She sat again at the table and sneezed at the musty-armpit scent of wild phlox. None of the doors or windows was open. The latches were locked. The aroma must have wafted in from some unknown gap.
The door to the nook on the landing, built as a discreet shortcut for kitchen staff, slammed shut. She flinched. “Did you hear that?”
Dave was focused on checking the ammunition in his rifle, his long legs stretched into a giant V, his feet nudging hers under the table, sliding to either side. No room for them otherwise.
“What?” He shoved the bolt and closed the breech.
The grandfather clock in the foyer chimed five times. Relentless as always in its declarations of the wrong time.
Dave clicked off the rifle’s safety and laid the gun before him. “Are you…okay?” His hesitancy dispelled any illusions of safety.
She half-smiled. “You’re a great father and a wonderful husband. I want you to know that.”
He didn’t meet her eyes, only glanced away from the Winchester in her general direction. “I’m a lump.” He lowered his head into his hands.
The grandfather clock chimed again, one stroke this time, as if to underscore his defeat. “Remember when we first bought the house?” she said quickly, to resurrect his spirits.
“No one else wanted it because the neighbors said it was haunted.” Rachel laughed the kind of laugh that gets caught in the throat and turns into a sigh. “We thought we were getting such a great deal. We should’ve listened.”
“It was gorgeous. The rooms are massive,” he said lifting his head. “You really liked it.”
“Yes,” said Rachel. “I did. And empty of everything except an old clock that never knows what fucking time it is.”
She glared at the old Victorian timepiece. It stood seven feet high, brassy moon-face cold and foreboding. There was a stain on the wood surrounding the face that wouldn’t come out despite scouring and oiling—perhaps blood? She wished now they’d donated it to the church thrift shop. Every few days Dave would open its case and set the weights for the chimes, yet they never worked when they were supposed to. Out of turn, out of time, the clock seemed to be speaking, of its own volition, of their future.
There’d been a similar clock in the house of the first murder victim. It alone had been left standing upright in the middle of the room, the rest of the furniture toppled and misplaced all around it. Its face turned to the wall as its owner’s body swung from bicycle chains dangling beside it, a hole in the floor yawning above it, a rainbow of blood spanning the wall it faced, shocked silent as a witness to murder.
Sheriff Wise drove one hundred yards east down Burnt Chestnut to the home of Revel Petty. Once a medical equipment repairman, Mr. Petty had retired to become an arborist five years ago. He’d been murdered twenty-nine days after H.V. Ewell.
Petty’s home was known to locals as Daisyland, or just the yellow house, and was famous for the way its front garden glittered in summer. And for the way the jewelry of passersby would tug toward it if Petty were working on his magnetic generator. He’d also been inventing a form of translucent concrete, and had confided to his neighbors that his cityscapes would one day be springing up like crystal villages.
At Harper’s Pharmacy, Zebulonians and the occasional tourist could purchase postcards of Daisyland, photographed on the Fourth of July. In the picture a giant flag flapped in the wind above the yellow mailbox, its stars and stripes caught in mid-ripple by Mr. Harper’s digital camera. White daisies and yellow black-eyed Susans lined the crescent shell drive, filled the flowerbeds, and exploded out of each canary-yellow box hung beneath the spotless windows of the 1920s Sears bungalow.
But that was just a postcard. Now, it was barely spring; and all the wishing in the world wouldn’t make it summer, or bring back Harmon Venable Ewell or Revel Petty. Faded yellow crocuses had tentatively poked their heads through the loam bordering the circular drive. A belt of jonquils lined the otherwise-dormant beds in front of the house. Some blew yellow trumpets to Heaven, while others leaned together, like mourners holding each other upright. Ancient magnolias stood sentinel around the house, their precocious blooms blushing cream in the sun’s early morning rays. Someone had just mowed a lawn and the cut-grass aroma drifted through the car’s window. It tickled Wise’s nose and got him sneezing.
The sheriff pulled into the marl driveway, sun-bleached clamshells crackling beneath his tires. He switched off the engine and sat behind the wheel a moment, his ample belly pressing the steering wheel. At last, he reached into the back seat, grabbed a bomber jacket and got out. A warming wind puffed between damp magnolias, carrying salt scent from the Atlantic, which lay three miles east of Zebulon. He still detected a scent of burnt wood, but there were no campfires, nor were there people around to start them.
In spite of the unseasonable warmth, he zipped up the coat to his neck, flipped up his collar, took ski gloves out of his pockets and forced his fingers into the tightly padded spaces. He felt hotter than a whore in church, but knew it wouldn’t last.
He wished for about the tenth time he had another deputy or two for the postings. But the county could afford only three. He’d have to make do. Time was working against him. The first order of business was to protect the Sheltons. The second, to figure out the killer’s motive in order to find him—preferably before dark.
The locking mechanism of Daisyland’s sun-yellow front door had been obliterated the night of the murder, as if the killer held a grudge against all things mechanical, including Petty. When Wise pressed his shoulder against the door, it slowly creaked open. He stepped over the jamb, hesitated. “Sweet Jesus, give me strength,” he mumbled. He squatted and reexamined the busted-up yellow door, as a doctor looks over his patient. The hinges groaned with each touch.
The knob had been battered off by something blunt—perhaps the poll of an axe. For the first time he noticed a trace of soot. Not a print, which he could’ve dusted, but an ashy smudge on the door at eye level. Perhaps one of the deputies had been smoking. Then he remembered: everyone at the station had quit and had taken up gum chewing or Krispy Kremes instead. Except Ruiz; she was too pretty to smoke, but she was hopelessly addicted, often puffing away at electronic cigarettes, or plastering herself with nicotine patches.
Wise removed the phone from his pocket and snapped a picture of the smudge, which floated on the door like a tiny cloud.
“Damn the state police,” he muttered. “Sons of bitches shouldn’t have dumped us.” He shook his head. “Hmph. Well, no time like the present.”
The sheriff stepped over a bloodstain inside the threshold.
Revel Petty had just opened the door when the sharp blade of an axe split his forehead down the middle.
There was no way this murder was the work of Steve Dix. The FBI and state police called off their dogs the night after the second murder, when Dix confessed to killing both Ewell and Petty. But the guy was a lunatic, schizoaffective, with PTSD.
“He’d confess to anything,” the sheriff had told them. “But he’s no killer.” Now Dix was being held at Middlemarch Regional Jail with all the county’s petty thieves and meth cookers. The sheriff shook his head. “Law enforcement,” he mumbled. “Damn lemmings.”
Wise leaned over the sofa, which had been pulled away from the wall. He lifted the cushions and peered into the seat, deeming it safe, free from explosives or other hidden weapons.. He sank into the softness of the foam-rubber pillows and surveyed the room. Like the furniture arrangement at H.V. Ewell’s house, the contents of Daisyland looked like a manic jumble of items at an estate sale. Revel Petty, however, had been a minimalist, except when it came to his fully equipped laboratory in the basement, and his garden. There was very little furniture. A trunk and two shelves—still packed with books on horticulture, landscaping, plant pathology, electronics and power plants—now faced the wall. A single rug, its pattern yellow corn woven into a bright orange background, was rolled up and standing on end. An oil painting of Daisylan
d done by local artist David Shelton had been torn from its frame and lay face-up in front of the hearth.
Where the painting had hung was a hole the size of a manhole cover.
Sheriff Wise sniffed at the fireplace. No ashes. No recent fire. The scent he detected in the yard had to be coming from somewhere else. He’d returned to Daisyland time and again because of the strange cold. Petty’s laboratory, just off the living room, had been brutally dismantled. Tables turned over and thrown against walls, scattered papers, collapsed shelves, shards of glass like bits and pieces of ice.
Even as he sat on the couch, the temperature around him dropped.
It wasn’t the first time he’d felt the cold breath of the inexplicable. There’d been the strange case of Maudie Pruitt’s grave, Wise’s first assignment after joining the force.
One night, as Maudie lay in bed with her sleeping husband, a spirit appeared. “Don’t go outside tonight. Death awaits you,” it’d croaked. Later, her husband had gone into the backyard in spite of her pleas. Something was after the chickens. She’d waited for a half hour, her terror escalating. Finally, she’d put on her robe and went outside to find him. The night was inky black, too black for her candle. A rabid fox rushed up to nip her heel. Three drops of blood fell to a slate footer on her garden pathway. Three weeks later, she was stark mad from rabies, then smothered to death by the doctor and nurse between two feather bed pillows, the only cure. Mr. Pruitt used the slate she’d bled on as a headstone. A hundred years later, Wise was called upon to investigate a neighbor’s complaint that the slate turned red as blood and the air turned icebox cold every time it rained.
Sitting on the couch in Petty’s house, Wise recalled standing in the wild copse of brush and trees that shielded the headstone while cedars swayed above him, whispering their sacred song. There was no rain to draw the blood from the slate that night. With his flashlight’s beam shakily focused on Maudie’s faintly engraved name, he urinated on the headstone.
“Sure, it turns red,” he’d reported back, teeth chattering. “But I can’t do nothin’ about it.”
After his encounter with Maudie’s ghost, why should Petty’s house scare him? As in the case of Maudie’s graveyard, he felt a curious absence of fear. Maybe the implications of these murders were so staggering his mind was refusing to respond.
He moved to the foot of the staircase and contemplated the icy crystals that seemed to be forming in the air before his eyes. The chill followed like a panting dog. He stood, waiting, until his breath seemed to be burning with ice. He coughed and blew it from him, then stepped out of the icy box of air and walked into the hall.
His eyes locked on his watch: thirty seconds, forty seconds, one minute. In spite of the heavy leather jacket, he was shivering in sixty seconds flat.
He pulled off a glove and stuck a bare hand out as far as it would reach, all the way through the igloo frigid cube of chilled air. His hand tingled as it slowly warmed. Yes, the damned box of cold was following him.
To hell with the state police. He turned toward the kitchen door as if he’d heard something. Yes, he had. He was certain of it. The sound of boots walking over linoleum. A faint whoosh, then a crunching sound, as if someone or something were walking away through snow.
He drew his gun and held it before him, bracing it in case he had to fire.
“Hold up there,” he shouted, and listened. If the door creaked open, he’d rush into the kitchen, pursuing the intruder. Everything by the book. If the footsteps stopped, he’d take one more step and ease into the room. The drawn gun weighed heavy in his hands. The cold came back with a vengeance, clutching at his chest and throat.
There was no sound now, except for the singing of birds in the backyard. “If you move, I’ll shoot,” he said, stepping over the threshold.
The kitchen was empty of two-legged creatures, the dawning yellow light settling on the table, the sink, the cupboard, the chairs set back at random around the room as if the sun were trying to memorize such artifacts.
“Be damned,” said the sheriff, “I know you’re in here.”
Puddles on the slate floor were beginning to ice over. The air thickened into a freezing mist. Mr. Petty’s green, enameled stove was shining with frost. In front of the refrigerator stood a column of fog that advanced a few feet, twisting like an octopus made of snowflakes, extending multiple arms.
The sheriff holstered his revolver. Let it come to me, he thought at first, but changed his mind and stepped forward. No sense in wasting time this morning by trying to set horses with such a disagreeable fellow. “Don’t figure you’re worth much.”
Pulling his collar up against the fierce freezing, the sheriff blew more ice from his lungs, moved forward, and stepped into the specter, pushing into its maw. Entombed. No sight or sound then, no movement, only his own heart beating and brain working. He pushed harder and something gave way, as if he had penetrated a wall of Jell-O.
At last, he was free, gasping, leaning on the refrigerator, watching snow fall onto the kitchen linoleum, then melt in sunlight. Reckon I’m about done here, he told himself. After resting for a few moments, he walked back into the living room and unzipped his jacket.
The furniture had levitated six inches off the floor.
“Be damned,” he muttered. “Whoever…whatever you are, I know you’re after somethin’. Don’t know what it is. Don’t reckon you’re about to tell me, either.”
Dave sat before a bare window rubbing sweaty palms onto the doeskin knee patches of his pants. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll drop dead like my dad at forty-eight. You’ll be rid of me.”
“Stop it,” Rachel said, sipping coffee at the dining room table.
“But then, who’ll splice the irrigation system to cover the back field, or play ball with the boys.”
He stared at an obese, fuzzy squirrel noshing something in its paws, bending a walnut branch to the ground. He felt an absolute need for an ‘Atta boy’ moment, but decided to go easy on his heaving sighs and operatic eye rolling. If he pushed the self-indulgence too far, Rachel would stalk away and begin one of her all-day bathing rituals.
No. He guessed she wouldn’t. Not today.
If he could coax some color into her face, they’d be better off.
“I’ve checked out Google Earth,” Rachel said. “The woods to the west of Ewell’s run from Main Street for about a half mile north to the woods. It’s wide enough to conceal two Zebulons. The killers could have camped there until dark, then hit the houses without being seen.”
“They could’ve come from the north,” said Dave.
“And cross the pasture in moonlight,” Rachel said, flatly. “This time, they’ll come from the east. The woods are smaller, but thicker, closer to the house. They might already be in there.”
“Not likely in daylight.”
“They might have scouted it out and left some tracks.”
“Maybe not,” said Dave, declining to humor her. “It’ll be all right. Sheriff Wise’ll be here soon. And the deputies to protect us.”
“Are you cold?” she asked, rubbing her arms.
“No.” He studied the street outside. Empty, except for a turkey vulture feasting on a carcass, which looked like a possum’s. A motorcycle sped by, but no sound came inside.
The sun had not yet lit the house. Traces of dew were still evaporating from the windows. In just jeans and a wife-beater shirt, no wonder she felt cold. She disdained central heating as wasteful and dirty, and only used it when the kids whined about cold feet, or when they had guests.
Dave got up to put kindling and split logs into the dining room wood stove, and then sat at the table to read the Middlemarch News.
“I’ll ride Le Pouf today if you ride Slivovitz,” she said. “We could head east, into the woods.”
“We need to go now. But Le Pouf’s a psycho,” Dave said, looking at the crime report.
“Le Pouf’s madness is the least of my worries,” Rachel said suddenly. “We can
’t leave the kids.”
“We could have the deputies scout the woods.”
“They won’t know where to look. They really can’t get through there on foot. The only way in there is on horses or dirt bikes.”
“Okay,” said Dave. “We’ll ride the game trails into the woods and the sheriff and deputies will stay here with the boys. Lev will be here too.”
A look of uncertainty settled on Rachel’s face. “I wish Aristino were still alive. He was rock-solid on the trail. He’d do anything for me.”
A mug shot of Steve Dix stared into Dave’s eyes from the newspaper page, looking bewildered. Dave squinted at the face. A total lack of comprehension. No malice. Steve Dix was not the killer.
“Last time you rode Le Pouf he put bruises all over your body. You got shaken-baby syndrome from the leaping and bucking.”
Rachel rose from the table. “I’m getting more coffee.” Soon the clatter of dishes, glasses, and pots and pans vibrated off the kitchen walls in angry cacophony.
“Rach,” he said. “Everything okay?”
“There’s nothing left in the pot,” she called back.
“Then make some more.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the picture of Dix. The simple face of a child, in spite of his age.
“But it was half full! I’m sure of it. I brewed twelve cups.”
“Obviously not.”
“At least a couple ought to be left.”
Something was wrong in her voice; too much insistence.
“Maybe Lev had some,” Dave said. Their assistant usually entered the house by the kitchen door. He had free run of the downstairs and often came in for coffee or protein shakes.
“Maybe something else came and drank the coffee,” she said. This time making a joke, it seemed to him.
“Not funny. Probably evaporated.”
He heard her start singing something from Les Misérables, faintly, then the rattle of coffee beans taken from the cabinet.
A grinder roared. Water poured into a coffee maker.
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