Phantom Nights (16 page)

One of the younger kids had appeared in their doorway rubbing her eyes.

"Church bell woked me up."

"Get in the bed here," Zerah told her, "and go back to sleep. Ike?"

"I's gwine," Ike, not such a ready believer in miracles, said with a shudder of apprehension. Church bells tolled for many reasons, but seldom in a dark hour of a new day. "What did you do with my Goody's?"

"Put your Sunday suit on," Zerah told him, still in the grip of a fervor willing to become full-fledged ecstasy. "Never know what you'll meet up with."

"Mean
who
, don't you?" Ike said, with another shudder that tormented his painful lower back.

S
unup, and just east of Lexington, Tennessee, traveling through the middle of the state on the long haul to Knoxville, Jim Giles had to pull over again so Leland Howard could be sick in the weedy ditch beside the two-lane blacktop.

He climbed back into the Pontiac Eight gray as Caesar's ghost and sat in a semisprawl with his eyes heavy-lidded, breathing through his mouth. Giles got them rolling again. Leland squinted and flinched at the first influx of sunlight.

"I've had bad hangovers. This one's like I went over Niagara Falls in a barrelful of cannonballs."

Giles grunted something. He was chewing one of his kitchen matches.

Leland marveled at his calm. How he took the worst of things unflinchingly, expression seldom changing. He was a thick-lipped country man with a brutalized nose, hard knocks all over his face, gray eyes deeply countersunk beneath a jut of brow, strawberry hair fading to a widow's-peak frizz.

"You ever been sick-drunk, James?"

"No. Never had no fondness for the alkyhall myself."

"Well, I'm swearing off. Taking the pledge. Know I've said that before, usually after a hellacious Mardi Gras, but this time I mean it."

"Yes sir, Mr. Howard."

"Eastbound, we'll have the goddamn sun in our faces a good six hours." Leland adjusted the pillow behind his head with a series of pokes. "When do you think they'll find her, James? Wouldn't have found her already, would they?"

"Couldn't say. What does it matter?"

Leland shielded his eyes with one hand as if searching for a penetrating insight into the future and peeped sideways at Giles.

"Then you . . . still think we're going to get away with it?"

"No reason why not. What you need do now is put it all out of your mind. Try to get some sleep."

Leland winced as he swallowed. Sleep? Not with his case of nerves. And his throat was sand-dry. But if he took a drink of water or coffee from one of the thermos bottles they had with them, the next time the Pontiac gave a lurch on the lumpy highway his stomach would throw it back at him. Better to suffer the dryness for now.

He wondered just what kind of fiendish death he looked like at this hour. But nothing could best how Mally Shaw had appeared, the glimpse he'd had of her remains by flashlight rolling out of that tarp at the cemetery's threshold before James Giles went to work with the one Catahoula dog they had brought with them and the gallon jug of fresh pig's blood to, as Giles put it with his tight, sardonic smile, make it more real than anyone, even lawmen accustomed to accident scenes, could bear to look at for long.

With a passion in his breast that was akin to worship, Leland said, "I don't know what I'd've done without you, James."

Giles rolled down his window and discarded his chewed match into the slipstream, reached another from his shirt pocket.

"That's all right, Mr. Howard."

Leland closed his eyes again and tried once more to make himself comfortable.

"What I want you to do is, after you leave me off in Knoxville, get on back to Evening Shade and hang around for a while, keep your ears open. Don't worry about me; one of the campaign volunteers can do the driving next few days. Then I'll be back in Nashville for the big rally at the Parthenon before the primary Tuesday week. We'll meet up there."

After a few moments Giles said, "All right, Mr. Howard."

"Of course if anything comes up—"

"Don't reckon there will be a problem. What else is there to make of a nigger woman got herself mauled to death by wild dogs when she was paying a visit to the grave of her dead husband?"

"I tend to be a worrier, James."

"She's meeting up with the Lord this minute."

"Are you a churchgoing man, James?"

That sardonic smile again. "No. Don't believe in the afterlife neither. It was just a manner of speaking."

"I learn something new about you every day, James. Now, I've often wondered. You're forty-two years old—"

"Forty-three."

"Did you ever get in trouble over a woman?"

"I leave the women alone, Mr. Howard."

"Except for an occasional visit to a whorehouse?"

"Never have set foot in a whorehouse. Them kind of pussy don't appetize me."

"Wish I could stay out of whorehouses, 'sall I know. Could be my fatal weakness. But what do you do, pardon my asking, when you get cravings, if you don't like women all that much?"

"There's boys," James Giles said.

"Boys?"

"Not saying little squirts. Boys. When they are just full-hung but not shaving yet. Maybe once a week they shave. Those are my meat, Mr. Howard."

"Oh." Leland looked away, his mind hopping off that touchy subject like fleas abandoning a dead dog.

Giles said, "There's a truck stop up the road apiece, this side the river. Recollect they don't never close. I could do with a stack of buckwheats and a pot of black coffee, fried ham and gravy drippings on the side."

Leland's stomach cramped at the thought of all that grease.

"I'll get along without breakfast, but stop whenever you feel like it, James."

"Well, all right, sir."

A
lex Gambier had the rest of Mally's spice cake and most of her buttermilk for breakfast. He hung around her house until about eight-thirty Sunday morning and then, growing restless, got on his bike and rode toward town, intending to return later in the day to find out if she'd made it home okay and if there was anything he could do to help her out. Also he was sure that Bobby would want to talk to her as soon as Alex told his brother about the rape.

He had pedaled a couple of miles beside the highway when a sheriff's department car pulled even with him and the deputy driving motioned for him to stop.

The deputy was Skip Stallworth, to whom Alex was related on his mother's side. Skip was beefy, crew cut, and took petty authority too seriously. He was still screwing high-school girls, and obviously he had gotten himself some the night before. There were fresh hickeys on his neck, as if he'd been set upon by a toothless vampire.

"Your brother said if any of us was to meet up with you this morning, run you straight over to the courthouse 'cause he needs to talk to you."

That was unusual, because Bobby didn't work Sundays even if Luther Tebbetts was out of town.

Alex wrestled his bike into the back of the Ford and joined the deputy in the front seat.

"Been awhile," Skip said. "Seen you around town now and then. You still not talking? What is that anyway; you got a bad stuh-stuh-stutter you don't want nobody to hear?"

Alex shot his cousin a birdie.

"Spit on it and sit on it," Skip advised, grinning and going heavy on the accelerator because he liked driving fast and scaring the bejesus out of other motorists even when there was no emergency to respond to. "So keep your fuckin' mouth shut, have the little gals feelin' sorry for you, but garntee the only ass you'll ever get will have VD or feathers all over it." He whistled a little tune, added words. "'
Take it away, I don't want it; slept all night with my hand on it.
' By the way, Bobby's in a cussed frame of mind, so I'd watch my step."

Alex looked Skip over.

"Well, one thing, he had to come in to work of a Sunday. There was a body found out by Cole's Crossing early this morning. I ain't too clear if it was a hobo fell under a freight train or maybe set upon by wild dogs. Come to, think, Dispatch said likely it were a woman's body." He returned Alex's look. "Ever see a dead body? Hell, I forgot. They done pulled old Shurf Bob out of your burned-up house a few years ago. That must have been a sight to behold."

Alex crossed his arms and stared through the bug-sprinkled windshield. For the fun of it Skip wound the Ford's mill up to a snarling ninety until they reached the edge of town, where the highway made a sharp up-and-downhill curve around the Evening Shade waterworks and he had to slow down. Also he had been trying to see if he could make Alex flinch, but got no reaction. Alex's eyes were slits, his pulses calm. He had no fear of machines or events that could kill him. Alex had faced down the
Dixie Traveler
, and that was just sport to him. Knowing that Skip would have shit himself royally—if he had the nerve to be on the track in the first place—filled Alex with secret pleasure.

T
he
 
sheriff's department and county jail were in the courthouse basement where some daylight sifted in through chickenwire-reinforced windows that were partly above ground level, the lower halves enclosed by gravel-lined window wells.

Bobby Gambier was out of uniform, drinking coffee and talking on a phone by the dispatch bullpen when Alex came down the steps by way of the parking-lot entrance. Without comment or a clue to his mood, Bobby pointed Alex to his office. He joined Alex a couple of minutes later, closing the door behind him.

"Had you any breakfast?" Bobby said, sitting on the edge of his cluttered desk and sipping coffee, regarding his little brother with a combination of wariness and skepticism, not liking the role he had to play right now.

Alex nodded.

"That lip is where Cecily popped you?"

Alex touched his sore and puffy lower lip and grimaced slightly.

"Well, I'm sorry she did that, and by now she probably is too. You know Cece; she lets things get out of hand way too easy. Not to make light of the stunt you pulled to bring it on."

Alex shrugged and shook his head, still having no idea of what the hell.

"Jesus name, Twig, where did you get such a damn-fool idea, smear Vaseline on the bottom of the bathtub? Was that in some library book you—"

Alex leaped out of his chair just as the door to Bobby's office was opened. A deputy looked in and said, "Ready on your call to Nashville."

Bobby motioned to Alex,
stay put
, ignoring the boy's outraged, boiling-over expression, and sat down behind his desk. He picked up the telephone receiver, tight-lipped, and leaned into an old strawback support cushion with springs popping out through the sides.

"Mr. Val Gene? This is—oh,
doctor
, I see, and Val John is how you—well—this is Bobby Gambier. I'm undersheriff here in Evening Shade. Yes, that's right, he was my father. The reason I'm calling this morning, I'm afraid I have some bad news regarding your daughter, Mally Shaw."

Alex's expression changed again as he stared at Bobby, one hand flexing at his side, his lips parting as if he were subvocalizing Mally's name; then his face seemed to freeze from dread. Bobby didn't look at him. His eyes were fixed on his inky, scrawled-over desk blotter that was filled with doodles, names, phone numbers, while his mind was fully occupied with the difficulties of a bereavement call. He scooted his swivel chair closer to the desk and picked up an uncapped fountain pen.

"Yes. Unfortunately that's how it is. She was, uh, discovered dead early today near the Little Grove Holiness church, in the cemetery there, you're familiar with—? No, not murdered. But it was a terrible thing I'm sorry to say from all we know of it. Seems Mally got jumped by a pack of wild dogs while she was paying a visit to her late husband William's gravesite. I don't know how to put it any more—uh-huh. Reason we figure why she was out there at such an early hour was she had a vase of flowers with her; we found them scattered—How's that? No, we—I'm not understanding the reason you asked me that, it surely is not a very pleasant—Well, if you truly feel the need. Yes. I do appreciate that you want to be satisfied in your—No, certainly wouldn't be much trouble for us to do that, I'll see to it. Yes. Um-hmm. Sure. They are still in business. Godsong and Wundall are the only colored undertake—I'll look up their phone number for you in just—No, couldn't say for sure. You would have to ask them that yourself."