The red church (7 page)

"No, ain't seen nothing up at the red church in a long time. Course, kids go up there to mess around from time to time. Always have."

Littlefield nodded. "Yeah. Ever think of posting a 'No Trespassing' sign?"

"That would only draw twice as many. I'd never keep nothing out there that I couldn't afford to get stolen."

Littlefield shifted his weight from one foot to an-other and a porch board groaned. The Mathesons lived in a board-and-batten house on the edge of two hundred acres of land. Even Lester's barns seemed better built than the house. It was roofed with a cheap linoleum sheeting that had visible patches in the material. The windows were large single panes fixed with gray strips of wood. The air coming from the open front door was stale and cool, like that of a tomb.

The sun was disappearing into the angle where Buckhorn Mountain slid down to the base of Piney Top. The air was moist with the waiting dew. Pigs snorted from their wooden stalls beside the largest of Lester's two barns. Crickets had taken up their night noises, and the aroma of cow manure made Littlefield almost nostalgic for his own childhood farm days. "Have you ever seen Boonie hanging around the graveyard?"

Lester scratched his bulbous head that gleamed even in the fading light. His hand was knotted from a life of work, thick with blue veins and constellations of age spots. "Well, I found him in the red church one time, passed out in the straw. I just let him sleep it off. As long as he didn't smoke in there, he couldn't really hurt nothing."

"Have you noticed anything unusual around here?"

"Depends on what you mean by 'unusual.' The church has always been mighty unusual. But I don't have to tell
you
that, do I?"

"I'm not interested in ghost stories," Littlefield lied.

Lester emitted a gurgling laugh and leaned back in his rocker. "Fine, Sheriff. Whatever you say. And I guess Boonie just happened to get killed in one of them gang wars or something."

"Perry Hoyle thinks it was a mountain lion."

Lester laughed again, then shot a stream of black juice into the yard. "Or maybe it was Bigfoot. Used to be a lot of mountain lions in these parts, all right. Back in the thirties and forties, they were thick as flies. They'd come down out of the hills of a night and take a calf or a chicken, once in a while a dog. But they're deader than four o'clock in the morning now."

Lester was a hunter. Littlefield wasn't, these days. "When's the last time you saw one?" the sheriff asked.

"Nineteen sixty-three. I remember because every-body was just getting over the Kennedy mess. I took up yonder to Buckhorn"—he waved a gnarled hand at the darkening mountain—"because somebody said they'd seen a six-point buck. I set up a little stand at a crossing trail and waited. My stand was twenty feet up a tree, covered with canvas and cut branches. Moon come out, so I decided to stay some after dark, even though it was colder than a witch's heart.

"I heard a twig snap and got my rifle shouldered as smooth as you please. We didn't mess with scopes and such back in them days. Just pointed and shot. So I was looking down the barrel when something big stepped in the sights. Even in the bad light, I could see its gold fur. And two shiny green eyes was looking right back up the barrel at me."

Lester drained his excess juice off the side of the porch. The old man paused for dramatic effect. Peo-ple still passed down stories in these parts. The front porch was Lester's stage, and they both knew his audience was duty-bound to stay.

The sheriff obliged. "You shot him," he said, even though he knew that wouldn't have made a satisfac-tory ending to the tale.

Lester waited another ten seconds, five seconds longer than the ritual called for. "About did. I knew what he was right off, even though his fur was about the same color as a deer's. It was the eyes, see?

Deer eyes don't glow. They just sop up light like a scratch biscuit draws gravy."

"What happened next?"

"He just kind of stared back at me. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Looking at me like I was an equal, or maybe not even that. Like I was a mosquito buzz-ing around his head. He drew his mouth open like he was going to snarl, and his whiskers flashed in the moonlight. And I couldn't pull the trigger."

"Scared?" Littlefield asked, hoping Lester wasn't insulted. But Lester seemed to have forgotten the sheriff as he stared off at the mountain.

"In a way I was, but that's not the reason I didn't pull the trigger. There was something about him, something in the eyes, that was more than animal. You might think I'm crazy, and you probably wouldn't be too far wrong, but that cat
knew
what I was thinking. It
knew
I wouldn't pull the trigger. After maybe half a minute of us staring each other down, he slipped into the woods, his long tail twitching like he was laughing to hisself. Like I was a big ball of yarn he'd played with and gotten tired of." The sun had slipped behind the horizon now, and Littlefield couldn't read Lester's expression in the darkness. All he could see was the crooked shape of the farmer's face.

"I was frozen, and not just from the chill, either," Lester continued. "When I finally let out a breath, it made a mist in front of my face. I was sweating like I was baling hay and racing a rainstorm. I strained my ears for any little sound, even though I knew the cat was gone."

Littlefield had been standing more or less at pa-rade rest, a habit he had when he was on official business, even around people he knew. Now he let his shoulders droop slightly and leaned against the porch rail. As a youngster, he'd hunted at night him-self. He could easily imagine Lester in the tree, muscles taut, ears picking up the slight scurry of a chip-munk or the whispering wings of a nighthawk. Like any good storyteller, Lester had put the sheriff in another place and time.

"You're probably wondering why I'm going on so about this mountain lion," Lester said. "You're ask-ing yourself what that's got to do with Boonie Houck's death."

"That mountain lion would have died a natural death long ago."

Lester said nothing. There was a clattering inside the house, then the rusty
skree
of the storm door opening. Lester's wife Vivian came out on the porch. Her hair was in a bun, tied up with a scarf. She had a slight hump in her back, a counterpart to her hus-band's twisted face. The interior light cast her odd shadow across the yard.

"You done yapping the sheriff's ear off?" she asked, her voice trembling and thin. She must have been a little hard of hearing, because she talked louder than necessary.

"Ain't hardly started yet," Lester said, not rising from his rocker. "Now get on back in the house be-fore I throw a shoe at you."

"You do and I'll put vinegar in your denture glass."

Lester chuckled. "I love you, too, honey."

"You going to invite the sheriff in for pie?"

"No, thank you, ma'am," Littlefield said, bowing a little in graciousness. "I've got a few other people to talk to tonight."

"Well, don't listen too much to this old fool. He lies like a cheap rug."

"I'll take that under advisement."

The door sprang closed. The darkness sprang just as abruptly. "So you haven't seen a mountain lion since then?" the sheriff asked Lester.

"Nope."

"And you're sure you haven't seen anything strange around the red church?"

"Haven't
seen
nothing. Heard something, though."

"Heard something?"

"Last night, would've been about three o'clock. You don't sleep too well when you get to be my age. Always up and down for some reason. So when I heard them, I figured it was one of those in-between dreams. You know, right before you fall asleep and your real thoughts are mixing in with the nonsense?" Littlefield nodded, then realized the old man couldn't see his face. "Yeah. What did you hear, or think you heard?"

Littlefield glanced at his watch, about to chalk up his time spent talking to Lester as a waste. The lumi-nous dial showed that it was nearly nine o'clock.

"Bells," the old man said in a near-whisper.

"Bells?" Littlefield repeated, though he'd plainly heard the man.

"Real soft and faint, but a bell's a bell. Ain't no mistaking that sound."

"I hate to tell you this, Lester, but we both know that the red church has the only bell around here. And even if some kids were messing around there last night, there's no bell rope."

"And we both know why there ain't no bell rope. But I'm just telling you what I heard, that's all. I don't expect you to put much stock in an old man's words."

The ghost stories. Some families had passed them down until they'd acquired a mythic truth that had even more power than fact. Littlefield wasn't ready to write
Death by supernatural causes
on Boonie's incident report. Since Samuel had died, the sheriff had spent most of his life trying to convince himself that supernatural occurrences didn't occur.

Just the facts, ma'am,
Littlefield told himself, hear-ing the words in Jack Webb's voice from the old
Drag-net
television show.

"There were no recent footprints around the church. No sign of disturbances inside the church, either," Littlefield said, piling up the evidence as if to convince himself along with Lester.

"I bet there wasn't no mountain lion pawprints, either, was there?" This time, Littlefield initiated the ten-second si-lence. "Not that we've found yet." Lester gave his liquid laugh.

Littlefield's head filled with warm anger. "If you believe so much in the stories, why did you buy the red church in the first place?"

"Because I got it for a song. But it won't be my problem no more."

"Why not?"

"Selling it. One of the McFall boys came by the other day. You know, the one that everybody said didn't act like regular folks? The one that got beat near to a pulp behind the football bleachers one night?"

"Yeah. Archer McFall." Littlefield had been a young deputy then, on foot patrol at the football game. Archer ended up in the hospital for a week. No arrests were made, even though Littlefield had seen two or three punks rubbing their hands as if their knuckles were sore. Of course, nobody pressed the case too much. Archer was a McFall, after all, and the oddest of the bunch.

"Well, he says he went off to California and made good, working in religion and such. And now he's moving back to the area and wants to settle here."

"I'll be damned."

"Me, too. And when he offered me two hundred thousand dollars for the red church and a dozen acres of mostly scrub pine and graveyard, I had to bite my lip to keep from grinning like a possum. Sup-posed to go in tomorrow and sign the papers at the lawyer's office."

"Why the red church, if he's got that kind of money?" Littlefield asked, even though he was pretty sure he already knew.

"That property started off in the McFall family. They're the ones who donated the land for the church in the first place. Remember Wendell McFall?"

Coincidences. Littlefield didn't like coincidences. He liked cause and effect. That was what solved cases. "That's a lot of money."

"Couldn't say no to it. But I had a funny feeling that he would have offered more if I had asked. But he knew I wouldn't. It was like that time with the mountain lion, like he was staring me down, like he knew what I was thinking."

"I guess if he's a successful businessman, then he's had a lot of practice at negotiating."

"Reckon so," Lester said, unconvinced. He stood with a creaking that might have been either his joints or the rocker's wooden slats. "It's time to be putting up the cows."

"And I'd best finish my rounds. I appreciate your time, Lester."

"Sure. Come on back anytime. And next time, plan on staying for a piece of pie."

"I'll do that."

As Littlefield started the Trooper, he couldn't help thinking about the part of Lester's story that had gone untold. The part about why a bell rope no longer hung in the red church, and why Archer McFall would want to buy back the old family birth-right.

He shook his head and went down the driveway, gravel crackling under his wheels.
FIVE

The dawn was crisp and pink, the air moistened by dew. The scent of pine and wild cherry blossoms spread across the valley along with the thin, smoky threads of the night's hearths. Water swept its way south underneath the soft fog that veiled the river. A rooster's crow cracked the stillness of the hills. Archer McFall nestled against the damp soil, the earth cool against his nakedness. He kept his eyes closed, looking back into the dark avenues of his dreams, chasing shadows to nowhere. The dreams were splashed with red, the color of retribution. They were human dreams, strange and new and chaotic. The rooster crowed three times before Archer re-membered where he was.

Home.

The word, even though it was only thought and not spoken, left a bitter taste in his mouth. The bit-terness came from the memory of old humiliations. And an older suffering, one that ran deeper than the expansive surface of sleep.

Archer coughed. Pine needles and brittle leaves pressed against his cheek. He shivered and rolled into a sitting position, opening his eyes. After so long in darkness, he was almost surprised at the brightness of the coming day. The light slashed through the gaps in the forest canopy, sharp and merciless and full of grace. He gazed down at his bare human flesh. His skin seemed to fit well enough. These human bags of water and bone had always seemed awkwardly con-structed to him. But he'd come among these people to take up their ways. Deliverance was more joyful when the victims thought it came from one of their own kind. More thoughts came back to him, more memories flooded the gray mass of brain that filled his skull. He spat. A reddish clot of half-digested pulp clung to a stump.