Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (39 page)

The best thing about her ghost train was
that it paid no heed to the earthly weather. Oh yes, it was just as
well that Anna Mae slept through most of that night with the wind
howling around her and the flood waters roaring over the long-gone
tracks, the branches whipping through the cars but never touching
so much as a lash of her sleeping eye.

The little medicine bag between her pointy
breasts rose and fell, rose and fell. You could almost hear a
chanting in the wind sometimes, or in the silent clicking that the
train wheels should have been making rolling down the nonexistent
tracks.

Along about morning Anna Mae woke and found
the worn-out moth-eaten carpet soaked and the metal all beaded with
moisture, but the seats beneath her and her sleeping bag and her
instruments were still dusty enough to make you cough. The train
had stopped moving.

Looking out the window, she saw that the
train had parked itself in somebody's side yard. She sat facing the
window of someone's kitchen and through that window, she heard a
mandolin playing "This Train Is Bound for Glory."

A man lay snoring in a sleeping bag on the
kitchen floor. Another woman sat up looking apprehensively around
her. Then a second woman entered the room, and to her relief Anna
Mae saw that it was Julianne. Juli turned around, saw her, and
waved, as unconcerned as if she caught trains parked outside
people's kitchens every day.

Anna Mae suddenly heard a voice very like
Sam Hawthorne's sing out, " 'Board! All aboard!" and Julianne
beckoned to the other woman, the two of them helping the man to his
feet. "No problem, Callie," she said. "It's okay. It's Anna Mae and
she's come for us."

They clacked on throughout the stormy day as
if they were ghosts themselves until they reached the outskirts of
Tulsa. In the midst of lines and lines of cars, the train chuffed
silently to a halt beside a beat-up car, and the train passengers
looked down into the drawn faces of Ellie and Faron. At first the
Randolphs didn't see them any more than the cops at the blockade
did, or any of the rest of the people in the cars, but Julianne
leaned out the window and hollered, "Hey, guys! It's us! Get on
board."

Then Faron and Ellie saw the train just fine
and climbed into the same car as the others and off they went,
through the blockade, across the bridge that was now under repair,
and over the flood waters of the angry Arkansas River. They picked
up two cows, a horse, and a yellow-striped kitty-cat who was
clinging to a mostly submerged roof on the way.

Ellie bounced up and down on the seat like a
little girl on her first ride. "I know where it's taking us! I
know! There's abandoned tracks in the lot across the street from
Mama and Daddy's house. I know it's taking us there."

And sure enough, that's where it took them,
right across from the yard Ellie had played in as a girl. Ellie
gasped and started crying, Faron groaned, and the others just tried
to hope for the best when they saw that there was nothing left of
the Curtis house but foundation and splintered floorboards and what
used to be a chimney left from the days when the old farmhouse had
had a fireplace. The flood waters covered the yard. The water was
shallow enough you could still see the tallest blades of grass
poking up through it along with snakes and frogs and backed-up
sewage and all kinds of other stuff that had floated in with the
water.

Ellie jumped down from the train and
splashed across the street and up to the side of the house, calling
back, "Come on you guys and help me! There's boards blocking the
cellar door!"

Anna Mae was about to ask if the Curtises
were down there for sure, but then she, like everybody else, heard
the happy, somewhat wobbly voices, tenor and alto, of the two
people who had found the supply of plum cordial Barry had put up
three years ago and then forgotten about, wailing, in Oklahomese,
the refrain from "The Wildwood Flower": "You've gone and neglected
yer frail waldwood flower."

CHAPTER 25

The refugee and relief camp was set up on
high ground in the middle of the beautiful park where Faron and
Ellie had gotten married. The garden center was right in the
middle, and all around it tents and shelters were set up with
Christmas bulbs strung around the entrances so people could see
where they were going in the darkness and the rain. The churches
donated food, and people kept calling the emergency phone operators
and the radio and TV stations to say, "We have an extra bedroom and
could maybe care for a family of three for a few days."

Molly went back to work with almost no rest,
handing out emergency checks to hard-hit families, though it was
going to take some time for any aid to come to her and Barry or to
the Randolphs.

Aldin managed to patch a call through to his
office to tell them he'd been dragged away by a family emergency,
absolutely unavoidable, to Tulsa and wouldn't be able to get back
to Arkansas for days. The office there talked to the office in
Tulsa, which drafted him to work on emergency communications
there.

The Weather Devil had blown himself out for
the time being, and there were no more twisters. He could only
generate puny little piddling twenty- and thirty-mile-an-hour winds
and drizzly rain that kept the tents from ever being warm or dry.
Flood waters just kept rising instead of falling, so nobody could
move permanently back into their houses, and emergency efforts had
to continue.

* * *

If anybody had asked Brose, he would have
said he was absolutely opposed to having James Francis Farnham ride
with them, but Dan swept them both along. Among Dan's best
qualities were his friendliness and overwhelming belief in the
goodness of all people and the triumph of brotherly love over mere
human considerations such as greed, power lust, other kinds of
lust, and just plain craziness. His worst qualities included his
indiscriminate friendliness and overwhelming and unfounded trust in
the ultimate triumph of good over evil in his fellow man.

If anybody had asked Gussie about allowing
the man they knew as Jimbo to ride with them, she would have backed
Brose up. So would Terry. But what with the quakes and the floods
and being worried about all of their other companions of the last
seven years, neither woman was feeling particularly like quibbling
over the roster of people to go on the trip. Farnham made another
driver and another person to push the van out of trouble if it got
stuck.

They headed for Tulsa to find the Randolphs
and the Curtises first, thinking that those families might help
them locate Julianne, Anna Mae, and Willie.

Gussie, sleeping in the seat behind the
driver while Farnham drove and Brose nodded in the passenger seat
beside him with Terry and Dan in the back, heard Farnham giggling
to himself and felt a chill pierce her nightmares. She had felt all
along, especially when she watched him move—which had not been
often, since she hadn't been involved in the street-singing
project—that there was something familiar about him. In the
rearview mirror she saw him glance back and lick his lips, and she
didn't sleep another wink until he was sound asleep in the back
with everybody else awake and she was in the passenger seat next to
Brose.

But they detoured around the worst-hit spots
by driving down on the Kansas side into Oklahoma, so except for
some detours in areas where roads were flooded around Tulsa, their
trip was without significant incident. Their windshield wipers were
all but shredded from the pouring rain and the sleet and hail, and
they rapidly learned they could not reach the place where the
Curtis house used to stand.

Gussie remembered where Molly worked and
called her there. Barry was spending part of every day in a rowboat
with a policeman, looking for people stranded by the flood and
offering help.

At the improvised refugee camp, Gussie and
the others shared soup from a local church and bread from several
area bakeries and grocery stores. First the Randolphs, then Barry,
then Anna Mae, and finally Julianne told what had happened to them.
Gussie completely forgot about Farnham, the rain, or any other
depressing subjects when, with a dramatic flourish, Callie and
Aldin hauled out the mandolin.

"Lazarus!" Gussie cried as the mandolin
played the Michael Smith song it had played in the dream of its
resurrectionists, and soon everyone was singing along, heedless of
the wind and rain.

Later Faron played the mandolin while Brose
plunked away on the guitar Gussie had found for him at the
secondhand store. He was playing "The Brown Girl Blues," which had
become his signature tune, and all the others knew it and joined
in, then went on to "In the Pines," which was particularly
appropriate as the wind picked up, since the chorus was, "In the
pines, in the pines where the sun never shines, and you shiver when
the cold wind moans."

The rain started again, and they crowded
into a lean-to made of milk cartons lashed together with string and
canopied with plastic tarp. Right in front of it somebody had lit a
fire in an oil barrel, one of several around the park, and people
in nearby tents and standing under the trees watched it as if
hypnotized.

Julianne stared into the fire and thought of
all the floods and storms there had ever been and all the displaced
people who had no place in the world anymore. The mandolin in
Faron's hands started playing, and she sang the words. People
quickly joined in—it was not a song only people who went to
folk-music clubs knew. Just an old Stephen Foster song that seemed
to fit the times:

"Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

Hard times, hard times, come again no
more.

Many days you have lingered around my cabin
door,

O, Hard times come again no more."

That felt so good that for a long time they
comforted themselves and everyone who was listening, which seemed
to be most of the camp, with songs that had easy choruses: "Darling
Clementine," "You Are My Sunshine," "She'll be Coming around the
Mountain," and "Red River Valley." Camp songs, childhood songs for
most of the people, although many of the children looked baffled,
having grown up without hearing those songs.

Faron wondered aloud if singing a dust-bowl
ballad or two wouldn't make the weather seem drier. Although the
author of many of the songs, Woody Guthrie, had been an Oklahoma
native, Faron had to wait while the kids asked what a dust bowl
was, and the older adults explained. He sang "Dust Bowl Refugee"
for three verses, then changed it to "Mud Hole Refugee," at which
the crowd, including the kids, joined in.

Brose played "Deep River Blues," with a
chorus unfamiliar to most of the people gathered around. But they
were in the mood to listen now, and Anna Mae sang a song called "
Wasn’t that a Mighty Storm?” about a disastrous storm in
Galveston.

Gussie watched fondly as the mandolin
whittled away at the various melodies, suggesting songs and
harmonizing with the other instruments. It was so good to have
Lazarus among them again.

The gold-striped cat Anna Mae had rescued
from the flood and pulled onto the ghost train yawned and fell
asleep across Brose's broad shoulders, purring a little, until the
board of devils yanked her back to do a little explaining.

* * *

"You took my murderer!" Doom and Destruction
thundered at Torchy, who cowered, hissed, and spat at him before
remembering herself and turning back into a two-legged cat with
long red hair.

"Oh, lighten up. I just borrowed him for a
little bit. I was doing you a favor. He was going to screw up in
Kansas City. Those women weren't going to sit still for some maniac
with a bread knife while there was an earthquake going on. Besides,
the party Gussie and Terry were playing that night was a ladies'
self-defense class. Your boy would have been dog meat. I saved him
for you so he can do some real harm."

"You're getting way too nice, DD," snarled
the Stupidity and Ignorance Devil, who actually believed what the
redhead said.

"I think we can work up a little something
together in that camp that will top a mere killer," said the
Pestilence Devil.

"I'm already working on a mutant form of
combined cholera and diphtheria," said the Doom and Destruction
Devil.

"That's
my
department."

"I'm culturing it from sewage
effluvia," Threedee countered, "so I guess that makes it
my
department."

"I think if you play your cards
right," Chairdevil said thoughtfully, "we can have our
murders
and
a plague. Maybe
even make people kill off all surviving household pets in the
meantime, which should add to the misery."

"You sure you don't want me to show up with
some drugs or booze or something to help those people kind of ease
their pain?" DD asked, not because she especially wanted to, just
to test the waters, as it were, and see if they were changing their
minds about her effectiveness.

"I don't want their pain eased," the
Chairdevil said. "While there is a certain value in having drunk or
stoned people abusing those around them, I think we can let human
nature stand on its own merits these days. Put enough pressure on
sober people, and they'll say and do things someone who's had too
much to drink wouldn't have the imagination to think of. I already
have a few of the more dedicated obsessive types going into work
and shopping withdrawal. All that fear and anger was bubbling along
real good till those damned noisemakers started that group-singing
shit and calmed everybody down. I think DD was right and your
killer is just where we want him. And, PeePee?" He turned his
attention to the Plague and Pestilence devil.