Voodoo Moon (19 page)

And then the train was crashing through the tunnel the trestle had created. And the steel bridge jerked and swayed and bobbled as the roaring train seemed to explode beneath my feet. The noise of engine and steel and speed obliterated everything else.

I stuck my arms out for balance, the way I would on a surfboard. But it didn't help much.

I was being tipped off the chord.

The creek bed was sandy, true. But the fall was a good twenty-five feet. Far enough to break more than a few bones, no matter how gentle the landing.

The noise was starting to spook me now. I was inside it. There was no escape. I had one of those paranoid flashes that I'd somehow crossed over into another realm. And I was in this realm forever.

I did the only thing I could. I dropped to the chord, straddling it like a horse bent over and hung on.

I forgot about Tandy. I just clung to the steel.

It was a rough ride, so rough that a couple of times I wished I was wearing a jock.

The train was one of those spectral mythic unending ones you see only on the prairies, long as a country mile, and even rolling at eighty, ninety miles an hour, taking forever to pass by.

The whistle again. And the cold dead air created by the cars as they charged through the night. And the different shapes of the cars—boxlike, cylindrical, open and flat. I even glimpsed a hobo sleeping in a gondola, though God only knew how you could sleep in the belly of such a beast as this one.

I glanced up once and saw the moon and a kind of awe gripped me momentarily, all the things that had happened on this little nowhere planet beneath the moon, before the Ice Age when this prairie didn't even exist, and then water eventually becoming landmass, and since that time so many, many epochs and eras for the moon to indifferently note, culminating in this era of screeching train and girl with psychic power. The moon didn't give any more of a damn about us than it had the Vikings or the Indians or the pioneers from New Hampshire and Rhode Island, or the hairy, forlorn, utterly baffled creatures who'd trod these lands so many millions of years ago we don't even know what to call them.

And then it was gone. And there was this strange quality in the air called silence. And my first reaction was not to recognize it for what it was. My entire body had been shaken by the thunder of the train.

After a time, I heard the night birds and the coyotes and the horses in the hills. And feeling, human feeling, came back to my limbs and my crotch, and into my mind, too.

I looked for Tandy and didn't see her.

T
he creek bed was pale and shadowy in the moonlight. I followed her footprints westward. You could smell mud and wet dead leaves from the recent rains.

I listened for her, too. Light as she was, she had to make at least minimal noise as she moved.

I didn't want to call out for her. She might be in a trance. My voice could destroy whatever she was learning.

The creek narrowed at one point and became little more than a path. I had to duck beneath low-hanging branches. Moonlight glinted off beer cans and pop cans angled out from the sandy creek bed. A possum switched its lengthy tail, watching me.

In the tree-broken silver glow of the moon, standing perfectly still on a hill, fingers touching her temples, eyes crazed and raised skyward, she stood like some piece of mad statuary, a benign prairie Medusa, slight as a child, frail as an autumn flower, a song of some kind coming from her lips, or what I mistook as a song, at first, anyway. It was really a moan, I realized, as I climbed the bank and started up the small hill toward her. In the sudden wind, the trees around her bent branches toward her, as if in supplication. Her crazed gaze was unwavering, and the moan grew only deeper and more disturbing.

I stopped several feet from her. I didn't want to scare her. She was completely unaware of me.

And then she started moving. There was a moment where her movement was almost comic, melodramatic and stagy as a zombie sequence in a bad, old late-night TV movie. Her arms weren't outstretched before her and she didn't plod as she walked, but still there was something overwrought about her, and I even wondered guiltily if she might not be faking all this for my benefit.

She answered my question by pausing halfway down the hill and throwing up.

Moaning ended. Eyes became real and focused again. And the throwing up was all too real.

She sank to her knees to do it, and I rushed to her and knelt next to her and held her as she finished her work.

And then I recalled another night. The first murder case we'd worked on together. Near the time when the image came clear to her and she was able to lead us to the buried body. Vomiting, then. Inexplicably. Me holding her.

Now she said, "I didn't get it."

"Get what?"

"The location."

"A body?"

"Yes. A child. An infant."

"Oh, shit." A child, let alone an infant, is always the worst to find. It changes you. You can never quite look at the human heart the same way again. In a very real way, you're no longer a virgin. In my FBI years, I'd lost my cherry early on. I'd worked a case in which a child had been mutilated and then burned. But Tandy still had her virginity. Until tonight, anyway. "Anything I can do?"

"No. Just please don't talk. In fact, how about walking back to the car? I'll come back when I'm through. Maybe—maybe something will come to me yet."

I touched her arm. "You've already accomplished something, Tandy. You've located a body."

"No, I've
seen
a body. In the old days—before I ruined my gift—I would have known where it is by now." Then, frowning, "Listen to me, Robert. There's a dead child somewhere out here and all I can talk about is losing my gift. Me
me
me
. Laura's right. I'm not better than she is. I just hide it better
."
Shaking her head. "And anyway, maybe this is all just fantasy. Maybe I'm just feeding myself images. Maybe there's no body of any kind around a trestle bridge."

I knew there was nothing I could say.

She was right. She needed to be left alone.

I
walked back to the car. I saw a doe on the way, standing at the edge of a shallow woods. A couple more weeks, the hunters would be out here blasting away. Maybe I'd seen
Bambi
too many times when I was a kid, but somehow hunting with guns has always struck me as singularly unfair. Maybe we need to teach the deer how to shoot back. Even things up a little.

I sat in my car listening to a National Public Radio story about the state of tabloid journalism in England. Impossible as it sounded, the Brits were even sleazier at the tab game than we were.

The cell phone rang. I once saw a cartoon where a man was out in the woods in walking shorts and backpack taking a pee in some bushes and talking to his cell phone at the same time.

I picked up.

"Laura gave me your number."

"Who is this?"

"It's Noah Chandler. Who the hell do you think it is?"

"You sound different."

Pause. "We need to talk."

I realized why I hadn't recognized the voice at first. He was so upset, his voice had gone up half an octave. "What about?"

"You know yesterday when you accused me of being the one doing the shooting out at the old asylum?"

"Yes."

"Well, you were right. It was me."

"Why the hell were you shooting at us?"

"Publicity, of course."

Of course.

Pause. "It's getting out of hand."

"What's getting out of hand?"

"The whole thing—the plan."

"I wish I knew what the hell you were talking about, Chandler."

"When're you getting back to the motel?"

"I'm not sure. Hour, hour and a half maybe. Why?"

"I'll watch for you. I'll come to your room."

"So I don't even get a hint?"

Pause. "Paul
Renard
? The guy that Rick Hennessy claims to be possessed by?"

"Yeah."

"That's what
Kibbe
the private eye was working on."

"So you knew
Kibbe
?"

"Yeah," Chandler said. "Pretty well, in fact."

"So he was out here because of you?"

"Because of me and Paul
Renard
."

"Paul
Renard's
dead."

"Maybe not."

"What the
hell're
you talking about? He jumped off a cliff into rapids. According to the locals, nobody could have survived those rapids."

"Well,
Kibbe
and I were working on evidence that
Renard
is still alive and that he's come back to town here." Then, "I've got to go. Somebody's coming. Like I said, Payne, I'll watch for you."

M
ost homicides are cut-and-dried. No big surprises along the way. You do the legwork, you interview enough friends of the deceased, you get a clear picture of the deceased's life and thus a pretty good sense of who killed him and why. And then you keep eliminating suspects until your best bet comes along.

What you don't get very often is the possibility that a man long thought dead turns about to be alive.

I.e., the one and only voodoo child, Paul
Renard
.

I was still thinking about
Renard
when I saw Tandy come up on top of the field from the bank below. She was moving slowly, her shoulders slumped. The news obviously wasn't good.

When she reached the car, she opened the door and dropped into the seat. "It's all my own fault."

"What is?"

"That I lost my gift. I pissed it away trying to be rich and famous."

"No more images?"

"Of the infant, yes. Of where the infant was, no."

"We can come back tomorrow."

"No, I'm done."

I touched the back of her head gently, cupping it in my palm. She said, "You're such a gentle lover. I really appreciate that."

"Yeah. Like the time I knocked us out of bed and you cut your head on the end table."

"You were just a little horned up that night. But most of the time you're really nice
."
She shook her head and stared down at her hands. "Shit. Shit." Then, "Shit."

"You need a meal and a few glasses of wine."

"I need a lot more than that."

I decided not to tell her about Chandler's call. Information that she didn't need right now. But I did ask, "How did you find out about the Rick Hennessy case, anyway?"

"Rick Hennessy's lawyer."

"Oh."

She looked up at me. "How come you want to know?"

"I'm just trying to find out all about
Kibbe
."

"Oh. I guess that makes sense. I mean, Noah did what he usually does to check out a prospective case. He called the editor of the local newspaper and the editor told him everything. Faxed him a bunch of stuff, too. At first, I wasn't very interested. I thought it sounded like bullshit. All the stuff about
Renard
and possession. I'm very leery of that sort of thing. But after I read the faxes, I got interested. How Rick started dressing like him and getting into voodoo and supernatural things. I thought it'd be an interesting story from a legal standpoint."

"So Noah came out here?"

"Noah and Laura. They used it as kind of a makeup vacation. They'd broken up again. You know, the marriage thing as usual. They're always breaking up. Noah has been a pretty boy all his life. He isn't used to women turning him down. Plus, emotionally, he's a very hungry guy. He's kind of a vampire. He wants to take her whole life over. Doesn't want her to think or do anything that he doesn't approve of in advance. I can see why he was married three times. And that's why he and Laura always get into it."

"Because she wouldn't marry him?"

"Right. And he was getting violent again. He even hit her a couple of times. He'd go on a binge, smashing things, ransacking rooms. He's got a terrible temper. She really does love him. But her first marriage just spooked her. The way Bob drank and everything. She doesn't want to go through that again. I know she's arrogant and cold, but she's a true-blue type. She's always faithful to her men, even when they treat her badly. She intimidates them, I think. They're afraid they're going to lose all that beauty
."
She smiled sadly. "It's like having your fortune taken away from you, I suppose."

"But they patched things up and came out here?"

"Right. And sort of laid out how the show would go. The production company really started getting cheap with travel when the ratings started to fall. They said they wanted me to come out here and shoot a little 'test footage, as they called it. And when they saw it, they'd decide how much money they wanted to spend on covering the trial."