Writ on Water (20 page)

Finally the sun moved so far to the west that working was no longer a practicality. At least, not in the family graveyard. There would, unfortunately, still be enough light in the slave cemetery to work for another hour or more. She weighed her options and decided that her desire to finish her job and escape Riverview outweighed her dislike of the other graveyard.

Chloe stretched a kink out of her neck and then hefted her various bags and headed for the gate. Out of curiosity, she detoured by forty-six to see how the moss was coming along. So far, so good. There wasn't even a hint of yellowing in the miniature grassy leaves. In fact, they looked magnificent. She decided that the weather must be optimal right then. The moss had crept several inches up the old wood door in the space of only a few hours. Its edge was squared and regular, like someone had applied it with a paint brush.

Amazed, Chloe put down her bags and reached for her camera. Rory would be curious about the progress of his favorite plant in the course of only a day. Outside of the controlled conditions of a nursery, she had never seen a moss grow so well. Maybe it was some species that he would want to culture.

Under the harsh light of the flash, the details on the tiny plants' structure sprung into relief.
Frowning, Chloe bent closer to the living velvet. She wasn't certain—and of course she was no expert—but this patch of moss looked an awful lot like Rory's new friend from Borneo. What was its name?
Weberi?

But it couldn't be. How would the spores travel all the way from the nursery to the cemetery? No one came here except MacGregor and Roger. Unless the cat had gotten some in his fur and then rubbed them on the door . . . ?

But that wasn't reasonable. Roger never went to the nursery with Rory. At least, he hadn't since she arrived at Riverview and the Borneo moss was a fairly new arrival.

Chloe shrugged uneasily. Perhaps she had misunderstood when the moss came to Botanics. Roger might have brought the spores out weeks ago and they had just been waiting for a good rain to start sprouting. Maybe they needed weeks or months to gestate—or whatever it was that moss did before it grew in the wild.

The easiest thing to do would be to ask Rory to come look at the moss. It would make for a nice bit of neutral conversation, and maybe they could regain a little of their earlier harmony.

In the meanwhile, the horrid slave cemetery awaited.

Locking the gates behind her was a chore. She was certain that by the next day, she would need a machete to get inside. It was a pity that she
wanted both the digital database and also her own shots, because if she could leave the thirty-five millimeter and its paraphernalia behind, the job would go a lot faster.

Well, she didn't need both cameras in the slave cemetery. The bulk of the bags could be left outside the gate. The setting sun was making for some dramatic lighting, but she would be content with just the shots needed for the database. Chloe took a deep breath of muggy air and forced herself to walk into the enclosure.

Roger trotted over immediately and stropped against her jeans. He left great muddy red streaks behind. Chloe didn't mind; she was already quite dirty and it was nice to have another warm body with her in the land of the dead.

“Hi, cat. What's a nice kitty like you doing in a dump like this?” The feline sneezed at her uncultured question and abandoned her.

Most of the markers had been wood and were long gone to compost. The rest were . . . awful. The rotting, crumbling stones looked like something from a Halloween horror house. It had never occurred to her that rocks could actually decay—but these were. They were rotting where they stood. Everything smelled dead. It was like walking into a nightmare.

Chloe shivered and then glanced briefly at the discarded pile of brambles, which could easily pass for some giant monster crouching in the dark
corner, waiting for an unwary victim to get too near. She could hear Roger rooting around in his favorite patch of earth and tried to draw comfort from the fact that she was not really alone. Determined to get the job over with, Chloe left the cat to his work while she reloaded the digital camera with a new memory stick. She'd do one shot of each stone, working in a clockwise spiral. She had a small mister of water, should she need to dampen the marker to bring up a name on the few that had them. That would have to do; she wasn't touching any of the rotting crosses with her hands.

She stuck doggedly to her task, but her imagination continued to make it unpleasant. Every snapping twig that crunched underfoot became an unhappy bone. Every whisper in the vines was an unrestful spirit. Soon, she was walking through her first nightmare of Riverview, even imagining the rancid smell of new death on the air.

Chloe breathed shallowly, determined not to let her imagination and stomach chase her away before the job was done. If she could stick it out another ten minutes, the horrid task would be finished and she wouldn't have to set foot inside the cemetery ever again.

She wasn't bothering to take readings with the light meter, just used a flat flash with every shot. That would wash out the fiery oranges of the setting sun, but it was the best way to get an accurate
and consistent shot of the rotting stones, and she didn't want to have to do the job again.

Two steps right—flash. Two more steps—flash
. But the horrible smell was overpowering. She felt dizzy, almost too ill to go on.

Chloe turned ninety degrees and looked over at Roger through the tiny box of the viewer. Even the cat, sitting in a hollow of brambles, was painted with the peculiar colors of sunset. Red earth, red light, red soil, red fur . . .
Flash—

But this time, there was something else there besides the ancient, fallen stone and a shallow pit. At first, she couldn't make it out. The flash had showed her some pale swags and scallops under the cats digging paws.

Flash—flash—flash
. The vines were in the way, but now she could see more clearly. The scallops were bits of vertebrae sticking up through the earth-covered skin. The swag was really the bottom of a ribcage breaking through to the air.

Flash.
A skeleton. The cat was digging up one of the slaves. Only, the smell was wrong. This was new death, not old. And she wasn't dreaming this time. It was real.

Against her will, the camera shifted a few inches up the rotting body to the lump that was the head. Dark hair. A skull tattoo on the bit of skin that still clung to the nape. She knew that tattoo. Knew the feeling of violent evil that floated in the air.

The camera finally dropped from her hands
and went silent. Only the habit of wearing a neck strap saved it from hitting the ground. She backed away slowly, colliding with stones, not feeling the accumulating scrapes and bruises on her spine and hips. Then it was the fence that stopped her. She slid along it, her hands clenching and then releasing each piece of iron that stood between her and freedom.

There was a gap—the gate. She stepped back. And collided with a warm chest.

She knew whose chest it was, but this time it didn't help. Still acting against her will, her hands clenched into fists and she spun around, hitting out in fear and hysteria. And she screamed and screamed and screamed.

Of course the police were summoned again, and this time there was no question about them coming to the house. They appeared promptly, Sheriff Bell and Deputy Ellis. They bore with them a second casualty wrapped in a blanket, the broken body of a gnome that Ellis swore had jaywalked in front of his car.

At any other time, Chloe would have laughed at the deputy's guilty expression. But she couldn't seem to find any trace of humor inside. She didn't have anything inside her—not hysterics, not fear. Nothing. It had all emptied out with her screaming fit in the cemetery.

Her memories of the last hour were not entirely clear. Rory had subdued her before she could do
more than thump his chest. He'd been gentle in his manhandling. He hadn't slapped her or anything, not even when she had ignored his command for silence and kept screaming until the noise brought a frightened MacGregor on the run. The poor old man must have been shocked within moments of a coronary because he looked like a death's-head, but he had still managed to pick up her then limp body and carry her to the house while Rory went into the cemetery to see what had terrified her.

As soon as she had been given over to Morag, MacGregor had left her, presumably to return to the cemetery himself. It had seemed an eternity of smothering afghans and unwanted brandy and tea before Rory and MacGregor had returned to the house and confirmed her fears that she hadn't been dreaming. Isaac Runyon was indeed dead.

Morag had given her more brandy then, probably with the idea that if it gave Napoleon sufficient fortitude to cross the Russian steppes, it would give Chloe the strength to face what was coming.

Father and son had never looked more alike than they did in that moment. Both were gray of face and wearing their skin too tight across their bones. Their eyes were calculating, though, and almost cold.

But even in the distress of the moment, they had not forgotten her equipment. Rory had it all, even the clipboard. He looked at her, still swathed
on the sofa, and attempted a reassuring smile. He said: “Don't worry. It's all here. I'll take it up to your room for you.”

Chloe nodded gratefully. She didn't seem able to speak. Her vocal chords seemed to have been torn out with her screams. Rory approached her slowly, and very carefully lifted her digital camera over her head. She hadn't realized that it was still there and that she was clutching it like a teddy bear.

The sheriff and his deputies had arrived a few minutes later, and then the coroner. Chloe heard MacGregor mutter, “It's more crowded than a urinal at a football stadium.” Chloe doubted that this was strictly true, but she took his meaning. She felt suddenly claustrophobic, overwhelmed by so many strangers in such close proximity.

The sheriff had tried to question her, but she had been unable to answer. She had started to say that she had been shooting her way through the graveyard, but had found her mind unable to form the words, paralyzed by fear of saying something wrong. Shooting was a bad word, she thought, under these circumstances. And she didn't want to say anything about her cameras until she had talked Rory and MacGregor. The police would want to see them and her thirty-five millimeter held film of the family cemetery.

Seeing her beseeching glance, Rory and MacGregor took turns explaining what had happened. Or explaining part of what she had been
doing. No mention of cameras in the slave graveyard or the family cemetery was ever made. Chloe was a guest, an employee of an old friend hired to do some work for them.

What kind of work?

Photography, of course. Hadn't they been told that when they were at the nursery? Chloe was working on the Botanics fall catalogue.

And that cemetery? What was she doing there?

Just looking at the old graves they'd uncovered. The gardeners had found them while clearing out the brambles. Too bad everything was so old and rotten. There was no knowing how old it was.

And the body turned out of the ground by the heavy rain and the digging cat?

Isaac Runyon. A guest brought to the house last weekend by MacGregor's nephew, Claude Patrick. The sheriff remembered Claude. . . .

A deputy disappeared as soon as he had a name, and Chloe was sure that he was going out to his car to use the radio. She wondered if Claude had a police record. She thought not, but Isaac would have one. She was sure of that.

. . . No, no, Claude had left early Monday morning before anyone was up. They had assumed that Isaac was with him.

And the crowbar, rope and shovel found near the grave?

Who knew for sure? But, yes, it did shed a whole different light on the break-in at the nursery.
Maybe it hadn't been an act of random vandalism after all, but rather someone after tools.

Claude's name wasn't mentioned, but the thought of him hung in the air.

Could they be certain that the shovel, rope and so on had come from Botanics
?

Perhaps they did. That would be hard to say, though. They looked like any old tools and could have been from anyplace.

And the gun?

What gun? Ahandgun! No, they didn't know anything about that. The deceased killed with a shotgun blast? Was the sheriff certain? Of course, the sheriff had seen many shotgun wounds. They weren't suggesting anything about his competence. . . .

Claude's whereabouts? No. They could give an address and telephone number for his main residence. A description of his car? Certainly. A bronze '58 Chevy Belaire. No, they weren't certain about the license plates. No, they couldn't think of any reason that Claude would have to hurt his friend.

Unless the friend had threatened him with a gun? They hated to say anything against the dead man, but he had seemed an uncultured sort. Mightn't he have brought the gun with him? There might have been a quarrel, or perhaps the two had just been out for some target practice—you knew how it was when some men drank.

The deputy returned. He had some news. Isaac Runyon wasn't just Isaac Runyon. Apparently he was also known as Icepick and someone called Shooter Bishop, both of whom had records—theft and aggravated assault, mostly. He was a violent man. Chloe nodded to herself. Of course, it didn't matter now. An Isaac Runyon by any other name still reeked of evil and remained just as dead. She could have told them that the creature was wicked, that she had seen it in his eyes and then dreamed about his death. But she wouldn't. No, it would take someone giving her a legal equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver to get her to cough up that part of her strange story. The law couldn't help her or the Patricks. She needed a shrink or maybe a witch doctor, and they needed an exorcist to cleanse their befouled land.

Maybe they needed Granny Claire.