Speak of the Devil

by Shari Shattuck

  “You cannot base any relationship on my shaky-at-best first impressions of someone. I don’t see anything evil or dangerous, but, girl”—Greer fixed a serious look on Leah, whose face had lit up—“not all doors are open to me. Just because I don’t see any garbage doesn’t mean that there isn’t some piled up in the basement. Especially with men. I don’t read men very well.”

  “But he seems okay?”

  Greer shook her head but couldn’t keep from laughing. “Speaking as your friend, not your psychic, he seems really nice. And more importantly, you like him, and you’ve grown a lot and you have to start to trust yourself.”

  They went back outside together and took their places on the comfortable porch furniture. Greer couldn’t stop herself from watching Leah, who kept glancing surreptitiously over to Weston as though she couldn’t quite believe he was still there.

  Chapter 31

  Sunday morning, Joshua got up early in a race against the heat. It was barely light when he started out on his hike. He was eager to connect the canyon above his house with the Oak Springs trail, and he knew it might take several hours. His mom had offered to come pick him up when he found out where he emerged. His best guess was that that would be about eight miles away.

  He took some power bars, an apple, two honey sticks, and a gallon of water. The pack was heavy, but he knew it would be light soon enough.

  After two hours he hit the fire road at the top of the trail from behind his house, and instead of turning back, he kept on. As he suspected, after he crested the highest ridge, he could see the twisting road up to Oak Springs, and it wasn’t long until he found the connecting trail.

  After almost three hours, his water was all but gone, and he guessed that the heat had risen into the nineties, but he came out on the paved road and started down. He checked his cell phone—no reception; he’d call when he got closer to the highway. Flipping it closed, he noticed that he was nearing the Caseys’ driveway and decided to stop in and check on them.

  Emily opened the door and looked delighted to see him.

  “I hope I didn’t startle you,” Joshua said. “I just hiked over from my house and thought I’d drop by and say hi.”

  “Good heavens!” Emily exclaimed. “You’re worse than Larry! Come in, come in, and let me get you a big glass of ice water. Are you hungry?”

  Joshua smiled. Emily reminded him of a Norman Rockwell grandmother. “No, thanks. My mom’s going to pick me up, and we’ll have lunch at that little cafe’ at the bottom of the hill, but water sounds fantastic.”

  “You can call your mom from here if you want. I know those cell phones don’t work up here.”

  “True enough. Thanks.” Joshua walked to the phone, set down his backpack, and made arrangements with his mom to start the drive up while he walked down. They’d meet wherever they met.

  Emily came back in with a big plastic cup filled with ice and water. She had one for herself as well. They sat at the little table and Emily raised her glass to him. “To the craziest hiker since my husband.” She smiled and started to move the glass to her mouth.

  At first, Joshua thought that he was seeing a shadow of something inside the translucent orange plastic, or a trick of the light through the ice, but the serpent was so clear, and its meaning had been revealed to him so recently that he recognized it in the next instant.

  “Don’t drink that!” he shouted, and reached out to pull the cup forcibly away from her mouth.

  Emily was so startled that she dropped the cup; the water spilled on the hem of her dress and all over the rag rug. She looked so fearful of Joshua’s action that he started to apologize before the water had even begun to soak in.

  “Oh, Emily, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, but I’m afraid that there’s something poisonous in the water. I don’t know how to explain it, but please, you have to trust me. I’m almost positive it isn’t safe. Did this come from the well?”

  Shaking slightly, Emily broke her frightened eyes away from Joshua and leaned down to pick up the cup. “Yes, but why would you think that?”

  “Where’s Larry?” Joshua asked instead of answering her question. He was pretty sure she would think he was insane, and as much as he wanted to convince her otherwise, he knew the odds were against it.

  “Our son picked him up and took him to Kaiser, to the urgent care. He hasn’t felt very well. . . .” Her brow furrowed deeply and she looked suspiciously up at Joshua. “He’s been nauseous for the last few days, and this morning, I made him go. I would have gone with him, but he wanted me to stay here and rest.”

  “Listen, Emily, I know it sounds crazy, but please, could I take a sample of the water to be tested? And could you not use it until you hear from me? It should only take a day or so, maybe less if I can round up anyone today.” She was watching him with narrowed eyes, but there was a return of trust in them. “Please?” he begged.

  “All right,” she agreed. “If you say so, Joshua. I know you wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “No, ma’am,” he asserted. “I might be wrong, I hope I am, but I would never lie to you.”

  She fixed him with her clear blue eyes and leaned toward him. “Why do you think there’s poison in our water, Joshua?”

  He sighed. He hoped this didn’t keep happening to him. It was one thing when people asked to be helped, another entirely when the warnings or the messages came unbidden. “The truth is, I see things. Mostly spirits, or whatever you want to call them.” Afraid to see the doubt that was sure to be on Emily’s face, he stared at the stain of water on the rug. “But I also sometimes see images that mean something, and recently I saw an image that meant poison. When you were about to drink, I saw that image again.” He looked up. She was watching him skeptically, but it seemed to him that she was making an effort to believe him, because she smiled slightly and nodded as though he should go on. Heartened, he continued. “My mother has always had these, uh, visions, and she’s been able to help people with what she sees. About nine or ten months ago, it started to happen to me.” A sliver of his old reluctance and resentment worked its way into his chest and pried open his sense of unfairness. “I didn’t ask for this,” he blurted out, suddenly angry and frustrated. “I’m sorry if you think I’m a freak. I know it seems that way, but it’s not like I asked for it!”

  He felt the pressure of Emily’s hand on his arm and he looked again into that transparent blue. “I don’t think you’re a freak,” she said gently. “I think you are very brave, even to tell me what you did, much less to put yourself on the line that way.” She rubbed his arm lightly, and the pressure and her words were very reassuring. “Now, I’m going to call my son’s cell phone and tell him that I think the water might be contaminated. Maybe the doctors at Kaiser can tell us something before the water test.”

  And that was it. His anxiety vanished with a poof. With her simple act of trust, Joshua’s warning had been heeded, his bizarre talent considered a possibility instead of a ridiculous farce, and his equanimity restored.

  “Emily,” said Joshua, taking her hand in his, “I think maybe you just saved my life.”

  Her eyes twinkled at him. “About time I returned the favor,” she said as she rose and started for the phone.

  Joshua sank back in his chair, exhausted by the hike in the heat and the emotional stress. He fixed his eyes on his cup, still filled with water and ice to the brim, and watched as a tiny serpent, black as coal, twisted and snaked along the icy droplets of condensation.

  Chapter 32

  Weston had been right, Leah thought. When they first took off in the helicopter, it wasn’t so much as though they were going up as the ground was going down.

  Leah gripped the straps of the door and closed her eyes.

  “Well, that’s no good.” She heard Weston’s voice, slightly tinny on the headset she was wearing. “There’s no point in going up if you can’t enjoy the view.”

  Steeling herself, she opened first one eye and then the other. As she
did, the helicopter began to swoop gently forward and she gasped; it was an amazing sensation.

  “What’s with the papers?” Weston asked, gesturing with the hand that wasn’t on the stick to the large roll of white paper in Leah’s lap.

  “It’s the plans for the Golden Door development,” Leah shouted, and immediately realized that she probably didn’t need to. “I was hoping we could fly over it. I wanted to check something.”

  He looked at her for what she thought was entirely too long, though she had to admit there wasn’t really anything to run into up this high. “Your wish . . .” he said, pushing the stick hard to the right, and suddenly Leah found herself looking almost straight down at the ground through the glass of her door as the helicopter leaned right and sped off in that direction. Leah’s stomach dropped, but almost immediately she felt the exhilaration and had to contain herself from whooping like a teenager on a roller coaster.

  What amazed her almost as much as the freedom of movement was how quickly you could move from one place to another in a straight line. It took only about two and a half minutes to make the trip from the fire station helicopter pad to the site; in a car on streets that were forced to follow the contours of a rippled landscape, it would have taken more than twenty.

  Once she relaxed and got used to the sensation of having nothing under her but several thousand feet of open air, or was able to not think about it anyway, Leah started to enjoy the rare freedom of such an exalted point of view. The heat and the haze kept the more distant mountains to the east and north from being little more than a suggestion on the skyline, but she could make them out, waiting there for millennia, the elders of the hills below her, which, from her perch above them, seemed by comparison youthful and childlike.

  “See any smoke?” Weston’s voice came over the headset. Leah gazed around.

  “No,” she answered.

  “Me neither. And that makes it a good day. Okay, can you see that big, ugly swath of earth and house frames?” He inclined his head toward what Leah knew must be the Golden Door development.

  It was even more jarring from this perspective, a tear ripped into the hillside. The entire top of a small mountain had been sheared off and large chunks of its shoulders had been leveled into steppes. The far left side was completely covered in framed-out homes, two hundred and forty-three to be exact, Leah knew. That would be phase one. Next to it, a second rent was still a gaping scar without the patchwork bandaging of the houses on their tiny lots. She could see the darkened swatches across it, and on the adjacent land, where the fires had struck. “Yeah, I see it.” Leah’s voice felt as hollow and cold as her guilt.

  As Weston circled it, Leah opened her maps and got her bearings with a little help from Weston and the compass on the dash of the helicopter. What she was interested in was the yet unbroken ground of phase three.

  She pointed a finger at the proposed acreage on the map and then at the area below that it represented. “Can we take a closer look at this?” she asked him.

  “Sure thing.”

  Twenty seconds later they were skimming the brown and dusty green scrub. Leah checked her map again and then asked, “Can you fly southwest?”

  Weston changed course. Below them the land sloped gently down, crested over a ridge, and then fell away into a different valley, in the depths of which was a single, two-lane road.

  Leah searched around and finally found what she was looking for—a few houses which were built off that road, one of which belonged to the Caseys. She checked her map a few more times before coming to the conclusion that the Caseys’ house was not on, or even close to, the proposed phase three. She sighed, rolled up the map, and then gave Weston the thumbs-up. They rose quickly into the air, the ground falling away below them, taking all its confusion, secrets, and ownership with it.

  When the ground was nothing but a carpet of khaki stretched out below them, Leah looked over at Weston, who met her eyes and didn’t look away. For a long moment there was a link between them so raw that it left Leah feeling as though her skin had been peeled away.

  When he turned his attention back to flying, breaking the spell, Leah felt as though he’d just surprised her naked, and she liked it.

  Turning away to hide the smile that had crept across her face and taking a deep, calming breath, she muttered very quietly to herself, “I’m in big trouble.”

  She had forgotten the headset and the microphone hovering just in front of her mouth.

  Into her earphones, Weston’s amused, rich voice rumbled, “I’m so glad to hear that.”

  Pretending that she hadn’t heard him, she focused hard on a specific spot below her that was absolutely identical to any other spot and wondered whether she should just throw herself out of the helicopter now, or die a slow and painful death of mortification.

  Chapter 33

  They knew just after Larry got home that the tank had been poisoned. Emily and Joshua had found an emergency number in the phone book for contaminated water supplies, and the county had dispatched a technician immediately. While they waited, Larry and his son, Adam, had returned, and Joshua had called Greer to ask her to hold off for a little while.

  The woman from the county had shown up with a large yellow toolbox that turned out to be filled with various vials and test tubes. After only ten minutes of mixing and shaking, she had declared the water from the Caseys’ metal holding tank undrinkable.

  Further testing of the sealed well, however, showed no traces of the toxins that had been found in the tank, leading the expert to conclude that either the tank interior was compromised by rust and some kind of rat poison, or someone had deliberately added the dangerous combination of iron oxide and strychnine.

  “We don’t use rat poison,” Emily said, shaking her head firmly. “We don’t believe in it. Not up here. If we were to give it to the mice that live here, they would be eaten by the hawks and the coyotes and the snakes, and the poison would kill them too. Once it’s in the food chain, it keeps on killing.”

  This didn’t seem to be any revelation to the county poison expert. “That is correct,” she said with the bland, studied disinterest that is only achieved after many years of government work comprised of one part egregious human apathy and three parts bureaucratic paperwork.

  “And that tank is new,” Larry said defiantly. “Well, anyway, we haven’t had it more than three years now, and it’s got a fifty-year warranty.”

  “What should we do?” Emily asked, wringing her hands.

  “You’ll have to flush the tank, and then we’ll test it again.”

  Larry was shaking his head. “It’ll take a week to fill that tank from the well right now. The water tables are low. We need rain, and we need it bad.”

  The county employee shrugged. “Not likely to get that until November at the earliest.”

  “Well, that’s only three weeks away,” Emily said hopefully, but they all knew that counting on rain this time of year, or even a month from now, was a crapshoot.

  “I’ll call Sheldon,” Larry said. “Hell, it’s worth a couple hundred dollars to get this done and sorted out.”

  Joshua had been listening quietly, but now he asked the question that so far had been left unsaid. “Who would poison your water?”

  “Don’t know,” Larry said, looking disgusted. “I’d say kids, but it’s a little sophisticated for a prank.”

  The county woman tilted her head farther over her clipboard as if to say, That’s not my department.

  “Have you had any arguments with anyone lately?” Joshua asked, grasping at straws.

  “No.”

  Emily had a half-frightened look on her face, as though she was reluctant to say something that might not be polite. “Actually, there was that real estate woman who wanted to list our house. She was pretty insistent. She wasn’t very happy that we didn’t want to sell.”

  Joshua narrowed his eyes. “Did she have a buyer?”

  Larry snorted. “She said no, but I didn’t b
elieve her. I’m guessing it was another one of these big development outfits. Somebody made an offer on Bill Wicker’s down the street. Said they wanted a place where they could keep horses not far from Los Angeles.”

  “Did he take it?”

  “He was thinking about it.” Larry shrugged. “I think he was holding out for more money. He’s been wanting to move closer to his grandkids back east for a while, but he’s not in any hurry. Vultures, they just can’t screw this place up fast enough.”

  Joshua had heard that the developers could be tricky, buying up land under false names or even sending a family to look at a home as though it were for themselves. But poison? That was not only extreme—it was criminal.

  The doctors had told Larry that he would continue to feel slightly ill but be able to flush out his system within a few days. What if he’d died? Was someone willing to go that far to build an ugly subdivision? Was there that much money in it that it was worth going to prison to get their hands on this land?

  Was there someone out there who would kill for it?

  Sheldon’s big truck rumbled down the driveway, and Joshua saw the familiar little head bouncing up and down next to him. He smiled as his new friend climbed down from the cab to meet him.

  “What are you doing here?” Tyler said as he ran to meet Joshua.

  “Well, the Caseys are . . . kind of friends of mine,” Joshua explained with a slight hesitation.

  “We are friends of his,” Emily corrected. “And we always will be.” She smiled gratefully at him. “Hello, Tyler. Would you like some cookies?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then come on in the kitchen, where it’s cool.”

  Joshua accompanied Larry and Sheldon over to the well and was just in time to overhear Sheldon’s bitter recrimination. “Bastards. Do you know who did it?”

  “Nope,” Larry said. “But when I find out, I’ll monogram their initials on a shotgun shell and deliver it personally.”