“Yes,” I realized, “it is.”
“That’s a better way to remember them than anything else I can think of. And P.S.: maybe it pays you to think a little bit about what a good friend Sheriff Skidmore Needle has been to you most of your life. Since the memory you’ve just chosen about the girls was actually more a memory about him than anything else.”
I let out a long, slow breath. With it a great number of minuscule, black ghosts, roughly the size of musical notes, left my body to join the night sky above.
“Are we absolutely certain that you don’t have a degree in psychology?” I asked Orvid.
“Only the one experience has provided.”
“Well, Dr. Newcomb,” I said formally, “thanks for the session.”
I finally realized that he was talking to keep my mind occupied.
“How far do you want to go?” I asked suddenly, interrupting his commentary on the difference between cold rain and summer rain.
“Yes.” He fell silent.
“Yes is not a distance.”
“You’ve had time to assess,” he sighed. “Good, I was running out of one-sided conversation.”
“You mean you’ve just been chattering on so I could gather my thoughts.”
“More or less. You have been preoccupied.”
“All right, I have,” I agreed, “but some of that has to do with Georgie.”
“Who?”
“Georgie is the man with the nail-studded two-by-four whom you dispatched about a half an hour ago.”
“Really? You think you know his name?” Orvid shifted in his seat so that he could see me better. “You were worried about him? I didn’t hit him hard enough to do much damage. I’m very precise about that sort of thing.”
“I’d imagine you would be,” I sniffed, “but as it happens, I had him in my mind because I believe he was the informant who originally told me about Hiram Frazier, the man on the tape I was telling you about.”
“What?” Orvid’s voice bordered on the shrill. “Stop the truck.”
I shot him a glance. His face was in dead earnest.
I let off the gas, tapped the brakes several times, my truck slowed. We were coming to a wide paved shoulder, a place where the big trucks could pull to one side and let cars pass. I came to a stop, windshield wipers still slapping back and forth. I tapped the emergency button on the dash, and my lights began to flash.
“Yes?” I turned to him.
“You knew the man I knocked out?”
“No,” I said patiently, “but I think he might be the person I talked to a year ago who told me about Frazier’s little key trick.”
“Because his name is Georgie?”
“And he looked a little familiar.”
“That’s what you’ve been thinking about,” Orvid said, not blinking.
“I believe that all coincidence has meaning,” I answered slowly. “An event of this sort is significant in the fabric of reality.”
“I agree. That’s why I asked you to stop the truck. But there’s more to your introspection. I can tell.”
“You’re absolutely certain you don’t have a degree in psychology?” I said, slumping a little in my seat.
“What is it that you’re worried about?” he pressed.
“I’m afraid of Hiram Frazier,” I blurted out. “I admit it. Something about him absolutely terrifies me. He’s like something out of my worst dreams: a body without a soul, eyes without content or context, lost.”
“A ghost,” Orvid said simply. “Only real.”
“I have a friend, June Cotage, who sometimes tells a story that ends with ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but this is different. This really happened.’”
“That’s right.” Orvid smiled.
“I can barely stand to think about him,” I said, softer.
“Then you have to find out why you’re afraid of the man. You have to learn what about him frightens you.”
“I suppose.”
“And you believe that this most recent coincidence is a road sign, an indication from something in the universe.” Orvid looked out the window. “Which it might be, who’s to say? I’m not a big believer in that sort of thing, but Judy is.”
“So how far are you expecting me to drive tonight? That’s what I was asking a moment ago.”
“As far as it takes to find the man we’re looking for.” Orvid let out a breath.
“And why am I driving, anyway?” I complained.
“Do you actually think you could fit into my Mercedes sports coupe?” He laughed. “You’d look like a Shriner in a parade, a big man in a toy car.”
“Good point.”
“Anyway, my car wasn’t back there. I drove by Judy’s on the way to the train crossing and got her to drop me off. I don’t like to leave my nice car just sitting around a place like that.”
“I see you didn’t spend much time at my house investigating,” I said to him, heavy-lidded. “But the point is, I don’t think we’re going to find Hiram Frazier on the road tonight. Maybe not at all. It’s pouring down rain, it’s getting late, and I’m hungry.”
“What’s the next town?”
“If we stay on this road, there’s nothing until Rabun Gap, but if we hurry, we might make dinner at the Dillard House.”
“The fabled Dillard House,” Orvid said, sitting back. “My cousin Tristan took me there once when I was very young, but I still remember the biscuits and honey.”
“So you wouldn’t mind a bite.”
I turned off my emergency lights, checked an empty road in both directions, and pressed the gas pedal.
“I could eat.” He looked out the window. “But you know we’re not far from New Hope Primitive Baptist Church.”
How Orvid knew about that church would remain a mystery because I was so startled that he knew it at all. And I was taken by my sudden memories of the place.
I pictured the interior of the building perfectly, plain rough boards, polished floors, backless wooden pews. Exposed rafters hung low over the congregation. There was a single, white door at one end of the long building, a simple altar table at the other. The walls were lined with glass windows painted black, glass and all. The only light in the place were the oil lamps on the altar; there was no electricity in the building.
New Hope was a snake-handling church, a place where the minister drank lye and ate rat poison to prove the power of his faith. He’d been bitten by cottonmouth, copperhead, and rattlesnake without so much as a blink of his eye. He’d never been to a hospital, never looked at an aspirin, never missed a day in church.
There were still a few other churches like it in the mountains, but they were growing rare. My minister friend on Blue Mountain, Hek Cotage, had stopped his snake services in favor of wife June’s more sedate explanations of faith. Hek was still capable of a trance when he was preaching, and there was no telling what might come out of his mouth, but he had not taken up serpents in over a year. Which made New Hope unique at least in our area.
I had spoken to the minister there many times, a humorless bachelor who called himself Levi. He lived in a trailer close to the church. His congregation had dwindled over the years, but he had never once wavered in his dedication to the faith.
I once told him that his penchant for reptiles, based on the biblical injunction to “take up serpents,” was the Western equivalent to an ancient Taoist notion.
“Allowing Tao to come into you,” I’d told him, “makes you like an innocent child. Poisonous insects will not bite, wild animals attack; no weapon can harm you.”
“That’s it,” he’d affirmed with a curt nod of his head. “Like a child.”
He never asked me what the Tao was, or anything about it. His eyes never met mine.
I found the power of his belief awe-inspiring, even though he was clearly a disturbed man.
I wrenched myself from my thoughts, shot a glance to Orvid.
“It is just the sort of place Hiram Frazier might know about,” I said.
“Good call. I’m going to ignore the nagging questions in my mind about your knowledge of the place.”
“I assume you know the minister there,” Orvid said, glossing over my suspicions. “I remember that you wrote some sort of article or monograph concerning a serpent bowl. Am I remembering that correctly?”
“You have not ceased to astonish me since the second we met.”
“I said that Tristan talked about you a good bit,” Orvid reminded me. “And I read a lot.”
I could tell from the sound of his voice there was more to his interest in me than idle curiosity. Perhaps I had misread him. Perhaps he did, after all, believe we might be related. I never dwelled on such possibilities. My mother’s propensities toward a dazzling array of paramours could have made me related to anyone in the state of Georgia. Or Tennessee.
“I do, in fact, know the minister at New Hope,” I said, eyes deliberately on the road. “But he’ll be asleep by now. He’s a sunup-to-sundown sort of person.”
“Still,” Orvid suggested, “we could swing by the church.”
“I didn’t tell you that one of the current warrants for Frazier,” I said, my pulse quickening, “is for breaking into a church in Clarksville and sleeping on the altar.”
Orvid’s breathing increased noticeably.
“So really, let’s shoot by the church before we eat,” he encouraged.
“Agreed.”
I pressed the accelerator harder, the wheels skidded on wet pavement, and we shot forward toward New Hope.
Fifteen
The church sat close to a bend in the mud road. Water washed off its roof in torrents, and the black windows made the building appear to be a dead hulk.
Rain pounded like rubber mallets on the roof and hood of my truck, a deafening din. I pulled up close to the front door of New Hope.
“Why are the windows blacked out?” Orvid asked over the noise.
“People are curious about what goes on inside,” I told him, shifting into park, “and Preacher Levi does not care for the idle eye. He would prefer to have a visitor brave the confines of the building.”
“Where said visitor might fall under Preacher Levi’s hypnotic sway,” Orvid added, a slight grin touching his lips.
“Exactly,” I confirmed. “But also, the members of this church need concentration. It would not do well for anyone to be holding a rattlesnake in one hand and suddenly be distracted from the trance state by leering neighbors, or a nice view. That’s just an invitation to a poisonous bite.”
“Yes,” Orvid said more seriously, “concentration on the task at hand. I understand that.”
Once again I had the impression that Orvid was employing a bit of judicious understatement. The concept of concentration was more than a casual element of his regimen. It was an imperative.
The moonless sky dipped low to the earth, helped to hide the trailer behind the church. I tried to peer through the darkness, past the distraction of the windshield wipers, but everything was black beyond the back of the church.
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s broken into the church,” Orvid ventured, staring at the front door. “Is there a back way in?”
“No.”
We both sat, trying to decide how to proceed.
“I have an umbrella under my seat,” I said absently.
“I don’t think it would help both of us at the same time. If you hold it, it’ll be too high for me, and if I hold it, you’d have to walk on all fours.”
“You can have it. I’m already as wet as I can get.”
“No.” He took hold of the door handle. “I like to have both hands free.”
He shoved the door open and got out of the truck.
Not one to be outdone in the category of manly deportment, I too eschewed the umbrella. I turned off the headlights and shut down the truck.
The air around us plummeted into darkness. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. I could barely make out Orvid’s back as he moved toward the church.
He checked the front door.
“Locked,” he reported.
I started around the church.
“The preacher’s trailer is back here,” I told Orvid.
He followed.
Night air was polished, wet obsidian, a slick black jewel set in the emptiness above the earth. Rain battered it constantly, a vain attempt to split the diamond. But the darkness would not be broken.
The soaked grass seemed to grasp at my ankles, hands of the buried souls beneath the earth around the church, hoping for help out of their drenched resting place.
The hushing static of the rain and the wet rustle of the last leaves on the trees all around us filled my ears, made sound a part of the absence of light.
The smell of sodden earth, decayed leaves, mildew and rust, filled the air around me.
All senses were stopped.
By the time I saw the trailer, I felt I had walked a mile in the rain.
“There.” I pointed.
But Orvid was ahead of me. He’d seen something.
He turned and held his finger to his lips. I fell silent.
Although the curtains of the trailer were pulled tight, it was obvious a light was on inside. And as I took a step or two closer, I could tell that the curtains closest to the door were parted just enough for a single eyeball to be seen peering at us from inside.
“He’s seen us,” Orvid whispered. “No good trying to pretend he hasn’t. Go to the door.”
I nodded.
“Preacher Levi?” I called, loud enough to startle both Orvid and the man at the window.
The curtains shut immediately.
“It’s Dr. Devilin,” I went on. “Sorry to disturb you so late, but I have some rather urgent business.”
There was no reply, but I could hear the preacher moving around inside the trailer, even through the masking noise of the sheets of rain.
Orvid slowly positioned himself by the door to one side of the hinges, so that if the door opened, he would be hidden behind it.
I took my cue and moved toward the other side of the door, clearly visible to Levi when he opened up.
After a moment the door cracked and his muffled voice shot through.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Fever Devilin,” I said.
I waved.
“Oh.” He sniffed. “You.”
“Look, I would never bother you if it weren’t important, but there’s a man wanted for murder running around loose up here, and I have reason to believe he might try to break into your church. He did just that in Clarksville not too along ago.”
“Break into the church?” he grunted. “Why’d he want to do that?”
“He’s something of a preacher himself,” I explained. “He had a congregation in Tennessee, until he murdered his wife.”
“Murdered?” Preacher Levi opened the door wide. “Is that true?”
Orvid was nearly pinned to the side of the trailer behind the door.
“You know me,” I said deliberately. “You know the kind of person I am. I don’t lie. And maybe you remember that the county sheriff is a friend of mine. And Hek Cotage too.”
“Hek’s a good’n,” Levi muttered, something almost like a smile beginning at one corner of his mouth.
“He is that.” I grinned back.
“Don’t know about that wife of his,” Levi grumbled, any hint of a smile gone.
“The point is,” I said hurriedly, “that there’s a man possibly headed this way who just may try to break into your church.”
“Uh,” Levi began, “yeah. About that. Maybe you’d better come on in.”
“Into your trailer?”
He’d never invited me into his home before.
“Yeah.” He bumped Orvid with the door several times. “And tell your little friend he can come in too.”
Orvid appeared, somewhat chagrined.
“So much for stealth,” Orvid said to no one in particular.
“Let’s have us some coff
ee,” Levi said, disappearing into the recesses of the trailer.
Orvid looked at me, I politely indicated that he might go in ahead of me.
He did; I followed.
The trailer was Spartan. It was only one open room. A sink and a gas stove were in one corner, a wooden kitchen table close to them, four solid chairs. At the far end of the rectangular space there was a cot and an oil lamp. Above the cot was a large wooden cross with a serpent coiling up it. At the foot of the cot there was a wooden trunk, lid open. Nothing else adorned the walls or floor. There was no other furniture. The front of the trailer had two windows, one on either side of the door, and a third window over the sink looked out the back, into the woods.
On the kitchen table there were two candles in nice crystal candlestick holders, Levi’s ever-present Bible, and, to my astonishment, a silver and glass Bodum French-press coffeemaker, nearly empty.
Beside it sat an ancient stone mortar-and-pestle set that had obviously been used to grind whole coffee beans by hand.
“I’ll make fresh,” Levi told us, his back to the door.
He grabbed the French press, pulled out the plunger, opened the window above his sink, and tossed out the old coffee and grounds. He washed out the press for what seemed like five minutes, not speaking, not turning to look at us.
Orvid and I stood silent, watching him, wondering what we were doing. I knew better than to speak before Levi was ready. I’d made the mistake of prompting him in one of our early meetings years before, and he’d stopped talking altogether. Patience was a necessary ally in the house of Levi. Luckily, Orvid followed my lead and contented himself with taking in every detail of the interior of the trailer.
Finally Levi turned.
“There.” He shook the press. “Sit you down.”
He nodded toward his kitchen table.
“We’re kind of wet,” I ventured.
“I don’t care about that,” Levi responded in a monotone.
I shot a quick glance to Orvid and we took seats.
Levi spent another ten agonizing minutes grinding more coffee beans while the gas eye under his old tin kettle did its best to boil water and I did my best to keep quiet. Orvid seemed perfectly at peace. All the while the rain made a constant drumming rhythm on the roof of the trailer.
A Minister's Ghost: A Fever Devilin Mystery Page 20