The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (7 page)

But I was glad that I had hit the mark when Gina was watching.

Back in the house I faced the problem of what to do about the other rooms. The living room and my bedroom were almost back to normal and I found that Gina had done a quick pick up of the bathroom.  The kitchen was very messy, but the guest rooms wouldn’t be too bad—the furniture had been moved around some but there were fewer small items for anyone to scatter about.  Cindy’s room would be the hardest; I decided to put that off until I was stronger.  I also thought I would leave my father’s room as it was so that when he came home he would be able to tell if anything was missing.

It was only then that I remembered his letter from Italy that I had put aside without reading.  It must have been scattered along with all the rest of the stuff in the living room.  I sat down on the couch and picked up the pile of letters and circulars Gina had stacked on the coffee table.

The letter was near the bottom.  I opened it.

Susie:

I’ve been staying in the Villa della Trattoria here in Florence for a few weeks now.  I’ve been doing a lot of sketching—here in my room, down in the square with pigeons flocking around the fountain, in the museums, wherever I can.  I suppose I’m just reliving my college days but those were happy times for me.  I had good friends here, all lost to me now.  I wonder how I could have let those friendships lapse. 

I have made a few new friends, though.  One is helping me to improve my Italian.  She works as a guard in the Uffizi Gallery and has aspirations of becoming a painter.  I have seen a few of her attempts and I think I may be able to give her some advice.  I was a teacher for 25 years after all!

I’m thinking of setting up an easel down in the square and doing pencil portraits of tourists for a few lira.  I have purchased a porkpie hat and have grown a goatee.

I hope your job is working out and that you are happy back in Pine Oak.  As for myself, I can’t imagine it any more.  Luckily, I have enough money to stay here; maybe buy a small house in the city and renovate it.  It will be a place where I can be alive again and a place that you can visit if you ever get the time.

I hope you were able to sort out all that paperwork I left you.  Cindy’s will made my work easier, but she had a lot of interests and I did the best I could with whatever she had not already put in your name—bank accounts, taxes, the files in her room.  You might sort through those files for the breeding papers on the horses.  I seem to remember that I promised to send them to the new owners.

Write me when you can.

M.M.

I put the letter back in the envelope, got up from the couch, and stretched.  It was the kind of note I expected from my father, heavy on his own doings and making it tacitly understood that he was uninterested in mine.  It didn’t sound as if he planned to ever come back.  I remembered now that while he had been a student at Florida State University, he had spent a year in Italy—or was it two?—on their Florence program.  He had, when I was much younger, often reminisced about the places he had seen and the four or five close friends he had made there.  It seemed strange to me now that I had never met any of them. 

A goatee?  Sketching tourists?  I wish you well, Daddy.

The files he mentioned were now probably strewn around Cindy’s room like big confetti.  And his letter had not mentioned who the new owners of the horses were so what was the point of looking for the papers?

Instead, I went into the kitchen to survey the damage.  Most of the dishes in the cupboards had been left untouched—as it was pretty obvious that nothing could have been hidden behind or in them.  But most of the food in the pantry had been pulled from the shelves, cans had tumbled out, loose cereal and flour were mixed on the floor.  Boxes of rice-a-roni and packets of sweetener had been trampled under someone’s feet.  I sighed, wishing Gina hadn’t had to leave, and began salvaging what I could.  I dumped the rest in two plastic garbage bags and swept most of the cereal and flour outside.  I was busy washing the dishes in the sink when I realized I was about to collapse.  I walked unsteadily to the bedroom and saw that the red light was blinking on the telephone.  It must have rung when I was outside picking up arrows.  Without checking the number on the Caller ID, I pressed the replay button.

“Sue-Ann?  This is Jack.  Listen, Sue-Ann, I’m sorry about what happened.  I don’t know whose fault it was but I’d like to talk about it.  I thought that I was okay with it but I’m not.  I’m . . . look, I’m driving to Miami for a meeting in a few days and I’d like to stop by and see you.  You’ve got my phone number.  Please call me back.”  The message ended.

I collapsed on to the bed, then stood up again.  The call was exactly what I didn’t need.  Jack Stafford—my boyfriend in Richmond—was a photographer for the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
.  Thirty-six, black wavy hair, blue eyes, rugged good looks, and gentle manner.  His only flaw—and a flaw that I think I am the only one ever to see—was that his camera understood more than he did.  In some impossible-to-explain way, his use of light, angle, focus, you name it—all of which came as naturally to him as bowhunting came to Fred Bear—gave his photographs unique personalities, allowed them to tell tales like the best storytellers, and conveyed marvelous aspects of life that only a very few people ever get to witness.  His worst photos were good enough for most magazines; his best were like diamond rings given with love to young maidens.  The problem was, he almost never understood why he took a particular photo until he developed it.  Although he had unbelievable people skills, he had trouble imagining why they acted the way they did.  Had trouble imagining why
I
acted the way I did.  He was high on the list of people I never wanted to see again.  I had no idea what to do about him and thinking made me tired.

I turned on the radio and began to undress.

The pirate station was playing a recording of William S. Burroughs reading something dreadful.  I leaned over to turn it off when one of the deejays, male this time, interrupted, “Thanks, Bill.  That was great.  Really. Yeah.  No, we’ll call you, okay?

“This is Smokestack here on W-A-K-O, your wacko radio station broadcasting from the wilds of tree country.  I’m gonna play a few songs by The Carpenters now.  Betcha thought now that Karen was dead, people would have thrown all their Carpenters stuff away, and you might be right but they would be wrong.  She was way cool; I even wrote a story about her once, but I won’t go into that.  Instead, I’ll play a song about her by Sonic Youth that kind of captures in three minutes what I tried to get over in 20 pages.  It’s called “Tunic.’”

The song that he played was both raucous and touching—a paean to the anorexic singer with the soft and beautiful voice.  I had heard the song once before—a soldier in Baghdad had played it for me.  It was about creation and death.

I lay down on the bed Gina had made, and put my eye-pillow carefully over my closed eyes.  It was cool and put a soothing pressure on my eyelids.  The aroma of eucalyptus and peppermint was indeed therapy and I loved how everything was suddenly so dark that I felt like I was floating in an isolation tank.  Not only was the light blacked out, but most of my sensations were, too.  I felt like I was drifting on a cloud and could no longer feel my arms or legs.  I was aware only of the sound of Karen Carpenter’s voice fading in and out as song after song began and ended.  I must have nodded off because the next thing I was aware of was Smokestack’s voice on the radio.  He was speaking in the pseudo-professional disk jockey voice he sometimes assumed when he was being facetious, which was usually.

“Let me remind you that this program is brought to you by—.  Oh, wait, this is a pirate station.  In that case, let me tell you about one of my new favorite things.  It’s called an eye-pillow.  Why is it called that?  Because it’s a pillow that you put over your eyes.  For a cool refreshing sleep, try an eye-pillow.”

I sat up with a start.  The coincidence was way too much!  There were a few seconds of dead air, then another voice came over the waves, no longer the voice of Smokestack, but the whiny, raspy, singsong voice of the man called The Creeper.  I listened intently; The Creeper was a mysterious commentator who was sometimes mentioned by the deejays, but who rarely came on the air.  I had heard him only once before, but I hadn’t forgotten his disquieting, almost annoying up and down timber with just the hint of a not-of-this-earth accent and a style of speaking that used correct pronunciation but odd grammar.  I had heard only the very end of the tale he told, but it was enough for me to gather that he spoke in parables as portentous as they were baffling.

“Here’s a story for you little kiddies out there,” he began in his sarcastic whine.  “Once upon a time, at this very moment in fact, there was a very old man they call Papa Gede.  Maybe he’s white and maybe he’s black.  Some say he was born in Africa, others say Haiti or other islands in the Caribbean.  Some even say New Orleans.  Papa Gede can do magic, yas; can heal the sick, can make one rich.  All the people who see Papa Gede try to get him to give them favors or eternal life, try to get him on their side in softball games.  But Papa Gede is tired.  Papa wants to rest.  So Papa comes here to the timberland and to the swamp to get out of doing miracles all the time.  He wants to be alone, hear?

“But somehow, little boys and girls hear that Papa Gede comes and want him to give them candy and teach them to rustle cattle.  They want to find Papa Gede, but how do they do this?  They can’t find him in phone books, no, so they look in other books, books written by people who have seen Papa Gede in Africa or in Haiti or New Orleans. 

“So little children learn how to dance, they learn secret signs that only the dead supposed to know and they find out how to call Papa Gede to them.  They make an altar, yas, they make a sacrifice; they draw on the ground secret symbols that only the dead supposed to know and they wait for Papa Gede to come.  And they draw a circle around where they sit and they call Papa Gede to come and they will be safe in the circle.  But oho, Papa Gede
do
come and he be a frightening old guy and little children shake and little children toss their cookies and little children cry and weep.  But Papa Gede point at them in their white circle and say ‘Boo!’ and the white circle becomes a black hole that kiddies fall down through.  They fall down and fall down and fall down and maybe they never come back up.  And Papa Gede say, ‘Let me be!’

“Moral of story: Leave shit alone.”

Almost before the last tones of The Creeper’s voice had faded came the first notes of what sounded like primitive African drumming. 

I was sweating.  It was impossible not to be frightened.  First the commercial about the eye-pillow when I had the only one—outside of Meekins’ Market—that I had ever seen.  Then The Creeper’s story, which was so unsettling that I fired up my computer to do a Google search for Papa Gede.  I quickly scanned the first article I clicked on.  A voodoo god of some kind, very powerful.  Life and death, creation and conclusion.  Healing.  With mounting concern I looked over a list of characteristics and symbols, appropriate offerings.  I pushed the off button on the computer without even shutting down and sat still and quiet for several moments.

One of the offerings to Gede was a black goat.

In the background, Smokestack was back on the radio.  “We’re back, Jack, and here with some Siouxsie, some Bauhaus, some Robert Smith and The Cure, and then, maybe, some really dark stuff like Crüxshadows.  Oh, boy!  This is W-D-E-D, all goth all the time.”

I turned off the radio, flicked off the light, and got back into bed.  Almost at once I fell into a deep but restless sleep rife with animals, knives, and vomit.  I slept almost until morning, and when I woke up I knew what I had to do.

Chapter 5

It was 4:30 a.m. when I stepped out of the shower.  I put on jeans, a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and walking boots.  It took only a few minutes to make coffee and cinnamon toast, and only a few minutes more to choke them down.  I walked out to the barn, taking up the bow I’d used the day before and attaching a clip-on quiver with three arrows.  A shoulder quiver was nice, but it added too much weight and was too noisy.  I filled a fannypack with a shooting glove, a wrist guard, extra string, a bow stringer, some razor-sharp broadhead arrow points, and a small pair of binoculars.  At 5:30 I parked behind Meekins’ Market and stole into the woods, taking the same direction in which I’d seen the shadows moving two mornings before.  It was early enough so that Clarence wouldn’t see me and ask what I was doing with a bow and arrows in his woods.  Despite his skepticism, I knew I had seen someone running from the dumpster, and I wanted to find out who it was.  I knew I wouldn’t be lucky enough to encounter them a second time, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t follow the path and find out where they had gone and what they had been doing.

Although I used my flashlight continuously, it was slow going.  The trail was narrow and might simply have been a deer path, but it was large enough to follow.  I’ve never found a way to comfortably carry a strung bow—especially one with a quiver and arrows attached—and several times it knocked into low branches or got caught in high weeds.  I didn’t even know why I brought the bow, but it comforted me to carry it, knowing my arrows were within easy reach.

Every few minutes I could hear a car whoosh by on the highway, but these sounds grew fainter until, after a while, they faded into the quiet of the trees. 

I had to walk slowly, conserving my strength and watching my footing.  At the end of an hour, I doubt if I’d gone even half a mile, but the sunlight filtering through the trees allowed me to switch off the flash and transfer it to my pack.  Almost immediately I came to a small clearing—an area thirty feet or so in diameter, surrounded by several tall pines and a gigantic live oak.  Dead limbs and newly cut brush told me that the area had been cleared deliberately and recently.  Near the center was a big white circle with other white splotches outside its perimeter.  I looked more closely.  Possibly letters or symbols, but partially scuffed out by heavy boots.  Near the oak was a log a foot and a half high, and around this I spotted signs of civilization: cigarette butts, empty cans of Miller Lite beer and an empty box of corn starch.  That must be what the circle and other lines were made with.

There was a stench and I heard the buzzing of flies.  Something was dead.  I looked around without seeing anything, but the sound was coming from within the corn starch circle—from a dark, sticky-looking patch of red.  Blood, but from what or who?  I saw more flies covering a small lump of something a few feet away and kneeled down to examine it.  Phew!  It wasn’t blood, but vomit, no more than a couple of days old. 

I didn’t see anything else of interest, so I sat down on the oak log to rest.  I rummaged in my fannypack and found a plastic bag containing a new bow string.  I took the string out and replaced it with several of the cigarette butts that were lying around.  There were at least two different brands, maybe three.

A few pieces of a story were starting to form in my mind.  It was pretty obvious that this must be the place where the goat was killed—in the center of the circle.  A sacrifice to Papa Gede, but the presence of the beer cans made it look like more of a party than a ritual.  The vomit told me that one of the gang had a weak stomach.

What happened after that was anyone’s guess.  Why carry a heavy, bloody goat for half an hour just to put it in a dumpster—especially after you’ve just killed it?  It made no sense.  And who had been crazy enough to steal a goat in the first place?  I had a few ideas about where to start, but that would be the easy part.  The hard part was figuring out how the pirate radio station was mixed up in this macabre business.   Playing the entire
Goat’s Head Soup
LP was no coincidence.  Nor was The Creeper’s parable about Papa Gede.  It was like a warning to stay away, but a warning to
who,
and to stay away from
what
?  He had used the words children and boys and girls, so it was a warning to young people.  What had Benny called them?  Goths, punkers.  And they were being warned away from here—from these woods, probably from this very clearing.  But why?  Scarier still was the fact that The Creeper had been in this clearing himself, may have sat right where I was sitting, had seen the circle and the vomit.  For all I knew he might have been the one who had rubbed out the symbols.  The whole thing was starting to weird me out.

I wished I had someone with me that I could talk all this over with, Gina Cartwright maybe, although why Gina would flash into my mind at that time was another mystery.  There’s no reason that Gina would think any differently than—

I became aware of faint sounds behind me.  Voices, but not from the direction I had just traveled, but from further down the trail.  The voices were a ways off yet, but coming closer.  I quickly took up my bow and moved to a position behind the oak, which was broad enough to hide three of me.  I crouched silently, listening.  Presently I heard hurried footsteps and was able to make out a few words. 

“ . . . see us!”

“No way.  Sunday morning, remember?”

The first voice was feminine, the other masculine.  Young, but not children.  They passed along the trail, without stopping at the clearing.  After a few seconds I ventured a glance around the tree.  The girl had wild and fluffy hair the color of the inside of a peach, and was wearing athletic trainers and a long, flowery dress.  The guy wore jeans and a t-shirt with a big red tongue silkscreened on the back.  Long hair, but not shaggy. Neither appeared to be much taller than I am and both were wearing backpacks.  That was all I saw before they disappeared around the path out of sight.  I hadn’t seen their faces.  I stood up to follow them, then had another idea.  I crept back to the path and headed in the direction they had come from.

The trail I followed was distinct, but bordered by thick brush and high grass.  It wound through the pines and oaks the town was named for.  Occasionally it opened out into a grassy glade, but always the forest eventually closed back around me.  I walked as briskly as I could for half an hour without seeing or hearing anything unusual.  My heart was beating rapidly, but I was enjoying myself.  I was closing in on a story that no one else believed existed, trying to solve a mystery that only I recognized. 

The trail sloped slightly upward into a grove of cedars.  The air was clean and fresh and the leaves were brilliant green.  Great old logs and trunks were evident here and there.   On one of these I spotted a pine cone, although the nearest pine tree was fifty yards distant.  Someone must have put it there; maybe one of the two hikers I had seen, maybe someone else.  I stopped to listen, but heard nothing but the wind and a few crows calling far in the distance.  I knew I was being careless, but years of stumpshooting wouldn’t let me leave such an obvious target unmolested.

I took an arrow from the quiver, nocked it, aimed at the pine cone, and let the string flow off my fingers.  It sailed high by a few inches and swicked into the ground.  I pulled another arrow from the quiver and pierced the pinecone through, sending it flying several feet, still impaled by the arrow.  I smiled.  Not too bad for someone sick and out of shape.

I stepped over brush and limbs and retrieved the arrows, pulling the pine cone loose and tossing it away.  I sat down on the log to rest for a moment before I went on.  The path I was following went through the cedar grove into an unusually thick growth of ground cover.  Beyond that, there was more forest, dark and brooding.  What would I find there?  A hunting lodge?  A logging trail?  Maybe a swamp or small lake.  It seemed impossible to think that there could be houses, farms, or civilization of any kind way out here, yet there must be something; Clarence had hinted at it when he told me about the farmers who had once peopled these woods.  I figured that as long as there was a path to follow, I would keep on.

I had been sitting quietly enough to hear the wind wafting through the tops of the cedars, but now I heard something else—the rustle of leaves.  It was coming from behind a huge cedar maybe twenty feet from where I sat; too quiet a sound for a human to make but too loud for the wind.  I slowly stood up and peered intently in the direction of the sound, but what I saw made my skin shiver down to my very cells.  It was a rattlesnake, larger around than my forearm, slithering slowly forward.  When it sensed my presence, it stopped, raised its head, and threw out its tongue like a tiny flame.  Its tail rattled like maraca. 

An icy fear in my belly froze me solid for a few precious seconds.  But I shook it off; my time in Baghdad—where every step outside the safe zones was a step into danger—had prepared me for fear.  I knew that if a snake that size struck me, I would never make it back to my truck.  The cedar was an old one, with dozens of low-hanging limbs, but I could see the snake clearly through a break in the foliage.  I watched it coil itself up slowly while, at the same time, I reached out for an arrow.  It had only a target point and there was no time to reach into my fannypack and change it out for a broadhead.  It would have to do.  It occurred to me as I slowly and quietly nocked the arrow, that I had been preparing for this shot all my adult life, that all my trophies and accomplishments meant nothing if I wasn’t equal to this moment.  This was for the entire wheel of cheese. 

Very slowly, I pulled the string to my anchor point and sighted down the arrow, hoping the snake wouldn’t sense the movement and strike.  But just before the arrow rolled off my fingers the rattler’s head came up a few more inches.  I released the arrow and jumped sideways with every ounce of strength I had left, trying to get the log I had been sitting on between me and the snake.  Too late I realized that my foot was caught on a root or vine, making me lose both my balance and my direction.  The last thing I saw was the end of the log coming toward me like a truck toward a bicycle.

Sometime later I was roused to consciousness by a sound I hadn’t heard since that morning in the Baghdad zoo—a soft whinny.  The top of my head hurt like someone had buried a hatchet in my skull.  I made an effort and opened my eyes but everything was blurred and red.  But there, towering miles above me stood a gray horse.  It was looking at me curiously, cautiously with its very large, brown eyes.  The horse seemed to be asking me questions I didn’t know the answer to.  I tried to raise my head, to reach out and touch the horse, but the pain made me pass out again.

The next time I woke up it was in a hospital bed.  My head still ached, but not as much as before.  I raised a hand and felt my head wrapped in bandages.  I was more than a little groggy, and heavy with sedation.  I was thirsty, though.  And hungry.  “Hey!” I called, but the word came out slurred and made me a little dizzy.  The response came almost at once from a lanky figure who was slumped in a chair in a corner of the dim room.

“I’m here, Sue-Ann.”

“Clarence?”

The worry on Clarence’s face was obvious.  “Hey, Sue-Ann,” he said.  “How’re you doin?”

“I don’t know.  Where am I?”

“County hospital.”

“How did I get here?”

“I drove you.”

“You?”

“I saw your car parked out back of the market.  When you didn’t show up after an hour or so, I figured you’d gotten a burr in your bra about that goat and gone in the woods lookin for somethin.  God’s gonads, Sue-Ann.  What did you expect to find out there?”

Then memories began flooding in: the path, the couple with the backpacks, the clearing with the circle of blood, the . . . “Clarence!  There was a rattlesnake, I shot at it but . . . I don’t remember any more.  Ohhh,” I moaned, “What happened to my head?”

“You conked your coconut on a log and sliced the top of your scalp open.  They had to shave off some of your hair to put in stitches.  I found the snake, though.  Somebody’d put an arrow smack through its mouth and nailed it to a tree.  It was as dead as I’ve ever seen a snake.” 

“I hit it?” I asked happily.  The dizziness was wearing off.                                                                                                                                                                                                            

“I should smile you did,” he replied.  “Darned arrow was stuck so deep into the trunk that I had to screw the point off and leave it there.  I’ve got your bow and stuff in the car.  Got the snake, too—I’ll give you ten bucks for the skin.  But don’t tell me you went out there rattlesnake huntin.”

“No.  You guessed right about the burr.  I was trying to find out who put that goat in your dumpster.”

“Now, Sue-Ann, we talked about that . . .”

I tried to sit up, but it made my head ache more and I settled down again into the pillow.  “But Clarence,” I told him softly, trying to keep my head from pounding with excitement, “I found the place where they killed the goat.  And I saw two people; one was a guy with long dark hair and the other was a strawberry blonde girl .  Youngish.  Wait,” I continued, trying to think rationally through the pain and whatever drugs they had given me, “If you followed me out on that trail, you must have seen them.”

Clarence looked blank.  “Sorry, Sue-Ann.  I didn’t see nobody.”

“But that’s not possible.” I began, thinking rapidly.  “Unless . . . unless maybe they came out before you went in.”