Devil's Oven (3 page)

Not thirty feet away was the broad rock threshold of the cabin that had burned here, the one belonging to a woman who—well over a hundred winters earlier—had bludgeoned her husband and one of her children. She had gone mad, people said. So mad that she had murdered her infant son and hanged herself in the forest using her own nightgown. Ivy and her mother had brought bouquets of garden flowers here, but Ivy had been too young to understand why. Later, it was Thora who told her the story when she was still far too young to hear it. Some thought the daughter who escaped had hidden in the hollow of a tree until her mother passed by, then walked off the mountain, never to be seen again. As a child, Ivy sometimes hid beneath her own bed, pretending to be the brave daughter who had escaped death.

With the dirt brushed away, she stroked the hand. Maybe it was because the texture of the skin was so similar to the many mushrooms she had handled that she wasn’t afraid. She picked it up.

Balancing the thing on her palm, the tips of its enormous fingers resting in the crevices between her own, she held it up to the sky. It was heavy, and didn’t look the least bit dead. In fact, it looked healthy and plump, rich with blood. At the place where it should have been attached to a wrist, there was a smooth stretch of something that wasn’t quite skin; it reminded her of the lengths of casing her father used for venison sausage. She thought of her father’s hands, brown with the life juices of the deer he killed, sawing ribs and sinew away to get to the most tender parts. But there was no trace of blood on this hand. It was a single, perfect thing.

Still, it was a person’s hand.

She knew she should run down the mountainside and call the police and lead them back here. It was the right thing to do. If there was a hand, there were probably more parts buried nearby. A person—a whole person, a whole man—belonged to someone: a mother, a father, or maybe even a wife. Someone would be missing him.

Looking around, she saw other clumps of blood-red false morels. It made an odd kind of sense that they would grow where he was buried.

She imagined police. Helicopters. Maybe even news vans. They always came when a plane crashed or someone was lost. For a while, anyway. But never here, so close to her part of the mountain, the only place where she could get away from Thora.

Ivy set the hand on the log and knelt in front of it. She listened to the morning birds in the trees and the trees creaking, settling—sounds that made her think of God walking in the Garden. She closed her eyes and breathed. When she opened her eyes, the hand was still there. It was real. It hadn’t been well hidden; anyone could have found it.  But she had been the one, hadn’t she?

Maybe no one was missing him. Maybe he had always been here. Waiting.

She slipped the hand into the bag at her waist and tied the cord.

•  •  •

Now, the false morels were gone.  All that was left were a few faint depressions that the wind had already filled with leaves.

Her head felt clearer now that she was up here. She wasn’t so worried about Thora. Why had she ever worried about her? Thora might be at the trailer right now. She might even have discovered Anthony for herself. But Thora wouldn’t do anything. She would wait to talk to Ivy about it, because if something happened to Ivy, Thora would be alone. More than anything else, Thora didn’t want to be alone.

•  •  •

Emerging from the trail, Ivy saw a second car parked near the house. The Phelps girl was early. Ivy smiled to herself.
Brides
. She felt like a bride herself. Touching her hand to her hair, she pushed it back behind her ear, anticipating. She wanted to be at her best because Anthony was such a handsome man.

Hoping that Missy and Thora weren’t looking for her out the living room window, she hurried to the back porch of the trailer. She told herself she just needed to see him completed, to check the stitches one more time to make sure they were as secure as she remembered making them.

The air inside the trailer was musty. She would have to burn some scented candles and crack open the windows now that it was spring.

“Hello?” she said, not really—not in her heart—expecting an answer. If she had gotten one, what would she have done? Fainted, probably.

Anthony was still there on the table, most of his body covered with the blanket. Had she really touched him in those hidden places? She blushed to think how bold she had been.

Standing over him, she marveled at how peaceful he looked in the morning light. She touched his hair tenderly, as one might touch a sleeping child.

“I’ll come back, Anthony,” she whispered. “Don’t worry.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Tripp imagined Lila up there on The Twilight Club’s main stage with the dancers. She liked to get him worked up by stripping down for him at his cabin, and always insisted on a serious fire so that she could start out in lacy panties and a bustier or bra, and finish naked in his lap. She had the body for it, too, more voluptuous than the dancers who worked the stage, and red hair that she loved to shake in his face when she was on top. When she had come back to town married to Bud, there were rumors that she had been a dancer for a while, rumors that got legs when Bud bought The Twilight Club.

Tripp didn’t believe it—not that it would’ve mattered to him, anyway. It seemed like he had been fantasizing about Lila his whole life, and now he had her. The tiny laugh lines around her eyes didn’t matter, whatever she had done in those years she was gone didn’t matter, her attachment to Bud didn’t matter. He was pussy whipped and didn’t give a damn.

He motioned for one of the cocktail waitresses to bring him another beer. Lila encouraged him to spend plenty of time at the club. “So I know where you are,” she had said. Did she think she was being cute, putting him under Bud’s nose? But Tripp also knew he was supposed to be keeping half an eye on Bud. There was a twisted kind of logic to it all, but he didn’t like to think too hard about it.

It wasn’t as though he wanted for female company. He had been a science geek in high school and, despite the shy warmth in his hazel eyes, the glasses he’d had to wear kept the prettiest, popular girls like Lila and her friends away. But he had filled out in college, bulking up alongside more athletic male forestry students, and his current job as a Department of Natural Resources officer meant he had plenty of money for things like laser eye surgery. So what if his coppery blond hair had thinned out some on top? He kept it shorter than strictly required by his superiors, indicating to the poachers and yahoos he ran across daily that he wasn’t someone to screw around with. His pseudo-military look also meant that a certain kind of woman—the kind who had no confidence in herself—didn’t bother him, either. He knew he wasn’t the best-looking guy around, but he was gainfully employed, college educated, and without dependents or a substance abuse problem. In Monroe County, those four things alone meant he could pretty much have any woman he wanted.

He wore jeans and a comfortable sports shirt, but few of the other men in the bar had bothered to change out of their second-shift work clothes. They sipped beer, barely glancing up at the steel-framed stage, as though they were jaded fifth-graders on their latest field trip to the zoo. The dancers, too, seemed to be going through the motions. The newest girl was the only exception.

She looked local to him, pale, dark-eyed and pretty in the narrow-faced way of the girls from up in the hills. They showed up at the consolidated high school with hard manners and a fresh mouth or a Pollyanna sweetness that was tough to fake. He hadn’t talked to her yet, but he was sure she would be one of the sweet ones.

Lila was enough for Tripp, but he couldn’t look away from the new girl’s shining black hair, and the way she caught it with her fingers, hiding her face as though behind a veil. When she threw her head back in a languorous arch of her body, her hair brushed the tops of the patent leather boots that stretched to the middle of her thighs. Her white G-string and lacy satin bustier gave her an old-fashioned, almost conservative look, far different from the neon-bright and glossy costumes of the rest of Dwight’s dancers. Her moves were fluid and natural, as though she had been born to it.

Tripp wandered through the nearly empty tables to lean against the far wall. It was early enough in the week that he had a clear view of the stage.

Watching the girl, he imagined her ivory body on one of the rougher mountain trails, naked to the approaching nightfall, a lock of her hair caressing the curve of her cheek, her knees drawn up like a baby in the womb. Helpless, and at his mercy. The image made him feel guilty and sick and he looked away at one of the other dancers to push it from his mind. Still, the strobing light on the stage was like moonlight flashing through the trees, and he couldn’t help but look back at her to see the way it reflected—icy blue, like cold death—off her skin. When the waitress showed up with his beer, Tripp didn’t notice her standing there until she finally touched him on the shoulder.

Lately he had been distracted, zoning out for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour at a time. That morning he had even found himself on a petered-out fire road up on Devil’s Oven, the truck about to wedge itself between a couple of pole-thin pine trees. There was a long scratch through the gold DNR logo on the passenger side of the truck to prove it.  Beyond the trees was a steep ravine.

He knew he wasn’t getting enough sleep. He had gotten to where he didn’t like to sleep alone anymore, and Lila was almost never with him overnight.

Dwight came over from the bar.

“What’re you drinking that pansy-ass crap for?” he said, grabbing for Tripp’s imported beer. But Tripp was fast enough to pull the bottle to him so Dwight was left holding air. “I got a G.D. wall full of good liquor and you embarrass me by drinking that foreign shit. What kind of man are you?”

“I thought Bud didn’t let you out of your coffin until after eleven,” Tripp said.

“Hell, my day never begins, never ends. Son of a bitch is out of town again for some truck lease thing. G.D. trucks. More trouble than women.”

Dwight never took the Lord’s name in vain. When Tripp had had enough beers to ask him about it one night, Dwight hadn’t even looked up or paused as he wiped down the bar with the wet rag he kept next to the coach gun beneath the counter.

“Some things you just don’t screw around with, man,” Dwight had said. Then he had launched into a rant about Monroe Consolidated’s losing football team.

Among the men who kept regular hours at the bar, Dwight, with his paint-white, indoor pallor, looked most like the one who should be running the place. He was only about five foot five and whip thin, not from any love of exercise, but from a habit of constant, anxious movement. The nails at the end of his splayed fingertips were yellowed, and he wore gold-framed aviator glasses that—along with his coal black hair—made him look a little like Elvis. He wore elaborate cowboy shirts, with thin braid and pearl-covered snap buttons, straight-leg jeans, and canvas basketball shoes. On those days when he came in just after waking up, his shirt snapped wrongways, he reminded Tripp of someone who might live at the group home for mentally challenged adults that had been built right next to the hospital. Lila told him he had the wrong idea about Dwight; Bud considered him to be some kind of financial genius.

That Bud was out of town was news to Tripp. Lila hadn’t said anything, leading him to believe she had gone with him. Bud took her away to nice hotels and glitzy shopping malls, plus the casinos. She was always standoffish for a few days after they got back from a trip. He worried when she took off with Bud.

“You look all disappointed,” Dwight said. “You miss Bud?”

“Yeah,” Tripp said. “I miss Bud. We had a date.”

Dwight blinked behind the thick lenses of his glasses, silent, as though he were trying to decide whether to believe him or not. Tripp knew Dwight’s glasses must be pretty old to be so thick. What in the hell did Dwight spend his money on? It couldn’t all go to those stupid shirts.

He didn’t actually dislike Dwight. Dwight was just unpredictable, what locals called “squirrelly.”

They both turned at a shout from a guy in the crowd.

“Oh, man. Now what?” Dwight said.

Up on stage, the dark-haired girl was on her knees. Though her hair hung in her face, Tripp, along with everyone else, could see she was vomiting.

Dwight gestured to one of the cocktail waitresses to go and help the girl. But the waitress, the one who had brought Tripp his beer, pretended not to notice him and walked toward the back of the bar. Tripp had heard that the waitresses and the dancers at The Twilight Club didn’t get along well, but this seemed particularly harsh.

“Aw, screw me,” Dwight said. “It’s always up to me.”

The other two dancers paused, but as Dwight trudged toward the stage, he made a circular motion in the air to indicate they should continue. He hustled up the metal stairs closest to the sick girl and leaned over, his face averted from the mess, to take her by the arm and help her up. As they left the stage, a couple of men in the audience gave her desultory applause, as though they were encouraging an injured player on the field.

Tripp decided it was as good a time as any to use the bathroom, and when he got back, the dancers had moved on to another song and the busboy was mopping up the mess.

Because the waitress had been such a bitch to the new girl, he ordered another beer directly from the bartender and wandered into the poolroom. There was a silver cage in the corner where Bud liked to have a girl dancing on weekend nights, but it was empty now. The guy sitting in the upholstered chair in the corner was getting a lap dance from one of the two dancers named Crystal, though this one spelled her name with a “K.” She had told Tripp that more than once.

 When Dwight found him again, Tripp said, “How’s the girl?”

“Jolene? These girls never eat right. It was all nacho chips and beef jerky. Nasty shit,” Dwight said, shaking his head.