Read The Hawley Book of the Dead Online
Authors: Chrysler Szarlan
The Hawley Book of the Dead (36 page)
“And you?”
“I like facts. That’s what I live by. I think all the paranormal stuff is bull.”
“I really don’t care what they say. The forest can be haunted or not. I just need to find my girls. Where are Grace and Fai? Where the hell are they? Where do we go from here?”
Jolon chose to bring us back to the real world. “Savoy today, like I said. Then a more detailed search here, if we don’t find anything. Ten or twenty abreast, covering grids over every inch of Hawley Forest. It’s bound to turn up something.”
“But searchers have already covered the forest.”
“Not like this. Not as many. We’ll have more searchers on the ground tomorrow than during the Molly Bish search.”
“Molly Bish!” I remembered her, a sixteen-year-old gone missing from her western Massachusetts town. Her body had been discovered years later, just miles from her home.
Jolon winced. “Reve, I didn’t mean to make a comparison. This is not the same situation. Your girls have each other, and their horses.”
“Which makes it even more strange that they haven’t been found.”
“We have to face the fact, sooner or later, that they may have run away. Ditched the horses somewhere. Some of their texts—”
“No! I don’t want to think that. It’s just not who they are.”
Jolon stirred the remains of his coffee, silent. “Don’t you think it’s crossed my mind?” I asked. “Of course I blame myself for Jeremy’s death, and for them having to leave all their friends, their home. But I honestly don’t think that
they
blame me. Even if they have a right to.
That’s
in the texts, too.” I felt the sting of tears behind my eyes. Jolon placed a steadying hand on mine. His touch didn’t comfort me. I was beyond any feeling at all.
“You know I’ll keep doing everything I can. Everything I can think of.”
“I know that.” And I did. I really did. But it seemed impossible to wait. Some part of me just wanted to sleep through this, hibernate until the twins were back, miraculously found. But I knew it didn’t work that way. I had to keep trying, keep searching for them, for the key to this whole mess.
I sighed into my empty coffee mug. “Time to saddle up.”
“Shit, Reve. I can’t forbid you, but I don’t want you riding in the forest alone. There’s no one out there today. What about your Fetch?”
“He’s gone again. He’s not in the forest now. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”
Exasperation and unease warred in his eyes. “All right. Where are you going?”
“Cemetery Road.”
“The old King Graveyard.”
“And around, and about.”
“Reve … be
careful
.”
“Being careful isn’t getting me anywhere. Maybe it’s time to be more careless.”
Jolon needn’t have worried. I didn’t run into another soul on the road. Saw no ice-eyed Fetch, no strange men. No mysterious cows. No girls, either. It was a peaceful ride, another gorgeous day to be out if you weren’t searching for your missing children. The weather, warm and dry so long into October, seemed unnatural even to a Nevadan. After all, I’d grown up in New England and expected a killing frost by the end of September, the ground to be frozen by early November. But we were nearing the end of October with not so much as a light frost. I rode in a T-shirt, carried a full water pack, stopped Zar at streams to drink often. The leaves were still turning and a few falling, enough so Zar crunched through some trails. But other trails were curiously summer-like, bedded in soft pine needles, some deciduous trees still green overhead. You could chalk it up to global warming, but it seemed even more unnatural than that.
The cemetery that gave the road its name was blazing, dazzling in scarlets and every shade of yellow. It was called the King Graveyard, as it was begun by the King family, but most Hawley Five Corners families lay there finally as well. There were Searses and Kings and Warriners. I tied Zar to the gate and walked through the graves. The last time I’d been there, Grace and Fai had been with me, laughing and teasing. I remembered
the shadow passing over the slanted stones, then the scent of lilacs. Why had it been
there
? Was it my first warning that the twins were in danger?
I concentrated on the headstones. There was Jonas King, whose gravestone was taller than my horse, and boasted of his son’s adventures as a missionary in India and Palestine. Jonas King, Jr., was probably buried under some burning sun in a land that was strange to his kin. So this Hawley monument served as his memorial in his hometown, as well as his father’s. There was a beautiful headstone with a sleeping fawn carved on it that I remembered from my childhood. But in the hundred or so gravestones that remained, all of which I examined that day, there were none that marked a death in the year 1924, and none after. The boneyard itself bolstered the theory that the town had simply vanished one fine day. Other than that, it told me nothing, and smelled only of freshly mown grass.
I rode out toward Hitchcock Meadow. Just as I got to the meadow pull-off, I heard the sound of a pickup lumbering down Cemetery Road. I trotted Zar behind a lean-to at the edge of the meadow, rested him in the shadows, held my breath. Hoped it wasn’t the weird men again.
It was Jolon. He jounced the truck into the pull-off, leapt out. He’d changed out of his uniform of the morning. His black hair needed combing, and his jeans and T-shirt were faded beyond recognizing their original colors. His tracking clothes. A tide of fear washed over me. He was back from Savoy so soon, it must mean something. Probably nothing good.
He made for the trailhead, but then he turned toward me. Of course he could find me. Even if he hadn’t been a tracker, he could always find me. I stepped out of the shadows.
“You said you’d be somewhere on Cemetery Road.”
“What is it?” My tongue felt thick with dread.
“Just wanted to let you know, it’s definitely not your daughter’s horse.”
I sighed out a long, relieved breath. If that was all, I’d take it.
“It means one less possible bad outcome, anyway,” he told me.
The cold crept up the back of my neck again. I shivered. Jolon had seen so many bad outcomes. Had brought them to light.
“I don’t know how you do it. I couldn’t do what you do.”
“But you are.”
“Only because I have to. You have a choice. I wish to God I did.”
Jolon turned and looked up at the sky, a rich blue. “God doesn’t have anything to do with it.” He did not turn back to face me. “The Brothers thought they were doing God’s work. Tried to make me feel that, too.”
“And you don’t?”
“I mostly don’t allow myself to think or feel, until I find the one I’m looking for.” His back was tense, and I knew it cost him an effort to talk about this. He kept looking up at the sky, the trees, as if he thought something he’d lost might be wedged up there.
“Dead or alive.” I couldn’t help thinking it, speaking it.
He looked at me then, a questioning look, searching for a clue to my state of mind, probably. “Most times, it works out fine, Reve. I find hunters and hikers who just got disoriented in the woods.”
Ninety-three hours, the internal clock told me.
Jolon read my thought. “Sometimes it
does
take days. Once I found a girl, seven years old. Went off on her bike while her mother was hanging clothes. One minute she was there, the next, like she fell off the face of the earth. Found her five days later. Halfway up a mountain, lost and scared and cold. But not hurt.”
“A happy ending.”
“It’s why I do it. Not for God. For the happy endings.” He sucked in his breath, in that Irish way of affirmation or denigration, according to context. His parents had brought it from their home country, passed it on to him. I was not sure how he meant it, but it was strangely comforting to hear that sound again. It was one of the things that made him himself. Without thinking, I reached for his hand. I felt my own pulse beating with his. Maybe it always had, after all.
“We were too young, then,” I said under my breath. Maybe I didn’t know I was saying it aloud.
“Too young not to be pulled apart by circumstance.” He finished my thought for me, like he used to.
“It’s strange how things turned out.” My feelings were slithering every which way. I was sad for all the lost years that we might have known each
other. And then I had a flash of longing for Jeremy. Wanted desperately to rush home, open the Book for another sighting of him. I wanted Kilcoole Beach, the rustling of stones lapped by small waves, Jeremy’s hand in mine rather than Jolon’s. That finished it. I pulled my hand away, leapt upon startled Zar’s back while he was peacefully cropping grass, put him into a big trot, and rode away with Jolon calling after me.
When I got to the smaller trails off the main road, where I knew Jolon couldn’t follow, the tangled skein of regret and self-loathing began to loosen. My feelings for him were like a new shoot off an old, shattered tree stump. But it did no good to think of. It had no place in my life. I wanted to bury it as deeply as Jonas King in his boneyard.
Caleigh’s Vision: “The Star”
Caleigh was bored without the presence of her sisters, even though when they were with her she felt as if they used up all the air in the house. Nathan and her Grand and Gramps tried to keep her entertained while her mother searched for her sisters, but there was only so much that could be done, cooped up in the house.
At least she had her string. In Hawley, she’d found her power to conjure with the string was even stronger. She’d had those visions of the past. She’d also made up new patterns: “Fox in the Morning,” and the shining red animal slunk across the paddocks, sniffed delicately at the fire pit where Nathan had grilled their supper once. “Bell in the Steeple” and she’d made a bell toll in the church, on the morning of the fair.
She was lying on the couch in the parlor, working on the “Skipping Rope Girl” again. She couldn’t seem to perfect the pattern. Conjuring people was harder. But she was getting more adept at using the string to see both the past and the present. She could see her sisters when she wove the “Twins” pattern, just vaguely, in a place that seemed to be under the ground. She thought that wasn’t really right, somehow, so she didn’t tell anyone yet, even her mother. She kept trying to get it right before she told. It was too important. It comforted her in a strange way.
She sometimes could see the magician Setekh weaving a huge pattern
above a stage with clingy silk rope instead of string. She could see her mother in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. She looked up then from the chopping block, distracted, and the knife clattered to the floor. Her mom said “Caleigh?” to the disturbed air around her. Then Caleigh saw Setekh again, weaving his web and laughing.
She suddenly felt very sleepy. She let her “Skipping Rope Girl” slide into the “Star” pattern. “A man is coming,” she murmured. Then she fell into a dreamless sleep.
1
Mrs. Pike was just pulling out of the driveway when I got back to Hawley. She’d left us another meaty dinner. “Shepherd’s pie,” she informed me. “From the church supper recipe book.”
“Great,” I told her. “Perfect.” I went in the house to check on Caleigh. I found her stringing on the couch.
“Where is everybody?”
“I told them to leave me alone. I can’t have you all hanging over me every minute. I need some privacy.”
Falcon Eddy swung his big head around the door to the dining room, gave me a wink.
“Where are Grand and Gramps?” I asked Caleigh.
“Dunno. I think they went over to Nathan’s apartment when I told them I wanted them to leave me alone.” Her dexterous hands swooped through her string. “Mom.”
“What, honey?”
“Now you’re doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Not giving me any
space
.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”
She rolled her eyes. I was almost glad of her snarkiness. At least she wasn’t scared.
So I rummaged around the refrigerator, pulled vegetables out of the bin. It seemed like days since Caleigh had eaten a vegetable that hadn’t
been boiled to death. I pulled a knife out of the block, started chopping and dicing, throwing a salad together. I could at least do that.
The knife slipped, fell to the floor. I thought of Nan, and how she used to say when a knife was dropped, “A man is coming.” I called for Caleigh, ran to find her. She was asleep on the couch in the parlor, where I’d left her.
My head seemed too heavy to lift. I slumped onto the couch next to her and fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed about
The Hawley Book of the Dead
. Not in any coherent way, but it was like a red thread through my dreams. I carried it like a baby, rocked it in one dream. In another I kept trying to give it away, but no one would take it. I tried to leave it by the side of a road, but it kept flying back into my hands, like a bird.
I woke in the late afternoon. Next to me, Caleigh still slept soundly. The day had become misty and dark with suspended rain. I jumped up, ran out into it, nearly tripped over Falcon Eddy. “Stay with Caleigh,” I commanded. I knew something was happening in the forest, something big; I could feel it like damp through my body, chilling my bones. But I didn’t call Jolon. I knew where to seek my answers. I bolted up to the office, dug out
The Hawley Book of the Dead
. It wasn’t blank this time.
Rigel Voss was all in a tangle. He’d fallen into a cellar hole, crawled through a mass of hobblebush to a cave that must once have been the root cellar of a house. He tried to rest under the damp rock overhang. Tried to breathe shallowly, not the doglike pant he wanted to indulge in. He was somewhere in the Hawley Forest. The handheld GPS he’d carried had sprung from his pocket during one of the belly crawls he’d had to subject himself to, to get away from the guy who’d sniffed him out.
Then at some other point, the pocket with his topo maps all protected in ziplock bags tore. It gaped now so his boxers showed, snagged during his headlong gallops and slides, trying to get far enough away. But that wasn’t the worst. His gun lay somewhere out in the brush, too.
He’d lost the guy, though. He thought. He hoped. If his senses hadn’t been honed, first by his Quantico training, then by years of lying low, he would surely have been caught. It was the smell of the man that had roused Voss’s suspicion, set him going. The wind shifted suddenly, and the smell of human came with it. Wood smoke and soap. He knew he himself smelled of sweat and fear to the man he’d never actually seen. Wasn’t sure if he’d been seen during the hour or so he was pursued. Smelled, yes, as he’d smelled the man. For all Voss knew, the guy was a hunter, thought he was a deer. That’s what he hoped, but he knew better. Hawley Forest had remained closed throughout the search for the missing girls. He himself had hiked in from Plainfield, a long haul. Then, this guy was no average beer-gutted deer hunter. He traveled light, as Voss did. He traveled methodical and sure and eerily quiet. It was only when the moose crashed between them that Voss could make a run for it, run and crawl, run and crawl. For so long his lungs were bursting. The moose followed him. Maddened by flies, or just at the cusp of rutting, something about Voss it didn’t like. It tramped and huffed after him, and was faster than Voss thought possible for an animal that size. He could hear it still, stomping and snorting somewhere above him. He’d have to lie low, wait until he could make his next move.
When he’d left Hawley, it had been his plan to vanish for a while, over the state line in Albany. He knew a no-name motel near the Albany airport, where the manager was a guy in an undershirt with ginger hair sprouting from his ears and never spoke, as far as Voss knew. Just took Voss’s cash, slid the key
card across the counter, went back to watching NASCAR. He was close enough to get back easily, as things developed and he saw his next chance. He watched the TV and scanned the Internet for news.
After a few days, he was getting antsy, just hanging around the room. It was your average low-end old motor court, with a decent bed, a desk, a television, a small fridge and microwave, a Monet haystack on the wall. Voss mostly sat in the breeze from the air conditioner, surfed the Web and television, ate take-out Chinese or ribs delivered from a different place every day so he wouldn’t be remembered. He read novels he’d picked up in a Walmart—James Patterson, Clive Cussler, a Stephen King he’d started, but which was spooking him too much. He kept running across coincidences in the book that resonated with his own life. Small things, really. A mention of the Petroglyphs outside Albuquerque, where he and Alice had gone to visit her sister, their only trip besides their honeymoon. The wife in the book used the same perfume Alice liked. He left the book in the lobby for someone else to get creeped out by.
Altogether, the room was fine, though. Restful, except that it smelled of something sweet and fruity, reminding him of the shampoo Alice used. Often, he would forget for days at a time, then be blindsided by something as innocuous as air freshener, a mention of Petroglyphs. It’s funny how our minds work, he thought. It didn’t even disturb him anymore, these sudden blasts of remembrance. He looked forward to them. They were all he had left of her.
In his first thirty-six years, Rigel Voss hadn’t set a foot wrong. Every move was calculated to yield the best result. But when he’d run across Maggie Hamilton, and through her the disappearing mystery woman, his life had spiraled down to hellish depths. At first, he was certain it could be remedied. He didn’t mention it to Alice, eight months’ pregnant then, and feeling achy and
swollen and hungry all the time. It seemed like whenever he came home, she was spooning something soft into her mouth. Butter pecan ice cream, or chocolate pudding, or tapioca.
They rented the first-floor apartment of a triple-decker in Holyoke then, at the nice end of town where there were real yards and trimmed hedges. Alice liked to sit on the porch high above the street, watch the cars pass, watch the neighbor kids play in their yards, running through sprinklers in the heat. They could even see a small blue patch of the Connecticut River from the porch, and from their bedroom. The yard out back was large and fenced. Perfect for children. The only thing wrong with the place was the steep stone stairway that led to the front door. But as Alice had pointed out when they were apartment hunting, they could always go up the more gradually inclined drive, come in through the kitchen door at the back of the house. All the same, the steps troubled him. He made her promise not to use them at all the last few months of her pregnancy.
Often he would park on the street, dash up those twenty-seven stone steps to the porch and kiss her mouth, sweet from the pudding or ice cream she favored to cool and comfort herself. He couldn’t wait to be with her, care for her. Every weekend he cleaned the apartment, then made stews for her, thick and creamy. Even though they’d had a long spell of hot weather, too hot for May, Alice wanted soup. Chewing seemed like too much work in her languid pregnant state. Corn chowder was her favorite, made with fresh corn they’d gotten from a farm stand that last summer. They’d shucked and steamed, sliced the juicy kernels off the ears, and put the corn up in jars one thundery day in September. They’d just found out she was pregnant, their baby not even a gentle swelling between Alice’s narrow boy hips. It would be months before she puffed up, couldn’t stand all day at the Super Saver, had to take an early leave.
How he loved her. He didn’t think it possible, but he loved her even more pregnant. He loved her big belly, her lopsided face and tiny hands, now a little swollen with the heat and the bloating. Her croaky voice asking him, “Honey, will you get me …” It was always only a glass of juice, or cool water in a dishpan so she could soak her feet, thickened and painful even though she could put them up all day. But he wished she had asked for more. He would have gotten her anything. Pearls or rubies. A trip to China. The moon and the stars all wrapped up and tied with a golden ribbon. He would have tried, anyway. She asked for only one tough thing, and he did it, at least to the best of his ability.
One day, she was lying on the bed when he came home, instead of reading on the couch. It worried him to see her with her arm curled over her face, the soft underside as vulnerable as a baby rabbit. He went and sat on the bed beside her, smoothed her skin there.
“My darlin’ darlin’ secret agent man.” She rolled onto her side, scissored her legs around his waist. “Now you’re trapped, by the fat lady in the circus. If you don’t do what she says, she just might crush you.”
“Then I guess I’d better do what she says.”
She smiled her crooked smile at him. “Sing to me.”
“I can’t sing, honey. I don’t even sing in the shower or the car. Try something easier. I don’t know any songs.”
“Oh, come on. You’re going to have to sing to this baby, you know. Your mama must have sung you some lullaby sometime.”
Then he remembered. His father hated when his mother sang baby stuff to him, but there was one song that stuck.
“You’ll be sorry!” he teased.
He cleared his throat. “Last night as I lay dreaming of pleasant days gone by …” he sang. The first notes were squawks, really, but after his throat got used to singing rather than talking, it flowed better.