“Mr. Oswald. Don’t be alarmed.”
Michael is sure the room is the product of a disturbed mind but also a testimony of chaos in organization. From out of the mess, he finds the source of the voice. The woman addressing him emerges from behind a filing cabinet. She is as neat and made-up as a wedding guest. She wears white slacks and a silk blouse. Her bright emerald earrings set off her eyes and a fine gold chain suspends a locket at her throat. Her expression is not manic as would befit the surroundings, but eager; a refined aspect of that former emotion, controlled and effective.
“What is all this?” Michael says for hello.
“My hobby,” she says with a nervous chuckle. “My obsession. My life.”
Michael traces the many lines of string to a photograph on the wall. It is a professional sitting, a family in a Fall New England forest. Four people sit together beaming at the camera. A toddler sits on his mother’s lap, his face caught mid-laugh. Beside the father stands a young teenage girl, her smile warm and endearing. She shares her mother’s green eyes. The woman staring at Michael, in the paper clutter beside him, has the same green eyes.
“Those were my children,” she says.
“How can I help Mrs. Tagget?”
“Call me Heidi.” She pushes papers off a folding chair. “Sit down. I wanted you to see this.” She gestures to the walls. “I wanted you to know how much effort I’ve put into this.”
“What?”
She unfolds another chair and after making room for it on the floor sits down next to him. She looks into his face earnestly and puts her hand on Michael’s knee.
“My husband thinks I’m crazy,” she says. “I may be.”
She watches him as if waiting for her words to take root in his mind.
“I don’t know “crazy,”” he says. “Or maybe it’s all I know. You should have asked me last year. Then I could have told you.”
She nods as if he’d just given her the passcode.
“My daughter, Marie, married a nice man from Boston, Bruce White,” she begins. “He was a scholar, something of a liberal. They were very happy. They didn’t have to work, but they did. He taught classes at junior colleges. She started an art studio in Boston. They had two kids. Annebelle and Trent.”
She pauses to collect her thoughts or perhaps she’s waiting for Michael to comment. He suspects that if he was up on society news he’d already know all this, but of course, it’s all new to him, not his class.
“Fifteen years ago, the spring after that picture was taken,” she says pointing to the wall but not looking at it, “Bruce decided to take a trip across country. It had something to do with a book he was writing, a road trip version of A Walk Across America.” She holds up a yellowed paperback to show him.
Michael nods.
“He got time off, took the kids out of school and planned an odyssey to see the country. I remember Marie singing that Simon and Garfunkel song as they drove off, I’ve gone to look for America! It was so romantic. Ollie thought it was stupid. He said it was “slumming.” For all his talk, he doesn’t think much of the common man.”
“I’m shocked,” Michael says before he can stop himself. He knows he should be embarrassed, but isn’t. She doesn’t seem to notice one way or the other.
“They started south. They went to Disney World and through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee. They stayed off the freeways and stopped at every roadside attraction they could find; lumberjack statues, big balls of twine, moonshine museums, that kind of thing. They were having a great time. They’d linger in a place if they found it interesting, rush through it if it didn’t feel right.” She pulls a thread of yarn from one map to another, bridging the room as she does.
“Marie told me about meeting people on the road, vagabonds, gypsy types who knew all the interesting places. Bruce bought a trailer camper and they started camping and avoiding hotels. Marie said they’d found a whole secret invisible community right under everyone’s noses. She was so excited.”
Heidi’s voice breaks a little and she swallows hard.
“They disappeared somewhere in Missouri,” she says. “Marie didn’t call one day. I didn’t think anything of it. Then it was several days and I couldn’t get through to anyone. Then a week. Then two. Then even Ollie knew something was wrong. We got the police looking, the FBI, even the Secret Service, but nothing. Nothing. They just disappeared. Gone. Poof. Nothing. No call. No car. Nothing. Just gone.”
She pauses to take in air as if breathing for her is no longer reflexive.
“Oliver went on with his life. Hardly a hiccup. He’s not a bad man, just a little old-fashioned. He has Mark, our oldest, his favorite. His son. The heir to the throne. I settled into a new hobby, Mr. Oswald, and here on the walls you can see where I am.”
Michael glances at the strings for effect. His own family is broken but not like this one. Does that matter? Is his better or worse for not having graves? Room for improvement; room for decline.
He does not enjoy being compared to the likes of Oliver Tagget, even by himself. Especially by himself. If Tiffany or Peter were to go missing, how devastated would that make him? Not much, he decides. He does not define himself by his children as others do, nor by his ex-wife. If the level of concern exhibited by them when he was comatose is any indication, they don’t define themselves much by him either. But Heidi Tagget is another creature. Even though her daughter moved out, married, had a family of her own, they shared a connection Michael never knew. Even when he was married and happy with Carla, he didn’t call her every other day with details of his life. When he did reach out to her on the road, it was all business, domestic collaboration about bills and appointments, child rearing on occasion, and her life. It was shallow and hollow and he doesn’t miss it.
“It was horrible,” she says to the air. “Not knowing.”
“I’ve heard that,” says Michael.
“Then four years ago, a utility company was laying fiber optic cable in Kansas for a new call-center in the middle of nowhere. They dug up a body. Then they dug up another. When they had eight, the FBI showed up and found fifty-nine more.”
She draws a deep breath, it is a labor to bring air into her body.
“Three of them were mine,” she says. “Dental records positively identified Bruce, Marie and Annebelle. But no sign of Trent.”
“Did they stop looking like at Crystal Springs?”
“What do you mean, did they stop looking?”
“After finding eighty-seven in Nevada, they poured asphalt over the lot and called it done.”
“There could have been more?”
“That’s how I understood it.”
“My God,” she whispers. “Why doesn’t this surprise me? They kept digging at the Woodston site. Woodston is the name of the closest town. Ever hear of it?
“No.”
“Don’t feel bad. No one has. It’s closer to Nebraska than Missouri. Much closer.”
He shakes his head.
“They covered it up,” she says, her eyes flashing bright. “That’s what got me going. It was so slick. I realized that there was already a plan on how to handle it before it happened. Like it was anticipated. Like it’d happened before.”
“Yeah. I got that too.”
“I kept looking,” she says. “We are not a family without means. I called in favors, hired investigators. I paid bribes. I went from trying to find out where my kids were to what happened to them. I needed to know.” She searches the air as if looking for answers, landing on taped-up pictures, lists, and string, his face and shadow.
“What did you find?”
“Five other burial-grounds discovered before Woodston—one after—yours.”
“Mine?”
“Crystal Springs. The one you found,” she says. “The earliest discovery was in 1803 in Virginia. They didn’t know how to date the remains like they do today, but there was indication that the bodies had been put there from the 1690’s.”
�
��How do you know it was the same thing? Maybe it was just a cemetery or a mass grave. Smallpox maybe.”
“Here are my criteria,” she says.
She bolts to the desk as if going for a gun. She throws open a drawer and Michael cringes back. She comes up with only a creased piece of yellow legal paper.
“The grave sites have to be large; twenty bodies or more,” she says, reading. “The site has to be unknown to neighbors. It has to have been used consistently for a long time. I set the parameters at thirty years, but the ones I found are at least fifty, most longer. Finally, everyone buried had to have died violently.”
“Died violently or murdered?”
“Murdered,” she says. “There behind you.”
She goes to a banker’s box by the wall. Michael follows her, looking over her shoulder as she thumbs through copied police files, photos, lab reports, forensic diagrams.
“Broken necks and strangulation are the norm when cause of death could be determined,” she says. “Later, I added another one: the bodies also had to be similarly mutilated.”
“Mutilated? How?”
“Post-mortem stab wounds,” she says heavily. “It appears to be ritualistic.”
His heart races to color his face and ears in crimson. He wipes his forehead to buy a moment. “Penetration of the abdomen to keep the body from bloating and revealing the grave,” he says.
“Yes.” Her voice quivers.
“I saw it at Crystal Springs.” His head is light and bobs on his shoulders, a cork on an ocean of fear.
“That’s what it was for? To help hide the bodies? I hadn’t thought of that.”
He knows that’s what the wounds are for. He knows also that the killer would not make the wounds himself. The gravediggers would in accordance with ancient custom.
“I’m guessing,” he lies.
“It’s systematic. It’s interstate. It’s multi-generational.”
“What is it?”
“A cult? Organized crime? Terrorists? Crazy-inbred hillbilly family? I don’t know.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s evil,” she says.
“Evil?”
“Evil.” Her eyes glaze over with the word. “I have dark dreams,” she tells him. “Evil has a face.”
Michael shifts his weight uncomfortably. “What’s the official line?”
“There isn’t one,” she says. “It’s an oddity. Seven mass graves in five-hundred years of white American history is a curiosity not a conspiracy. The government knows how to keep disturbing news out of the press when it has to, when it’ll harm trade, but they don’t have much to go on. They’re old crimes.”
“Is that why you brought me here?” asks Michael. “To raise a stink, embarrass somebody so they have to investigate?”
“No,” she says taking up both of Michael’s hands and squeezing. “I brought you here to find Trent and save him from this evil.”
The word was meant to rouse him, but Michael found it merely quaint.
“Every gravesite I mentioned was discovered by accident, by the encroachment of civilization. Every one, except yours: Crystal Springs. According to the reports I read, reports that were not easy to get, you claim to have had a “hunch” that there were bodies there.”
“Body,” Michael says. “We were looking for a missing truck driver.”
“Still, how did you know?”
“We were just grabbing at straws,” he says.
“There’s no we about it,” she says. “Your partner, Craig, said it was all you. He said you woke up in the middle of the night and “knew where to dig.” That’s what he said in his sworn affidavit.”
“He exaggerates.”
“Did you dream of the black woman? The one with the skulls?”
Michael’s breath catches in his throat.
“You did,” she says, tears forming in her eyes. “I knew it. What do you know?”
“Heidi—”
“What do you know!”
Someone stirs outside the door. Mrs. Tagget turns to it and tenses. Her hands rise in claws and she steps back a pace. Her eyes are wet and wild.
“I know less than you,” Michael says. “I didn’t know about any of the others. I was told to pretend it didn’t happen and your husband offered me money to come talk to you. That’s why I’m here.”
She turns her face back to Michael, but doesn’t lower her hands. “You know the Evil,” she says. “I can tell you do.”
“I don’t know evil.”
“The Devil.” She glances at the door before lowering her voice. “A pitchfork. Limbs and blood. Vicious eyes. A black woman feasting on the dead. This is the Devil and I have seen her. I know she has Trent.”
“How do you know that?”
“A hunch.”
“Mrs. Tagget, I don’t know how I can help you.”
“Okay you don’t have to believe me,” she says. “Put it off to an old woman who doesn’t know what happened to her grandchild. Trent wasn’t in the grave with his parents and sister. He was gone. He was—he might have been taken by the killers. Or he was killed and buried someplace else. I’d like to know what happened. If he’s dead, I’d like to know where he is, so I might bring him home. If he’s alive, I’d like to know he’s safe.” She retrieves a stuffed bear out of basket of toys. Its fur is sun-faded, its plush sagging. She offers it to Michael like a clue, or a bribe. An offering.
Michael shakes his head and she drops it to the floor as if forgetting she held it.
He’s never seen a more broken person in his life. He senses that she’s holding on by tension alone, a cold breeze could bring her down like a house of cards.
“You’ve hired people to do this before, I assume?”
She nods.
“And they found nothing? Nothing to give you hope?”
She shakes her head.
“But you think I can find him after fifteen years because I had a hunch?”
“You walk with the Devil, Mr. Oswald. In my dream. When I knew who you were, I dreamed you walked with her. She knows where my grandson is. You can ask her.” She sobs and her words crackle out of her in choked gasps. “It’s so dark there, so bad. Evil. Such evil. He cannot be part of this. God will never forgive him. You can save him. Please Mr. Oswald. I’ll give you anything you want. Anything.”
She falls apart completely then, sobbing uncontrollably, howling in despair.
“You walk with Her!” she screams.
Chapter Nineteen
The screaming goes on.
“You walk with Her! With Her. You walk with Her!”
The door opens and a woman quickly enters with soft steps. She puts her arms around Mrs. Tagget and leads her out of the room.
Michael listens to Heidi’s cries as they’re put behind another door. They are quieted, but not stopped.
Tagget’s man is in the hall. He does not enter but stands quietly outside watching and waiting for Michael to come out.
Before leaving, Michael examines the walls. He follows a knot of yarn to a piece of torn yellow legal pad, a single word written in black sharpie: Kaleekah.
He shapes the word with his lips, then says it out loud as a whisper. He listens to it echo in his mind like a drop falling into a bowl of blood on a still and blackening night.
“Mr. Oswald,” says the man. “You should leave now. The car’s waiting.”
Michael traces other yarn lines through photographs of glades, deserted roads, missing persons reports, and family snapshots. He finds his own picture, the one currently on his driver’s license, tacked up beside a map of central Nevada. He traces a red line from his shoulder to a picture of a multi-armed demon and his skin bristles with goosebumps.
“Mr. Oswald?” The man in the hall taps his watch.
Michael pauses in front of the photo of Heidi’s lost family as much to irritate the man as to take a closer look. The baby boy is three, maybe four-years old. That would put him about nineteen now, give or tak
e. The man in the picture draws his attention. There is something familiar about him. He thought so when he first saw it but ignored it. He’d just met Oliver Tagget and assumed the likeness was from that. It’s not. Heidi’s son-in-law has sharper and darker features, soft brown eyes and the start of a widow’s peak. He’s handsome and fit in the picture, American aristocracy like the Taggets, but he’s not a Tagget. And yet he’s familiar to Michael.
“Mr. Oswald?” More impatience in the man’s voice.
He cannot differentiate the dreams he has suffered from the memories he has made.
With one last look at the photo he leaves Mrs. Tagget’s web of worry and goes downstairs.
The limousine he came in waits for him on the road in front of the house pointing the other direction. His bag’s in the back. The driver opens the door for him.
“Mr. Oswald.” Oliver Tagget stops him from behind. “Were you able to help her?”
“I doubt it.”
“Yes. Well, thanks for coming.” He doesn’t offer him a handshake. He allows Michael to turn toward the open door and then says, “One more thing, Mr. Oswald. What happened here today is confidential. If a word of this leaks out, if my wife’s condition is mentioned, if my name appears somewhere or somehow I don’t approve, I will not be happy.”
“How’d you make your money?” Michael asks. “Not you, of course. You were born into it. How’d your family make it to give to you?’
“I can trace my family’s fortune to Roman times.”
“And they stole it.”
“What’s your point, Mr. Oswald.”
“Just thinking about class.”
“What about it?”
“Certain things are best done behind closed doors. Certain people don’t like the sunshine.”
“Spare me.”
“You live in the shadows, Mr. Tagget.”
“Privacy is not a sin.”
“Shadows.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Oswald.” He turns his back and takes a step into the house before Michael stops him.
What Immortal Hand Page 16