Ghost Dance (22 page)

‘Andie, I need to—’ he began.

The crash was deafening. A blasting screech of metal on metal. The whir of tires against wet gravel. The rear of her pickup wrenched left and the back left tire hung spinning off the edge of a narrow and deep gorge at the bottom of which the Bluekill boiled. Andie screamed.

Now came the crunch-clank of gears shifting, the revving of a turbo-charged engine and a violent shudder as the vehicle that had struck them disengaged and spun backward into the darkness. There was a moment of shocked silence; then they were blinded by hot white light. Truck headlights, fog lamps, a rack of overhead spots. A high-beam grid of blazing electricity, faceted and primordial like a giant insect’s eye. The engine under the eye revved again.

Gallagher threw his hands up to block the glare. ‘He’s going to push us off the edge!’ he shouted. ‘Get us out of here!’

Andie downshifted again and jammed on the gas. The pickup’s frame vibrated and lurched but did not get free. Gears chunked. From fifty yards back, the bug’s eye bore down.

‘Shit!’ Andie screamed. She dove for a small yellow lever beyond the shifter, tugged at it and the truck set-tied. A garish, metallic light surrounded them. Gallagher scrunched down, waiting for the impact, waiting for the long tumble into the gorge. Andie smashed down on the accelerator.

A split second of hesitation and then the other three wheels caught low gear and they fishtailed out into the road. There was a tremendous catlike wail as fenders caught then slipped off.

‘Hold on!’ Andie yelled.

They went careening down Gorm like a bobsled amuck, slashing through turns, caroming off red-clay banks. The giant insect behind them was swallowed in darkness and for several moments Gallagher thought they’d lost it.

All four of the truck’s wheels left the ground when they lurched out onto the stretch of busted macadam. Chickens pecking along the road flushed in terror. A mongrel dog tore out of the darkness, trying to run alongside the pickup, then yelped in fear and dove into the ditch when that startling, iridescent grid growled in behind them again, bathing them in a white dazzle.

Gallagher’s head snapped forward and back before he heard or felt the impact against the rear bumper. Andie’s forehead cracked off the steering wheel. The pickup veered and for a single, gut-wrenching instant seemed incapable of righting again. But it did, only to drift into a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin across the ditch and up a grade.

An opening in a rock wall. Saplings growing in the opening. They smacked the saplings. Headlights shattered. The waist of a hundred-year-old maple trunk flashed by within inches. A volcano of mud and grass erupted. The pickup tipped up on its side, threatened to roll, then thudded back in the soft pasture soil.

At that same instant, all the lights on the attacking vehicle turned off. Gallagher caught the shadow of a jacked-up four-by-four pass. Then the last remaining headlight on Andie’s truck sputtered and died, leaving nothing but quiet rain and tree frogs peeping. A man’s voice called out in the darkness. ‘Leave it alone, or next time you’ll be in the river!’

Then there was weird laughter and the sound of the truck grinding away.

‘The chief’s up there on Gorm taking a look,’ Deputy Phil Gavrilis said. He tapped his pencil on a notebook while Andie held an ice compress to her forehead. It had taken five stitches for the emergency room doctor to close the gash at her hairline. She and Gallagher stood at the ambulance entrance, giving Gavrilis their story.

‘Oh, he’ll be a big help,’ Gallagher said.

Gavrilis reddened, but did not respond to the jab. ‘You’ve got no description of the truck that did it?’

‘Jacked-up pickup,’ she said. ‘A lot of lights.’

‘There’s ten thousand rigs like that in Vermont,’ Gavrilis said.

‘That guy Bernie Chittenden’s got one,’ Gallagher said. ‘The asshole’s already tried to run me over once.’

A figure approached from the far end of the parking lot. Chief Kerris sauntered up with that baseball cap jauntily pushed to one side.

‘I just stopped at Bernie’s store coming down off Gorm Ridge Road,’ he said. ‘I can tell you his truck’s spotless, no mud anywhere. And there’s nothing up on Gorm to speak of other than your tire tracks gouging up Ron Boucher’s cornfield.’

Kerris wormed his mouth around. ‘You sure some truck ran you off, Andie? Or is it possible you and your Hollywood pal here went up to Gorm to have a snort or two at sundown and your rig got away from you.’

‘Kiss my ass, Mike,’ Andie shot back coldly.

He smiled and held open his palms. ‘Hey, no offense. I had to ask.’

‘Let’s go,’ Andie said to Gallagher. ‘We won’t get any help here. You’re driving.’

Kerris pulled himself up to his full height and stepped in their way. He put his hand on Gallagher’s shoulder. ‘Not so fast. I want to know what you two were doing up there.’

Gallagher said, ‘Looking for lady slippers. Hand off, please.’

‘Yeah, lovely day to look for flowers,’ Kerris said, not moving his hand an inch. ‘I want to know what you were doing up there.’

Andie got between them. She glared at Kerris. ‘We were looking at Lawton’s past, Mike. Does that scare you? Your uncle? Or does it scare your whole family?’

There was a twitch at the corner of Kerris’ mouth; then he got control, leaned right down in her face and smirked. ‘I don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about. And anyway, no one’s going to listen to you, Andie. Everyone who counts in this town knows you’ve gone off the deep end again. Crazy, drunken Andie Nightingale.’

She did not flinch, merely returned the same smirk. ‘You don’t get it, Mike, do you? I don’t care what people think any more!’

That night Gallagher watched Andie as if she were an exotic member of some long-forgotten tribe. She was susceptible and sensitive yet had the capacity to be remarkably tough. In that way she reminded him of Emily. He had wanted to talk to Andie about his ex-wife before someone tried to run them off the road, but now that seemed more dangerous than any possible auto accident; and he asked himself if he’d ever be content to just be in a room with a woman who comforted him.

Andie was chopping up last year’s garden vegetables put up in Mason jars.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

Gallagher flushed and said, ‘Who we go after now: Kerris or Danby or Lamont Powell or the rest of the journal.’

She dropped the vegetables into a hot wok. They seared. The room smelled suddenly of ginger. ‘I think it’s all one story. We go after all of it.’

‘Too much ground to cover,’ he said.

‘Not if we split up,’ Andie said.

T
HE VERMONT STATE MENTAL
Hospital in Waterbury is a Kremlin-like gathering of large red-brick buildings with ornate leaded-glass windows and turrets. Long green lawns flank the main entrance. Towering over the complex is a dormant brick smokestack perhaps eighty feet high.

In the bowels of one of the outlying buildings, Eunice Marcous, the hospital’s archival clerk, took a sip from a diet Pepsi can before belching softly and complaining: ‘This took me the better part of two hours to dig up.’

‘You don’t know how much I appreciate it,’ Andie said, looking at the cracked brown folder cradled in the emaciated arms of the woman on the other side of the counter. The blue shadow under Marcous’ penciled eyebrows matched the color of her blue muumuu dress.

Andie held out her hand for the file, but the clerk stepped back, clutching it to her bosom. ‘I saw you on the local news the other night. This part of them Lawton killings?’

‘No,’ Andie lied. ‘Now, I really need to go through those documents, Ms. Marcous, and it’s getting late.’

Seeing finally that Andie was not going to let her in on the reason behind the unusual request for records dating back to 1899, Marcous reluctantly handed over the half-inch sheaf. Andie turned her back on the clerk, went over to a green metal table under a naked bulb and flipped open the file on Lamont Powell, former mayor of Lawton, great-grandfather to the current mayor, Bruce Powell, and great-great-grandfather to Chief of Police Mike Kerris.

At some point in the past nine decades, the documents had been water-damaged and many of the notes written by various case workers in dark black ink had been smudged.

But according to a cover sheet that included data on his birth, nearest kin and the like, Lamont Powell had been committed to the hospital in March 1899 after a diagnosis of ‘violent dementia’ and had remained within the asylum walls until his death. The preponderance of the record was arranged in reverse chronological order.

In the year before Powell’s suicide, the doctors in charge of his case had been encouraged by ‘vast improvements in his general mental condition’ and had been allowing him increased freedom of movement around the hospital. During this time Powell had ‘displayed none of the tendencies toward self-mutilation exhibited upon committal,’ the narrative noted. Indeed, in the last two months of his life Powell had been granted orderly status, which, in effect, had given him access to the entire facility, including the outer grounds.

Andie read the next paragraph and recoiled. On June 28, 1906, Powell had used torn sheets to hang himself from a tree in the woods behind the smokestack. Before killing himself, he’d cut his tongue out with scissors stolen from the hospital’s barbershop.

She pressed her knuckles to her lips at the gruesomeness of the suicide. She took two deep breaths and read deeper into the file. Sparse notes described a twenty-four-month period Powell had spent in a near-catatonic state broken only by fits of hysteria in which he claimed to have conversations with the dead. She flipped a page to an annual evaluation dated May 12, 1902. Here was a section describing the patient’s physical status, including a digression regarding the results of a recent dental examination:

‘Three years into treatment, patient Powell still suffers from vivid hallucinations. These hallucinations continue to directly precede efforts to slash at his gums with any object available in order to rend his teeth from his mouth.’

Andie stared at the paragraph in horror, then looked up to find Eunice Marcous studying her from the wire-caged window. ‘Five-thirty, time for me to close shop,’ the clerk announced.

‘Just fifteen more minutes,’ Andie pleaded. ‘And I’m going to need a copy of this when I’m finished.’

‘Records that old you got to run through an archival copier, and the only one available to us is over to Montpelier,’ Marcous sniffed. ‘Take at least a week.’

‘That would be fine,’ Andie said. ‘I’ll take notes for now.’

Marcous arched one of her penciled eyebrows. ‘Fifteen minutes and that’s it. I got grandkids’ll be tearing the house down for their supper if I give you much longer.’

Andie returned to the file, scanning the subsequent pages for further mention of Powell’s hallucinations. In the eighteen months that preceded the 1902 evaluation, she found two minor asides that vaguely mentioned delusions. Both of those notations followed incidents in which the former mayor had managed to dig teeth out of his gums, once with a fork, the second time with his own fingernails.

She did not find another reference to hallucinations until she came to a long diagnostic narrative written in the months directly after Lamont Powell’s committal to the insane asylum.

When she finished, she almost doubled over with nausea and fear. ‘Oh, my God!’ Andie whispered.

A
T THE SAME TIME
, almost halfway across the state, a clear tube ran from a pale yellow oxygen tank into a splitter, where it became two hoses threaded into Oscar Stubbins’ nostrils. Stubbins’ mottled hands shook with anticipation as his wife, Cornelia, lit the cigarette, then held it to his lips. Stubbins placed his fingers over a hollow nub of plastic that jutted from a stoma at his trachea. The cigarette tip sparked and ran. Blue smoke trickled out of the plastic nub.

‘Another puff,’ Stubbins croaked on the exhale.

‘No more,’ Cornelia snapped. ‘Doctor’d have my head if he knew.’

‘Won’t ya love me when I’m gone?’ he asked in a froggy voice.

Cornelia would not meet his gaze. Then she nodded and snuffled, ‘That won’t never die, Oscar.’

‘Then give us another puff, bunny girl.’

She held the cigarette to his lips again. The cigarette glowed hot. His eyes closed in the pleasure of it and then he chortled into a hacking liquid cough. He twisted and groaned in the wheelchair. Cornelia jumped up in alarm. She fitted a thin hose into the stoma. There was a whooshing noise and a slug of bile came sucking up the hose.

Stubbins hacked again, then breathed easier. He looked at Gallagher and croaked, ‘I got a month, maybe two. Gunk’s all through me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Gallagher said, trying to fight the desire to race outside and gulp fresh air.

‘What the fuggh?’ Stubbins said. ‘Death comes for everyone sooner or later. What do ya want, Mr Gallagher?’

‘I’m here about Terrance Danby.’

Stubbins accepted the name as if he’d been expecting it somehow. ‘He in trouble?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re bullshitting me.’

‘It’s possible he’s in trouble.’

‘What trouble?’

‘His name has come up in connection with homicides. Three of them.’

‘Not those killings down in Lawton we been reading about?’ Cornelia asked.

Gallagher nodded.

‘That spider,’ she said in disgust. She was at least a hundred pounds overweight and had stuffed her folds into a stained pink sweatsuit. But what made her almost impossible to look at was that two of her upper incisors had grown in wrong: they came horizontally out of her gums like little yellow tusks, and peeked through her lips even when her mouth was closed.

Despite the freak-show quality of their home, Gallagher realized how lucky he had been to find the Stubbinses. The couple had worked at the orphanage where Terrance Danby had been placed after he pole-axed the man who killed his father. Oscar had been night house manager at Hennessy House. Cornelia had been the cook.