“Hands ache,” said Wise. “Barometric pressure’s takin’ a nose dive.”
“It’s been a long day, Sheriff,” said Crockett. “Mine aren’t cooperating either.”
“Lev, you stay here with the Sheltons,” the sheriff said.
“All right.” Lev unsnapped his rain slick.
“You ready, Creed?” said the sheriff.
“Ready.”
“Let’s go.”
• • • •
The wind was a touch lighter now and the thunder calmed, but from the north a storm was approaching. A gray front of rain-cooled air formed a flat shelf cloud, plowing under the warmer moist air. In a short time the sky would be black and the space between the cloud and the earth would be filled with water, as if it were poured from a hidden big dipper, now tipping in darkness.
Water streaming from his face, Wise stood frozen, Creed and the deputies beside him. The tarp’s loose corner was beating in the wind violently, pounding at the earth in frustration, Leveaux still gone.
Wise roared, over the tumult of wind and rain. “Oddest thing is, three of the corners are still in place.”
Creed nodded, cocking his rifle.
“Guess he couldn’t’a crawled outta that one corner,” shouted the Sheriff.
“Nobody could’a pulled him out, either,” said Ruiz, gazing at the sheriff like a child looking to her daddy for answers.
Creed snorted. “I’ll tell you what we have left,” he said, barely making himself heard. “Somebody uncovered the body and then hauled it away for some reason. Then came back to flatten the tarp for no reason. After which he put cinderblocks on three of the corners, but not the fourth, for no reason.”
“You think so, do you?” said the sheriff.
“No, I don’t.”
Wise walked around the flapping blue sheet, focusing his Surefire C2 on the muddy ground. Creed and Ruiz pulled out their flashlights, Ruiz following in the sheriff’s path, Creed walking a circle outside of it.
“It’s impossible to find evidence in these conditions,” said Ruiz.
“Got something here,” shouted Creed, focusing his beam on a small area devoid of grass.
The deputy and the sheriff joined him. Two footprints were plainly visible in the mud. “Leveaux’s,” said Crockett.
“Not unless he can walk around with his head burst open and his face smashed flat,” said the sheriff.
“Maybe he took the tractor,” Creed said, dryly.
The tractor was gone. The sheriff and Deputy Crockett looked around, the beams of their flashlights crossing and re-crossing lines of rain.
Creed stomped northward, his flickering light straight ahead, as if he already knew where he was going. “There’re some tire tracks back there headed in this direction,” Creed called over a shoulder.
The sheriff muttered, “Deputy Crockett, post yourself here at the tarp.”
Creed was just the sort of man to walk off by himself when coordinated action was called for. The sort of man who’d get himself shot or axed, leaving others responsible, feeling guilty. Wise hulked forward, spitting out rain. Deputy Ruiz tagged after, as timid as Creed was heedless. Creed seemed to surge with a joy that drove his legs forward, speeding them up as if they were afraid of being caught.
Ribbons of lightning jagged down stepladders of sky and lit the tree line to the north. Thunder followed in a string of booms as lightning struck again. Wise saw the tractor roll into a stand of scrub bush and Scotch pine at the edge of the woods and disappear.
Creed took off rabbit-fast. Deputy Ruiz moved ahead of Wise, looking back, as if hoping to be told to stop, and then loped after Creed when the sheriff waved her forward. Wise walked, flashlight in one hand, rifle in the other. He’d never shot a man during his entire career as sheriff. Maybe the time had come. If, in fact, whatever was driving the tractor could be shot—if the thing at the wheel was a man.
The trees lost substance in the driving rain beneath a tornado sky. The weight of his legs was crippling as he struggled to lift them, the suck of the mud felt as if it were quicksand. By the time he reached the farm road that bordered the woods, Creed was already thrashing about in the undergrowth, a half-seen shadow. Deputy Ruiz had found a slippery ditch to lie in, rifle extended, as if she thought some doughboy of World War I had come to haunt them.
“Where’s the tractor?” Wise snapped.
“Creed will find it,” said Ruiz. The storm exploded, the field lit by overlapping flashes of lightning.
“Why are you in that damned ditch?”
“The tractor can’t go far in those woods,” said Ruiz. “Pretty soon, the guy who’s driving it might come this way.”
“My Aunt Bessie’s fanny, he will.”
“There’s a chance.”
“Get out of the ditch,” shouted Wise.
Ruiz stood, covered with mud. The sheriff looked back toward the swaying pines. There was no opening large enough for a tractor to pass through. Maybe they were in the wrong spot. He walked fifty paces east, a hundred paces west, then walked back to Ruiz, who was weeping with fear, her face distorted, her lips either struggling to stay in place, or say something.
“There’s no space for a tractor to go through,” said Wise, looking away. He sucked in a deep, wet breath and hollered, “Creed! Hey Creed! Creed! Can you hear me?”
The day darkened further, as if the sun had gone out or the earth had turned too rapidly. The downpour increased its fury. The gods have turned on all their spigots, the sheriff thought. Trying to kill us all.
“Creeeeed!” he yelled.
“What?” came an answer, punctuated by a round of thunder.
The sheriff’s flashlight caught Creed emerging from the woods twenty feet away.
“Thank you, Jesus,” the sheriff muttered, but then, from deep in a thicket, came the sound of an engine starting up. Wise and the two deputies turned toward the chug and roar.
Wise was shivering. The frozen air started at his feet, spread to his knees, raced to his waist, and rose to his chest and face like ice erupting. A crash overhead drew his eyes upward to the sky, where a vertical cloud towered over the field like a tipping anvil. He backed up a step, heart chilled but still jack hammering against his ribs. Never in his life had he been so afraid. His mind seemed to float out of his body and then hover above him, looking down, detached, curious about the mechanics of fear.
As for Ruiz, he was certain she was pissing herself. But what about Creed? His smile was gone, but the little man wasn’t shaking. He was standing, one foot ahead of the other, rifle shouldered and pointed at the woods, lining up his sights.
The sound of the tractor engine thrashed the thick evergreen wall. “How the hell did it cross over the ditch?”
“Is there room for a tractor to run in these woods?” said the sheriff.
“None at all,” said Creed.
“We’d better bolt,” said Ruiz.
“No point,” said Creed. “That thing will catch us.”
The threesome broke for the ditch and dove.
“Might as well try a shot,” said Creed, poking out the barrel of his Winchester.
The storm uttered a deep cry, one moment the roar of a waterfall spilling over rocks, the next moment the shrieking of a train accelerating over clacking tracks.
“Duck,” yelled Creed. Covering their heads with interlaced fingers, they flattened themselves at the bottom of the ditch where the water was inches deep and getting deeper. The monstrous bellowing continued. Amputated branches flew overhead, hurling leaves.
Then it was gone. The only sound remaining was the pounding of rain, filling up the trough in which they wallowed.
“A tornado. A little one,” said Ruiz, pale faced and shaking, rising to her knees.
“I doubt that,” said Creed.
“If it was a tornado,” said the sheriff. “It was driving a tractor.”
Back at the house, the deputies, the sheriff, and Creed took hasty showers. Zack sat sile
nt on the landing, listening, thinking. The sheriff put on Dave’s old clothes, unable to button the pants, but concealing the breech with an untucked shirt. Creed and Ruiz wore Zack’s T-shirts and jeans. Zack smiled, a little. By the time they all got downstairs, everyone but Beatricia was settled in the living room speaking in hushed tones. Beatricia was still sleeping in the guest room upstairs, no one thinking to wake her, except Zack, who had decided not to. He had had his reasons.
“I’m not going to put up with this,” said Rachel, suddenly. “Blaming ghosts. We’re adults.”
“Well what could it be?” whispered Aniceli Ruiz, lifting her cross to kiss it. She had her hair up, still wet. No makeup on. Zack thought she looked ten times more beautiful without it. But her eyes were red, her voice a whisper.
“Could have been a tornado,” Creed said. “But a tornado that could sniff you out?”
“That’s not funny, George,” Rachel said, handing him her cell phone.
He called up his wife and told her to get the hell out of Sykesville, just north of Zebulon, to drive to Parksley and stay overnight at her mother’s house. “Right now, Liz,” he said. “I love you, Babe. See you tomorrow. Promise.”
“We don’t know what it was,” said the sheriff. “Maybe it was a tornado with a GPS.”
Zack appreciated the joke and chuckled. No one else did.
Still, he was growing anxious about his safety, the safety of his whole family, and Lev’s. And what about Isabel? Since she’d first come to him, Isabel had never left the house or hurt anything, animal or human. Why hadn’t she told him about Deputy Leveaux or the tractor? On the landing, he’d called to her twice since noon, but she hadn’t talked to him or come out of the closet since morning.
Perhaps she was angry with them all for staying in Zebulon. But where could they have gone? Zack felt his stomach burn. He broke out in a sweat. Wolfie was shivering too, rubbing against his leg. He’d counted on Isabel to protect his family from the neighborhood killers. But where had she gone?
• • • •
Coming down the stairs, Rachel thought she could hear the faint croaking of frogs through the oculus above the entry door. She refused to speculate further about the mutilation of Deputy Leveaux or the incident with the tractor.
The guys had hauled all the materials from the burnt-out cellar to the refectory table by the front windows and were now turning pages in frantic study. The sheriff settled into an overstuffed chair, flipped open his notebook and clicked his pen. Having mixed a martini, George Creed sauntered into the living room, hoisting the glass to his lips. He looked over Dave’s shoulder at photographs of Yad Vashem, the memory wall in Israel for victims of the Holocaust.
“You’re not going to be any good to us drunk, George,” said Rachel.
“Can’t hurt.” George slurped up an olive from the glass.
She turned the corner at the foot of the stairs and headed for the kitchen, Leo trailing behind her. Her Internet research on the Holocaust had been a waste of energy—nothing applicable to the present situation had leaped out at her. Now she’d have to waste even more effort throwing some food together. The boys were unmanageable when hungry. The darkness outside the kitchen window was no longer caused just by rain and the black clouds thrusting themselves between the earth and the sun. Night was upon them.
All day she had been watching the clock, as well as the sky. Now, the two were in strict accord. She almost cried out, her strong hands fisting.
She pulled the curtains of the windows in the kitchen tightly shut, in case some killer was creeping around outside. She imagined arrows from a crossbow, perhaps, breaking through the glass, impaling her and Leo as he worked beside her.
She cracked a clove of garlic, broke lettuce into a bowl, threw oil in a skillet. She washed tomatoes and cucumbers then began to slice them beside the sink.
She was tired of being a doctor, horse trainer, and her husband’s secretary for his Internet businesses. She was sick of taking care of the house and everyone in it. She’d rather do something creative, like become a set designer or movie makeup artist. Big magical stuff involving prosthetics. Maybe she could become a writer. She was full of words and wrote in a journal every morning. She’d even managed to squeeze out a few short stories in the dank overnight physician’s quarters during night shifts at the hospital. Dreaming up scenarios involving imaginary people and worlds was pure freedom. She achieved transport easily and instantly. Words tumbled from her brain almost unbidden. Details poured out of her like ink spreading on white vellum. Sentences scrambled down the page, so fast it felt she’d have to catch up, haul them in, and contain them. The difficulty, for her, wasn’t starting—it was stopping. Yes. She was suffering from end-stage physician burn-out.
Being killed would certainly stop her. She choked at the thought. There was no mundane interruption of her life that she did not resent when it intruded on any of her passions. How much more would she resent an arrow through the window?
Or a murderous ghost?
Again, she was angry. Sick to her stomach and angry. If a ghost spoke to her right now through the pipes of her sink, she would rip the pipes out with her bare hands and pull the intruder into the light of the kitchen, screaming. Then tear it, or him, apart as easily as she had the lettuce in the bowl.
Leo backed up against the refrigerator to watch her. She realized she was handling the knife like a mad woman, cutting the carrots with a butcher’s stroke, mumbling to herself.
“Do you need any help?” Dave said. He stood at the doorway, his voice soft and tentative. Wolfie fled to his pillow in the pantry.
“Dave,” she said, “There are no ghosts in this house.”
“I didn’t say there were. Someone just stole the tractor, and the noise was loud as a tornado.”
“I am resigning as your secretary,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, voice almost a whisper.
“So don’t ask me to help with your businesses, ever again, please.”
“Okay. Maybe Lev can help out.”
“And don’t ask me to cook. We can hire someone.”
“Alright.”
“It’s not that I won’t help you once in a while, or never cook. I love doing it. It’s just I can’t be the one always expected to do it. I’m a doctor, for God’s sakes.”
He smiled, shrugged. “Okay with me.”
“Well, I’ll be cutting back on my hours at the hospital, too,” she said, “and only riding one horse a day, no more.”
“That’s fine, too.”
“I’m going to be a writer. I need time to do it,” said Rachel. She picked up a knife and began to slice. “You have your mandolin lessons and painting lessons. So I’m going to have my writing time, uninterrupted.”
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t pretend I’m not agreeing with you.”
She was quiet for a moment, thinking, biting her lip. “I finished that noire detective story, you know. No spare time, and I did it anyway.”
“I know, honey. You can be anything you want to be. You’ve proven that.”
“And I gave that story a great title: ‘Big, Blond, Beautiful, and Dead.’”
“Being angry is better than being afraid,” Dave said. “But don’t turn it on me.”
“You’re not my psychiatrist.”
“Don’t get hysterical,” said Dave.
“You chose this house,” Rachel said.
“We both chose it.”
She bowed her head, and began chopping again. There was no answering back to the truth.
• • • •
Zack barreled through the kitchen door. Dave stepped aside, never lifting his gaze off Rachel. If she got any worse, he would insist she take a Valium and lie down upstairs, out of sight of the others. But what if her old night terrors came back? What then?
“I’m going to have a Coke,” said Zack, going to the refrigerator and putting his hands on his brother’s shoulders to move him aside.
“There�
��s one left, and it’s mine,” said Leo.
Paying no attention, Zack opened the door and took out a can. “I said it’s mine.” Leo scowled.
“That’s Leo’s,” said Dave. “He bought it with his own money.”
Zack, Coke in hand, paused, glaring at Dave. “He can have it.” Zack slammed it back into the refrigerator rack.
Dave felt a flash of anger, but knew it was born of his frustration with Rachel. He tried to push it down, struggling with it. He was a Gemini, and thought like one—something he regarded as nonsense—but there it was again and again. Easygoing and thoughtful, quick to serve others and empathetic, despite a sometimes lordly indifference, yet he recoiled at the slightest hint of injustice. There was Zack, a son he was raising as his own, showing a dismal attitude in the kitchen Dave had upgraded and decorated with painted bumblebees.
“I hope you’re happy now,” said Zack. “Leo gets his precious Coke.”
“Just leave the kitchen,” said Dave, keeping his voice low and even. “Go to your room.”
“He doesn’t have to go anywhere,” said Rachel, turning from the sink, eyes narrowing. “He’s my beautiful boy and you’re not going to touch him.”
“Go ahead, Zack,” interrupted Leo. “You can have it.”
“Let’s share it,” said Zack, punching his brother in the shoulder. Leo returned the punch and laughed. Zack hugged his mother and looked down at his shoes as he passed Dave on the way out. “Come on. Let’s go drink it on the landing. I’ve got something cool to show you upstairs.”
“Get your mother a chair from the dining room first, Leo.”
He disappeared into the dining room then brought back a chair that he placed in front of the butcher block, in the middle of the kitchen. Rachel kissed Leo’s cheek and plopped into it. She cut up a beet.
“Where’d that come from?” said Dave in hushed tones. “I’ve never lifted a hand to Zack, or to anyone else. You know it.”
“But you’ve wanted to,” said Rachel.
“No,” said Dave, “I’ve never wanted to.”
“Fine. Whatever,” she pointed a kitchen knife at him as though it were a wagging finger. “Leave me alone. Why don’t you go do something useful like figure out who’s trying to kill us?”
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