The Witch's Key (13 page)

“What tipped you off?” I asked.

The old man pointed at our shoes. “Thems for one,” he
said. “Both your clothes are old and soiled, but your shoes are
clean and new.”

“And yer hands,” said Rags. “Ya got no dirt un`er yer
nails or in the creases of yer skin. Ya ought know that train dirt
sticks to ya sum`in aweful.”

“Hair, too,” the boy said. “You messed it up to look
dirty, but it’s still clean and shinny.”

“I guess we wouldn’t have fooled nobody,” I said.

“Not even the bulls,” said Thatch. “But don’t worry.
We’ll letchas hang out. Ya seem like good eggs.

Right about then, the bottle of tequila came around
to me. It seemed like a good idea to take a swig and this time
swallow, which I did. I handed the booze to Carlos and he wasted no
time in putting his dent in the bottle as well. We sat there a
while longer, shooting the bull and watching the fire. I told them
that Carlos and I were father and son, looking to rekindle a lost
connection by engaging in an adventure that we had talked about for
years. I said we had always wanted to ride the rails and that
attending the jamboree together would mean the world to us. For our
candid admission, Thatch and the guys rewarded us with wonderful
tales of life on the rails. We learned about hobo traditions and
about the misconceptions that all hobos are bums.

“We’re free spirits,” said Skeet. “It’s not that we
don’t want to work. We just don’t need much.”

“It’s about open sky and enjoying the great
outdoors,” another said. I think it was Buffalo Bobby, but to tell
the truth, I kept getting him and Milwaukee Mike mixed up.

“No,” said Weeds. “It’s more `bout getting out of
your dead end job and not getting chained to a desk your whole
life.” To that, Dogfish agreed.

The only one that never said much was the boy,
Oliver. I did not make him out to be one of them lambs that
Spinelli talked about. If so, then he was a lamb without a wolf.
His closest friend appeared to be Rags, but he seemed more of the
brotherly type to him than anything else. In any case, I imagined
that whatever pushed the kid out of his home and into the arms of
transients was probably something he would rather not talk about. I
waited until the tequila was almost gone before broaching the
subject that I really wanted to talk about.

“Let me ask you,” I said, addressing my question to
Thatch. “What do you make about all these suicides lately?”

“Suicides?”

“Yeah. You have heard about them, haven’t you?”

“I heard about hobos getting killed.”

“But you don’t believe they were suicides?”

“Don’t seem likely.”

“Why is that?”

“`Cause I knew some of the men. They weren’t no more
suicidal than you or me.”

“So, what do you think? Did people from Gitana kill
them?”

He reached for the bottle of tequila and someone,
Weeds, I think, handed it to him. Thatch pitched the bottle back
and killed the last of it in one long swig. Then, after tossing the
empty onto the fire and wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he said
coldly, “Oh, it was Gitana, all right. But it weren’t no
people.”

I gave Carlos the curious glance. He shrugged
discreetly, but at least a couple of the guys, including the boy,
saw it. “I don’t understand,” I said to Thatch. “If Gitana
employees aren’t behind it, then how—”

“It’s Gypsy!” he snapped. “Don’t you get it?”

I reeled back, nearly knocking Carlos right off the
stump. I almost asked him what he knew about Gypsy, but then caught
myself, realizing that he could not possibly mean
my
Gypsy.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry, but no, I don’t get it.”

He looked at me forgivingly. “`Course you don’t. How
could you? You weren’t even born then.”

“When?”

“Way back, a long time ago, the last time that Gypsy
rode the freights.”

I swallowed back the lump in my throat. It
was
my Gypsy. I just knew it. “Are you talking about Jersey Jake’s
Gypsy?” I asked.

The old man’s face grew white as ash. His eyes came
down on me in a crush of suspicion. “What do you know about
Jake?”

“I don’t…I mean, not much. I’ve heard stories. That’s
all. We both have.”

“I haven’t,” said Carlos. I elbowed him again. “Oh,
wait a minute. Maybe I have.”

“Forget it,” I said. “Look, Thatch, I don’t mean to
get anyone excited. I’m just curious. I’ve heard about this Jake
guy and his companion, Gypsy. All I wanted was to know a little
more.”

“Really? Well then, if you heard about Gypsy, then
you know about the autumn of 42. That’s when it all started.”

“What started?”

“The serial killings. For five years, she rode the
freight lines, choosing her victims carefully and then killing them
in the most despicable ways.”

“How do you know it was Gypsy?”

He scoffed. “Because she always left her sign.
Sometimes she would sketch it out in chalk or coal dust, other
times she would draw it using the blood of her victims.”

At that point, my heart was racing too quickly for me
to catch my breath. If I was not already sitting, I believe I would
have dropped from hyperventilation. I just could not believe that
the woman I thought was my mother was also a cold-blooded murderer.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing normally. In the
back of my mind, I had created an image of this woman based mainly
on the story Pops told me back at the hospice care center. His
earlier description of her had me painting a picture of someone
that looked a lot like Lilith. And after he told me of her hotshot
attitude and her hair-trigger temper, I had to work at convincing
myself that it was not. But the signs were all there. I considered
the intimate knowledge of railroad terms and hobo jargon that
Lilith displayed back at the Cyber Café, the axle grease on her
jeans and the slip up she made in mentioning Jersey Jake’s name. Of
course, all of that I could forgive as coincidence if not for her
role in the murders of Doctor Lieberman and the Kayo twins. It is
something I could never prove, and extenuating circumstances may
have existed, however, I had to concede that I knew not what goes
on in the mind of a witch.

I had all but gotten my mind around that when it
dawned on me that one broad assumption could explain my inclusion
in Lilith’s rite of passage ceremony and her subsequent refusal to
allow intimacy into our relationship. One broad assumption,
supported by a string of circumstantial observations, and yet (call
me a hopeless romantic) I was unwilling to make that final
leap.

After catching my breath and calming my pulse, I
asked Thatch about the signs that Gypsy left behind. What he
described was a crude skull and crossbones symbol with the letter
‘G’ over the skull.

“How do you know the ‘G’ stood for Gypsy?” I
asked.

He looked me in the eye and answered, “`Cause Jersey
Jake said so.”

He said it with such conviction that I just had to
ask him, “Thatch. Are you Jersey Jake?”

He laughed, though I noticed he did not say no. I
wanted to press him further, and I suppose I should have, but the
tequila was gone and I felt that our welcome was wearing thin. So,
I drove the conversation back to the topic of dead transients and
worked on trying to understand the connections between the cases
then and now.

“I’m still in the dark about this,” I said to Thatch.
“You had these murders way back in the 40’s. What makes you think
that Gypsy could possibly come back now and murder again? If she’s
still alive, then she has got to be in her 80’s now.”

“Who said she’s alive?”

“What? You think she’s a ghost?”

A nervous laugh rolled throughout the circle. “How
else would you explain it?”

“Explain what?”

“Come on. Gitana Freight Lines? You think that’s
coincidental?”

“I still don’t follow.”

“Gitana,” said Carlos. “It means Gypsy in
Spanish.”

I turned to him. “What?”

“Sure. You didn’t know that?”

“No! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. You didn’t ask.”

He was right. I had not asked. Neither had I told him
that my mother was a smokin` hot hobo who could hop a freight on
the fly with both hands tied behind her back. If I had, I would
have also had to mention that dad was a sniveling coward who
knocked her up and then caught out on a hotshot the next day to
skirt his parental responsibilities. All in all, though, I’m not
bitter about it. Am I?

I turned again to Thatch and said, “Okay. Let’s say
it’s no coincidence. Over sixty years ago some woman named Gypsy
went around killing transients, and now transients are turning up
dead around a railroad company named Gypsy. How does that make her
ghost responsible?”

“It doesn’t,” said Thatch.

“All right, then.”

“But when you find Gypsy’s mark by the bodies of the
victims, then you can’t deny it.”

“You mean the recent victims?”

Thatch nodded. “Yes.”

I looked to Carlos. He gave me another empty shrug.
Neither of us had heard of signs left at the sites of the alleged
suicides. Then again, by the very nature of the circumstances,
authorities do not generally combed over suicide sites for evidence
of a suspicious nature.

“How do you know that the signs were there this
time?” I asked.

“I seen`em,” Thatch answered. “We all seen`em.”

As I surveyed the men, I could see them all nodding
in agreement. Even Oliver acknowledged as much. I said, “I
understand that there are witnesses to a few of the suicides. They
reported seeing the victims succumb to no external forces as they
placed themselves in harm’s way.”

“None external,” Thatch repeated, bolstering his
argument. “That’s `cause you can’t see a ghost.”

I rocked forward on the log a bit to adjust a pinch
in my buttocks. “So, you’re convinced?”

He nodded. “We’re all convinced.”

As I rocked back into my original position, Carlos
shifted his weight unexpectedly. Our momentum continued carrying us
backwards, beyond the point of balance until both he and I spilled
from our seat and landed flat on our backs in the dirt. The boy,
Oliver, who had barely said boo all evening, spotted Carlos’ Glock
in his shoulder holster. He sprang to his feet, pointing and
shouting in his girly prepubescent voice, “He’s got a gun! Look.
He’s got a gun!”

By the time we rolled off the log and pulled
ourselves up, the circle of bums had scattered into the woods like
roaches. I turned to Carlos and grinned the embarrassing episode
right out of my thoughts. “Okay, I’d say that went about as well as
one might expect. Didn’t it?”

He smiled back. “Yes. I believe it did.”

Carlos and I stopped at The Brewer’s Mug for a couple
of beers after leaving the jungle. We talked about what we had just
learned, the railroad related murders of the 1940s and the
mysterious calling sign that the killer, supposedly Gypsy, left
behind at each one. I also filled Carlos in on what Pops told me
about Gypsy and about Jersey Jake being my biological father.

“And something else,” I said. If it was not Carlos, I
doubt I would have shared the thought. “I don’t want to believe it,
but I have this nagging hunch that Lilith isn’t telling me
everything she knows about this Jake fellow.”

“You mean your dad?”

“Uh-uh. No. Jake’s not my dad. He’s just some
deadbeat sperm donor with no sense of pride or responsibility. As
far as I’m concerned, that poor old bastard back at the hospice
center, dying of cancer, he’s is my real dad. He may have left me
on the doorstep of an orphanage, but at least he gave me five of
the best years my childhood had ever known.”

Carlos shrank back mildly. “Ooh, sorry. Didn’t mean
to hit a nerve there.”

I waved it off. “Forget it.”

“So, what makes you think she’s holding out?”

“Lilith?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure, but she’s being more secretive than
usual since this case broke. You know she’s been going out at night
until all hours of the morning?”

“Doing what?”

I shook my head. “Don’t know. She says she’s hanging
out at the Internet Café, but….”

“You don’t believe her.”

“I’m sorry to say, I don’t. Did I tell you that last
night she came home with axle grease on her pants.”

“On her butt?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Hey, maybe she had car trouble.”

I looked at him seriously. “Carlos, we’re talking
about Lilith here. Her idea of working on a car is figuring out how
to stop the intermittent sweep on the wiper switch.”

He chuckled. “Oh, right. You still doing that to
her?”

I shrugged with guilty pleasure. “Yeah, I leave the
volume on the radio turned up all the way, too.”

“You’re cruel, Tony. You know that?”

“Leave me alone. It’s all I’ve got.”

“Still.”

“Forget it. Hey, you should know something else. The
first time I mentioned Jake’s name in front of her, she blurted
out, ‘Jersey Jake?’. I mean, come on! What’s with that?”

Carlos waved his finger at me curiously. “Wait a
minute. You don’t think that Lilith is really Gypsy, do you?”

“Well…” In my hesitation to answer, Carlos went ahead
and took a sip on his beer. “That thought has crossed my mind,” I
said. “You know back when Mister Marcella first told me about
Gypsy, he did slip and called her a witch.”

Beer spray and pretzel bits showered down on my lap,
as Carlos spat, sputtered and coughed out his reaction to my
statement. “HE WHAT?” He was still gasping, but I knew he heard me
correctly.

“He called her a witch, but when I questioned him on
it, he used the ‘B’ word instead. I have to tell you, though, it’s
got me thinking.”

After cleaning up with a handful of napkins and a
dirty shirtsleeve, Carlos regrouped to challenge my assertion.
“Okay. Aside from calling Gypsy a witch, and Lilith’s unusual night
time romps, what else makes you think Lilith and Gypsy are one and
the same?”