Still on a step. He put a hand over his head and steadied himself against the ceiling. He stepped again. With the new margin between his head and the roof, he felt his balance more or less return.
McKee stood across from him like Bela Lugosi, flashlight turned under his chin. “Yeah, funny. Don’t do that when Annelise comes in.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He turned the beam to the coffin beside him. “Papists.”
Huck saw the glint of glass on the upper half of the lid. “That the head honcho?”
“Must be.”
“What’s a papist?”
“A feller of the Roman Catholic persuasion,” Raleigh told him.
Huck felt some of the rubber return to his legs but willed himself forward. Even in the soft light of the lantern the wooden parts of the casket were clearly ornate, with carving and silver fixtures. The lid had not one but two glass panels, upper and lower, divided by a solid black sash. Some of the other boxes were stacked atop one another along the perimeter walls, but this one rested on its own velvet-draped stand.
The man inside wore a red satin shroud and matching cap, a contrast to the casket’s billowing white lining. His enormous red beard descended from an otherwise wax-white mug. Garish red rouge on his cheeks, though. An elaborate crucifix lay on his chest, and his clasped hands held a rosary. Yellowed fingernails.
“Almost just looks asleep.” Huck’s own voice, coming back at him in the blank bottled air.
“Rip Van Winkle,” said Raleigh.
“Where’s the other? The kid?”
“Right this way.”
The child’s coffin sat atop a plainer box against the back wall, and it was sadly small indeed. White, with gold-washed handles and trim. He came up on the glass and saw to his shock that the enclosed was not a boy but a little girl, maybe five or six years old. She had the same rouged skin but hair dark as a raven’s wing, stark against the white lace of her costume.
“Whoa. Didn’t figure on a girl, for some reason.”
“Me neither.” For some reason they were both whispering. “You know the weirdest part, though? Her dern teeth.”
Huck looked back through the glass. Her little lips were parted in what could nearly have passed for a smile. The bottom edge of her tiny white incisors showed in the aperture and it was sort of an eerie sight, although he had to admit she looked perfectly peaceful.
“Hello?” Annelise had mustered the nerve to crouch by the entrance. “It’s mighty quiet down there.”
“We’re paying our respects,” said McKee. “You want to come down?”
“I think so.”
Huck found his normal voice. “It’s not that bad. The kid ain’t a boy, though. She’s a girl.”
“Okay, good to know. Does she look . . . I don’t know, normal?”
“She looks like she could’ve been walking around yesterday,” Raleigh said. “The arsenic-and-lead operation evidently worked.”
“Houston?”
Huck was still looking at her delicate parted mouth. With Raleigh’s lantern angled away, her skin looked less ghost-pale than nearly luminous. “She looks like an angel.”
McKee went to the base of the steps. “The old guy’s like a dead pope, no big deal. The little girl doesn’t look old enough to be where she is, but the both of them could just as well be asleep.”
Huck could practically hear the row inside her brain. He knew her nerves were still jangled from the unfortunate business with Miss Earhart, knew as well she’d hardly be able to live with herself if she didn’t steel up and take a couple of embalmed cadavers right in stride. Which is exactly what Miss Earhart herself would have done.
“All right, I’m coming down. Hold the light on the steps.”
Huck watched her descend, backlit by the daylight behind her and wary as that doe across the bowl a while ago with its guard up, and he thought how good it was just to be a live human being with your own people around to feel it too. McKee held out his hand to her.
She took in the caskets. “This just feels wrong.”
“Oh, come now. Don’t tell me you’ve never done this sort of thing.”
She paused while holding McKee’s hand, and Huck heard Raleigh clear his throat, only now doing the math. Usually Huck alone felt eternally in the dark. Odd as it was in the moment, he felt a small swell of pride, maybe even triumph, to be a step ahead for once.
“All right. Pope first.”
McKee led her forward. Annelise peered through the glass. Her voice came on steady, nary a wobble nor a hitch. “O Bearded One. He looks like Saint Nick.”
“Ho, ho, ho,” said McKee.
“Not funny,” she said. “Remember that part about paying respects? I take it that’s the little girl?”
Huck stood aside for her, and she untethered from McKee. Raleigh held the lamp higher.
She walked up, appeared to dare herself to peek down, and let out a sound somewhere between a whimper and a sigh. “She can’t be six years old. Or couldn’t have been when they walled her up in here. I wonder how she died.”
McKee moved in behind them. “Kids used to up and die all kinds of ways. Flu, pneumonia, dysentery, scarlet fever. Hell, a bad hangnail could probably do it. Even when I was a kid, down in the desert. I bet one in five was gone before they were out of diapers.”
“I wonder how old she actually is,” Raleigh mused.
“Like I said, I doubt she’s six. Still with her front baby teeth.”
“Right, but she didn’t die yesterday. She’s been in here for what, forty years? Maybe fifty?”
This was a startling thing to consider, that the child in the case was technically older than Mother and possibly even Pop. At the very least, she’d probably been right here in her dreamless sleep clear back when Pop made his long ride from Texas. The same dawning silence hung over the lot of them.
Finally Annelise broke the spell. “You missed it by that much, kiddo. I am so, so sorry.”
“Are you talking to her?” Raleigh asked.
“Let’s say she’s been here forty years, like you said. That’s 1897.” She took in a breath, blew it audibly back out again. “That’s also the year Amelia was born. So this little girl died never knowing what an airplane was, never knowing cars, never knowing the radio or even electricity, most likely. Never knowing she’d be able to vote someday, or maybe fly her own airplane. And now here she is, six years old forever—1897 forever. Think of what she missed. By that much.”
Huck wondered if she was actually a little angry—this was as much of her usual fire as he’d heard in more than a week. When she’d first arrived in Montana those months ago, that edge she possessed put his nerves on an entirely different sort of edge. Now he was just relieved to hear her talk like herself again.
“Amelia will be forty, two weeks from today.”
Huck started a little.
“Forty,” said Raleigh. “I didn’t realize. Would’ve guessed younger.”
“I think that’s why this was supposed to be the last big feat. Her gift to herself.”
“July twenty-fourth?” Huck said.
“Yes. The twenty-fourth. Missed it by that much.”
“That’s my birthday.”
Even in this light he saw her react. “How did I not know that?”
Huck shrugged. “Guess it just never came up.”
“Well. That is curious.” Annelise held her hand out, palm flat and fingers splayed above the little girl’s folded hands, but careful not to touch the glass. “Guess we’ll never know this one’s birthday. Or her name, even.”
She let her hand hover, then pulled it into a fist against her chest. She turned away. “Can’t say this won’t come back to haunt me, but it’s out of the way for now. What was that about a jackpot?”
Huck had sort of forgotten why they were here
in the first place.
McKee beamed his light into the front corner of the crypt, down the wall from the stairs. Another wooden box, but a crate rather than a coffin, maybe two feet long by a foot tall, made of no-nonsense unpainted wood.
“What’s in it?”
“Ain’t sure. The lid’s nailed down.”
“Then how do you know it’s any kind of jackpot?”
“Try lifting the thing. It’s got something solid in it. I mean really solid.”
“Concrete?”
“Doubt it. I’ll be right back.” He went up the steps and out, returned with the hand sledge and chisel. He gave his flashlight to Annelise.
He drove the point between box and lid, enough to start the nails backing out, then dropped the hammer and put his weight into the shank. The nails wrenched with a squeal. The crate itself, solid as an anchor, barely moved. He worked the lid up and down until the last of the nails whimpered free.
They peered in at a flap of folded canvas. McKee grabbed the corner and pulled the covering back. They looked down on a crateful of gleaming gold ingots.
“Ay Chihuahua. There’s a stash.”
“Yeah, a stash of contraband,” said Raleigh. “Wonder what in tarnation they planned on doing with that.”
“They may not know themselves,” McKee said. He lifted one of the bars, about the size of a brick but clearly much heavier. Another layer of ingots sat below. “Not everybody turned this stuff in when they were supposed to, though. Not even the honest people.”
“True,” said Annelise, “but this is actual bullion, and not a small amount. My dad had a bunch of coins and certificates that he exchanged, or said he did, but plenty of people hid that stuff away rather than just hand it over for less than it was worth.” She seemed to consider. “I assume he did, too, even though he’s usually as by-the-book as it gets.”
Huck remembered Pop’s stash of eagles, squirreled away in their Mason jar. He reached in and hefted one of the ingots but otherwise kept his word. “I saw an article last spring on the new depository in Modern Mechanics. Fort Knox. It’s a dern fortress—granite walls two feet thick. The heaviest door ever built in all history. You know they’re moving six billion dollars of this stuff into it? Right while we’re standing here.”
McKee set the bar back into the crate. “Our backwoods crypt may not be all that, but I reckon this stuff’s safe enough for the time being.”
“What do we do with it?” said Raleigh.
“We leave it right where it is, at least for now. Try to figure out some sort of game plan.”
Annelise looked back and forth between Huck and McKee. “We have to spill this to the police. Now that we’ve seen this. Because they will almost certainly be back.”
“Who’ll be back?” said Raleigh. “Detective Blank?”
“In a manner of speaking. Along with Charles Angle.”
“Who? I’m playing Heinz 57 here.”
“It’s a long ride home,” she told him.
6
She beheld an oblong bulk, hovering within a fog, dark and indistinct but somehow, she sensed, dearly important. She both dreaded and desired the knowledge of whatever it was, like some deadly mythic apple. An answer to a mystery she was fated both to solve, and forevermore regret solving.
She wasn’t peering through mist—she was peering through water. She realized it when she realized she was holding her breath, because she was underwater, too. The object swam toward her, or drifted at least, black and pliant as a half-deflated inner tube but increasingly taking on the loose-limbed countenance of a body, in half-buoyant suspension.
Houston’s ghoul, coming right at her. He’d described the sight of its face rising through the murk, gradually and then suddenly coalescing from a wax-white smear into a fully distinct death mask—bruised-fruit eye sockets and purple parted lips, dark hair dancing with the action of the water. Though she warned her eyes away even now, she knew full well her morbid curiosity would prove the stronger. She knew she’d see it, and never in her born days find a way to unsee it.
The figure drifted nearer by the second. She couldn’t hold her breath much longer, the sear of expiring oxygen burning in her lungs. But the ghoul was nearly distinct now, just a few more seconds, just a few more feet through the murk . . .
The golden halo threw her off. Houston and Raleigh were still talking months later about that dark wrack of hair, how utterly macabre it had been, but somehow he seemed now to shine right through the water. Maybe he really was a reverend, forgiven in the end of whatever misdeeds he’d committed.
The body bobbed ever forward and she saw in a flash it was not the ghoul at all but Amelia, half-lidded though blue-eyed yet and even smiling, with that famous gap between her teeth. Her head of copper curls seemed to generate its own numinous light through the distorted heave. Annelise gasped by reflex and felt her lungs flood—
She came awake sputtering, had evidently been holding her air even while she dreamed. She clawed for the lamp and turned it on, chasing out the dark.
7
Her dreams continued to torment her sleep for the next couple of nights, to the point where she was practically afraid to turn off the lamp, afraid to face her own mind in the sinister dark. She felt bone-weary during the day from lack of rest, caught herself more than once nodding off at the desk in the office, or even in the bathtub.
Finally she and Roy and Houston spent a night at the ranch. To her shock, she woke up very late in Houston’s little attic bedroom, after her first solid night’s sleep in weeks. No agonizing hours inside her own head, no fraught imperiled visions. She lay there looking at his models soaring beneath the tattered ceiling. She felt the calm of her own air.
Roy came into the kitchen while she was finishing the eggs her aunt had fried for her.
“There’s the sleepyhead. I had half a mind to run back to town two hours ago and come back for you this afternoon.” He winked. “You were sawing wood like a lumber camp.”
“You do look rested,” Aunt Gloria told her. The two of them had been sitting there while she ate, not even playing the radio, because her aunt for some reason had started to tell her about her own mother when they were girls, and how Annelise resembled her.
I don’t mean looks, exactly, although there’s that, too. I mean her spirit. She’d given a rueful smile. Victoria. The right name exactly. I could tell you stories.
I’d love to hear one.
Oh. She’d never forgive me.
Swear me to secrecy, then.
Her aunt chimed with a laugh like a rare bird, and something shimmered inside Annelise, too. That is just what she would say. My land. It’s like you’re her, or she’s here, right in my kitchen. You know she . . . also loved to dance when she was young. Your age or thereabouts. Had the beaux lined up for it, too, to speak the honest truth.
By the time her uncle came in she was on to Victoria’s first experience with the moving pictures, and how she’d come to idolize Mary Pickford. Gloria herself was as animated as Annelise had ever seen her, outside of that tent revival those long weeks ago.
Even Roy noticed. “Don’t mean to bust the party, but we need to scoot. You close?”
She took in her empty plate, everything down to the runoff yolk mopped away with a piece of toast, and it struck her. Already she understood her mother better than she ever had. Meanwhile the goons and their watch and their coded ledger and those dark relentless dreams awaited back in town.
“I think I need to rest. Maybe I’ll just stay another day?” She looked at her aunt. “If that’s all right?”
Three days later she was still there. Still sleeping in near-dreamless bliss in the attic at night, still systematically forking down eggs or powder biscuits or chipped beef and, on the second evening, nearly half a chicken that Aunt Gloria roasted for her.
They set a table in th
e shade of the porch with the sun slanting, away from the infernal heat of the cookstove. They’d made a potato salad that morning and cooled it all day in a tub of water in the root cellar. Aunt Gloria as usual ate like a sparrow, but Annelise tore in like a pack of hyenas.
“Sorry,” she said, with her mouth half full. “I guess I haven’t been eating enough lately.”
“That was my mother’s recipe. The potatoes. She was of German stock.”
“I wish I’d known her better, when I was little.”
“She could cook, like a true farm lady. I don’t hold any sort of candle.”
“I have to disagree.”
“Well, thank you. It’s lovely to have someone to cook for again.” She paused. “If I didn’t know you’d been starving yourself lately, I’d almost worry you were eating for two.”
Annelise practically choked but managed to swallow down the food in her mouth. “Oh. Definitely don’t worry about that.”
Aunt Gloria looked out at the shadows, stretching long across the folds in the land. She seemed very calm, even serene. “That’s probably all it was, with your mother. All those months ago. Just . . . worry. Panic. I’m sure she saw her own life in it, if you want the truth. She had a wild spell herself when we were girls, put your poor grandmother through no amount of nerves.” She looked back and smiled in the shade. “But Victoria can be a lot scarier than my mother ever was.”
Annelise took another bite, considered how strange a conversation this was turning out to be. “She just . . . doesn’t understand that she might be wrong. It doesn’t seem to occur to her.”
Her aunt looked up at the underside of the little overhang, where the points of roofing nails pierced through the sheathing. “Victoria was always headstrong. I admired it, to be honest. She had the certainty of a given moment. And the next day she could decide the exact opposite, and she’d be just as certain. I guess that’s what you’d call conviction.”
Annelise felt herself nodding. “Yep.”
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