“It’s a good thing, or I’d hoodoo you out of this problem. Hell, I could hoodoo most of the females in town. Quite a few fellows, too. They all come to me.”
“Don’t blame them one bit.” He grinned like a short rumpled shark. “Wendy Joe, beauty queen of Crossfall.”
“It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t it?”
Earl shook himself.
“This is all just crazy talk, you know?” he said. “Just superstition,”
He looked at Wendy Joe like he was begging for some sort of sign of comprehension.
“You know that, don’t you?” he finished.
“It’s as real as sin, Earl Toad. Don’t you mock what my momma taught me. She had the gift of conjure. She’d go to church every Sunday, and burn long black candles every Hallow’eve and summer-come-day. Folks paid her for what she could do with her gift.”
Earl just laughed.
“Wendy Joe, you’re so full of shit the flies got to love you. You trying to tell me a little bitty doll can make a grown woman disappear?”
“I didn’t say disappear. It ain’t for me to say what the doll does. The doll’s a focus, is all. It’s like giving a hound a hat or a pair of skivvies when you want him to take a scent.”
Earl considered that.
“Well, Emma did disappear,” he admitted.
“She’s out of town at her folks.”
“That’s just what Wilfred tells us.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“That’s real.”
“So prove it.”
Wendy Joe closed her eyes. She wished hard that Earl would vanish. When she opened them back up he was still there.
Just waiting.
* 3 *
Marvin Pusser was royally pissed.
Both of his uniforms were trashed. It was sacrilegious. He ought to report that fat bitch to the police, but what if she told another story? What if she said he’d raped her or something like that. A judge would believe her. They always believed the woman.
Hell.
Wilfred had no liking for Marvin. That was for sure, and Vic Harker was a bad-assed fucker too.
“Fuck him,” Marvin swore. “I ain’t afraid of Vic badass Harker.”
But just to be certain he took a quick look back and forth, making sure no one was listening. Then he walked into the field, looking for some rock moss to wipe the paint off of himself. He’d be fucked if he went into her barn. She’d charge him for trespassing, just as quick as that.
What got into little Maddy anyway?
He’d never seen her that wild. She usually didn’t say boo. The whole town knew she’d had her gumption beat out of her, regular as clockwork. Who knows – maybe the worm had finally turned.
Stranger things had happened.
Marvin was sponging himself clean with some moss when he saw the daisies.
Daisies?
Now what the fuck were daisies doing in bloom this early in the year? Hell, they’d just seen the last of the snow.
He got closer.
“Peew!”
They stank like the town dump. Maybe Vic was burying something out here like toxic waste. Marvin had seen that in a movie, just the other week. Some city fellow paid some country fellow big bucks to let him dump his shit in the backwoods. The next thing you know, all the animals are getting big and weird.
To fuck with that horseshit.
Marvin unzipped and pissed in the dirt.
How’s that for daisy water, you dirty bitch?
“I’ll be back, Maddy Harker,” he promised. “I’ll be back and you’ll get what’s coming to you, mister badass Vic Harker or not.”
He felt braver out here in the field where no one could hear him.
“Fuck you, Vic Harker,” he swore to himself. “I’ll kick a tree stump up your ass if you come messing with me. That’s a promise that I’ll deliver on. I’m the mailman, damn it. You bet your ass I’ll deliver.”
He kicked at the stub of a root sprouting from the dirt.
Daisies.
Maybe she’d forced them up inside, and transplanted them here.
Way the fuck out here?
Not likely.
And double not likely that Vic Harker would stand for his house being turned into a greenhouse. Not unless he was growing weed or some such shit.
Yeah.
That was a theory that Marvin could easily picture.
“Old Vic Harker,” Marvin muttered. “Crossfall’s drug lord.”
Fuck.
Marvin kicked the root again.
“Shit.”
That hurt. What the fuck? He turned his boot to look at it. There was a tear in the leather, like the damn root had bit him.
“Shit.”
He heard a soft growling sound.
Like a dog, or worse.
He looked around nervously.
Didn’t Vic have that old hound?
Marvin walked away quickly, whistling like a man walking through a moonlit graveyard.
Just an inch and a half beneath the soil, the thing that had once been the head of Vic Harker gnashed the stumps of its teeth in a fit of frustrated anger.
The dirt shifted away like it was afraid of what was buried beneath it.
It ought to have been.
CHAPTER 12
Nice Try
* 1 *
Wendy Joe concentrated as hard as she could.
“Mommy Loa, Mommy Loa. Grant this wish.”
Earl snickered.
Damn it.
She’d hear about this until Judgment Day, if she couldn’t show him something. She ought to seduce him. That would get his mind off the doll and onto something it was already leaning towards. It couldn’t be much harder than peeling a banana.
To hell with that, he’d laughed at her and got her North Preston roots rising. You don’t fuck with a North Preston girl, no sir. Not if you don’t want to go home carrying your balls in a dirty paper sack.
“Mommy Loa, Mommy Loa.”
They heard a car horn blaring in the distance. It sounded like Gabriel blowing a storm.
“Some kid stuck a nail in a car horn,” Earl decided. “I ought to go check it out.”
“Hush.”
She shook the doll above her head.
“Mommy Loa.”
There was a loud bang.
The horn stopped.
“That was a gunshot,” Earl said, grabbing for his pistol.
“Car backfire,” Wendy Joe assured him. “Now sit down. I’m trying to conjure.”
“I ought to check it out.”
Wendy Joe scowled.
“This was your idea, Earl Toad. You ought to see it through. You ought to see something through, at least.”
“This is bullshit,” he grumbled, but he shut up all the same.
“Mommy Loa, hear my call.”
Wendy Joe waved her arms.
There was a sudden pop.
A sulfur smell reeked up, like somebody had let off a stink bomb.
“Well, that was sure spectacular,” Earl said. “I was expecting to see a devil.”
The front door banged open and banged back closed.
Wendy Joe shoved the doll into the drawer, just as the inner door banged open. Wilfred stomped into the station house, looking like Lucifer himself, a pitchfork in one hand and a lost soul dragging behind.
* 2 *
The horn was jammed.
It blew so loud Wilfred could hardly think.
He pulled his pistol and shot the horn dead.
Then he yanked on the back door.
Damn it, it was jammed.
“Clavis?” he called, trying to work his way closer.
Ivan Barrand rushed out of what was left of his hardware store’s front door.
“Damn it, Wilfred, I thought you were dead,” Barrand said.
“Not hardly,” Wilfred answered.
“What’d you shoot your car for?”
“It was a mercy kill. The vehicle was dying already. I jus
t put it out of its misery, was all.”
Barrand gaped at the shot-up horn.
He was a balding man with a high beach of a forehead furrowed with middle age worry. He wore a bow tie, even on the hottest of summer days. There were folks in town who claimed that Ivan Barrand was a bit of a sissyboy. They swore that he drove down to the city of Halifax at least once a month to tomcat himself in the gay bars.
Wilfred saw different. He figured Barrand for a fifty-year-old virgin who had most likely never worked up the nerve to get lucky with any woman in town. The way Wilfred figured – unless Ivan Barrand was raped by a wandering love-struck motorcycle gang, he’d most likely die unsullied.
“Why don’t you give me a hand digging out Clavis, instead of asking so many stupid questions?”
“Is Clavis is in there?”
“Don’t worry,” Wilfred assured him. “I didn’t shoot him. At least not yet, but I might shoot you through your bald spot if you don’t get your ass in gear.”
With the help of a crowbar, the two of them pried the back door open.
“Are you okay Clavis?” Wilfred asked.
Clavis lay as still as a photograph.
Barrand looked like he might puke.
“What’d you roll him in?” Barrand asked. “He stinks worse than you.”
Clavis groaned.
“Damn,” Wilfred passed a hand over his forehead in relief.
He helped Clavis out of the car.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to move accident victims,” Barrand said.
“Might be I’m worried about an explosion,” Wilfred said.
He wasn’t, but it was worth the saying to see Barrand’s face grow even paler.
“It’s just fine,” Wilfred assured him, leaning Clavis against the hood. “I emptied the gas tank just before I backed through your store.”
He turned back to Clavis.
“I’ll get you back down to the station house. Then we’ll get you to the clinic.”
He should have called for help, but he was too mad at himself for that.
“You can’t just leave this car like this,” Barrand said.
“You’re right.”
He yanked a pitchfork from the grillwork of the car. He stood there for a moment, looking a refugee from “America Gothic”.
“That’s better,” he said.
He shouldered Clavis into a fireman’s carry.
“You can’t just leave it here.”
“I can’t carry the car and Clavis.”
Barrand relented.
“Well thank God for insurance, anyway.”
Wilfred said nothing, as loudly as he could.
“Your car’s insured, isn’t it?” Barrand asked nervously.
Wilfred shrugged.
“Be against the law if it wasn’t.”
Barrand’s tidy little store-clerk mind tried to decide if Wilfred was admitting to lack of insurance or not. At the same time he was calculating just how much a crashed-in storefront was going to cost him.
Wilfred lobbed the pitchfork down the street, in the general direction of the long-gone Mercury.
“Aren’t you going to chase him?” Barrand asked.
Wilfred looked at the hardware store owner as if he was speaking Swahili.
“Well, let’s see. I got to get Clavis to a doctor without moving him. Then I got to drag my car out of your storefront and pull my insurance policy out of my ass, and then chase after the bad guy? Now how the hell you figure I can do that? Are you offering me the use of your store truck?”
Barrand took a long look at the Thunderbird’s remains.
“I’ve still got thirteen more payments to make on that truck,” Barrand quietly protested.
“I thought so,” Wilfred said.
Wilfred started walking up the road, half dragging, half carrying Clavis.
“Where you going?” Barrand asked.
“I’m in hot pursuit of a hospital.”
“Who’s going to pay for all this?”
Wilfred waved his hand like he didn’t give a fuck, which for now he didn’t.
“That’s what God grows little green insurance men for, Ivan.”
He got three more dragging steps before Barrand called out to him.
“I’ve been wondering about Emma,” he remarked. “Will she be back soon?”
Over the last couple of months, Emma had been working part-time for Barrand. Wilfred had got her the job in the first place. He had hoped the busy work would lift her spirits. He guessed that it hadn’t.
“Why are you asking?” Wilfred asked. “You only hired her as a favor to me.”
“She was a good worker,” Barrand explained. “I miss her around, is all.”
There was something else. There was something Barrand was and wasn’t saying at the same time, but Wilfred was too damn tired to poke at it anymore.
“Yup,” Wilfred said. “Emma’s one of the good ones. She was born back when things were built to last. It might be that she's away for a while, Ivan.”
He thought of her, hanging by that goddamn extension cord and now lying in the bottom of the freezer, hard as a chunk of cordwood.
He let go a long hiss of sigh.
Maybe he ought to join her.
“You got any rope, Ivan?”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve about come to the end of mine.”
“What in tarnation is that supposed to mean?”
Wilfred just shook his head.
“Look, Wilfred,” Barrand went on. “If you need some rope, I’d be glad to...”
Wilfred smiled.
Of course Ivan would be glad to.
The whole town would be glad to.
Glad to help old Wilfred step off the edge of his last drop.
“Nope,” Wilfred said. “Never mind. I’m just telling a joke, is all.”
He kept walking, dragging Clavis like a paraplegic partner in a three-legged race.
“A joke?” Ivan called behind him. “What kind of joke is that?”
“Kind you got to unravel,” Wilfred said in a voice too low for Barrand to hear.
He’d be fucked if he’d let some balding nail-peddler help him out.
He bent and picked up the pitchfork.
It made a lousy crutch.
“What about that pitchfork?” Barrand asked. “Are you going to pay for that?”
Wilfred shook his head without turning back.
“It ain’t broken,” he called over his shoulder. “I’m confiscating it as incriminating evidence.”
“Is that legal?”
“I sure hope so.”
He kept on walking.
Damn it.
He would have to radio the Mounties on this.
Goddamn it, but those red-shirted bastards were going to get a laugh out of this.
It was a bad start, to a bad day.
It probably meant a good omen.
He couldn’t imagine it getting any worse.
The last thing Wilfred imagined was how fast he was entering the worst day of his existence.
Worst, and maybe last.
* 3 *
“Stupid bastard,” Ivan Barrand swore, once Wilfred was out of earshot.
Damn.
It wasn’t smart to swear where people could hear. It was bad for a businessman’s image.
It was especially bad to let Wilfred Potter hear you swear at him.
Barrand settled for a hard glare at Wilfred’s receding shoulder line. Then he turned and stared at the ruins of his front window.
Damn.
Broken paint cans puddled about the car’s tires. Tools were strewn like an overturned jigsaw puzzle.
How in the hell could he fix this?
“Shit.”
He shook his head.
Maybe he could tell folks it was a new idea – call it open air window shopping, a new kind of freestyle display.
Call it performance art.
“Shit.”
; He ought to sue that bastard.
He ought to sue the whole town.
Hell.
He ought to tell him about Emma. That’d paint Wilfred’s little blue wagon, for goddamn sure. Barrand glared, hoping Wilfred would turn around and see his displeasure.
But Wilfred just kept on walking.
* 4 *
The red Mercury growled along the roadside gravel, stopping half a dozen feet from Maddy. She waved and threw an extra wiggle into it for the driver’s benefit.
What the hell.
She was a single woman with a freshly-dispensed fry pan divorce.
Why not live a little?
The diver honked a friendly how-do-you-do tootle on his horn. Maddy eyed the car. She saw a lousy paint job. Early white trash. Two or three rusty shades of red patched together over another two or three shades.
There was a kid at the wheel.
“Hey lady?” the kid said. “You look like you could use a ride.”
He was tough-looking for a kid, rawboned and reckless. All angles and bone, chin stuck out like a hood ornament, hair as red as a burning firehouse. He was kind of sexy in a scruffy, Brad Pitt kind of way.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “Do you want a lift?”
Don’t take rides from strangers.
That’s what Momma used to tell her.
Don’t trust a man farther than you can spit.
That was Vic talking.
To hell with it.
Momma was dead. So was Daddy. So was Vic.
Maddy just wanted a little fun.
The kid pulled a cigarette out of a pack in his shirt and snapped a big shiny Zippo lighter, like magic in his other hand. There was writing on the lighter, but his hand hid it. He grinned winningly.
“It’s a hot day to walk, don’t you think?”
“Hotter than seven kinds of hell,” Maddy agreed.
“Hop in,” he said. “I’ll take you far as you wanna go.”
You’re going to get yourself raped, Momma’s memory-voice warned her.
What the hell, Maddy thought. You can’t rape the willing. Besides, he looks kind of cute.
The kid leaned over. He cracked the door open half an inch. Maddy grabbed the door handle and opened the door wide. She saw Duane’s body lying there with his head half shot off. The other half looked like a bowl of sweet and sour with maggots crawling in what used to be brains.
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