Picking the Ballad's Bones (9 page)

A few minutes later she kicked Giorgio
in the tight ass of his counterfeit designer jeans. He had been
changing a tire. Now he changed his expression as he caught a
glimpse of her ethereally thundering countenance. She looked like
his wife in a bad mood. But the witch's bad moods were something to
fear.

"Diabla! How good it is to see
you."

"What's the matter, Giorgio. Didn't
you like my little present?" she pouted, a mockery of a normal
woman. "You threw her back. And even those mangy beasts of yours
thought they were too good to eat the tidbit I gave
them."

"Diabla, I swear to you—"

"Save it for your wife, luv," she
said, still smiling.

"You won't cut off our
supply?"

"Oh, no, Giorgio. I wouldn't do that.
But I think I'll start giving away samples to the kids and ease the
old folks' pain along, how would you like that? And maybe get you
to do a lid or two with me but not your wife. Just our little
arrangement. Wouldn't that be nice?"

He had already been sweating but now
streams of salt water ran down him like the tears of all the grief
he'd ever caused. He had seen what the drugs he acquired from
Diabla and sold to his profit did to others. He knew in the pit of
his black heart that he was of the lowest creatures of creation,
but he was not yet that low. And for the children and the elders of
his tribe to succumb, for he himself to be infected while leaving
his wife in control. No. He would have to kill her. His world would
fall apart. He would have no power any longer and no will to wield
it if he did. "It was not my fault, Diabla. My stupid sow of a wife
became jealous and attacked me and the gadje woman escaped. As for
the lions, I will shoot them myself."

"Oh, Giorgio, would you really do that
for me?" the witch cried with the glee of a carrion bird finding
flesh, and transformed herself as she twined cold-bone limbs about
his neck, filling his nostrils with the stench of lime and
decomposing bodies, the stench he had smelled as a boy when he and
other boys had been on grave detail in the camps. The gold in his
own tooth was from gold he hoarded from stripping those bodies. He
would have been killed if the Nazis had learned of his treachery,
but he learned treachery well and early. From the time Diabla first
came to him when he was no more than a feral-eyed child, he had
been able to most satisfactorily avenge himself on the world for
the wrongs it had done him. And had he not saved this small band of
his people too? And did he not care for them and provide them a
good living? The terror they felt of him was far less than the
terror of the camps. The thing they did to live they did only to
outsiders to appease their patroness. Even his wife, who was crazy,
was less afraid of him, less afraid of Diabla, than of the outside
world.

He spit on the outside world, but he
could not bear to look directly at the witch and said to the front
of her decaying dress, "I will get the woman back again and kill
the man with my own two hands."

"That would be so sweet of you,
Giorgio," she said. "But what I want you to do first involves all
of your people. I want you to bring me something."

"Anything, Diabla."

"It's easy, really, for such talented
folk. Just some old books. I'll tell you which ones and where to
find them and how to get them. But you must bring them to me, show
me the titles, and burn them in my presence, then give me the ashes
as evidence I can show my friends that the job is done and I've
taken care of them, just as you take such good care of your people.
Do you understand?"

He nodded, still sweating, still not
daring to pull away from her charnel-house breath and fog-cold
embrace.

CHAPTER 9

Julianne took a hot bath at Hy
MacDonald's house, or as much of one as she could get for the ten
pence the heater took. She emerged from the tub wearing a T-shirt
and jeans that belonged to Hy, the jeans a little big and held up
with a woven band he'd bought at a crafts fair and thought might
come in handy as a guitar strap. "Willie," she said, "I just wanted
to thank you for—you know—helping me get away from that
guy."

Willie waved his hand negligently and
looked uncomfortable. He thought it was all very well that she
thought he was good wolf-scaring material, but he actually much
preferred the role of the wolf. Why should she need protecting
anyway? She was a grown woman and had been away from her mama for
quite a while.

She saw his impatient expression and
added, "I was caught off-guard. I thought those folks would be fine
since Torchy took me to them. I know you're getting close to her,
Willie, but she's got really strange energy, y'know?"

He did know. Maybe he was mad at Juli
partially because he was mad at Torchy, trying to make lion food
out of him when he thought they had been getting along so well.
Damn, it always seemed to be something with women, and sometimes he
wasn't sure which kind griped him more, the ones like Torchy who
were wild and sexy but treacherous as rattlers or the kind like
Julianne who said they were independent and wanted to make up their
own minds but still expected a guy to risk his neck defending them.
He missed the fact that Juli had just been warning him about
Torchy, not realizing that the redhead had already betrayed Willie.
Juli thought that in warning him she was paying him back, somehow
protecting him.

When Willie didn't respond, she smiled
uncertainly at Hy MacDonald, who came out of the kitchen with a
tray full of fresh drinks. Hy hadn't heard her. He was preoccupied
with an entirely different issue.

"I wish I could be of more help," Hy
was saying. "It's been very good to see you. I needed someone to
keep me from drinkin' alone, y'know. But the timin' is a wee bit
awkward as I've got this new job. Taxes have hit me very hard and
my brother has pulled quite a few strings to get me on the North
Sea oil rigs. I'm hoping, of course, to pick up a bit of change
entertaining on the side but we'll see how that goes."

"But don't you see?" Gussie asked him.
"It's the same thing that was happening to us at home. It's
these—these critters trying to run you folks away from the music
just like they did us."

The banjo, propped up in the corner,
played a tune Gussie recognized as some old Irish exile song, one
of those with the general theme of "the landlord wants his rent,
the tatties have gone bad, you're pregnant once again, and I'm
outta here, my lassie-o."

"Yes, I do see," Hy said. "But I don't
much fancy bein' one of the first casualties, like Hawthorne and
Nedra and them, d'ye see? I can let you look through my record
collection and books if that will be any help at all, and take you
'round to Sir Walter Scott's old place, since that's where you said
the Randolph couple planned to go. There's tour buses in and out
all the time so I'm sure you could pop back up here on one of them.
You might find it all very interesting anyway. Sir Walter built his
estate from the lands once roamed by Thomas the Rhymer—his turf, I
suppose you could call it. And there's all the auld lit'rary places
from the books thereabouts, and the Wizard's grave over at
Melrose." He cast a rather nervous glance at the banjo mumbling to
itself in the corner of the living room. "Perhaps your instrument
could get old Michael Scott to exhume his magic book for you and
give you a wee hand, eh?"

* * *

Gussie Turner stepped into the
entrance hall at Abbotsford as reverently as if she were entering a
church. She stared up at the wooden ceiling and the carved wooden
rafters with the little coats of arms in the middle and the
miniature shields on either side where the rafters connected to the
walls. She looked beneath her feet at the pretty octagonal tiles in
five different colors of stone. She studied the carved wooden walls
and the suits of armor and more little shields all around her. She
peered closely at all of the doodads Sir Walter had placed very
carefully around his house: the bust on the pretty shiny carved
table, which she saw was of William Wordsworth himself, the fancy
clock, and the two skulls on either side of it on the mantel above
the very elaborately carved fireplace that had a genuine brass
grate all backed by blue and white tiles that looked like those
Dutch dishes, the kind with willow trees on them. The carvings
above the fireplace looked like the naughty ones from temples in
India and a row of uncomfortable-looking but very grand chairs that
might have come from some ritzy church's business office ranked
along one wall.

A lady about her own age with an
expression that tried to be friendly but didn't succeed very well
was sitting behind a desk. Her clothes, which looked like what
high-school girls used to wear in the winter before the schools
changed the rules to let them wear blue jeans, were a matched beige
sweater set—short-sleeved sweater and a cardigan with little pearl
buttons, and a red tartan skirt with pleats. Gussie wanted to ask
her if that was the Scott tartan but felt shy because she figured
the lady probably got asked that all the time and Gussie didn't
want to seem so much like a tourist.

"My, this is a nice place you got
here," she said instead.

The lady showed her teeth. "That'll be
two pounds, mum. And please sign the buke and be sure to visit the
gift shop in the old stable."

Gussie was glad Hy MacDonald had let
them stop at a bank. She forked over her two pounds and was signing
the guest book when Willie strode in with his air of
everything-can-start-now-that-I'm-here, clutching the banjo.
Julianne wandered in beside him. In this setting, in Hy MacDonald's
oversize T-shirt, she looked so wan that she could have gone
drifting through the garden and passed for the lady in white in her
nightgown.

Must be the setting, Gussie decided.
Everybody looked like they belonged in a Gothic novel.

"Ah'm afraid ye canna bring yon
instrumunt in he-er, sir," the lady said. "Might scratch the polish
or bump somethin' ov-air, y'see."

Willie looked like he was going to
tell her off for a moment, then he turned on the charm and said
sweetly, "Why, ma'am, I promise to be real careful, but this is a
special sort of an instrument you see."

"Can ye no leave it locked in yer
auto?" the lady asked.

"Our ride just went back to
Edinburgh," Gussie put in.

The banjo began frailing "Wassailing"
in a minor key. Gussie remembered the words that went, "Oh, Master
and Mrs. da da da da da Pray open the door and let us come in. Oh,
Master and Missus who sit by the fire pray think of the traveler
who walks through the mire."

"You see that, ma'am?" Willie asked,
turning around to show the banjo playing itself to her. "I never
touched fret or string. Have you ever seen a banjo do that before?
Why, not only would I be careful not to let the banjo scratch your
furniture or knock anything over, but I would be certain not to
knock any of that stuff against this very valuable
instrument."

"Ah'm sorry, sir. I dinna mak
t'rules."

"I'll take it with me, Willie, while
you look around," Gussie said. "I need to go find postcards to send
Lettie and Mic and Craig Lee to let them know we're
okay."

He gave it to her and she walked back
out the big heavy front door and back into the yard. The banjo
began thrumming "Stewball" as she turned toward the direction the
lady—a docent, they called people who watched museums and
such—where the docent had showed her the old stables
were.

The truth was, she was glad to be
alone and just have some time to think her own thoughts. She had
always wanted to come and see England and especially Scotland and
now that she was here she was rushing around so much that she
hadn't had any time to think about what she was seeing. She whirled
around and leaned back on her heels and shaded her eyes, looking
way up and all around at the cobbled-together mansion that had
belonged to Walter Scott. It wasn't a very tall house, only a
couple of stories, but it had two castle-like towers, one with a
cone roof, one with those square toothy things, crenellations she
thought they were called, and little bitty towers flanking the main
entrance door. A whole raft of chimneys jutted above the main
building, with more chimneys all around, and all of the gables and
such had serrated fronts. The whole thing was done mostly in one
color of brick with stone trimmings around the sides and windows
and it had a castle-type wall around what would have been the
driveway anywhere else but she guessed was a kind of courtyard
here. She went beyond the wall to find the stable beside a couple
of churchy-looking buildings.

The brick and stone all looked as cold
and wet as only those materials can look on a dismal day, and she
was glad to be able to stop in at the little tourist shop, and the
song the banjo was humming very softly in her hand made her think
she could still smell the horse manure.

There were warm-looking wool plaid
scarves that said they were Scott and Douglas tartans, ruler-sized
strips of color slides of the local sights, postcards of every
tourist attraction in the Scottish Borders.

She lingered over some of these. On
the road, the van had passed signs advertising these sights on the
way from Edinburgh but Hy MacDonald had been in too big of a hurry
to play tour guide. But nearby there was Linlithgow Castle where
Mary Queen of Scots was born and Hermitage Castle where she nearly
died riding to find her lover. All around were the Eildon Hills
where True Thomas met the Fairy Queen. There were battlefields like
Falkirk and Bannockburn and coming up from Carlisle they'd passed
by Flodden Field—she remembered songs about all of them, victories
and defeats. The banjo, as if it had somehow been looking through
the cards with her, would do a soft bar or two of each as she
picked it up to look at it. The lady in the shop looked around as
if searching for a radio but she was behind a counter and Gussie
carried the banjo low, her hand circling its neck above the fifth
tuning peg.