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Authors: Phillip Depoy

BOOK: The Witch's Grave
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“My mind did wander,” he admitted. “That's what's in the chicken wire bin over there?”
“All new footwear,” I confirmed. “You need glasses.”
Above our heads bare limbs, silhouetted against a huge moon, were ink spilled across yellow parchment. We listened to the percussion as wind blew across the roof of the church and upward toward the night.
Cars pulled out of the lot and farewells receded into the darkness. I watched the empty hall.
“What are you staring at?” Andrews sidled up to me, following my stare. “Did you see something?”
“I thought so. Probably not.”
“Trick of the moon.” He headed for the passenger side of my pickup. “The way the shadows move in this wind.”
I fished in my jacket pocket for the keys. “I guess so.”
A charcoal cloud covered the moon; wind wheezed like an organ bellows. We heard faint laughter. It was impossible to tell where it came from. Down the road some of the parishioners were walking home, but deeper in the woods, where shadows collected waiting to
cover everything, something stirred up the leaves like the sound of running feet.
 
Girlinda called me the next evening.
“Dev,” she said, the clamor of her brood in the background, “you heard?”
Andrews and I had spent a gloriously worthless day sleeping late, eschewing the shaving razor, cooking, talking about going fishing, napping, watching a Poe film festival on the old movie channel. He was on vacation, after all, and what sort of a host would I have been if I hadn't joined him in his sloth? We hadn't been out of the house.
“I haven't heard anything.”
“Truevine didn't come home last night.”
I sat up and motioned for Andrews to mute the television.
“Go on.”
“It's the first night in her life she hadn't been in bed by ten,” Girlinda said, her voice unusually high-pitched. “Her brothers were worried at five after, started drinking by ten-thirty. When midnight came, they loaded their rifles and went looking.”
“How do you know that?”
“Just listen,” she insisted. “All Thursday night and into the wee hours of this morning them liquored-up Deveroe boys scoured the mountain between the church and their house. When the sun come up and they still hadn't found her, they did something they generally try to avoid. They come to our house.”
“I see.”
“Two stood in the yard and one kicked at the front door. He was so drunk he didn't realize he had to set down his rifle to knock. Woke us up. Skidmore went to the door with pistol in hand.”
“The boys are generally harmless,” I ventured.
“You didn't see them boys, Dev,” she whispered. “They were armed and agitated. They said Truvy was gone and wanted Skid's help.”
“Did he go with them?”
“He pointed out that all three of them had been looking for her and she might be back at home.”
“So he got dressed and drove them back up to their house,” I guessed.
“Uh-huh,” Girlinda went on, “but Truvy was gone. I wouldn't call you about it except that this afternoon the Deveroes apparently heard the story about Truvy's argument with Able at church last night.”
“Now I understand,” I told her, sitting back. “Able's missing, too; is that right?”
“The first place Skidmore checked after he found Truevine's empty bed was Able's house in town. Nobody had slept there; Able didn't show up at work this morning. They're both gone.”
I could see in my mind's eye each Deveroe brother coming to a different conclusion: (1) she had run off and gotten married; (2) Able had kidnapped her; (3) Able had murdered her in anger and disappeared. Their solution, however, was unanimous. Able Carter was to die.
“The Deveroe brothers are out for blood now,” she said, confirming my supposition.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Find Able, honey. And Truevine, of course.” She lowered her voice to a whisper again. “I can't have nobody shooting up my kin, Fever.”
“I'll do what I can, Linda, but isn't this really a job for your husband?”
“You help him.” That was all.
I knew from experience that I could spend hours trying to draw out more facts from her. I took a simpler tack.
“All right,” I promised.
“And come over to dinner tomorrow night,” she said, her voice returning to normal. “Bring Andrews.” She hung up.
I looked over at Andrews. He was staring at the television trying to read Peter Cushing's all-too-thin lips.
“That was Girlinda. We're invited to dinner tomorrow.” I picked up the remote and the sound of the movie resumed. “Able and the Deveroe girl are missing. We have to find them.”
“So Linda's premonition was on,” he said lazily, still glued to the screen.
“I hadn't thought about that,” I admitted.
“Maybe they're holed up somewhere apologizing to each other the way I hear some young people do.” His eyes drifted my way. “I mean, witchy sex has got to be difficult to pass up.”
A woman screamed on the television, backing away from a leering Peter Lorre.
“So do you mind if I do a little looking around tomorrow?” I asked him. “I'd like to help out if I can.”
“You mean with my being here and on vacation?” He sat forward. “It'll be fun: tromping through the woods looking for Romeo and Ghouliet.”
The television screamed again.
“What
is
this?” My eyes darted to the screen. “There's not a screaming woman in ‘The Cask of Amontillado.'”
“Not as such,” he agreed, settling back, “but in great literature the woman is always implied. Speaking of same, where is your sometime girlfriend, Lucinda? You told me, I know; I just don't remember.”
“Birmingham,” I muttered absently, standing. “Hospital thing.”
“When are you two getting married?” he teased.
“Shut up; would you mind?”
“You always avoid the subject.”
“My parents' union,” I said softly, “did little to promote the institution in my eyes, as I believe I've mentioned. What if I had a marriage like theirs?”
“Fair enough,” he said, and let it go.
The sun was going down and I thought to open our first bottle of wine for the evening. Out the kitchen window the green of the woods was turning gray, the sky fading into red dusk.
The woods were beginning their sunset transformation from all that was stated by daylight into everything the darkness implied.
 
Three drunken boys discovered the body next morning. It was broken, dressed only in blood, facedown in a culvert near my home. They stood near the top of the ridge laughing at the naked corpse.
I found myself amazed by the casual cruelty of these boys, puzzled and repelled. Their laughter had drawn me from my bed at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning, barely light in the bite of October sunrise.
We stood on a path as familiar to me as my dreams. I'd walked it daily when I was a boy, nearly as often since I'd returned to the mountains. Rising up from the other side of the ravine was the behemoth of Blue Mountain, a shoulder against which the sky rested. The path ran along the edge, provided the only way around the mountain. On the other side the land sloped downward to the valley and the town. From where we stood we could already see day spreading silver over lakes, gold onto evergreens. A panic of autumnal loss exploded everywhere; leaves of burgundy and pumpkin and cider made a calico covering for the valley deeps.
“Thanks for calling, Dev.” Deputy Needle zipped his coat. “God in heaven, what a mess.”
“What killed him, can you tell?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Looks like somebody bashed his skull in. Plus he's got a cracked rib—it's all purple; you can see the bone. There's some bits of thread up under his fingernails, like maybe he grabbed somebody. Could be something.”
I had been staring at the body for nearly twenty minutes. Andrews stood beside me watching strangers swarm a dead man not sixty yards from where he'd slept. Something on my face must have betrayed my thoughts; he took a step closer to me and spoke in low tones.
“You knew him,” he said. “You knew the dead guy.”
“When I was six or seven,” I began, straining to see the ashen face at the bottom of the slope as the deputies turned over the body, “I was walking along this very ridge. With older boys.” My eyes darted to the group of laughing teenagers. “About their age.”
The morning was hard and clear. The cathedral of the sky arched into infinity above us; all the stained-glass leaves filtered sunlight over the ground around us. The deep ravine mimicked the sky exactly the way hell mimics heaven: a nearly equal though darker vision. In those cold shadows three other deputies moved and shifted, not entirely
certain what to do. Murder was a stranger to Blue Mountain.
“Go on,” Andrews prompted me, his accent only slightly out of place against the other voices.
“We'd been squirrel hunting,” I said quietly. “One of the boys, a monster by the name of Harding Pinhurst the Third, found a bird's nest in the lower branches of a dogwood tree.” I scoured the ravine, then pointed. “That one there, I think. Look how much bigger it is now. At any rate, he pulled it down and found five eggs. For no reason, he took one out and broke it open on a rock. Instead of runny egg, a nearly formed baby bird, slick and blind, came spilling out. He was delighted beyond reason. He began to poke at the thing with a stick, telling it to fly, shrieking with laughter. The other boys, some of the Deveroe clan whom you may remember from your last visit, were watching.”
A sudden shock of October breeze sent a shower of red maple leaves toward the ground, raining around the body, echoing the blood.
“I watched the bird's beak open and close, those blind eyes. I couldn't stand it, grabbed the nest, ran into the woods. I think I was crying. No telling how far away from the others I was when I hid the nest under a pile of pine straw, the remaining four eggs.”
The policemen finished their work, at least for the moment, and were headed slowly back up the ravine to the path where we stood, finding footholds in ivy and granite. A nod from Deputy Needle and the men standing by the ambulance struggled down the same way, wrestling their stretcher with them as best they could.
I blew out a short breath and was surprised to see that it made a ghost in the air around me. I hadn't thought it that cold.
“I knew I wasn't really saving the eggs,” I whispered to Andrews. “Even if they hatched after that, they wouldn't survive. I just didn't want them to be dead with boys standing around laughing. They all called me ‘Birdy' after that—for the rest of the school year.”
“That's not so bad,” Andrews offered.
“You're right.” I managed a smile. “When your given name is
Fever,
what nickname can sting?”
Andrews watched the side of my face in the growing morning light.
“Ask the question,” I allowed.
“Waiting for you to go on,” Andrews said with an indulgent sigh. “But all right, why did you tell me your little
bird man
story?”
“I had completely forgotten the event.” I returned my attention to the corpse. “Until I looked at that. Who was he?”
“You're about to say.” Andrews knew me too well.
“None other than Harding Pinhurst the Third, dead as I ever wished him.”
The group of slack-mouthed monsters erupted in unexplained mirth once more.
“That laughter,” I gave one last quick glance in their direction, “is a fitting epitaph for the likes of him.”
“Able Carter done this; everybody knows it,” one of the boys blurted out to a passing policeman. “He get hung for sure—if Deveroe boys don't get him first.” The boy was so drunk he was drooling, delirious from an all-night bout with distilled corn and icy air. “He kill that Truvy Deveroe; now he got her cousin.”
“You don't know
she's
dead,” another beefy boy chimed in, jabbing a fist at the other's arm.
“She's dead all right. Them Deveroe boys'll kill Able good.” He twisted his face in my direction. “What're you staring at, Goliath?”
It always struck me as strange that anyone would make fun of my size. I could have broken him in half—were I the sort. Maybe it was the fact that my hair was prematurely white; they mistook me for an older man.
“That's Dr. Devilin,” one of the policemen chided.

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