.” There was a silence at the other end. “There’s no good way to say this…. Yes, Aidan was killed last night. Kyra didn’t do it, but she is responsible for a death. She’s been taken into custody, rather than arrested, I think.”

As succinctly as she could, she laid out the course of events. “And Reba evidently used some drug called Roe-something. What was the name, Phillip? Oh, I remember, Rohypnol.”

There was a silence at the other end. Then Laurel said in a voice that quavered and threatened to break, “Well, at least one good thing came out of this whole stupid mess. He’s a great guy, Mum.”

“Laurel, it’s not like that—” But her daughter had hung up.

Phillip seemed in no hurry to leave. She left him doing dishes while she went over to the cabin to check on Ben. He was still asleep, but this time could be awakened fairly easily. He sat up gingerly. “Holy shit, what did I drink last night? And how did I get home?”

Leaving the difficult explanations for later, Elizabeth told him to come over for breakfast, “or lunch, if that’s when you get up. We’ve got some stuff to talk about.”

The dishes were draining in their rack and Phillip was in the living room with the dogs, when she returned.

“If you’re not in too big a hurry, Phillip, would you stay for lunch? I have a feeling I’m going to need help explaining all this to Ben. It’s like you said: he doesn’t remember anything. Then after lunch, maybe you could give us a ride to get our vehicles. At least, Ben can get his, wherever it is. I probably ought to go on and call AAA for a tow truck for my jeep.”

“I’d really like to stay for lunch but…” He ran his hand over his head. “I gotta tell you, your car’s okay. Somebody, probably Reba making sure you couldn’t go for help, shoved a wad of rags in the jeep’s exhaust pipe; pull ’em out and it’ll run fine. I could have fixed it when I saw them last night, but I wanted to drive you home.”

“And you figured I’d be too stubborn to accept your help.” Elizabeth laughed. “You know me too well, Phillip.”

When the morning chores were done, she asked Phillip to go with her to deliver one of the ripe pumpkins to Miss Birdie. “I promised her one to make preserves with. And she would be thrilled beyond belief if you came with me. She’s been eaten up with curiosity and it would make her day to meet you. I know you’ll like her; she’s a lot like your aunt Omie.”

Miss Birdie was on her porch, Pup at her side. She looked Phillip up and down with an appraising eye. “Well, sir, you’re taller ’an I thought seein’ you pass by all these times. But I believe I need to thank you for helpin’ Lizzie Beth find out what hit was happened to my boy last year. Git you a chair.”

The visit proceeded in a predictable fashion: Phillip explaining his Marshall County connection via Aunt Omie, a discussion of people Birdie had known who knew Aunt Omie, a not-so-subtle inquiry into Phillip’s marital state, a sly marveling that he had gotten out to Full Circle Farm this morning without Birdie’s seeing his car pass.

“We’ve got to get back for lunch, Miss Birdie.” Uncomfortable with the way the conversation was going
— hah! Inquisition’s more like it—
Elizabeth stood.

“Ay law, Lizzie Beth, I like to forgot. Dor’thy come by yesterday to tell me ol’ Franklin Ferman was gone. She said she went by to take him some soup she had fixed and he didn’t answer when she called in the door. Said she feared he might of fell or summat and she went on into the house.

“He weren’t in the front room nor in the kitchen neither, but when she went on back to that bedroom where Loretty died, there he was, a-layin’ on that bed under all them quilts, the Bible open acrost his chest and dead as a hammer. Dor’thy said he had the happiest, most peaceable look she’d ever seen on a corpse.

“ ‘Well, Dor’thy,’ I says, ‘I reckon he’s gone to be with his Savior.’

“And she come back just as quick, ‘Don’t you fool yoreself none, Birdie, hit’s his Loretty ol’ Franklin’s gone to be with.’ ”

Ben wandered into the kitchen while they were making sandwiches. He looked hungover and irritable but he accepted a glass of orange juice and sat down to listen to their account of what had happened the night before. His eyes widened as Elizabeth related her escape from the locked room. He frowned as she told of finding him and shook his head. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

When she began to describe the sequence of events, he shook his head vigorously. “That can’t be true; I don’t believe it.”

Phillip took over, first explaining the Rohypnol and its effects and then detailing the discovery of Aidan and ending with Reba’s death and Kyra’s breakdown. Ben continued to shake his head as the story proceeded. As it drew to an end, he stood, his face turned to stone. Elizabeth moved to hug him but he gently pushed her away.

“No, Aunt E. I need time to think this over. I’m going back to the cabin.”

What can I do to help him through this? Will Kyra ever be normal after spending all of her life under the domination of that twisted woman, or is she irreparably damaged? What about Laurel? I thought there was beginning to be something between her and Aidan— but the news didn’t seem to hit her nearly so hard as I would have expected. I can’t help worrying though.
Elizabeth’s heart was aching.
So much pain and Ben won’t admit that he’s suffering. It’s not good that he’s so alone.

Phillip was clearing the table and she was filling the dishpan with soapy water when he put down his plate on the counter, ran his hand over his head, and cleared his throat.

“That story you told me on the way back from Miss Birdie’s, about the old man reading the Bible to his dead wife, it got me to wondering.” He picked the plate up again and set it back down. “Thing is, I don’t want to…oh, hell. I need to know. Elizabeth, do you miss Sam like that? I mean, do you think you would ever…that someone else might…”

She stood, hands deep in the soapy dishwater, carefully considering her answer. Finally she turned to him. “Not long ago I’d have said, ‘No, never. I’ll never take that risk again of loving someone only to lose them.’ But recently, I think I’ve come to accept that risk is part of life.” She smiled, suddenly remembering the tarot card,
her
card. “You know, Phillip, I think I’m willing to be like the Fool on the Tarot card, the one who’s smiling just when he’s about to step off a cliff. I think—”

“You’ve told me what I wanted to hear.” His face was close to hers and his arms were around her again. They stood quietly cheek to cheek and she began to think through the logistics of getting down the mountain to stuff the dishtowel in the exhaust pipe of his car.

And then the telephone rang.

It was Rosemary. Rosemary, whom she and Sam had always considered the practical daughter, the grounded, mature, unemotional Rosemary was on the verge of tears and her voice was trembling.

“Mum.” It was an urgent, strangled murmur. “You know that stuff you sent me…about my friend…about…about what happened back then. I read it and I was working on that story I had in mind. And then I started remembering things— a
bunch
of things about that summer before…before she disappeared and I remembered some things she told me.”

At the other end of the line Rosemary was breathing hard and struggling to speak. Finally it emerged— a desperate, hollow whisper. “Mum…I
don’t
need this in my life right now but…I have to find out what happened to her. Mum, please, I’m serious…I’ve got to come home. I know that if I do, if I go to the places where she and I used to play, then the memories will get clearer. And I need to go to Cherokee and the Qualla Boundary, where her grandmother lived. It’s like I’ve never healed from that terrible time…that Halloween. Mum, I have to find out what happened to Maythorn Mullins.”

V
ICKI
L
ANE
has lived with her family on a mountainside farm in western North Carolina for more than thirty years. She is at work on the fourth Elizabeth Goodweather mystery.

R
OSEMARY STARED AT THE GLOWING COMPUTER
screen, the only light in the gloom of her tiny, windowless office. She slumped back in her chair and let out an exhausted sigh that spoke of surrender…and relief. At last it was done: the story that had, against all her careful defenses, clawed its way into existence. The story that had haunted her for too many long years, tapping with urgent, insistent fingers on the clouded panes of her memory, the story that she had pushed away like an unwanted and unloved child. Now, at last, she had allowed it into the light, had unbound it and let it speak.

The words crawled down the screen and she scanned them critically. Enough details had been changed; it would pass as fiction. But the heart of the unresolved matter was there. She had put down all she knew…or all she remembered, after so long.

She watched as the account of that terrible time passed before her blurring eyes. As the last page came into view she paused, pulled off her reading glasses and wiped them on her sleeve. She drew in a long, shuddering breath, fighting back unwelcome tears. It had been worth it— painful but cathartic. It had been necessary, she told herself. And the story was powerful— her best work ever.

Rereading the last words, that desolate closing paragraph, she frowned. This
was
it, wasn’t it? What more was there to say? For a moment she was still, paralyzed by the flood of memory and emotion that threatened to overwhelm her. Then, with a sudden decision, she clicked on the PRINT icon. The printer stirred into action and as the white pages began to patter into the tray, Rosemary’s lean body began to tremble. “Maythorn?” It was a tentative whisper.

Thrusting her chair back, she started to rise but was held in place, mesmerized by the growing paper stack before her. The murmur of the pages falling one upon another mocked her.
You think this is all but you’re not done.

So many questions remained unanswered.
I have to keep going. She won’t be satisfied with this.
The final sheet of paper inched its way out of the whirring printer.

“Mary Thorn.” Her voice was stronger now. The name was a declaration of the buried grief and doubt of the past nineteen years.

Rosemary pulled the sheaf from the tray and stood, clutching the pages to her heart. Closing her eyes, she tilted her face to the ceiling and cried out, in a voice to wake the dead: “Mary Thorn Blackfox, I
see
you!”

Still gripping the pages, Rosemary Goodweather reached for the telephone and punched in her mother’s number.

E
LIZABETH
G
OODWEATHER SAT ON HER FRONT
porch, staring unseeing at the distant Blue Ridge Mountains that vanished into ever hazier rows along the eastern horizon. She was blind to the nearer wooded slopes with their first gildings of copper and gold, oblivious to the clear blue sky marked only by a pair of red-tailed hawks riding the cool autumn currents, and deaf to their shrill, descending calls. The breakfast dishes in the kitchen behind her were still unwashed; the mug of coffee she held had grown cold without being tasted. Her mind whirled in tumult— seething thoughts and feelings, all unresolved.

Only yesterday she had been on the verge of
…on the verge of what? Phillip asked if I was still grieving for Sam, if I would ever let someone else into my life. And I said something really profound about being willing to take a chance. And I was…I
am
…but then, just then—

But just then Rosemary had called. Her brilliant, reliable, eminently
sensible,
older daughter. Assistant professor of English at UNC–Chapel Hill and not yet thirty, Rosemary had been writing a story based on the disappearance of a childhood friend almost twenty years ago.
And in the writing, something let loose. All those years that she wouldn’t talk about Maythorn…and then yesterday…oh god, it was awful to hear Rosie so…so
unhinged.

“Mum!” Rosemary had whispered, sounding more like the ten-year-old she had been than the self-assured academic she had become. “Mum! I have to find out what really happened to Maythorn.”

Rosemary had been all but incoherent, babbling about her lost friend, about memories that had resurfaced
…and Maythorn’s granny and something called the
Looker Stone…
and what was the really weird-sounding thing?…the Booger Dance? Whatever the hell that is.

Maythorn Mullins, the child of a neighboring family, had been Rosemary’s friend
— she’s my
best
friend, Mum,
and
she’s my blood twin! We were both born on January 11, 1976, and we both have brown eyes and we are exactly the same height! We cut our fingers and swapped blood and now we’re blood twins!
Rosemary and Maythorn had been almost inseparable for two idyllic years. Then had come Halloween 1986 and, with it, the disappearance of Maythorn from her family’s home.