Wide Open (33 page)

Just out of Hallie’s reach, Dell drifted. Drifted, and looked at her. Actually looked at her.

“I know what I’m doing,” Hallie said.

She said it out loud, said it like Dell could hear her, like she’d understand. She reached out her hand one more time. Dell reached out and took it.

Good-bye
.

Martin screamed.

*   *   *

“Hallie.”

Hallie was cold. And her ass was wet.

And oh my god, her head hurt like fire. She groaned.

“Hallie.”

She opened her eyes. At least she thought she did, but there was something wrong with them. Because she appeared to be looking at the world through a waterfall. Or a rainbow. Yellow and blue and green like prisms and raindrops.

“Can you sit up?”

“I—yeah—oh crap.” The stabbing white-hot railroad spike was back. Right through her skull, right down her spine. She tried sitting up again. The second time was easier. Not because the pain had lessened. Because she was getting better at pushing it away. “What happened?” she asked.

“It was like—wow!”

That couldn’t be Brett, though it sounded like her. Brett didn’t say
wow
.

And besides if that was Brett, then—

“Are you all right?”

Boyd
.

“You shouldn’t be walking around,” she said, still blinking furiously because she needed to see, damnit! And not tiny fucking rainbows either.

Boyd touched her arm, and she almost recoiled because he felt as if he were on fire. Then she realized that it was her, that she was so cold, he felt like a furnace.

“What have you done to me?”

Hallie struggled to turn her head. She could barely make out Martin on the ground, sobbing. His hands covered his face, as if he was trying to hide. “My god, what have you done?”

A siren echoed in the distance, though it sounded in Hallie’s head like a giant Chinese gong.

“It was—” Hallie heard something in Boyd’s voice she hadn’t heard before. Wonder? Fear? A combination of the two? “We could see it, Hallie. It was as if, while the magic ran through them, the ghosts were all alive. Visible.”

“Dell?”

“I don’t know,” Boyd said. “I can’t see them anymore. I can’t see her. I’m sorry.”

Hallie closed her eyes. With them open, her head hurt worse, which she wouldn’t have believed possible. It felt as if she’d forgotten how to see, as if she were seeing the world from outside.

She could hear Martin talking behind her. “I was a god,” he said. “I was a god. And you—you destroyed me.”

Hallie turned toward the sound of his voice.

“No,” she said. “The dead collect their own price, you sorry son of a bitch.”

37

Hallie hadn’t seen a ghost for three weeks.

They’d been gone by the time Ole and the others had arrived. Martin had confessed right there, in the middle of the cemetery in a rambling long monologue that included his grandmother’s entire history including two husbands and three dead children, every woman he’d killed, everyone he’d thought of killing, every detail of his magic and the rituals behind them.

Ole had looked at Hallie like somehow he suspected the whole thing was her fault, but he’d let her go in the ambulance with Boyd, long drive to Rapid City while the EMTs told Hallie how she should have done things, and Hallie blinked and shivered, wrapped in three blankets, and held Boyd’s hand. And breathed.

They kept her overnight at the hospital, but they couldn’t tell her what was wrong with her eyes. By morning, her eyesight was more or less back to normal and her headache was gone. Until she walked out the front door of the hospital, and it slammed into her like a pile driver and knocked her to her knees.

She finally got back to the ranch three days later, days that had involved intense back-and-forth conversations between Hallie, her doctors, and the army, who wanted her back, but not if she couldn’t stand up. They extended her leave five more days and told her to report to Fort Leonard Wood at the end of that time for a complete physical.

There were no ghosts when she’d come back to the ranch, her father out of the hospital and coming home with her. Brett came over an hour after she got home, like she’d had a trip wire installed on the drive. They sat together on the back porch, and Brett made Hallie tell her from the beginning about ghosts and Martin and weather magic and how Lorie had died.

“It seems so … unlikely,” she said when Hallie finished.

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t so,” Hallie said.

Brett shook her head. “I don’t like it,” she said.

“I don’t think events care whether you like them or not,” Hallie said.

“Huh. Yeah.” A pause as they looked across the prairie. The sky was cold and gray. It would snow soon. Brett looked over at Hallie, gave a quick dazzling grin. “Maybe I’ll just remember it differently,” she said. And if anyone could do that, it’d be Brett.

Hallie had tried to visit Dell’s grave a couple of days later. Because if the ghosts were gone, she should be able to do it, right? But the minute she’d stepped across the boundary, they’d begun to rise, ghost upon ghost upon ghost. Not
her
ghosts, maybe, but still there, reminders of a past Hallie didn’t even know and had no part of. She’d stood in the parking lot for a long time, wanting to go in, to stand in front of Dell’s grave like she would if the world were normal.

She thought of the time her father’d been gone to Brookings for some continuing education thing and a fierce blizzard had swept in out of Canada. She and Dell had spent three hours getting the horses into the barn and finding the dog, who was trying to shelter in the lee of the equipment shed. Between the equipment shed and the house, Hallie’d lost Dell and crawled on her hands and knees back to the shed, knew she’d never find her and headed back to the house to find Dell on the back porch with a rope ready to head out after her.

“What were you thinking, you dumb ass?” Dell had said. “You know I’m always fine.”

I’ll always be here,
she’d written in Hallie’s yearbook.

And she always would.

But not the way she’d meant it. Or Hallie’d always figured.

She made one more attempt to enter the cemetery, but the old ghosts were still there. They weren’t malicious, didn’t know they were stopping her. They just wanted someone to remember.

Jennie had come to the ranch two days after Hallie and her father had come back. Hallie met her in the front yard where Jennie hugged her tight, which made Hallie uncomfortable as hell, though Jennie didn’t notice.

“Because you saved me, Hallie,” she said. “And if you ever need anything. Anything. You tell me. I’ll do it. Anything.” Then she went away, which Hallie couldn’t help but think was somewhat of a relief.

After that, she packed up her things and left her father standing on the porch and drove herself to the airport. Not that he wouldn’t have done it or Brett. But she was afraid and she didn’t like being afraid and she didn’t want to talk to anyone about it or even tell them why. But the headaches weren’t going away. They were like being hit in the head with a sledgehammer, and she was getting them, still, two or three times a day. They didn’t last more than a couple of minutes, but she was down. Out. Nonfunctional for the entire two minutes, like someone threw a lightning bolt into her brain.

She was pretty sure she and the army were finished. And she didn’t want anyone to tell her they were sorry.

She got back to the ranch on a Tuesday. She wasn’t entirely finished with the army yet—or they weren’t finished with her—because cutting someone loose took reams of paperwork and weeks of time. But they had nothing for her to do and nothing to do for her, and someone decided she was due thirty days’ leave anyway and signed the papers and tossed her back.

She found her father down behind the horse barn, pulling the wheel off an old ATV. He dropped it when he saw her. “Got it at auction last week,” he said with a wave at the four-wheeler. “Better than nothing.”

Hallie thought of all the things he’d lost—at least three tractors, half his field equipment, twenty years’ worth of tools.

“I’m sorry you got dragged into this mess,” she said.

“What mess? That bastard Weber? The only thing I’m pissed about is you didn’t ask me to help.”

He folded his arms across his chest, and Hallie could see that he really was pissed. Which, he probably had a right, because it was his daughter who’d died and he cared about things like that, cared like hell, no matter what anyone else saw or thought.

“So, you going to be here for a while?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly.

“Plenty of work.” He turned back to the ATV, shoved a crowbar into the gap between the tire and the wheel. “If you stay.”

Hallie knew he would never actually say one way or the other, would never act as if he wanted her to stay, even if he did.

She’d visited Boyd a couple of times at the hospital up in Rapid City that first week before she left, but in the meantime, he’d been released and she didn’t know where he’d gone. She actually called the sheriff’s office.

Patty, the backup dispatcher and an old friend of Hallie’s mother, answered the phone.

“He’s on leave. Ole told him not to come back for at least three weeks. And then he’ll be on desk duty for a while, which, in this county is boring, let me tell you. Plus he blew up a car. Ole was plenty mad about that.”

“He didn’t blow up a—”

“He calls in every couple of days,” Patty said. “I can tell him you were asking.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hallie said.

Tom Hauser and Jake Javinovich and half a dozen others came out two Saturdays in a row with a couple of big trucks to haul away the remains of the equipment shed. The insurance agent and a claims adjuster had been there two days after the fire and promised Hallie’s father a check was coming.

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” he’d said.

Before Hallie left for Fort Leonard Wood, she’d been hauling old equipment out of the wreckage when Jake came over to work beside her. For a good while, they’d worked in silence. Then, pretty much right out of the blue, Jake said, “Sometimes, you know, sometimes … I see things that people tell me aren’t there.” He stopped as if he had to think for a minute about what those things were. “Not people, okay? But … fog in graveyards and—once in Rapid City, I saw a dog, a dead dog, get up and walk around. I mean, the dog was still lying there. I could see that. But then, there was this … other, all just walking around. It’s been since … after Karen, since the car accident.” He looked at Hallie then. “I almost died, you know. Not like I stopped breathing or nothing. But I saw the Reaper. I talked to him. And you don’t come back from that like nothing happened.”

A sharp pain, like a needle, skewered Hallie through her left eye when Jake said
Reaper
. Another headache. Because that wasn’t what happened to her. She’d remember that.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, though it even hurt to talk.

“People talk,” Jake said. “About what they think happened between you and Pete and Martin. Not that anyone knows what happened. Or believes it if they do know. Or even really knows … or even think they know.” He stopped, wound up in his own tangled words. He inhaled sharply. “I’m saying that maybe I know a little what it’s like. If you ever wanted to talk. If … that would help.”

“Yeah,” Hallie said, didn’t even add
okay,
because when had anything ever been helped by talking?

She didn’t miss the ghosts.

She didn’t.

Besides, she had to figure out what she was going to do now. Stay and ranch with her father? Go to college? Sitting in a classroom was as unappealing as ever, but she was going to have to do something. Brett had been talking up psychology yesterday, and Tom Hauser was trying to convince her to get EMT certified and join the ambulance crew.

“That doesn’t actually pay anything, Tom,” Hallie said.

“Yeah.” He’d laughed. “Welcome to the prairie.”

On her third day back, down by the horse barns, unsaddling Scout, because now that there were no ghosts around her, the horses let her near them again, she saw Boyd coming down the lane. He looked pale and thin, and every bit as young as she remembered. He had an aluminum cane with a black rubber base, and he was limping, though not badly. She thunked the saddle down on the fence rail, slipped the bridle off Scout’s head, and waited for Boyd to reach her.

He was dressed as only Boyd would dress: loose-fitting jeans with a crease down each leg, boots that looked like he’d taken them new out of the box that morning, a red denim shirt all crisp with knifelike edges.

“How are you?” she said, leaning against the top fence rail.

“You never gave me my gun back,” he said in lieu of greeting, “Ole’s mad.”

“Ole’s always mad,” she said. “What else does he have to do?”

She couldn’t stop smiling, and she didn’t know why. He looked tired, but better than the last time she’d seen him, lying in that hospital bed in Rapid City.

He reached up and put his hand over hers, where it rested on the top fence rail. They stood like that for a moment or two, not talking.

Like idiots, Hallie thought, because did they really have nothing to talk about anymore?

“I was going to buy you breakfast once,” Boyd finally said.

“It’s a little late now,” Hallie told him. She hopped the fence and picked up the saddle and bridle.

Boyd laid a hand on the sleeve of her shirt. “I could buy you dinner,” he said.

“You’re on.”

She let him make his own way back up the lane, while she went ahead of him into the horse barn to put her tack up. When she came back out to meet him, there was a moment when the low-slanting sun flashed brilliant against an old aluminum horse trough tipped up against the barn. Hallie looked away. When she looked back, Boyd had nearly reached her.

And behind him was another ghost.

“Goddamnit,” Hallie said.

She was pretty sure she’d seen that ghost before, forgotten in the scramble of Dell and Lorie and all the women Martin had killed. She was young, maybe younger than Hallie, maybe the same age, with short blond hair. She was dressed in black and staring right at Hallie, like she saw her, like Dell had at the end, like Hallie was the Thing that kept her anchored here on Earth.