Wolfwraith (8 page)

“I’ve only met him the one time,” Shadow replied. “He said all three girls had been murdered and there’s a reason for the killings. The spirits of the people who used to live here had killed them, he said, to tell us the park people don’t belong here—hand me a candy bar from the glove box, would you—and he apparently even believes we’re going to put in ‘mansions,’ as he called them and golf courses. What do you make of that?”

Jonesy handed over a candy bar. “He’s a nut job. A nature freak. He might not dance with wolves, but he probably gathers acorns with the squirrels.”

“He says he’s sure this latest girl is dead.”

“I told you. He’s a fruitcake. He hears the voices of his ancestors, telling him what to do.”

“Do you know anything about the gravestone a little ways off from the cemetery? Mamie Bunch is the name on it—looks old.” Shadow peeled the wrapper from his candy without releasing the wheel.

Jonesy gave him an odd look. “Frank been telling you ghost stories?”

“He was putting shells on that grave.”

“Hmmm. I haven’t thought of that story in quite a while.”

“You know about her?” Shadow asked around a mouthful of candy.

“Yeah, I grew up in the area. Not here on the cape—over in Creeds, the other side of the bay, below Pungo. That’s why I volunteer in the park; it’s nice to think I’m preserving some of the wilderness I grew up in. You’ve heard of the Witch of Pungo?”

“Mamie Bunch was the Witch of Pungo?” Shadow was surprised. He’d heard about her; there’d been a book written on the subject many years ago, it was very popular in the area and still talked about.

“No.” Jonesy grinned. “Mamie never got the publicity ol’ Grace Sherwood did, mostly because this cape was so remote that the story didn’t get spread far. Matter of fact, folks around here make a point of not mentioning the one you’re asking about by name, much less talking about her to outsiders. She’s mostly forgotten, but there’s folks living around Back Bay who blame her for their troubles.”

“Why’s that?”

Jonesy answered the question with one of his own. “How much do you know about witches?”

“As much as anyone I guess. You know, black cats, brooms, magic spells, pointy hats.”

“That’s what I figured,” Jonesy said with a chuckle. “That’s the modern, sanitized version—good for the kiddies on Halloween.”

“So what’s the difference in these old time witches?”

“Serious shit. They were in league with Satan—say, you know how they could tell if a woman was a witch, don’t you?”

Shadow put the wrapper to his lips, sucking out the last bite of candy. “Didn’t they torture them, like in the Salem witch trials?”

“Maybe up north. Down here we had a better way. You ever go down Witchduck Road in Virginia Beach?”

“Sure, all the time.”

Jonesy laughed. “So what did you think it was named for? Some kind of duck, like a wood duck, maybe?”

Shadow started to answer, but Jonesy went on.

“No, a witchducking was how they proved whether someone was a witch. They’d put her on the end of a long pole and duck her under water.” He held out his hand and let it flop down at the end of his wrist. “If she lived...” His hand came back up. “She was a witch—and that’s all there was to it.”

“What if she drowned?”

“She was innocent of course—perfectly logical from their point of view. Safer to kill an innocent woman rather than take a chance on her being a witch.”

“So Mamie Bunch...” Shadow licked some gooey chocolate off his fingertips. “Did she sink or—”

“Look, Shadow.” Jonesy interrupted. “Would you quit saying her name? I know it don’t make sense, but in my family, growing up, we didn’t use her name. Brought bad luck.”

“Sorry.” He looked over at Jonesy’s expression, figuring he was putting him on. As usual, it was hard to tell. “So how are you sure ‘you know who’ was a witch?”

“Well, when a lot of bad things began happening in Wash Woods one fall, they began to suspect she might have something to do with it—hateful old woman anyways, and she lived with a man who was half Indian, which was a pretty bold thing to do back then. She pretty much told them to go to hell and that maybe she
had
been up to something but it was none of their business. That was enough for the townsfolk; they locked her up in a sturdy shed and sent for the circuit preacher, so he could pray over the ducking party. But before he could get to the cape, a hurricane came up—people say ‘you know who’ called it.”

“People believed someone could call a storm?”

Jonesy laughed again. It was obvious he enjoyed telling the story. “Hell—oh, maybe I shouldn’t use that word, considering the subject. Heck, people will believe most anything. There’s a local televangelist who says he prayed away a hurricane and his followers believe him—even though we got hit with a monstrous hurricane a couple of years later and he’d tried to pray that one away, too. Anyway, everyone forgot about the suspected witch locked in the barn, until after the hurricane. There was an enormous storm surge and most people only survived by climbing trees, them that hadn’t fled to the mainland when the storm started to brew—remember they didn’t have weathermen to warn them back then. Anyway, when the storm had passed, that shed had been ripped to smithereens and there was no sign of ‘you know who’. Everyone figured she’d drowned in the hurricane.”

“Which meant she wasn’t a witch, right?”

“Yeah, if that had been the end of it. Hey, you mind if I have one of those candy bars?”

“Since when did you have to ask? Get me another one, too.”

Jonesy got them both a bar, then continued. “Bad things kept happening—seemed like Wash Woods had become cursed. People began saying they’d seen her wandering around the area at night. And there was another strange thing.”

“Yeah?”

“You remember you said ‘black cats’ when you described witches? Well, that part was true back then, too. Near every witch had a ‘familiar’ so it goes—some kind of animal, usually a cat. I’m not sure what they did, maybe only kept the witch company but not ‘you know who’. Her familiar weren’t no cat.” He took another bite of candy and chewed for a moment, obviously drawing out his story for effect. “It was a wolf.”

“Oh, come on!”

Jonesy glanced over with a hurt expression. “Seriously. I’m telling you precisely what my granddad told me. She was seen in the woods, runnin’ with a wolf, and anybody that saw her—or the wolf—was in for bad luck of some sort.”

Shadow was skeptical. “Are you sure you’re not putting me on? Because I saw old Frank at Mamie’s—oops, sorry, that old headstone.”

That brought him a reproachful look from Jonesy, who asked, “You notice that particular headstone was off by itself?”

“Yeah, so what?” Shadow tried not to grin.

“They wouldn’t allow her grave in the churchyard, because of being a witch.”

Shadow laughed. “Gotcha! You said they didn’t find her body. So how could she be buried there?” He took a bite of candy.

“Damn Shadow, you sure are a skeptical cuss. I didn’t say she was buried there!”

“It’s her grave, isn’t it?”

“Yes and no. It’s said her old man, her husband, I guess, put up a headstone for her—in her memory. The townsfolk would have knocked it down but they were afraid to touch it. And if you’d done let me finish my damn story, I’d have told you that.”

“Okay, okay, sorry.” Shadow still wasn’t sure if the older man had been putting him on.

Jonesy finished his candy bar, tossed the wrapper to the floorboard and wiped his hands on his pants. He stared out the window for a couple of minutes, then said, “After a few years, the sightings of ‘you know who’ died out. Folks still saw the wolf now and then, even in daylight. Plenty of men took shots at it—and there were some damn good shots in these parts—but no one ever hit it. Eventually, they began to believe it probably wasn’t a wolf after all, but ‘you know who’ in animal form. My grandmother called it a ‘wolfwraith.’”

“Quite a story,” Shadow said.

“Yep.” Jonesy was quiet for a while and Shadow thought he was done with the story, but then he asked, “Since you lived here, you ever find a light or appliance turned on that you were sure you had turned off, or had things disappear on you, just to show up another place?”

Shadow took his last bite of chocolate. “Sure I misplace things sometimes, but who doesn’t?”

“Have you noticed that sometimes the lights in the environmental building or the boathouse turn on in the night, with no one around? And you might leave your car locked but, when you get in the next morning, your things have been moved around. Or you turn on the key and the radio and heater are set on full blast?”

“Yeah.” Shadow grinned. “That happened to me a couple of times, but I sort of figured it was you, messing with me.” He crinkled the empty candy wrapper into a ball and tossed it over his shoulder into the rear seat.

Jonesy looked over, with a deadpan expression. “Wasn’t me. Maybe it was ‘her.’ I’ve had a quite a few things happen around the Taj Mahal. She was supposed to be an evil old woman, but nothing real bad has ever happened—at least not since I’ve been staying in Wash Woods. Just pranks. Back then, she was supposed to have soured cow’s milk, made litters of piglets stillborn, given children the colic—stuff like that. Maybe it’s all she’s good at. Anyhoo, I’m surprised you haven’t had things happening, like me—you living in Wash Woods, too, so close to me. What her grave would have to do with old False Cape Frank, I have no idea.”

They talked for a while longer, but Shadow learned nothing more about False Cape Frank. Jonesy rambled on, telling the history of the park, although Shadow knew most of it already. The Parks Commission had acquired the land below Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in the early sixties. The original intention for False Cape State Park was as a major tourist attraction because it was so near Virginia Beach. The state had planned to build a two-lane road through the wildlife refuge to provide access for hundreds of visitors daily. However, the federal government refused to allow the road through the refuge, and Virginia ended up with a remote park that very few people visited.

When Shadow’s truck came alongside the refuge headquarters, he drove over a passage in the dunes, raising an access barrier with an electronic key. The gate was there to keep unauthorized vehicles off the beach. On the other side of the dunes, they drove past the headquarters building, where the paved road coming from town ended. Soon they were at the maintenance compound, where False Cape Park had been granted permission to erect a large hangar-type building within the enclosure to store gasoline and maintain their vehicles.

The two men entered the hangar through a small door next to the large, closed roll-up door. An old, olive drab bus stood parked along one wall and two of the park’s pick-up trucks were on the far side, with their hoods up. The hybrid vehicle in the center dominated the garage. It was a huge all-wheel-drive truck with a boxy, covered passenger compartment for twenty people. The box sat so high that a retractable ladder was necessary to get aboard. School bus yellow with a black stripe, its large, fender-less tires were as wide as they were tall to provide traction over mud and even the softest sand. The Terra-Gator had been developed with funds from a government grant to solve the problem of wintertime access to the state park, when the federal refuge’s interior roads were closed to avoid disturbing over-wintering waterfowl. Its motor was running with a quiet hum and Shadow noticed that an exhaust hose carried the combustion gases from the hangar.

“I’m glad you’re driving,” Jonesy said, looking up at the Terra-Gator. “That’s too much machine for me to feel comfortable with.” The enclosed driver’s compartment, with a ladder on the side, was actually a tractor cab.

“I can’t say I’m fond of it, either,” Shadow admitted. “The thing is too damn wide. It makes me nervous, except on the beach where there’s room to maneuver. I’d feel like a real idiot if I slid off the dike road into the water.”

“Not a problem, Shadow my man. This thing won’t get stuck, even in one of the ponds. You could power right out.”

“Yeah, and tear up all the muck and grass around the edge of the pond. The Chief Warden would have a fit. You know how he is about damage to the habitat.”

“You’re right.” Jonesy grimaced at the mention of the warden’s reaction. “He’d pitch a fit all the way back to Richmond that you’d gone and destroyed some poor snappin’ turtle’s home and family with your reckless abandon.”

“Won’t matter if you pay attention to your driving.” A hollow echo came from under the Terra-Gator. “This thing is maneuverable as hell. You have to learn what you’re doing, that’s all. They ought to just let me drive her.”

A tanned, dark-haired mechanic in his late twenties crawled from behind one of the over-sized tires at the rear of the vehicle. He wore jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, grease-stained and torn, showing off his trim, muscular physique. A tattoo of a snarling, salivating wolf’s head decorated his right shoulder.

“Hello, Jennings,” Shadow said without warmth. He considered Tony Jennings to be a blow-hard, someone who had always, ‘Been there—done that,’ no matter what the subject was. The mechanic had come to the park along with the Terra-Gator, in a way. Alex had been contracting vehicle maintenance out, but the Terra-Gator needed someone familiar with its special features. It made sense to have an in-house mechanic so Jennings had been hired.