The Devil You Know (3 page)

I don’t get out nearly enough, despite living in the center of backpacking and camping central. It helps to have someone to go with, I suppose. I wondered if Vivian was into kayaking, camping—all the things New Yorkers swarmed this town for on weekends. Highly imaginative thoughts of Vivian were busily lifting my spirits when I heard someone knock on the open door. I turned to find Blackwater’s own Sheriff Ben Oswell standing there with a foam cup full of nitro java from NiBor’s.

“Ben. How goes it?” I asked.

“It goes, Nick,” he said, watching me attack the boxes.

Ben’s in his early forties like me, but a whole hell of a lot more ambitious, and nothing like your typical small-town sheriff type. He’s not greedy, fat, sloppy or corrupt. I mean, I can’t say for certain that his computer at home isn’t full of llama porn, for instance, or that he doesn’t cheat on his taxes, but I know he doesn’t take bribes, and he doesn’t bang college co-eds. He has a wife his own age, a daughter who stays out of trouble, a dog, and an arrowhead collection. That’s saying a lot in this town.

Ben is tall, dark and as lean as a totem, without an inch of fat anywhere. He has a predilection for mirrored sunglasses and gourmet coffee. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. All leftovers from his days with the State Troopers. Ben had a black dad and a Shawnee mom. I’ve seen Ben express Synchronicity on occasion, the innate supernatural ability to be in the right place at the right time, but I still haven’t figured out if that’s because of his mom or his dad. Ben hates his mojo, and mine, but he’s not above using it to get the job done. I do respect that about the man.

He looked into one of the boxes sitting on the counter. “Well, that’s awful ugly. What are those?”

“Hopi Kachina dolls,” I explained as I grabbed a mug off the counter, filled it with tap water from the basin sink and stuck it in the microwave for two minutes. “Effigies made of cottonwood that embody the ceremonial Kachina. You want one?”

“If I brought something like that home my dog would eat it or my wife would eBay it.”

“That would be very bad sorcery for you,” I said in my wisest occult shopkeeper’s voice.

“What are you supposed to do with it, anyway?”

I dug out one in eagle dress with its feathered arms outstretched. “You sit and think on it.”

“Just think on it.”

I offered it to him. “This one represents good fortune in seeking lost items. Pretty fitting for a policeman, in my opinion.”

He took it and looked it over. When he found the price tag he lurched a bit. “Shit, I can’t afford to think that hard, Nick. Why can’t you just sell Webkinz like everyone else in this town?” He started handing the Kachina back to me, but I shook my head.

“Keep it. When I saw it, I knew it was yours. That it was waiting for you.”

He looked at me steadily, and even though I couldn’t see his eyes past his Super Trooper shades, I knew he was shaken. He didn’t believe in mojo, but he also couldn’t leave it alone. “You are one spooky bastard, you know that, Nick?” But he slid the Kachina dutifully into his pocket. He once told me it was against Shawnee custom to refuse a gift.

The microwave beeped and I got my water out, added a tea bag, and picked up the third, as yet unopened, parcel. With it stuffed securely under my arm and my tea in hand, I turned to the beaded curtain. “Don’t mind me, I’m late with opening the shop.”

Ben took a sip of coffee and followed me out onto the floor. “The Berger girl is missing.”

I set the box on the counter and turned to look at him. “The Bergers of Berger Hollow?”

“That’s them. You know them?”

“Not really,” I said, going to the door and unlocking it. There wasn’t exactly a line, though I knew Morgana had some longtime clients dropping by later today to pick up some elixirs. “I know the family name, one of the Blackwater founders, correct?” Actually, I knew that to be true. Our humble little mountain burg had been settled at a crossroads by four founding families, the Kings, the Rinkleys, the Bergers and the Wodehouses, though the Bergers and Wodehouses were nearly extinct.

Ben nodded.

“I didn’t know they had a girl.”

“Most people don’t. She’s sick, the girl. Has special needs.”

I nodded my head in that
ahh
way you do when you really have no idea what to say. I slid behind the counter as the first customer stepped into the shop. It was a bored-looking tourist, not a local, which relieved me some. That meant she’d likely browse for a while before finding something. The cop in me wanted to hear Ben’s story.

“Cassandra Berger disappeared from her home between one and two yesterday afternoon,” Ben said. He consulted his notepad. Like any good cop, he wanted his facts straight. “The father, Thom Berger, was at work. His wife Rebecca was home, but she was downstairs doing laundry. The girl vanished from their backyard. Rebecca reported it immediately. We canvassed the whole neighborhood but no one saw anything. Everyone was at work. We’re organizing a search team later today to search the woods behind the house. The Bergers’ house is butted right up against the bottom of Bear Mountain.”

I sat down behind the counter. There were about a hundred things wrong with this whole scenario and my sarcasm just jumped out of me. “Because leaving a disabled girl alone in the backyard is a truly excellent idea.”

Ben put the notepad away. “If the Bergers screwed up, I’ll be more than happy to put their asses in State Penn, believe me.” He watched me light a new smoke in that hungry way he had. He’d been on the patch for six months. So much for the patch. “You wanna help? Because we sure could use it. There’s about five miles of woods going back.”

“Depends on whether the Kings will be there, I guess.”

“A third of the town is turning out for this, Nick. I ain’t promising anything, and I ain’t refereeing.”

I waved the smoke away and thought about that. Two years ago, Ben asked me to help his boys bushwhack Indian Mountain Lakes Park where a lone hiker had gone missing for six days. Turned out, he’d stumbled upon the remnants of an old house that had burned down years ago and he’d gone right through the crumbling floorboards, winding up in a dry septic tank with a broken ankle. The sulfur residue from the septic tank had confused the tracker dogs and he was too weak to make much noise. God knows what he ate or drank. Or maybe God had no idea. Wouldn’t surprise me much. I found him alive, but only after I’d left my particular group. Bradley King, who qualified as red, white and blue—redneck, blue collar, with white sheets hanging in his closet—wouldn’t stop aiming his gun at me and talking with his Saturday night fight club friends about adding a New Age fag to the collection of stuffed animals in his den.

Every town has a walking cliché. We have Bradley King.

I ran a hand through my hair. The tourist looked over from the bookshelves and gave me a disapproving look. My last haircut had left me with scruffy 1980’s David Bowie hair. She probably thought I was an alcoholic, chain-smoking transient being picked over by the police and was wondering where the real owner was.

I really didn’t want to go stomping through woods until I found some half-eaten girl a bear had buried under a tree while a bunch of rednecks had a tailgating party. Not my idea of a good time. And yet, the cop in me was already dumping loads of guilt onto my conscience. “What time?” I finally asked.

“As soon as you can get away. We started organizing this morning.”

“I’ll see if I can get Morgana up.”

“Thanks, Nick.” Ben actually smiled a little before he left the shop.

The tourist, an older lady who looked a bit like one of those church ladies you see who have ten cats, checked out two books, an embroidered scarf, and some Navajo earrings. Before she left she said, “You know, I don’t believe in any of this New Age stuff. God is the only way, the truth and the light.” She set a tract down, one more to add to my ever-growing collection. “Why don’t you come back to Jesus, young man?”

I smiled nicely. In retail, the customer is always right. “His dad and my dad don’t get along, I’m afraid.”

The church lady left the shop looking very confused.

I biked out to the Berger house at the end of Berger Hollow Road.
The weather was balmy cool and simply too nice to stuff myself into a car. Besides, the Bergers lived in a development only two miles away, and I’ll do anything to save a few cents on the ridiculous cost of gas these days. The car I owned was a huge Dodge Monaco and it hoarded oil like an Arabian sheik.

The Bergers, though among the first settlers in the area, were a dying breed, and Thom Berger was the last of his kind, so far as I knew. The family had taken a massive hit during the Depression and never really recovered. They’d started out as city elders but wound up lawyers and business owners.

By the time I got down to the development where the last of the Bergers lived, the tailgating party was in full swing. The Bergers lived in a huge neo-Colonial that looked less than two years old, brick-faced, with two wings. The lawn, even this late in the season, was a chemically treated, eye-sizzling green, and there were planters full of yellow and rust-colored mums in the window boxes. The long, curving asphalt drive was crammed with vehicles, mostly huge blue pickups covered in decals. In Blackwater it’s mandatory that one owns two things: 1. a dark blue 4 x 4 with decals and 2. a red-and-blue Phillies cap. That’s in the manual somewhere. Those who couldn’t fit their monster truck in the drive had parked it on the lawn, and I could imagine the lawn guy having conniption fits when he saw the big muddy furrows when next he did the Bergers’ lawn.

Behind the Berger house rose a panoramic view of Bear Mountain, so big it looked sheer going straight up, a misty fairytale blue that was one of the perks of living this close to the Blue Ridge Mountain Range.

The tailgates on all the blue 4 x 4’s were down and the locals were hyping themselves. I saw plenty of plastic Igloo coolers and Tupperware full of cold food being expertly handled by pretty, manicured wives. There was a lot of beer being manhandled. A scattering of hounds bayed nervously from inside truck cabs. I froze momentarily and attempted to prepare myself for stepping into this particular hornets’ nest.

Brad King and his boys were gathered around his giant blue Cadillac Escalade. Brad stood outside with his elbow resting in the open window as Toby Keith bellowed soulfully about the red, white and blue. Meanwhile, his bleached-blonde wife ran in circles around him, a cell phone clipped to her ear, unloading the flatbed. Brad spotted me immediately like he had radar tuned in to just witches, then turned and said something to a member of his Legion of Doom while flopping his wrist rather dramatically. The Legion of Doom member snickered in response.

Boys and girls, inbreeding is bad.

I sighed, crushed out my cigarette, stuck my hands in my belted trench coat, and ambled forward, edging toward the police vehicles in a line in the street.

“Hey, it’s Dick Tracy,” one of Ben’s deputies said, looking up from a thick manual he was reading in the midst of all this chaos. Did the police actually have to consult a manual on how to canvas a wooded area? He was young, early twenties, and probably wouldn’t know Dick Tracy from a hole in the ground.

I ignored him and looked around, spotting Ben heading toward me. I wondered if he still had the Kachina doll in his pocket. “Nick,” he said, “thanks for showing up.” He did that guy slap thing on my shoulder and handed me a photocopied Google map that meant almost nothing to me. Telling a New Yorker to go north
here
or south
there
rather than
right
or
left
is about as helpful as teaching a pig to sing. I crumpled the map up in my pocket as he started giving me a rundown of the procedure. There were going to be fifty-four teams, two per every hundred feet. We were going to fan out, heading north to Cherry Hill, the next big town over. He hadn’t known who to buddy me up with, so I was going with Deputy Dog. Oh joy. Still better than getting one of the members of the Legion of Doom, I suppose. He’d likely shoot me in the woods and claim I looked like a deer.

“Are those the grieving parents?” I said, nodding discreetly toward the back of the house. A couple stood there, talking to a reporter from Mountaintop Radio, our local talk station. I recognized the reporter, Shelley Preston, the shining, young face of modern daytime talk radio. She had that perky palomino beach bunny look you normally associate with Venice Beach gurus and reruns of
Baywatch
, her skin carefully spray-tanned four shades darker than her long golden tresses.

Four years ago, while Shelley was working for a minor local paper, she visited Curiosities and interviewed me for their Halloween edition, hoping to gain insight on the local pagan establishments. At least, that’s what she told me. While we were alone in the Loft, she nearly bit my dick off. She reacted badly to me throwing her out. The following day, Shelley’s paper ran a piece debunking everything that Curiosities did. Morgana was livid. She cast a spell on Shelley and the girl lost all her hair for a month. That was the day I learned an abiding respect for Morgana’s power.