Resendez was showing him an old country church and the ruins of six small cottages he’d found while clearing the bottom ten acres of his land. “Impossible to say how old they are,” Resendez said. “Too overgrown. I bet the place is probably crawling with rattlesnakes.”
Garza nodded, suddenly mindful of where he stepped. The cottages themselves were nothing special, just small moldering derelicts waist deep in yellow alkali grass. None of them had roofs, and only one still had all four walls. The weather and the years had not been kind to them.
But the church was in better shape. It no longer had a front door, and few of the gravestones on its north lawn were still standing, but it retained enough of its former self that you could tell at a glance it was a church.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” Resendez said, watching with pleasure at the fascination on Garza’s face. “Go on, look inside.”
Garza got as far as the front steps and stopped. “Oh Jesus,” he said. He put a hand over his mouth and gagged. “Something’s dead in there.”
“It’s a deer,” Resendez said.
Garza glanced at Resendez, his face wrinkled in disgust. Even after twenty years of handling homicides, the smell of rotting flesh still rattled him.
“Go on, you big baby,” Resendez said. “Go inside.”
Gagging, Garza went. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness, but once they did, he saw that the church was as simple inside as out, no frills, no ornamentation. It was just a large, high-ceilinged, rectangular room with a couple pews. The dead deer lay across what had once been the altar, and swarming around its carcass was a vast gathering of flies. Their murmuring buzz filled the deepening shadows.
Resendez led him around the carcass to a small wooden box tucked back into a corner. The ancient black iron lock had been forced open. “One of my workers found this yesterday while he was clearing brush for me,” Resendez said. “Go ahead. Open it.”
Inside lay a small brown leather book. The back flap was water-damaged, but the spine was still somewhat supple, and the pages felt stiff as he thumbed through them. The handwriting was a thin, scrunched-together scrawl that didn’t yield to easy translation. It looked like a series of journal entries, with an occasional list of names and dates. Some of the earliest were from the 1720s.
“It’s in German,” Garza said.
“Yeah, I was hoping you could translate it. That’s what you did in the Army, right? A language officer.”
Flies buzzed around them. Garza waved a hand to shoo them away. “That was twenty-five years ago,” he said. “Rusty” didn’t even come close to describing his comfort level with the German language. “I can try, I guess.”
Resendez nodded and together they walked outside. The dusty haze of late afternoon wrapped around the trees. Resendez said something about wanting to know the history of the place.
But Garza was only half listening. He was watching a coyote about forty yards off, and it was watching him. Garza opened his mouth to say something about it, but the animal melted back into the cedar before he could get the words out.
He turned to Resendez. “Did you see that?”
***
Garza and his wife, Linda, both lay awake in bed, their eyes open in the dark, as their dog howled in the kitchen downstairs.
“Will you please go check on him?” Linda asked.
Garza grumbled something about strangling the damn dog with his bare hands and got dressed. On his way downstairs, he passed his daughter Sam’s room. A white glow bordered the door. She was awake, of course, probably on her cell phone, or listening to music. For a moment he thought of getting her to do it. Guthrie was her dog, after all, and she was probably in there doing nothing, as usual.
“Screw it,” he grumbled, and went down to shut the dog up himself.
Guthrie, a full grown chocolate lab ordinarily gentle as a kitten, stood in the kitchen by the back door, barking himself hoarse. His coat bristled down his spine and his lips pulled back over his teeth in a fairly convincing imitation of a tough-as-nails junkyard dog.
“Guthrie, shut up!”
The dog looked at him, whined once, then started barking even louder at the door. Garza watched him for a second, morbidly fascinated. He’d never acted like this. Not when they lived in the city.
Of course there Guthrie hadn’t had ten acres of land to lord over.
A part of Garza wanted to slap the dog and be done with it. But another part of him recognized something hideous in his bark. At times it became a keening wail, almost feral, wolf-like. City dogs didn’t make noises like that. And Guthrie, despite his new home, was decidedly a city dog.
Garza flipped on the kitchen light and Guthrie backed away from the door, his barks trailing off to a low, stuttering growl.
He turned on the floodlights for the backyard and looked through the window.
There was nothing there.
“Stupid dog,” Garza said, and patted him on the head.
He looked outside again, his hand poised over the switch to turn out the lights, when he heard a low murmuring hum. He glanced at Guthrie, who was still growling, and then back at the yard.
There was nothing but grass and darkness beyond the trees. He hesitated for a moment, then opened the door and stepped outside—only to jump right back in and slam the door behind him.
A huge swarm of flies covered the outside of the door. He put his knuckles in his mouth to stifle the nausea threatening to overtake him.
“Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus.”
***
Though he was unbelievably tired, Garza stayed awake most of that night thinking about the church on Resendez’s land, and the book he’d been given to translate.
It was curious how a building like that could have been spared the ravages of the South Texas weather for as long as it had. According to the book, the church had been there since at least 1728, for there had been a baptism in March of that year. Later entries showed the church was in constant use until 1848, when the last entry was made.
But the most curious thing about the book was that it only mentioned one name—Kretschmer. Garza guessed that it was a family prayer book, which might explain why only that name was written there. The other alternative, that the little community had been so isolated that they only married each other, was too repugnant for him to dwell on.
He assumed it was a prayer book because the various authors whose handwriting he could decipher all made mention of religious rites and ceremonies. He’d skimmed over them at first, only because he figured they described conventional ceremonies, like baptism and marriage. But when he began to read them in more detail, he realized they described activities so hideously strange they could only be Satanic in design. There were so many references to demons that Garza wondered if the community’s isolation was voluntary, or perhaps forced on them by horrified neighbors.
He was enough of a modern man to dismiss most of what he read in the prayer book as hogwash. But there were constant references to flies that stirred something inside him. He was almost surprised to discover this superstitious side of his personality was there, but there it was. He read the numerous entries about the flies, and how the book said they were the eyes and ears of a demon called De Vermis, which Garza guessed meant “the worm,” and he found himself thoroughly creeped out. It wasn’t a feeling he enjoyed.
But he hadn’t known any of that when he went to Resendez’s house earlier that evening. At that time, shortly after touring the church and cottages on Resendez’s land and before making it back to his place for dinner, he hadn’t even opened the book yet. It wouldn’t be until he was alone in his own study, while Sam was upstairs doing her homework and Linda was in the kitchen doing the dishes, that he learned about the demon the Kretschmers called De Vermis.
“I suppose the first thing we ought to do is figure out how old those structures are,” Resendez had said. “Once we know that, we can make more informed decisions.”
&
nbsp; They were sitting in Resendez’s study, looking over some maps of the land around the lake.
“Decisions about what, exactly?”
“Well, think about it, Robert. If it’s just some cowboy church, we might as well bulldoze it and move on. But if it’s something else, something older—maybe Spanish—we could use that.”
“Why would it be Spanish? That book was in German.”
“You know what I mean. I just want to know if we can use it somehow.”
“Use how?”
Resendez smiled at him patiently. “We could market it. Maybe change the name of the development from Espada Ridge to something having to do with the church.”
Garza started to speak, but suddenly stopped himself. It dawned on him that he and Resendez had very different ideas about their obligations.
“Do you think we have the right to do that?” Garza asked.
“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t we?”
“Well, if it is a church, Spanish or otherwise, wouldn’t it fall under some kind of historical preservation act? The federal government’s got that law protecting archeological artifacts.”
Resendez waved the idea away with a dismissive flick of his hand. “This isn’t like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, Robert. It’s just a little out of the way church the world forgot about. My point is we could use it to really give the development an identity. Make it something unique, you know?”
“Frank, I really think—”
Resendez said, “I’m not going to turn this thing over to a bunch of academics and let them put the development on hold indefinitely, Robert. You know that’s what they’d do. Remember when they were building the Wal-Mart over off General Kirby Parkway and they found that old Indian village? The academics got a court order to put a twenty-million-dollar building project on hold so they could dig around for a bunch of fucking arrowheads and cornhusk dolls. You think I want that?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re right. I don’t. What I do want is for you to translate that book. Try to get me some answers.”
And just like that, Garza realized he’d been given an order. There’d be no further discussion. The matter was closed.
***
“Hey, honey.”
“Yes, dear?” Linda said. She was dropping spaghetti into a large pot of boiling water.
“We probably shouldn’t put our garbage out on the back porch anymore. It attracts flies.”
“Flies?”
“Yeah. Probably other things too. I think that’s what Guthrie was barking at last night.”
Linda looked puzzled. “I didn’t put any garbage out back,” she said. “We always put it out on the side, remember?”
Garza nodded. “Must have been Sam. I’ll talk to her about it.”
***
The little town of Bonheim stood about three miles South of Worther Lake. It was a quiet crossroads for the surrounding ranches, with a little eight-man police department under the command of Chief Pablo Delgado.
Delgado was a heavyset man in his early sixties with a sunburnt face and bald head. He’d been an assistant chief in Horizon City, and the chief’s job at Bonheim was his retirement gig. Bonheim was a peaceful little town that didn’t demand a lot from its police force, and that suited Delgado just fine. He preferred to be easy going anyway, more like a benevolent grandpa than a serious lawman.
Garza knew that Delgado also happened to be the local expert on regional history, so he called Delgado, and the two agreed to meet in a little cafe in town.
“What kind of history do you want to know about?” Delgado asked as he managed to wrap his mouth around an enormous pulled pork sandwich that dripped red ropes of barbecue sauce onto his plate.
That was a good question, Garza thought. He didn’t really know. Or he did, he just didn’t know how to bring it up. How does one break the ice when talking about demon worshipping in-breeders?
In the end he decided to come as close to the truth as he could.
“I’ve heard rumors about a family named Kretschmer that was supposed to live around these parts,” he said. “Folks I’ve talked to said they lived up by the lake. Near my house.”
The smile on Delgado’s face slipped away like a greasy egg yolk running off a piece of toast, and Garza guessed he’d hit a nerve. The man put his sandwich down and wiped the barbecue sauce from the corner of his mouth. “How’d you find out about the Kretschmer family?”
“Just people talking,” Garza said. “You know the way people talk. I figured if they used to live on my land, I wanted to know about it.”
Delgado looked annoyed, or maybe skeptical. He said, “Well, that’s the kind of thing I wish people wouldn’t talk about. This area’s got a lot of good, honest history. It doesn’t need a scandal to make it interesting.”
But Delgado seemed willing enough to talk about the scandal. After all the horrible things he’d read in that book, and the flies at his door, and the coyotes that seemed to leer out of every dark pocket of cedar, Garza found himself keenly interested in the tale.
Most of it revolved around a man named Oswald Kretschmer, who fled Germany in the 1680s with his family to avoid religious persecution and ended up in Mexico. He relocated his family again to the area around Worther Lake sometime in the 1690s or early 1700s.
“They pretty much kept to themselves out there,” Delgado explained. “Of course, at the time there really wasn’t anybody else around for them to associate with. Most of the area was a giant Spanish land grant to one of their local governors. Empty except for a few half-starved Indian tribes.
“After Texas got its independence from Mexico, settlers started moving into the area and founded this town. People avoided the Kretschmers, mostly. Though, I did read a diary once that mentioned them. It said you could always tell the Kretschmer family on account of their eyes.”
“Their eyes?” Garza asked. He was leaning forward despite himself, like he was hearing dirty gossip about what the pretty secretary in the office looked like naked.
“Said to be the iciest blue you ever saw. Every single member of that family had those eyes, apparently.”
“And so what happened to them?”
“Nobody knows,” Delgado said. “The Texas government took a census of the area when they tried to enlist local boys into the Confederate militias, and there’s no record of them in it. My guess is they packed up and went somewhere where they could still be by themselves.”
Garza sat back and scratched his head. “I’m afraid I don’t see the scandal in all that.”
“Well,” Delgado said, and he obviously found this detail distasteful, “there’s the part about them all marrying each other. It was just the one family, you know. Over the space of a hundred years or so, you’re bound to end up with what the law calls marriages of consanguinity.”
“In-breeding,” Garza said.
Delgado nodded. “You know how that kind of thing gets people talking. There’s more than a few references to them doing devil worship—and witchcraft too—but I think that’s just people embellishing an already sordid story. The records I’ve seen mention birth defects and deformities and all the other things you’d expect from generations of in-breeding. Given the nature of the time it’s only natural stories of witchcraft and such would start up.”
Garza said he agreed, but his mind kept turning back to that book.
And the flies.
***
“You did what?” Resendez said. “Robert, what in the hell’s wrong with you? I told you I didn’t want a bunch of historians crawling all over this place.”
“He’s not a real historian, Frank. He’s just an amateur—”
“I know who he is, Robert. What I want to know is why you’d do something like that. Don’t you realize how much is at stake here? We both stand to make a lot of money if we do this right.”
“I was just trying to find out about the history of this place. Like you asked me to do. And I didn’t say a word about the
buildings you found. As far as he knows, I was just following up on idle gossip I’d heard around town.”
“You mean about that devil worshipping crap you found in that book?”
Garza nodded.
“That’s great,” Resendez said, and then he turned and looked out the window of his study, his gaze wandering over the acres of cedar to the lake beyond. At last he said, “You know, this isn’t what I wanted when I asked you to help me give this place an identity.”
“You got the truth, Frank.”
“Bullshit,” Resendez said. “There’s no truth in that book. And none in Delgado’s amateur history either. The truth is what we make it.”
Garza was appalled. In all the years he’d known Resendez, he’d never once heard the man say something to suggest slippery ethics. He felt like one of his boyhood heroes had let him down. But that wasn’t all. For the first time, he realized that some small part of his orderly, rational mind actually believed the stories he’d read about devil worship. Maybe there was a kernel of truth in it, at least. People who isolated themselves for religious reasons usually did it because they had some off-the-wall beliefs, didn’t they?
“So what are you going to do, Frank?” Garza’s voice strained, his lips thin as razorblades.
“I don’t know yet,” Resendez said, and turned back to the window. “Go home, Robert. We’ll talk later.”
***
The next day was Monday, and work was uncomfortable. Resendez, never one to hold a grudge or let a problem bog him down, was unusually cold, and he and Garza went most of the day without speaking more than a few grunts to each other.
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