A Minister's Ghost: A Fever Devilin Mystery

by Phillip DePoy

  I got out of the truck, stood on the sidewalk awhile trying to decide what to do. After a moment I thought I heard noise inside and stood at the glass doors peering in.

  There seemed to be someone behind the popcorn machine.

  I tapped on the glass and popcorn sprayed everywhere.

  “What the hell!” A boy’s face popped up from behind the counter.

  “Hello,” I called through the crack in the door. “It’s Dr. Devilin here. I think I spoke to you on the phone.”

  “Christ.” He leaned on the counter a moment. “You near scared the life out of me.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Can you talk for a second?”

  “I’m not supposed to.”

  “It’s about the girls I was telling you about.” I rummaged in my coat pocket and found the snapshots I’d just gotten from Lucinda.

  “Yeah,” he said, heading my way. “People are talking about it now. I called around. Terrible.”

  I held up the photos even before he got to the door. He was a sandy-haired teenager, a touch on the hefty side even for our mountain community. He wore a button-down, white cotton shirt, thin, fifties-style maroon tie, black dress slacks, and white tennis shoes. The name badge said Andy.

  He came to the door and opened it before he saw the pictures.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said quickly. “Damn. You don’t forget those girls.”

  “Right.” I stepped inside. “I was hoping.”

  “They came to the later show,” he said, “last show of the night, you know? And they were all cute and stuff, but their boyfriends were kind of a pain in the ass.”

  “How so?” I asked, hoping I didn’t look surprised that they had boyfriends.

  “I know them from school,” he sighed. “Jocks.”

  “Sports aficionados.”

  “They play football,” he confirmed.

  “I suppose it’s not like when I was in school,” I said, putting the photos away. “In those days, the sporting crowd lived in one universe and I seemed to live in another. Smart was exactly the last thing I wanted to be. When I was your age.”

  “The more things change,” he sighed, “the more they stay the same, you know?”

  “I know,” I commiserated.

  “Were you as big in high school as you are now?” he asked.

  “About.”

  “Lucky,” he said haplessly.

  “Didn’t help. I was often referred to as Goliath and several times as Tiny, an attempt at something of an ironic appellation.”

  “You were bigger though. You could have done something.”

  “Ever read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”

  “Saw the movie,” he piped up. “Great stuff.”

  “What’s the Chief’s problem? Remember that character?”

  “Ohhhh.” He rolled out the sound. “He was a giant guy, but he thought he was too small to do anything about his problems.”

  “There you go.”

  “So you were, like, nuts?”

  “What?” I scowled.

  “The Chief was nuts. Wasn’t everybody in an asylum in that movie?”

  “Well, yes,” I said quickly, “but I was making a point about being in high school.”

  “Look,” he interrupted impatiently. “I really have to get the snack bar ready. And now I also have to clean up because you scared me and I decorated the place with popcorn.”

  “My fault. I’ll help. So about these boys, the dates. Do you know their names?”

  “Yeah.” He headed back to the old glass counter. “One was Tony Riddick and the other one was Nickel Mathews.”

  I followed him in.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Is the Mathews boy related to Melissa Mathews of the sheriff’s department, do you know?”

  “Nickel is Melissa’s cousin,” he said wearily. “He’s always going on about how he can get away with stuff because his cousin will fix it. But as far as I know, he never did anything, he just talked about it.”

  I’d followed him to the counter and begun to pick up popcorn kernels.

  “Where do you want these?” I asked.

  “Oh.”

  He went behind the counter and pulled out a large black plastic garbage bag.

  “I’ll get the vacuum,” he said, “you don’t really have to help. But thanks.”

  “Look, here’s an uncomfortable question,” I said, straightening up. “How much do you know about the drug culture in your high school?”

  “Drug culture?” He laughed. “This isn’t Atlanta. We don’t have a drug culture. If we want to destroy ourselves, we get drunk, as God intended.”

  “You’re saying there are no drugs in your high school?” I asked him sternly.

  He stopped what he was doing and looked me in the eye.

  “If there were,” he said soberly, “would I tell you?”

  “You would if the two girls died from taking drugs,” I told him, locked on his eyes.

  “Oh.” He looked down. “Damn. Those girls? I don’t believe it.”

  “There are drugs in your high school,” I pressed. I was sincerely hoping his answer would still be no.

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “Pretty much everything.”

  “So, what’s popular?”

  “Weed, of course,” he said quickly. “I hate it. Makes me stupid. Meth is good. Good for work or studying. You know, like No-Doz.”

  “No hallucinogenics?”

  “What year is this?” he chided. “Hendrix is dead, man—along with the acid culture.”

  “Nothing else? I read in Time magazine that ecstasy was making a comeback. As a party thing.”

  “I guess,” he said softly, busying himself behind the popcorn machine. “That’s sort of like a hallucinogen.”

  “Sometimes boys slip that into a Coke or something. Dose an unsuspecting person.”

  “No,” he corrected. “You’re thinking about the date-rape thing. X is just good clean fun.”

  “You actually seem to know a good bit about the subject,” I said casually.

  “Look,” he exploded unexpectedly. “I’m trying to help you. And I know about the subject because I’m a worldly sort of person. I’m a filmmaker. See? An artist.”

  “And it’s an artist’s responsibility to know the world,” I agreed, thinking it best to change the subject. “Who was your favorite? You were telling me on the phone. Lelouch?”

  “Favorite, I don’t know,” he hedged, “but I like him. I like all the French new wave.”

  “I prefer Truffaut. He’s got more of a humanist sensibility and a greater body of work. He often constructs a dynamic to make you think something terrible is going to happen, and then it turns out to be something wonderful instead.”

  No sense talking down to the boy.

  “The opposite of real life,” he sniped, “in other words.”

  “Well, you’ve been very helpful,” I said, stepping back from the counter, “and I expect to be standing in line for one of your movies within the decade.”

  “Uh-huh.” He shrugged.

  “I’ll see myself out.”

  I turned to leave.

  “So, okay,” he mumbled. “I hope you find out what happened to Tess and Rory, and stuff.”

  I stopped.

  “I never told you their names.” I turned.

  He froze.

  “Yes, you did.” He stared hard at the countertop in front of him.

  “You knew them,” I said firmly, taking a step his direction. “You knew Tess and Rory. No point in lying about it, I can find out. That’s an easy thing to check, you understand.”

  He fidgeted for a moment, then his shoulders sagged.

  “Of course I knew them,” he whined. “Damn.”

  “So why did you lead me to believe you didn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” he said defiantly, an imitation of a movie tough guy.

  I took a quick step in his direction, growling, a generally threatening gesture coming from a large m
an with an expensive vocabulary.

  “Listen, you little gob of spit,” I snarled. “I’ve had a terrible day, I’m really hungry, and I don’t care what I do to you. If you know something about Tess and Rory, tell me now. Do you understand?”

  “Christ.” He was startled, dropped the plastic garbage bag and took a dance backward. His breathing had increased and his eyes were wide.

  “Why did you pretend not to know the girls?” I demanded.

  “Because I thought I might get into trouble,” he answered immediately, a high school kid again.

  “Why would you get into trouble?” I moved another step in his direction.

  “Because I sold some ecstasy to Nickel Mathews,” he blurted out in a stage whisper, “on the night the girls died!”

  Nine

  All the way home I tried to calm down, wondering why I’d lost my temper so suddenly, why I’d used such a disgusting phrase to threaten Andy the drug-dealing filmmaker; and what to tell Skidmore about the boy. I’d simply left him standing in the lobby of the theater and lumbered away without any further conversation. I was so stunned by his revelation, I had no words. Cherubs were selling drugs in the local movie house. The war between the forces of light and the powers of darkness was over: the night had won.

  As I drove, these thoughts gave way to a quiet desperation, a melancholy meditation on my own weltschmerz, which quickly moved to a great world-loathing, an existential nausea.

  I generally loved to think of Blue Mountain as a world apart, a safe haven, a place where the reality I saw on the network news, in movies, or on television programs didn’t really exist. I often convinced myself that I lived in Mayberry, or Brigadoon.

  But twenty-first-century America would not covenant such places. I realized with a cold certainty that there were no places left in America untouched by dark matter. True innocence, like my genuine folklore, had turned to a quaint notion for addled academics. People like me were outdated archaeologists crawling over ancient tombs, lost souls who longed for a time that was, I concluded with great certainty, gone forever.

  Autumn sun sank low behind blue pines on the ridges all around me. An aching amber light filled the road, the grass, the air rushing past my speeding truck. I saw in that light the twilight of our civilization, a pale fire burning out. I had an apocalyptic vision to match anything in Hiram Frazier’s nightmares. I saw an angel standing in the sun. With a loud voice it called to all the birds, “Come! Gather for the great supper, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men.” And all the birds were gorged with that flesh.

  At least that’s how I remembered the quote from Revelation. When in doubt, Revelation is the book of the Bible for harsh depression.

  Alas, neither the image nor the contemplation did anything to assuage the pangs of my stomach. Appetite always belies the greater philosophical concerns, or mine does, at least. Since I wasn’t certain how to proceed, food was obviously the answer.

  I had a fleeting urge to drive to the Methodist church, see if any food was left there. I was still dressed for it, and I’d had some of the best meals in the world at family reunions in that church. Any church homecoming in our town was nothing more than an excuse to eat. Ordinarily all the good cooks in a family or the church or the entire county would indulge in a kind of friendly competition to see whose dish was the best.

  For some reason I recalled a day from the previous April, the Carter family reunion, Girlinda’s clan. Sky bluer than a china plate, air rich with honeysuckle, the yard at the side of the Methodist church was cluttered with table after table of unbelievable food. My eyes were desperate pirates after treasure, roving over those dishes with an abandon that might have been illegal.

  Then I saw Melissa Mathews standing over one familiar-smelling dish, staring down at it.

  “Is that rabbit stew?” I asked her.

  She looked up.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, smiling. “Fresh. My cousin Nickel got this rabbit just yesterday out in back of my house. He didn’t even have to shoot it. Got this rabbit by chunking rocks at it. So it don’t have no shot-up taste. I cooked it myself. Have you some.”

  “I don’t know.” I peered at it dubiously. “What about that over there?”

  I pointed to another big stew pot beside her elbow.

  “That’s the venison,” she said, “which Uncle Hulitt got last year, but we froze it right after because didn’t nobody want to eat it, you know, on account of Uncle Hulitt’s funeral.”

  I nodded. Hulitt had accidentally shot himself after shooting the biggest deer of his hunting life. He’d been so excited about the kill that he’d dropped his rifle and it went off. He died before the deer did. I decided against the venison.

  “I remember Hulitt’s hunting accident,” I said. “You didn’t bring any of that pig foot this year, did you? You know you’re famous for it.”

  “Shoot.” She grinned. “I think you’re the only one that eats them.”

  “I tried the first one last year because you told me it’d come from a pig that wore a lucky rabbit’s foot around its neck. I thought it was a funny thing to say.”

  Melissa laughed then, and the sound of her laughter was like water over round rocks in a cold stream, music from nature, not a human sound at all.

  “It worked for a good while too,” she claimed, barely a smile on her face. “She was one lucky sow. We put off slaughtering that pig until the day she got caught rooting around in our corn patch. She rolled around so that the rabbit foot fell off from around her neck. I don’t know how she got it around her neck in the first place. Pig ain’t got no elbows, so I don’t hardly see how she could reach way on around her back like that.”

  Melissa’s chestnut hair always seemed just-washed, her eyes were shy but her posture was bold, and her lips were never far away from a smile. She was only a few years out of high school; dozens of men had courted her. But she was a self-confessed coward where men were concerned. She could be friendly with someone who had no interest in her, but she was terrified of any man who wanted her attention.

  As a sheriff’s deputy under the Maddox administration, she’d broken into a murderer’s hotel room, jumped into the Nantahala River to save two elementary-school children, and fired her pistol more than a dozen times in the line of duty. But a halfhearted hello from a boy who was barely beginning to like, her, that would send her into paralysis.

  I was clearly no threat, so she enjoyed her conversations with me, though there had only been three of them in the entire time I’d been back to Blue Mountain.

  I could see why Skid might be attracted to her, though. And Skid’s being married would make him an easy man for her to love.

  I slowly withdrew my thoughts from the images of that lovely day and focused once again on the darkening road that lay before me.

  But contained in my muddled Remembrance of Aprils Past was a nagging image, one that haunted. I saw Nickel Mathews, cousin to a law-enforcement officer. A boy who would throw a rock at a rabbit was someone who might feed drugs to a couple of sweet young girls.

  When I finally pulled up in front of my house, I had decided what to do. I bounded up my front steps and through my front door, not even bothering to close it behind me. It would only take me a moment, I reasoned, to pick up the phone instead of heading to the refrigerator.

  I dialed quickly.

  “Sheriff’s Office,” Melissa said.

  “Hello, Melissa. It’s Dr. Devilin. Is Skid in?”

  “No, sir,” she said hesitantly, “but he said when you called to patch you through to his car. Can you hang on a minute?”

  “Of course.”

  Before I could ask how Skid knew I’d be calling, a silence on the other end told me I was on hold.

  A black wind took hold of the tops of trees, rattled them like snare drums. Dark clouds were rolling in once more, and it looked as if a heavy rain was imminent.

  “Damn it, Fever!” Skid’s voice jumped through the ph
one lines. “I told you to stay clear of all this mess with the Dyson sisters.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re so mad about,” I shot back, “especially after I helped you out at the church, but that’s your business at the moment. I have some information.”

  “Mr. Dyson is very upset,” he began.

  “He’s upset with you, Skid.” I told him, voice several notes higher. “Now, listen: the usher at the Palace theater, his name is Andy something.”

  “Stop,” he demanded. “I’m telling you as the sheriff, you have to quit looking into this business any further, or I’ll take action.”

  “Shut up, Skidmore,” I bellowed. “Andy sold ecstasy to Nickel Mathews, and Nickel Mathews was with the girls on the night the girls were killed. Ecstasy, Skid. A serotonin-raising chemical compound. Is that something you already knew, or am I, in fact, giving you important new information?”

  My face was hot and I realized I was gripping the phone like a barbell.

  I rarely found myself that angry more than once a decade, and my steam had risen twice in one hour that afternoon. I’d gotten almost that angry with Andy Newlander. What was the matter with me?

  My ire did, however, have the desired effect. Skidmore was silent.

  “Also did you know that someone besides you,” I pressed on, “found Mr. Millroy and got the results of the coroner’s investigation? The same toxicology report?”

  Silence still reigned.

  “Skid?”

  “Andy Newlander sells drugs?” His voice was weak, absolutely exhausted.

  “To Nickel Mathews,” I answered, as gently as I could with my heart still thumping my sternum.

  “Are you sure?” Skid’s sails were windless.

  “I asked him, and he admitted it.”

  “So the girls had taken ecstasy.” Skid sighed heavily. “I guess that answers most of the questions.”

  “Well, we’re not certain they took it. But Nickel could have slipped it in a drink at the movies.”

  “Seems a fair guess,” Skid said, gaining strength again. “Nickel is a little piece of crap. Just the kind of boy who would do something like that.”