The Hawley Book of the Dead (21 page)

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Authors: Chrysler Szarlan

BOOK: The Hawley Book of the Dead
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I knew better. I knew Maggie was terrified, with good cause. And now I knew that what had happened to her had something to do with me, with my power. That the Fetch had killed her all those years ago, as he’d killed Jeremy. And it was my fault. Jeremy’s death and Maggie’s resonated, bookmarking my life. I’d as good as pulled the trigger on them both.

I told Jolon the story as briefly and sparingly as I could. I told him almost everything, even the part about me being disappeared in the photos. But for the first time since I’d met him I kept something from him. I didn’t tell
him about the tortured man in the tunnels. I thought it would be more believable that way, but I was fearful, too. Fearful of what might happen if I told even Jolon. That it would seem much bigger then, and more terrifying. After Maggie, I’d never told anyone, even Jeremy. It was our secret, mine and dead Maggie’s. Ours and the Fetch’s.

Jolon was silent after I finished speaking.

“Do you believe me? I know it sounds strange and … kind of crazy.”

“I believe you. I always have. Why stop now?” He sighed, looked out the window at Hawley Forest, where we were by then. “As for being strange, well … it is.” He skipped over the crazy part. “If you’re right about it being the same guy, and it sounds like it could be, this has been going on for a very long time.” Neither of us then had any idea
how
long.

Pizza by Earl—October 24, 2013
1

Jolon called me the next morning. The Fetch’s e-mail had been sent from a new Yahoo account set up at a public library in St. George, Utah, the previous day. St. George was about two hours from our Henderson house. The library patron had been a man named David Tolland, who had a Provo, Utah, address. He was otherwise unremarkable, the librarian told them. No one remembered him. He had also been dead for eleven years. A fake ID. Another dead end.

“One thing I’ll tell you. Knowing what you’ve already been through, you and the girls should have protection.”

“Meaning?”

“A bodyguard. Maybe a couple.”

I laughed when he said it, but I mulled it over. After a day of trying to work, but mostly just spent stewing and checking my e-mail or the girls every ten minutes, I thought it would be good to get us all out of the house.

Most nights at Pizza by Earl are slow. A middle-aged couple sat side by side in one of the green Naugahyde booths watching
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
. Smoke lay bluely over their heads, clouding the television. A few men huddled in the corner of the bar over beers. No one looked up as we walked in except the waitress, who snapped her gum at us. Earl could be seen flinging dough behind the hatch. A puffy-eyed busboy slung beer mugs into a dishwasher. A sign by the cash register was turned to
PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF
, so we all wandered over to the booths. Nathan and I
scooched into one. The girls slumped into the one behind us, and immediately started poring over the tabletop jukebox selections.

The seats were cracked where they weren’t duct taped, but there were real flowers in vases on all the tables, and along the marble counter. Pink and red carnations wafted their spicy scent as we sat down. We picked menus out of a wire rack that advertised
BUDWEISER—THE KING OF BEERS
. The specials were handwritten in marker and slid into the plastic menu cover: Chicken parmigiana dinner with choice of ziti or spaghetti. Cajun catfish with rice pilaf and green beans, and something cryptically titled “roast beast feast.” The dessert of the day, apart from the usual apple, cherry, blueberry, banana cream, and chocolate cream pies, was Grape-Nut pudding. Grape-Nut pudding was Fai’s strange favorite. She always ordered it when we went to Mustang Sally’s Diner back home. Which we hadn’t done in a very long time. Would Hawley turn out to be just another stop on our trajectory of flight? I felt a catch in my throat at the thought. Nathan, sitting across from me, narrowed his eyes. “Is this going to be okay, Reve? We can go home.”

I twirled the heavy glass ashtray on the table. I wished I still smoked. “I’ll be all right.”

The gum-snapping waitress came over for our order, poured waters, sloshed some onto the table. She looked nervous, her face flushed. “My dad says you’re the lady from over Five Corners. Said to tell you we hope you’re getting settled in.” She said it all in a rush, her face growing redder. She was not much older than Grace and Fai. I felt exposed, felt my own face redden. I was tired of being a curiosity. Why hadn’t I fled to a big city, where no one cared enough to gossip about their neighbors? Nathan, ever ready to rescue a social situation, told her, “I’ll have the roast beast. Does it come with a salad?”

While we waited for our food, I listened to the girls debate the merits of various singers, the décor, what they might order for dessert. I lost the thread of their conversation, twirled my straw in my iced tea, and snuck glances at the four men in the shadows near the bar. Two of them seemed familiar. I wondered if they had been part of the strange assembly in the forest the previous day.

The door chimed and more of the forest men walked in. I was certain about
them
. Walnut man and Mike, the fat man. The walnut-faced man made a beeline for the bar, but Mike looked around, saw me, and froze. Then he tipped his feed cap at me before he, too, scuttled to the bar.

I remembered a thing Maggie used to say. That if you wanted to know something, it was better to just ask. Even if you were 99 percent sure you wouldn’t get an answer, there was always that 1 percent variable, and usually the odds were better than you thought. Especially if you surprised the truth out of a person.

I said to Nathan, “I’ll just be a minute,” and slid out of the booth. The waitress pointed to the signs that said
GULLS
and
BUOYS
, but I walked right by them, and planted myself at the bar. The men looked at me, looked away.

“I thought you all might like a drink. On me.” I dug in my bag for my wallet, dropped a fifty on the bar. “That should cover a few rounds. I’ll have a Sam Adams, too,” I told the bartender. His head was shaved, polished as if he’d rubbed it to its high sheen with a bar rag. He sported a tribal tattoo on his arm that reminded me of a crown of thorns, with
USMC
in the center. A marine, then. He wordlessly plunked a bottle down in front of me, slid five Buds down the bar for my new friends.

I raised the bottle, tipped it toward them, said, “Cheers,” and took a swig.

Mike was busy peeling the label off his sweaty bottle. The walnut-faced man gave a quick nod in acknowledgment, but didn’t look at me. Then a tall guy from the other end of the bar got up, tugged at his jeans, took up his cane, and made his way over. The age spots on his face were the color of tea. He held out his hand. I didn’t recognize him from the woods.

“I saw you on TV once. You and your husband. Your magic act was the bee’s knees. I’m sorry about …” He shook his head, and what hair he had left floated like cotton.

“We’re all sorry. And we hope it don’t start again at Five Corners. Hope you’re all safe there.”

“Christ sake, Hank!” the walnut man exploded. “
She
don’t …”

“She don’t what, Len? She got a right, it’s her kids.”

Hank nodded toward our booths. Fai and Caleigh, their heads bowed, were absorbed by the puzzles on their place mats. Grace was blowing bubbles with her straw in time to “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” Hank turned back to me. “Don’t mind these guys, missy. They got their heads stuck up their keisters so far they can see out their own mouths.”

Hank surprised a laugh out of me, the first real laugh I’d had in a long time. It felt good to laugh. Normal. “Well, Hank, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you sure have a way with words.”

“Why, I’m talking about the disappearances at Hawley Five Corners in the twenties.”

The smile froze on my face.

“You know,” he went on. “The six young girls. And then the whole church congregation just up and vanished one Sunday morning. You must’ve heard that story?”

I thought back on the conversation I’d had with Carl Streeter, about the abandonment of Hawley Five Corners. He hadn’t said anything about children disappearing first. Girls.

“Aw, Hank, you know that’s just an old legend—” Len piped in.

“No, I don’t know any such thing. Just because nobody here ever talks about it don’t mean it’s not true.” A couple of the men in the corner had swiveled around on their bar stools and were staring at him now. I saw that one of them was the black-haired man from the forest. Hank did have a voice that carried, but I didn’t think they were staring because of that.

“Well, I believe it. That forest is haunted, especially the Five Corners. I was just a boy then, six years old. But we knew what happened, all right. We knew that the girls were disappearing. Fall of ’23. Why, the search for Lucy Bell went on for months, even before what happened in the church that next spring. You can’t tell me that everyone who lived in Hawley Five Corners decided to move out all on the same day. And it was a warm fall when it started then, too, just like now. I
remember
. And there’s a few others that do, as well. Only they won’t speak of it. Rather it was forgotten. Dead and buried. Len’s one of those, miss. Ma’am. But I’d sure hate for anything to happen to those girls.” He nodded again in my daughters’ direction. They were intent on choosing more songs, Fai’s hand flipping
the cards that listed music from a past they had only heard of. Elvis and Johnny Cash just distant echoes to them.

Hank rested his bony hand on my shoulder. I tried not to flinch. “You know …” He shot a look to the men in the corner, then whispered, “One of them came back. Hannah Sears did. Gone two months. And then one day just walked on out of the forest. Couldn’t even say where she’d been. Thought it was the same day she’d gone out blackberry picking down by the old tavern. She came back still carrying her basket of berries, even though it was December. Those berries were a wonder.”

“Hank, will you just shut it?” the man with the black hair snapped. “He’s old, he believes all that hoo-ha. Ghosts and vanishing towns. Don’t pay him no mind.”

“Remy, she
saw
the ghost herd!” the fat man said.

“Mike, you can just shut your big yap, too. Shit. I’m surrounded by old men and fools.” Remy went back to his beer.

Hank jabbed painfully at my arm. His mottled, moony face was alight with urgency. “He wasn’t there. I
was
.”

I pulled away as gently as I could. “I think my food is here. It was … good to meet you, Hank.” I took my once-sipped beer back to our table.

On the way home, while the girls were quiet, digesting their roast beast feast, I thought about the disappearing town story. It was probably just a ghostly legend parents scared their children with to prevent them from straying into the forest. But the disappearances Hank had mentioned, the girls he knew disappearing, his hope that “it” wouldn’t start again—it all pointed to something more real, and more troubling. His fear for my own girls frightened me. And Hank’s story had another layer of doubt and mystery that he probably wasn’t aware of: its connection to my own family’s past. My grandmother’s name, before she went back to just plain Hannah Dyer, had been Hannah Dyer Sears. Hannah Sears, like the girl who disappeared, then reappeared, in Hawley Five Corners ninety years ago.

2

I couldn’t call Nan, not that late, even though it would serve her right for keeping me in the dark, as surely she had done. I got up, put on a robe, and went up to my office. I sat across from the portrait of the mystery woman and mulled. It seemed like all I could do in the middle of the night was to pray, although I wasn’t exactly a believer. I didn’t even know
how
to pray. The closest I could come was to shut off the light, close my eyes, and say to whoever or whatever might be listening, “Please help me out of this mess. Please keep my girls safe. Please let me do the right thing.”

No great flash of insight hit me. I opened my eyes. Moonlight suffused the office, weaving ghostly patterns through the room. The mystery woman gazed down at me from her portrait. Moonlight, crisp as a spotlight, shone on her pointing hand. I got up for a closer look.

The wall below her, with its chair rail painted green, had seemed smooth and unblemished, but now, when I looked again, I saw what she seemed to be pointing at: a crack in the wainscoting. I dropped to my knees, slipped my hand into the shadowed breach. I pulled at it, and a small door concealed in the wall dropped open.

Something thunked to the floor. I shivered, a deep shiver that started at my spine, radiated out to my skin. A book had fallen at my knees. It was covered with worn crimson leather and there was printing in gold on it:
The Hawley Book of the Dead
. The book from my dreams.

I closed the small door. I could see it was cleverly hinged—impossible to detect, except on certain moonlit nights. I took up the book. It seemed light for its size, and inexplicably warm, as if it had been beamed in from a sunny meadow on a summer afternoon. I carried it to my chair and opened it. The fragrance of lilacs hit me like a truck. And another smell beneath that one, a metallic scent I couldn’t identify for a moment. Then it came to me. The book also smelled of blood.

I didn’t need any more mysteries, and I almost closed it right up again, but something made me begin turning the pages. They were thick, like woven linen, and at first glance, completely blank. I riffled through them,
and near the very end, ink began to shimmer onto the page, form words. I could read them in the moonlight. Then after a few words, I didn’t need to read at all. I could see everything the book described. More than that, I could feel the story the words told unfurl inside my head.

A man sat at the entrance to a shallow cave in a sandstone ridge. He looked down on a house, sometimes raising binoculars to his sunburnt face. For days, all there had been for him to do was think. He ate PowerBars and thought. He thought while the heat dried his lips, made his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth between sips of warm water hauled from town. He thought while the stars, huge and almost menacing in their clarity, wheeled above him every night in the frost-lapped desert. His thoughts began in one cankered, corrosive track, then shifted to a place of bright desire. Revenge, then redemption.

But this night was different. There was something in the air, something old that didn’t belong in the desert. The man turned toward the East. He inhaled the ghostly scent of a New England flower, a faint breath on the air. It made him think of the old days, before he’d been caught in this web of hatred and vengeance seeking. It reminded him of his mother’s garden in Massachusetts. It reminded him that the woman he sought was from the East. And in that moment, he knew where she had gone. She had gone home.

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