by Celia Roman
I got outta the IROC and trudged up the stairs toward the trailer. A large brown envelope was stuffed flat against the door between it and the doorjamb. I tugged it out and let myself inside, and opened it soon as the light flickered on. A handful of paper was stuffed inside topped by a handwritten note signed by Angela Hill, a girl I went to high school with before Terry Whitehead planted Henry in my belly and I had to drop out.
I riffled through the pages, which turned out to be autopsy results and photos of Lily and Ferd’s corpses. Up close photos, at that. I dropped ‘em face down on my desk top so I didn’t have to look at ‘em too hard. The pasty death masks their faces was froze into was creepier than just about anything I ever seen, not to mention the bloody holes gored plumb through their chests from sternum to spine. Another picture showed a close up of the holes. In amongst the bloody tissue was tiny flakes of something I couldn’t quite make out, and probably wouldn’ta noticed if it hadn’t been for the arrows pointing at the largest ones.
I skimmed through the autopsy reports, then turned back to the note. Just got these from the Medical Examiner, it read in loopy cursive. Look at the evidence photo. That’s granite. How did it get into their chests?
It hit me right then why Angela brung the packet to me. She was the junior Deputy Coroner. As such, she’d be one of the first to see the autopsy reports. Fast’uns, too. The sheriff musta put a rush on ‘em, what with him being in a hurry to commit Fame to a lifetime of confinement on the state’s dime.
And Angela probably knowed Fame weren’t gonna get no fair shake.
On t’other hand, she’d made a point to highlight the abnormality. Flakes of stone found in holes gorged into two dead bodies. Evidence of the murder weapon?
I plopped onto the couch and scraped a hand through my stick straight hair. Me and Angela never spent much time together in school beyond a coupla shared classes. American Lit and Algebra, if I recalled correct, and I usually did. We was friendly enough, but we wasn’t the best of friends. So why was she doing me this favor? Did she know what I was, what I did when most folks turned a blind eye to the critters hid in the shadows? Was that why she delivered them pictures to me, ‘cause she suspected something unnatural had a hand in my aunt and uncle’s deaths?
The questions spun around in my weary mind, endlessly circling without a single answer presenting itself. Finally, I stood and dropped the autopsy reports onto my desk on top of the accompanying photos. Time enough for sorting one from t’other on the morrow. Between BobbiJean and Riley, I was plum tuckered out. Sleep, then, and a good night’s worth at that. Morning was soon enough for thinking.
Fifteen minutes later, I crawled into bed, and dreamt of a lurid shadow stalking me through the deep, dark night.
Chapter Twelve
Whatever I dreamed, it drove me awake at 5:17 a.m., gasping and clutching my chest. A faint echo of gloom lingered in the pre-dawn chill, though try as I might, I couldn’t connect it with nothing. No trace of my dreams remained, no monsters, no death, no blood, just a hollow where something shoulda been.
I shivered and clutched the covers to my thin chest, hidden ‘neath a ragged ol’ t-shirt, and that voice whispered to me.
Seek, it said. Hunt.
Now, I was a lotta things. Done a lotta good and bad, and experienced more’n most folks my age had, even them what’d traveled the world over and back again. I never heard no voice in my head before, never had nothing guiding me ‘cept instinct born of my coon crazy mama and honed by my daddy’s and Fame’s teachings.
And here it was the second time that little voice touched me. Maybe the craziness of the past few weeks’d done drove me right around the bend.
I shook it off and crawled outta bed. Just the thought of going back to sleep stirred a greasy unease in the pit of my stomach.
Oh, well. No rest for the weary.
Since I was up so early, I might as well do something constructive. Riley’d mentioned another body being found. Weren’t no harm in taking a look, was there? ‘Specially since right then it was about the only hope Fame had of clearing his name.
Half an hour later, after showering and gulping down a quick breakfast, I hit the road dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt under a warm jacket, with Daddy’s knife tucked into my boot and Missy’s ring looped on a chain ‘round my neck. I took a thermos of piping hot coffee with me and, on impulse, brung along a sheath of Styrofoam cups.
Hey, it was chilly outside. No telling who I’d run into what needed a little warming.
Half an hour later, I pulled up behind a deputy’s car and cut the IROC’s engine off. This spot was a good ways away from Lily and Ferd’s campsite, and was probably gonna be a lot harder to get to, from what Riley told me. It was deeper in the woods along a narrow trail, not one used regular like among locals or nature lovers neither one.
I climbed outta the car, slammed the door shut. It echoed in the morning’s quiet. The sun’s leading edge was just cresting the mountaintops now, shedding thin light on the trees. Sunlight didn’t quite reach the ground, so I opened the trunk and rooted around for a flashlight, then slammed the trunk shut, too.
If anybody was in the deputy’s car, they was doing a good job of ignoring the one and only visitor to the crime scene.
I tromped up the dirt road toward the car, careful to swing wide so whoever was perched in there could see me coming. Soon as I swerved back toward the front of the car and caught a good look at the lone occupant, I laughed. Deputy Franks was sitting in the driver’s seat with his head leaned back against the headrest, sound asleep.
If me slamming this door or that trunk hadn’t woke him, like as not, he needed the rest. I let him be, switched on the flashlight, and followed a small herd of footprints pressed into the loamy verge into the forest.
The trees closed in around me, silent witnesses of the dawning day, and memory flashed, of Henry’s ghostly limbs gnarled into thin branches. I shivered in the forest’s chill and hunched my shoulders around my ears under my jacket. Dang ol’ dreams.
The trail narrowed as it wound through the scraggly undergrowth, thinning to a bare hint until it dumped out into a campsite almost a mile later, by my reckoning. Yellow police tape circled the area. Beyond it, the forest was thick and untouched around a single trail bisecting it. I slid the flashlight’s beam along the far side, beyond the scattered shambles of a canvas tarp and a lone backpack hanging off a branch by a ragged rope.
I frowned as instinct stirred. Something was off here. Something set this campsite apart from Lily and Ferd’s, but what? I scanned the area again, searching for the dissonance, and finally hit on it. No traces of blood on the ground, no traces of food in the campsite, no lingering hint of a campfire mingling with the musty scent of rotting leaves, but there was an oddly familiar odor I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Moss-coated stone, rich dirt, unwashed skin. Where’d I smelt that before?
After a minute spent combing my memory and drawing a blank, I let it go and, resigned, slapped the flashlight against my thigh. Whoever’d made camp here, it hadn’t been recent. Hang it all. There went Fame’s alibi.
On impulse, I ducked under the police tape, picked my way across the campsite, and ducked under more tape. The trail beyond hardly warranted the name, it was so faint. An animal trail, maybe, or used to be, likely commandeered by humans searching for the easiest path through the woods, same as the critters.
Unease stirred as shadow crept into my mind. I shook it off and stepped deeper into the woods, one step, another. It was like slogging through molasses, the reluctance was so thick in me.
The nape of my neck tingled. I hunched my shoulders against the chill fear, scrubbed a hand along the back of my neck. In the distance, birds chirped the sun awake. A car passed by on the road leading to the one what’d got me here. A door slammed shut a whole lot closer to the campsite. Somebody else’d arrived. Like as not, it was the investigator come to look the scene over, in which case, I better shake a leg if I wanted to get my gander in before I wa
s chased off.
That urgency drove me farther down the trail. Low hanging tree limbs and leafless huckleberry bushes tangled with overgrown laurel into a gnarled mess. Voices echoed toward me, no louder’n the slammed car door, but my heart leapt in my chest all the same.
I broke into a jog, spurred on by my heartbeat thundering in my ears, drowning out my progress as I crashed through the woods with all the finesse of a mama bear chasing down a threat to her cubs. Faster and faster I went, ‘til I was at a near gallop. The trail wound around strong oaks and dying hemlocks, under fallen pines, and I followed it, propelled by the urgency burning hot in my blood.
The trail curved sharp to the right. I slowed a mite, more on instinct than fear I’d skid around it like a car gone outta control, and near about run into a jumbled stack of boulders. The trail veered left around ‘em, but I stopped there and doubled over, winded by my spur of the moment run.
I just needed to catch my breath, was all, then I could move on.
My lungs seized up on me, refusing to draw air, and the scars in my side throbbed a reminder that I weren’t supposed to be engaging in the overly physical just yet. I braced sweaty palms against shaky knees and sucked in a breath, and that smell hit me again, stronger now. Moss-covered rock, loamy earth, and the faintest hint of unclean.
I stared at the boulders, stared whilst my mind turned over and oxygen soaked into my lungs, and finally caught on to what I was seeing. A slim, black half moon outlined the edges of an opening in the rock where the trail veered away.
A cave.
Neurons fired in my noggin, I reckon, or maybe misfired, ‘cause the next word what leapt at me was monster.
I pushed myself into a stand, rolled my shoulders back ‘til my spine was stiff and rigid and my breath come proper like. The campsite Lily and Ferd had been killed in was located near rock, just like this one. Two incidences did not a pattern make, but it didn’t need to, as the first time I smelt that odd aroma finally popped into my head: That day at the cemetery, when me and Riley was studying the crime seen in the frigid winter air, that was when it was.
What smelled of rock and earth and critters? Why, a cave monster’s hidey-hole, that’s what.
I eased close to the cave’s opening and shone the flashlight’s beam inside. Darkness eat the light before it got too far, but I seen what I needed to, or some of it. The passage narrowed into a thin slit, too small for an adult human of any size a’tall, certainly a tad tight for me, and I weren’t exactly puffy around the middle. So whatever’d lived here was small, or narrow anyhow, as the cave’s opening stretched well over my head. It liked the dark damp. And it hunted humans.
I flicked the beam around again, learnt not a single dadgum thing, then pivoted away and jogged back the way I come. The sun was stronger now, brighter, and the air a mere fraction warmer’n when I stepped into the forest, but I shivered anyhow. No way in aitch ee double hockey sticks was I going into that cave alone, not when nary a soul knowed where I was, and maybe not even then. I could come back later, if there was a need, but I didn’t think there’d be much of one. Whatever critter’d tracked down that poor, hapless camper was long gone. Maybe it’d already skeedaddled away from Lily and Ferd’s campsite, too. My gut said otherwise, but it was a possibility I had to consider if I was gonna track it down.
In the meantime, I needed to record ever thing I knowed and hit the books in hopes of finding whatever monster I scented near the cave and the cemetery. Maybe there weren’t no connection between the dead and the monster.
Instinct jangled a warning and in the back of my mind, a tiny voice whispered to me. I was on the right track, I just knowed it, but it weren’t no easy track and it sure as tootin’ weren’t gonna be a safe’un.
Weren’t no point hiding my exit outta the woods, seeing as how the IROC was parked in plain sight right behind Deputy Franks’ patrol car. Still, I weren’t right keen on ever body knowing exactly what I was up to. I twisted a green needled branch off a pine sapling, jogged halfway back to the campsite, then swept my boot prints off the trail from there to the tape and through the site itself. That done, I tossed the branch into the woods and hightailed it toward the IROC’s roadside perch.
A cluster of uniforms awaited me on the other side. Three men huddled together beside Deputy Franks’ car, including him. I stepped on a dry branch in a polite attempt to warn ‘em of my presence. They glanced around and broke apart, leaving a gap for me in their circle.
“Hey,” I said right off. “I was just looking at the campsite.”
The investigator shook his head, but he was grinning under the thick jut of his moustache.
Deputy Franks coughed into his fist. “She’s not been here long.”
I cut a side-eyed glance at him and, since he been so good as to keep Riley, and therefore me, in the loop, I cut him some slack. “I didn’t touch nothing. Just a quick walk in and out to see what was what. Want some of that coffee now, Deputy?”
His freckled face relaxed into a relieved grin. “Yeah. Thanks, Sunny.”
I grinned back and dutifully fetched coffee for him, but that echo of what I found in the woods pressed against me, like an invisible hand shoving at me. I left the thermos with the good deputy, told him to bring it by when he got a chance, and left before questions on what I seen, or didn’t, started flying. It sure was hard not to stir up gravel and dust as I drove off, but seeing as how I had places to go and research to do, not to mention three officers of the law bearing witness, I eased Daddy’s car around and headed home in a right sober manner befitting the girlfriend of a fellow law enforcement officer.
Once I hit paved road, all bets was off. I inched the IROC into a higher speed and hurried home whilst planning my approach so I could hit the ground running soon as I got there.
No such luck.
Old Mother was sitting on the head of the trail leading from the trailer to Fame’s, with her arms holding her bent legs to her chest. Bare toes peeked out ‘neath the dirty hem of her dress and her knuckles whitened where her hands clenched together at her shins.
I got outta the car, bit back the curse words threatening to spill outta my mouth, and searched for something a mite more appropriate. “Hey, there. You wanna come in outta the cold?”
I winced. ‘Course, she wanted to come in. It was near freezing out and she hadn’t a coat nor a hat covering the filmy white of her dress.
She lifted her head up to me and her normally placid expression twisted into confusion. When she spoke, her voice was Deep South and even, like a teenage country girl, not the hoodoo woman I knowed her as. “Where’s the third? I came to see the third.”
“The third what?” I asked, and just about did curse then. Weren’t no use asking Old Mother questions. Hadn’t I learnt that time and time again? I clamped my mouth shut and jogged over to her instead, and held out a hand, mindful of the last time I done the same. Back then, she ‘bout fried my noggin and, if that doctor of mine could be believed, nigh on caused a heart attack what’d forced me into bed rest for a week. God’s honest truth, I weren’t too eager to repeat the experience, but I couldn’t hardly leave her out in the cold now, could I?
She unfolded herself and placed a cool palm against mine. “Have you seen the third?”
“The third what?” I said it gentle as I pulled her upright. Weren’t no helping what addled her and no use getting all het up over it neither. I was just hoping the third didn’t have hide nor hair to do with me. “You want some breakfast ‘til we find this third?”
“Breakfast,” she murmured. “Gravy?”
“And biscuits, if you want ‘em.”
I turned and led her toward the trailer, walking slow and easy on account of her being barefoot, and she followed along like a trusting lamb. The first hint of wrong threaded into me. This weren’t like her a’tall. For one, she didn’t cotton to folks laying hands on her. If I’da remembered that a few weeks back, it mighta saved me a whole lotta hurt.
For anot
her, she weren’t one to linger in fellowship. Experience taught me that and was reinforced by gossip. Old Mother was an odd duck, protective of her privacy, and not a’tall inclined to socialize.
I sure could relate to that.
‘Long and along, I got her inside and sat her down at the kitchen table, fetched a warm quilt and thick socks, tucked her into ‘em. She was a limp statue, hindering more’n helping, and docile as a babe on the cusp of sleep.
Old Mother tucked the quilt up under her chin, in fists hidden behind the hand-stitched patchwork. It gleamed red and gold against her near ebon skin. “Have you seen the third?”
I paused where I was, kneeling in front of her with my hands wrapped around the fuzzy green and purple socks covering her slender ankles, and glanced up. “What’s the third?”
She blinked them chocolate brown eyes of hers at me and her forehead furrowed. “Who, Sunshine. The third is yours, and he is a who.”
It hit me square in the head what she needed. I slapped my palms against my thighs and launched myself into a stand. “All righty then. You just sit yourself right there and I’ll get the third for ya.”
Her hand snaked outta the folds of the quilt and grasped my wrist gentle like. Her palm was smooth against my skin and warmer’n it been when last I felt it. “Thank you,” she said. “I knew you could help me.”
A weak laugh huffed outta me. Well, that’s what I done, weren’t it? I helped folks, even them what normally didn’t need none.
I filled a mug with water from the tap, stuck it in the microwave, set the clock. Hot chocolate should do the trick of warming her whilst I whipped up some vittles and texted my cousin, him what was the third of his name.
Sometimes I was dense as bedrock and twice as dumb.
Trey poked a wary head through the front door right about the time I slid a tray of from-scratch biscuits in the oven to cook. He glanced between me and Old Mother, cleared his throat, then inched into the living room and shut the door behind himself.