The Witch of Hebron (31 page)

“My folks are dead,” the boy said.

“Where are you from?”

“Sandgate, Vermont.” The boy started weeping again, but without his previous hysteria.

“It’s going to be all right,” Loren said.

“My brother Roy’s back there.”

“In Sandgate?”

“No. Where we just come from.”

Loren glanced back up the road toward Argyle. The distant whitewashed houses shone spectrally in the moonlight.

“All right. I’ll go back and get him.”

“There’s others, too.”

“How many?”

“Three. And one that’s dead.”

“Are you sure he’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“Where did he keep you?”

“A barn.”

“Back of the store?”

“I think so. In a hole under it.”

The boy started hyperventilating again. Loren put a big hand on his neck and squeezed it.

“Look at me, Jack. I’m going back there to get them. Can you stay here and wait with my horse.”

“No!”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Don’t leave me here!”

Loren rummaged in the pannier behind the saddle until he found what he was looking for: the Smith and Wesson automatic that the doctor had given him. It was chambered for nine-millimeter Luger ammunition. The clip was filled with original factory cartridges from the old times, not reloads. The doctor himself hadn’t fired it in a decade, though he kept it cleaned and oiled. Loren stuck it in his waistband.

“Okay, Jack, you can come with me. Here’s what we’re going to do.…”

Loren explained his plan to the boy while he tethered Lucky to a blowdown behind the oak tree. Then he and the boy stole back toward the hamlet, careful to stay within the shadows. They slipped through the yard of the darkened house next door to the brick store and crept around to a gray barn thirty yards behind the store. A candle was glowing in an upper rear window of the store building.

“Is this the barn where he kept you?”

“I think so.”

“Does he live up there?”

“I don’t know.”

“You stay here out of the moonlight. Don’t come out until I call your name.”

The boy nodded.

Loren located the safety switch of his pistol in the moonlight and clicked it off. A wooden stairway sprawled up the back of the brick building to a door on the second floor. Loren climbed it carefully to keep the treads from creaking. It took him ten minutes. He could see Jack’s face watching him anxiously below, at the edge of the shadows beside the barn. At the top of the stairs he pressed his ear to the door. He heard nothing. He wondered if the storekeeper had a wife or a companion, and he was not altogether sure what he would do with her if there was one. Despite the growing chill, he felt himself sweating through his shirt. He heard what sounded like chair legs scuffing against the floor, followed by footsteps. The glow of the candlelight faded in the window beside the door as the footsteps diminished. He tried to snatch a glimpse within through the window beside the door. It appeared to be a sparely furnished kitchen with no one in it.

He tried the doorknob and it turned easily, soundlessly. He pushed the door inward, an inch at a time. Soon he was standing in the small kitchen. A candle flickered somewhere farther down a narrow hallway. A jar of some amber liquid, whiskey or brandy, sat on the kitchen table along with a stack of old magazines. Loren could see that they were ancient pornography magazines of a kind that seemed to cater to men who preferred children. He heard some grunts and a cough from down the hall. He drew the pistol and held the barrel pointed up beside his ear, with his finger along the side of the trigger guard, as his father had taught him years ago at the Diamond Point Rod and Gun Club in Lake George. He proceeded into the hallway with agonizing slowness. Candlelight issued from a door ten feet down the hall, along with grunts and other noises that suggested the labors of solitary sexual activity. Loren drew in several breaths to oxygenate his brain and turned in the doorway to discover Miles English in a full suit of long underwear with the fly open and his generative member in his hand.

The storekeeper blinked at him breathlessly.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Put your pecker away and get up.”

English hoisted himself out of his bed.

“Turn around, back to me.”

“You going to whack me on the head?”

“No,” Loren said, seizing a fistful of the storekeeper’s collar and twisting it until it impinged on his airway. “Okay, turn slowly and march into the hallway.”

Rather than go out the way he came in, Loren took English down the interior stairway that led to the back of the store on the first floor.

“You sell rope?” Loren asked.

“No,” English said.

Loren rapped him on the side of his head with the pistol.

“Is your memory improving?” he said.

“No.”

“Really? How’d you tie that boy’s legs up?”

English didn’t reply.

Loren hit him again, harder.

“All right! All right! You said you weren’t going to hit me.”

“I changed my mind. Where’s the rope?”

“On that shelf there.”

Loren saw it in the moonlight that streamed through a transom window above the rear door, a fat coil of good quarter-inch hemp.

“Kneel down.”

“You going to execute me?”

“No. Do what I say.”

English jabbed an elbow into Loren’s liver and attempted to squirm away. Loren smacked him in the face with the flat of his gun. English howled. Loren hit him again and slammed him against a wall of storage drawers.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said.

“You knocked my front teeth out,” English hissed.

“I meant to jam them down your throat.”

“Why don’t you just kill me?”

“Because I’m not like you. On your knees.”

Loren flung him clear of the wall. English fell on his knees. Loren shoved him flat onto his stomach with a boot to his back.

“Hands behind you,” Loren said.

He retrieved the coil of rope and cut three lengths of it while standing with one foot on the back of English’s neck. He proceeded to tie the storekeeper’s hands tightly together, hobble his ankles, and run a length of cord between his hands and his hobbles to secure him. When he was done, he picked up the smaller man and stood him on his feet. His chin was a smudge of blood.

“You comfortable?” Loren asked.

“What do you care?”

“You try my Christian patience, you know that? Do you sell matches?”

“Drawer under the counter.”

Loren shoved him into the store proper, where he found a dozen crudely made splint matches in a bundle in the drawer. Loren put the matches and a candle in his pocket and stuck the pistol back in his waistband.

“Where’d you put that silver I paid you?”

The storekeeper stared balefully at Loren.

“You can’t afford to lose more teeth.”

“Under the counter,” English said, spitting a gob of blood onto the floor.

Loren dragged him to the counter. The storekeeper directed him to a small gray stoneware crock with coins in it, a bit more than the $5.20 that Loren had paid for the boy and the fruit. Finally, he shoved English toward the back door and outside into the moonlight. They were halfway to the gray barn when Jack ran out of the shadows.

“I was afraid,” the boy said.

“It’s all right now. Do you know how to light a candle?”

“Yessir. I don’t got any.”

“There’s one in my pocket and some matches. Reach in and take them.”

It was darker inside the barn. Loren told Jack to light the candle.

“Where do you keep the boys?”

English mumbled.

Loren wheeled him around and smacked him repeatedly about the face and head with the flat of his hand. “You’re starting to piss me off,” he said.

English pointed to a spot on the floor beside an empty grain bin. The trapdoor was plainly discernable in the candlelight. It was secured with a crude oak bar latch and a three-inch cotter pin. Loren told Jack how to get the latch off. The boy opened the trapdoor and called down into the hole. Soon, three other boys warily emerged from the darkness, blinking against the candlelight. A terrible odor wafted out of the hole.

“I’m taking you boys out of here,” Loren said.

They began crying and wailing.

“He’s our friend,” Jack told them.

Loren told English to lie down in an empty horse stall and threw the old gravity latch. He asked Jack to give him the candle and ventured down a rickety stairway that was little more than a ladder into the chamber under the floor. It was about twelve feet square, not deep enough for Loren to stand up straight in, though the boys had been able to. The stench was overpowering. A filthy old mattress was shoved against one wall. Several buckets filled with waste stood randomly about. There were no other furnishings. The place was nothing more than a hole. In the far corner, the body of a small boy sat on his haunches with his knuckles scraping the floor and his head sunk between his knees. Loren searched the cold skin on his neck for the carotid artery. There was no pulse. A centipede crawled out of the boy’s ear and Loren shrank back to the ladder.

Up in the barn again, he gave the candle back to Jack, retrieved Miles English from the horse stall and told him to sit down on the edge of the trap hole.

“Can you feel the ladder with your feet?”

“Yeah.”

“Go down there and look at what you’ve done.”

“I know what I done.”

Loren shoved him down into the hole. He heard him land with a thud on the floor.

“I’ll be back to get you in due course,” Loren growled into the hole. Then he shut the trapdoor, closed the oak bar latch, and replaced the cotter pin. The other boys had stopped wailing and crying. Loren got down on one knee, told them to gather round, and explained how they were going to steal out of town back to where Lucky was tied up just off the road.

“Did God send you?” one of the boys asked.

“I don’t know,” Loren said. “When we get where we’re going tonight, I’ll ask him.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

Billy Bones stood on the road in the slanted orange evening light admiring Barbara Maglie’s house and gardens.

“You hungry?” he asked Jasper.

Jasper shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, I am,” Billy said. “This is a nice house. I think we could beg a meal here, no problem. You just keep your mouth shut and follow my lead. Understand?”

Jasper nodded.

“All right. Let’s go.”

Billy hid his pistol and his brush knife in his shoulder sack and went to the back door with Jasper. He peered through the window and craned his head around trying to take in the interior.

“It’s real nice,” he whispered, and then rapped on the door.

When Barbara opened it, Billy recoiled at the sight of her, so powerful was the impression her beauty made on him. Yet, unable to read the expression on her face, he stood gaping dumbly.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Uh, ma’am,” Billy said. “Me and my little brother are on our way to Granville, where we have some people. We lost our mom and dad to a fever over in Fonda. I wonder if you might give us a meal and a place to sleep. We came a long way today.”

Barbara stared intently at Jasper.

“He don’t talk, ma’am,” Billy said. “His head was squarshed at a tender age by a falling tree limb, poor thing.”

“You can sleep in the hayloft out there,” she said, pointing to the barn. “No candles or smoking. I can’t have you burning down my barn.”

“We won’t burn nothing, ma’am, I swear.”

“I’ll leave some food out here on the step for you. You can eat it on the porch out front. Go settle in and come back for your food.”

“We can’t pay nothing,” Billy said.

“I’m not asking you to pay.”

“You’re a very kind lady. Say, if the man of the house wants a few chores out of us in the morning, just ask. We’ll stack cords, clean windows, whatever needs doing. And then maybe we can get a breakfast, too.”

“I’d prefer it if you get an early start tomorrow and be gone,” she said, withdrawing inside and shutting the door in their faces.

“Maybe she ain’t as nice as I thought,” Billy muttered. “But she sure is pretty. Come on, let’s have a look at the accommodations.”

Jasper followed Billy into the barn and up a ladder into the loft.

The hay was loose and green and there was plenty of it, stuffed into the loft with an airspace above for good keeping. Billy swung off his shoulder bag and flopped backward into the hay.

“Ah, isn’t that soft and lovely?” he said. “Try it.”

Jasper reclined warily into the hay a few yards away.

“Lookit,” Billy said, “you can burrow right in like a groundhog. We’ll sleep warm and nice in here tonight. I bet she don’t have any husband, though.”

“How do you know?”

“Shut up! Didn’t I tell you not to talk? She thinks you’re a goddamn mute. I was just musing to myself. I don’t know that I’ve seen a prettier lady lately. She’s old enough to be my ma. But guess what? She ain’t.”

Barbara’s voice could be heard outside calling them to come and get their supper.

Billy and Jasper found a splint basket on the step to the kitchen door. They took it around to the front porch and settled into two slat-back chairs with the basket on the floor between them. Billy fished out items one at a time and inspected each in the declining violet light. There was a jar of pickles, a chunk of cheese, six hard-boiled eggs, as many raw carrots, squares of corn bread, a bowl of warm mashed potatoes, two small oatcakes studded with nuts, a jar of sumac-and-honey punch, and a couple of apples.

“I’m sick of apples, tell you the truth,” Billy said. He attacked the mashed potatoes. “Mmmm. They’re all buttery,” he said with a full mouth. “She’s something, that lady. Better save an egg for your breakfast.” Billy cut the chunk of cheese in two pieces, one obviously larger than the other, and told Jasper to take the smaller one.

Jasper bolted two of the eggs, a piece of cheese, the corn bread, and his oatcake.

By the time Billy passed him the bowl of mashed potatoes there were a few scant forkfuls left.

“Sorry about that,” Billy said. “I couldn’t stop myself. Hate to pull rank on you, but the master goes before the protégé. You can have my carrots. Hand me that pickle jar.”