by John Hart
“Are you a godly man?”
“I was once.”
“Then I would pray for a miracle.”
When he was gone, the girl came at last, and came slyly. “You know the land I want?” She stopped ten feet into the room, and John had a sudden insight into just how smart she was. Had she asked for the whole plantation, the county would have risen up. She wanted the dark places, the forgotten lands. “I want people, too. And tools for building.”
She used a mix of English and her own language. John looked at Isaac, who translated.
“People?” John asked.
“My people, African people.”
“Just heal my wife.”
“There is a place your slaves worship. We will go there first.”
“There is no such place.”
“He knows.”
She pointed at Isaac, and spoke in her own language. Isaac explained, looking ashamed. “Some of us worship in secret. She says it’s the only place she will accept your … payment.”
“Do you know this place?”
“In the swamp,” Isaac said. “I know it.”
* * *
She wanted the slaves to see, so they trailed behind. John looked back at the shuffling line, the condemned men on the buckboard that rattled and clanked as the path narrowed. “How much farther?” he asked.
Isaac rode beside him. “Not far.” The air thickened as they neared the swamp, and when the sun set, they lit torches. “This is the place.”
It was a clearing in the woods, a hollow place that smelled of mud and stagnant water. “There’s nothing here,” John said.
“That’s always been the point.”
John swung down from the horse, and held Isaac’s gaze. “For Marion,” he said.
“For your wife.”
“Tell her to get on with it.”
But the girl was already moving. She cut away the white man’s clothes, then did the same to the other two. They froze as the knife moved, but the girl was not finished. She pointed with the knife and spoke in her own language.
“Isaac?” John whispered.
“She’s telling them what she plans to do. She’s taunting them.”
She touched a penis with the blade, then an eyelid, the white man’s lips.
“You can’t stop it,” Isaac said.
Even if John wanted to, he knew that he could not. The huddled slaves were in her thrall. They watched the foreman, the men who were like them. No one moved to help them; no one dared. “What’s she saying now?”
“She’s listing their crimes.”
John looked at the foreman, but thought of his wife. The girl straightened and pointed at a great tree that rose from the clearing.
“She wants them hung from their ankles.”
John knew what was coming; he could see it in her face. “Do it.”
Men screamed as they were strung up, and John knew then that his soul was forfeit. There would be no joy in life, not if Marion died, not even if she lived. When the men were hung, the girl spoke to Isaac but kept her eyes on John.
“She says the deal is not yet done.”
“Isaac, Jesus…”
“There will be one last thing, but you must agree now.”
“This was the deal. This!”
“She says it is a small thing, a nothing.”
John dragged fingers through his hair. He looked at the night sky, and Isaac spoke the sentence that was already formed and perfect in his mind. “What choice is there?” he said; and John, in his soul, knew the answer.
“No choice,” he said. “I have no choice at all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Clyde Hunt liked to drive with the windows down. He liked the smell of it, the cut grass and warm pavement—and he liked the sounds of it, too. There was something about the rattle of a mower, the crackle and fire of young men playing sports in the heat.
“Two-Allen-One. Dispatch.”
Clyde keyed the radio. “Two-Allen-One. Go ahead, Dispatch.”
“You have a call, Detective. Jack Cross. He sounds upset.”
Hunt took a curve, saw young women arguing beneath the awning of a convenience store that had been robbed twice in the past year. “How upset are we talking about?”
“Two-Allen-One, I’d say very upset.”
“Okay, Dispatch. Patch him through to my cell.”
* * *
A minute later, Clyde was blasting east and north, the heavy cruiser leaning into the curves, sitting down on the flats. The windows were up. Otherwise, he couldn’t understand a damn thing. He’d heard Johnny and something indistinct, and then, he’s dead, man, I think he’s dead … “Just slow down, son. I’m coming your way right now. Just slow down and breathe. I can barely understand you.”
“Sorry, sorry. I’ve been running. Cell service. That damn swamp.…”
The connection crackled. “Jack, you’re breaking up.…”
“You need to get here, Clyde.…” Static. White noise. “… hurry, man … holy shit … please hurry.…”
“Where are you now?”
“Roadside…”
“Roadside. Understood. But exactly where?”
* * *
Clyde saw Jack from a mile out. He rolled the needle from 90 to 110 and ate that last mile like it was nothing at all: a whisker of green, a shudder beneath his palm. Fifty yards out, he hit the brakes; the last ten, he was sliding. On the roadside, Jack was scraped and pale and bruised. “Are you okay, son? Come here.”
“It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
“What’s happening here, Jack? Where’s Johnny?”
“I don’t know.”
Clyde let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “You said someone was dead.”
“We need cops,” Jack said.
“Just breathe, son. I’m here.”
“You don’t understand.” Jack bent at the waist, sucking wind. “We need lots of cops.”
* * *
Clyde needed to see it for himself first. He drove to the church, pocketed a radio, and unlocked the shotgun from the dash. “That’s your car,” he said. “Why were you running?”
“Lost my keys.”
Hunt pulled an emergency kit from the trunk and locked the car. “Tell me again about the cave.”
Jack spoke as they walked, but didn’t make a lot of sense. He was still wild-eyed and rattled. Concussion was a real possibility. “Just slow down,” Clyde said. “Let’s start with who’s dead.”
“I don’t know, man. You’re not listening.”
“Just breathe, son…”
The boy’s story made little sense: one man dead, another dying. Something about a waterfall, a deer, this hidden cave, and piles of old equipment. Hunt stopped when he saw the waterfall across the glade. “Where’s the cave?” Jack pointed, and Hunt ducked low at the cave’s mouth. “It looks shallow.”
“You’re wrong about that.”
“What about the girl?”
“In the back, and down. There’s a drop, and then it opens up. Cree’s in there with the … uh … you know, with the dude.”
Clyde studied the young man’s face, then pushed the emergency kit and rope into his arms. “Take these,” he said. “Stay behind me.”
Hunt bent low, and the shotgun scraped against naked rock as he maneuvered his big frame through the narrow opening. Ten feet in, something shiny glinted in the dimness. “Your keys.” He scooped them up and handed them back. Damp air stirred the deeper he went.
“Jack? Is that you?”
A voice rose from the gloom. A young woman. “Ms. Freemantle. My name is Detective Hunt. Jack Cross is with me.”
“Hurry, please. I think he’s dying.”
Hunt slid deeper into the cave. Fifty feet in, the floor fell away, and he saw the young woman deeper and down. It looked like a man beside her, but everything was obscure in the gloom. “Give me the pack.” Jack handed it over, and Hunt pulled out a half-dozen glow sticks.
&nb
sp; He cracked the seals and dropped them.
They fell into a sea of bones.
* * *
Everything looked different under the floodlights. The stone was gray, the bones so old, they were almost black. Hunt watched technicians in white hazmat suits work across the exposed bits of rock, setting markers, taking photographs.
He struggled with the image.
The cave was not so wide as he’d thought, but deeper. The floor was littered with bones and bits of rotted cloth, an old pack, and a broken snowshoe. Farther in, he saw a brass lantern, a rusted rifle. If he had to guess at the number of human remains, he could not. They gathered in the low places. Some of the bones were cracked and chewed.
“Scavengers, maybe. Coyotes or something.” Tom Lee joined Hunt at the drop. “How old, you think?”
“Some of it’s pretty old, but not all of it.” Hunt pointed at scraps of faded cloth. “That looks like Gore-Tex. Nineteen eighties, maybe. The rifle, though, that’s a hundred years at least.”
“What’s going on here, Clyde?”
“Your guess is good as mine. Anything from the survivor?”
“He’ll be lucky if he lives. He’s sure as hell not talking.”
“What about the dead one?”
“Twenty-four hours, maybe. Maybe forty-eight. You see his face?”
Hunt had. He glanced at the captain, a lean man with weathered features and a narrow mouth. Bent as he was, Hunt thought he looked coiled. That could be subconscious, though. Hunt knew what was coming.
“I’ll need to talk to him, Clyde.”
“Johnny had nothing to do with this.”
“We don’t know that.”
Hunt gestured at the old bones and the old gear. “Some of that goes back a hundred years.”
“Some of it, but not all.”
Hunt looked back at the world outside. The day was ending. People moved in the glade. “You’ll need help here. Forensic anthropologists. Pathologists. Forensic dentists.”
“State police. FBI. Yeah, I get it.”
“Still no sign of the sheriff?”
“He’ll turn up.”
Hunt picked up a pebble, bounced it on his palm. “You’re not going to let me near this, are you?”
“The sheriff might say different. Until he does, the answer is no.”
The sheriff was the wild card. He didn’t like Hunt, but respected him. Captain Lee knew that. Then again, the sheriff hated Johnny, and that was no secret, either. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some air.”
Outside, a dozen four-wheelers were parked haphazardly, mud on the fender wells, heavy cases on the racks. People weren’t panicking yet, but a current was moving. Johnny had been a wild card since childhood, but it was different now, even for the harder cops. Little time had passed since William Boyd died in a way no one yet understood, and the rumors were rampant. Now there was this cave, the multitude of old remains, another fresh body.
An investigator called out from across the clearing, and Lee said, “Stay here.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
Hunt watched him leave, then let his gaze slide to the body bag stretched out in the dusk. After a moment’s thought, he crossed the clearing and unzipped it. No one stopped him. No one said a word. Settling onto both knees, he spread the vinyl and peered down. The odor was bad, but Hunt was habituated to death smells. The face was a different matter, and Hunt leaned closer to study it from one side and then the other. The features were inflamed to the point of deformity: the lips, the tongue. His entire face was so swollen and dark, it was liverish. No one had ever seen anything quite like it. No one knew what to think.
“The hell are you doing, Hunt?” Captain Lee called across the glade, and people stopped what they were doing to watch. “No one said you could touch that body! Step away!”
Hunt did not. He had a few seconds.
“Detective!”
Hunt unbuttoned the dead man’s shirt and understood why, in spite of everything, he seemed familiar. “Ah, shit.” He studied the filthy skin, the scars. He looked again at the face, then stood slowly.
“What are you thinking, Clyde?” Captain Lee arrived. “Your stepson is a person of interest. You can’t touch the damn body. Come on. You know better.”
He bent to zip the bag, but Clyde stopped him. “You were with the sheriff in ’07, right?”
“So?”
“In June of that year, he was stabbed four times.”
“A meth head by the river, I remember.”
“I’m sorry about this, Tom.” Hunt drew back the dead man’s shirt to reveal a cluster of scars six inches above the right hip bone.
“That doesn’t mean … It might not…”
“I sat with him in the hospital,” Hunt said. “I made the arrest.”
* * *
To his credit, Lee kept himself together for the first five minutes. He huddled with his top people, and Hunt watched from his place beneath the tree with Jack and Creola Freemantle.
“What’s going on?” Jack asked.
“I think it’s about to get ugly.”
“What do you mean?”
Hunt didn’t answer. Lee was on the radio, his face pale at first, and then an angry red. He stormed across the clearing, and Hunt braced for it. “Does the name Waylon Carter mean anything to you?”
“Should it?” Hunt asked.
“He says the sheriff and a man named Jimmy Ray Hill came out here for a single purpose. Would you care to guess what?” Hunt said nothing, and the captain’s eyes moved from him to Jack. The grief was unmistakable. So was the rage. “Where’s your friend, Mr. Cross?”
“I … uh … what?”
“Don’t screw with me, son. Where the hell is Johnny Merrimon?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Johnny rose from the dream like a forgotten creature in a forgotten sea. Above him the sky was purple, the shadows beneath, the same. He felt police far away and, in the past, hanged men. Between them, Johnny drifted, and there was no peace in that place. Men were dying behind him, and Jack was out there, afraid. Johnny almost rose, but choice, in the end, was an illusion. He had nothing left for Jack, not even for himself. He sank back into the blackness, for that’s what forgotten creatures did.
They surrendered themselves.
They faded.
* * *
John Merrimon was on his knees, the taste of vomit in his mouth. He couldn’t look anymore, couldn’t bear the screams. Isaac knelt at his side. “The girl says you must watch.”
“No…”
“She says you must watch if you want your wife to live.”
John did it for Marion’s sake, but he watched the knife instead of the girl, focused on its movements rather than the things it cut. There was purpose in her eyes. She was playing to the crowd, showing her power. John saw it in the firelight. A white man was bleeding, same as the blacks. The blood glinted the same. The screams were the same.
“Dear God, have mercy on my soul.”
It was a whisper only Isaac heard. “God is dead in this place.”
And that, too, was her purpose, the killing of gods and expectation and systems. She was making this place her own, and some of the people, as well. John saw the ones who would stay. Their eyes burned, and they nodded as the knife moved. It was a line in the gathering as clear as any John had ever seen: those who looked down and cowered, those who watched.
It took a long time for the men to die, and when it was done, she drove the knife into the tree and stripped away the rags that were her clothes. Naked, she stood before the gathered slaves, and before her nakedness they bowed. John had never seen such silence in so many people. She spoke in her native tongue, her voice soft but loud enough to fill the clearing.
“Do they understand her?” John asked.
“Some,” Isaac said.
“What is she saying?”
“That this is her land now, and that those who are willing and strong may live here as well.”
“Tell her it’s not done yet.”
Isaac delivered the message. She spoke again and smiled. “She says to give her your jacket.” The jacket was bottle green with gilt buttons and a velvet collar. John smoothed the front, then handed it over.
She wore it like a coronation gown.
* * *
The walk back was processional, and at the house, the crowd lingered. From the porch they were a sea of faces, and John felt the animosity. People had tasted blood. There were some who wanted more.
“Now my wife.”
The girl dipped her head, and John led the way. He tried to ignore how she smiled out from his coat. He didn’t care anymore, not about her bloody hands or the things he’d seen or the parts of himself he’d sold. But the girl was in no rush. She circled the room slowly, then put a palm on Isaac’s chest, whispered in his ear, “She knows the power of words on paper.”
“Fine,” John said. “Bring the lawyer.”
The lawyer came, and was disbelieving. “My God, man. You actually did it. You let a slave kill a white man.”
“I had no choice.”
“You’ll pay for this. You know that.”
“I’m sure I will. You’ve prepared the documents?”
“I wish now that I had not.”
“The sooner we finish, the sooner you can be away.”
“Very well.” The lawyer opened his case. “I’ll need legal names, et cetera. No woman has ever owned so much land, and certainly no slave. There will be repercussions—”
“I don’t care about that. How much time to finish?”
“Not long.”
They discussed names and particulars, and John sent him to the study with a warning. “If you leave before I say, I will hunt you down and kill you myself. Isaac, if you please.”
Isaac took the lawyer’s arm and guided him from the room. When he returned, John pointed at the bed. “Fix her,” he said to Aina.
The girl did not move.
“Fix her or I’ll kill you, too. I’ll kill everybody.”
The gun was in John’s belt, and he was deadly serious. Were his wife to die, he would die with her. In some ways, that was better.
Eternity.