CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
From the front door of Hashilli’s cabin, Marie could see the ruins of the old house where the Maytubby family inner circle once lived. Foundation stones had collapsed in moss-covered heaps. A pool of stagnant water filled the old cellar. Cottonwood trees outlined the house’s perimeter, strung together by inch-thick vines.
A four-foot high mound of tangled greenery stood beside the ruined building. It looked like a mausoleum overgrown with vegetation, but Dr. Moon said it was a boat.
“Resting upside down on cinder blocks,” he’d told her, “dressed in a shroud of creeper.” According to Dr. Moon, the boat was still sound. Kept high and dry by the magic of his touch. “Magic brings ruin or preservation.” That explained why the big house was gone and the boat and cabin remained. Magic was a one-word explanation for everything.
Dr. Moon was crazy as the rats that live in the deepest recesses of the old Maytubby outhouse. Hard to believe she ever thought the man was sane. Hard to believe she ever thought his words could heal broken minds.
He’d fooled lots of people—staff members of two mental hospitals, educated people, sophisticated in the ways of mental process, who should have seen the signs but hadn’t. The only person at Flanders who’d seen through the pretend-psychiatrist’s disguise was Sarah’s crazy boyfriend, Robert Collins. She wondered if her daughter had finally sorted that out.
Love is a lot like lightning. It strikes in inconvenient places and won’t be ignored. Marie understood this perfectly because she was a lightning rod. She could feel the charge building up between herself and Dr. Moon, and she knew the discharge threshold would soon be reached. Condoms, fake menstruation cycles, and verbal assaults on tumescence wouldn’t insulate her much longer. It was time to seek lower ground, time to take cover.
He wanted to talk about the restless spirit of a child waiting to be born.
Those had been his last words to her as he went off to take care of his business in the city. Calculating the motives of a crazy man required a special kind of arithmetic. Marie wasn’t all that good with numbers, but she knew this would add up to something bad. In the end, it almost always did.
Almost. She clasped her hands over her lower belly, the place Sarah had lived for the only nine peaceful months of the girl’s life. When a woman is pregnant, the truth is summarized in a single sentence that is crisp and clear and written at a third grade reading level: “Keep the baby safe.” It was a concept so fundamental even wild animals understood it.
How quickly Marie had forgotten that cosmic truth. She’d squandered the shiny coin of Sarah’s childhood on penny candy, and there was no way to get it back.
But she could still be a better mother, if she survived.
Marie had the staples of life: lukewarm Sprite, bottled water, Spam, chips, and Oreos. She could live on the provisions Dr. Moon had brought to the cabin. Now she needed a weapon.
She found a butcher knife sturdy enough to push its way past muscle and ribs into the inner sanctum of the vital organs. Could she stab a man to death? It would be better to decide that now while she could still make other plans. Marie had never killed anything bigger than an insect, but under the right circumstances she might be able to make the leap.
She looked at her reflection in the knife blade and did not like the doubt she saw in her eyes. A knife was no proper weapon against a magic man, especially one who carried a pistol. Then she remembered the bullet in the kitchen wall, the bullet that had started Hashilli along the sorcerer’s road. The bullet he hadn’t wanted Marie to touch. Perhaps there was another way a knife could be used to fight a madman.
The plaster was old and brittle. The lath underneath was firm and free of dry rot. Oak, Marie realized. The cabin was built when hardwoods were plentiful enough to waste under plaster. It took a long time, but she finally chopped and pried a foot long piece of lath free of the two-by-six-inch studs that held it in place.
She tossed the broken lath onto the pile of rubble in the kitchen floor and prepared to dig the bullet out of deeper supporting structures of the wall.
Nothing. There was no bullet hole in the lath on the other side. Could the slug have made a series of turns that defied the laws of physics, like the bullet that killed John F. Kennedy? Marie chiseled away more plaster, and chopped and pried more slats of hardwood. No bullet hole anywhere.
She retrieved the original section of lath and examined it more carefully. The hole did not go through. It took her a few minutes more to notch the wood so she could break the lath along the plane of the bullet hole. She was not surprised at what she found.
Nothing—no slug, no magic bullet, no human sacrifice, no baptism of blood for an Indian witch. The whole thing was a lie. But whose lie had it been?
Marie remembered the pride with which Dr. Moon told his story. Did he believe it? She thought he did.
Grandfather had been a clever old confidence man, as well-versed in matters of faith and conscience as the Pope. He’d planted the seed of Hashilli’s legend in a child’s mind and fed it with details until its roots were tangled in the boy’s memory. A man doubts nothing learned before the age of reason. The imaginary bullet was the most important strand in the rope of lies used by the old man to bind Hashilli to the world of sorcery.
Perhaps the bullet could still be a weapon, even if it wasn’t real.
The cool water of the Kiamichi River wasn’t even up to Marie’s waist, but the bottom was slippery, and every square inch of her was wet by the time she waded to the other side. Her butcher knife made short work of the creeper vines covering the old wooden jon boat. Before an hour passed, she pushed the boat into the river and pulled herself inside.
How far would the water carry her? Would she meet her nemesis along the way? Marie clutched the butcher knife in one hand and the broken piece of hardwood lath in the other. If one thing didn’t work, she would use the other. She tossed the lath into the river and watched it float away.
What would Hashilli do when he discovered Marie had run off with his magic bullet? He would no longer want to talk with her about the restless spirit of a child waiting to be born. She was pretty sure of that.
Owl Dreams Page 45