Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  No.

  Her right hand shook. She ignored it. She was tired of being afraid, tired of pretending that Death wasn’t coming, tired of wanting things to be different. If this was the time, right now, then it was. She stepped back anyway, involuntarily.

  Blackness flowed over the ground like lava, thick and oily. Then it stopped at the edge of the cemetery, as if, like Hallie, it had encountered an invisible wall.

  “Come on,” Hallie said. “Let’s do this.” One hand clenched tightly into a fist.

  The shadow rose, like gathering itself, forming itself into—what? A person? It didn’t look like Death, but then it didn’t look like anything yet. Hallie’s heart thumped. She had a reckless urge to leap forward, to embrace it before it could embrace her, to just get whatever this was over and done.

  But she still didn’t want to die.

  The loud blast of a car horn shattered the nearly silent morning. The ghosts stopped. The shadow stopped. Hallie’s heart nearly stopped. Suddenly, everything was gone, all of it, the ghosts and the shadow both. It was a cemetery again, like any other cemetery, with grave markers both old and new, surrounded by fields of old grass and tangled multiflora rose.

  Jesus.

  Tires crunched on gravel as the car, an old Ford station wagon, parked at the edge of the lot. For a long moment the car sat there, engine idling, but no one got out. Hallie wondered if she’d traded one problem for another. But then, this one, at least, seemed human, and she figured after everything, she could handle people.

  If her legs held her. If her heart stopped beating like a drum.

  The hinges on the station wagon door shrieked in protest as it opened. To Hallie’s astonishment, Beth Hannah climbed out. She was wearing a hooded down parka with a tear in one elbow patched with duct tape. Her hair was caught up on her head in a messy bun, and she was wearing a dingy pair of fleece earmuffs that curved around the nape of her neck.

  “I’ve been all over the Badlands,” she said with no preamble. “I’m pretty sure it’s there. I can feel it. But it’s a big place and it all looks kind of the same. And even if I’m within a couple of miles—I know I’m within a couple of miles, but still—it could take forever. And what does it look like, anyway—a door? A pile of rocks? At least you’ve seen a door. I figure you would know. I mean maybe I would know. But you would for sure. I think. You could … you should … you should do it. Okay?” She’d started out talking quick, but her voice fell off by the end, as if she didn’t know what she wanted to say, just that she’d wanted to find Hallie and say it.

  “What are you doing here?” Hallie asked. “How did you find me?”

  “I always know where you are,” Beth said, as if it ought to be obvious. “Well, within, like, a mile or two.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know.” She laughed. “I know how to find Boyd all the time too. You want to know where he is right now? It’s kind of annoying.”

  “Really?”

  “I think it’s because you’ve been there, in the under. Like you’ve been dead. That would make sense because I’ve only known since, you know, then.”

  “Anyone else?” Yet another conversation she couldn’t quite believe she was having. She was thinking Beth might know where Laddie was. Or Maker. Beth said, “Yeah, somebody. I don’t know who it is. But they popped up here around the same time I did.”

  “Here, like here?” Hallie pointed at the gravel parking lot, though she meant here in Taylor County.

  “Yeah, here. I mean, I think.”

  Hallie had to remember that no matter what Beth said about going to the under and living with her father—taking over the “family business,” as it were—this was all new to Beth too.

  “So there’s someone else in Taylor County who’s been to the under?”

  “That’s not really important right now.” Beth waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “What’s important is opening that door.”

  “No,” Hallie said. “You have no idea what that means. You’d be dead, Beth. You might as well kill yourself.” Which she regretted as soon as she said it. She wasn’t going to encourage suicide.

  “I don’t think that’s right,” Beth said.

  “You don’t want to think it’s right.”

  “Did you die when you went to the under?” she asked.

  “I would die if I took Death’s place,” Hallie said. “When you’re Death, you’re not in this world anymore. Ever.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Hallie could see the ghosts in the cemetery rising again. “I have to go,” she said, and she didn’t like the sharp pitch of her voice as she said it. “Look, Beth, I will help you. Boyd will help you. You have a place here if you want it. But I’m not helping you die.”

  She’d already turned away when Beth said, “Do you want to go in?”

  “What?”

  Beth pointed toward the cemetery. “In there.” She took Hallie’s hand. “Come on.”

  Hallie could never remember being as dumbfounded as she was right then when Beth led her into the cemetery. The ghosts, those cold painful creatures, began to rise once more, then calmed as they passed, sinking slowly back into the ground.

  “I could always do that, I guess,” Beth said. “I didn’t know it—well, I’d never been in a cemetery until a couple of months ago.”

  “Not even when your mother died?” Hallie couldn’t help it; she looked from one side of the path to the other as ghost after ghost sank down and disappeared.

  “She was cremated and we didn’t … No.”

  They reached Dell’s grave, and it was the first time Hallie had seen it with the marker in place. ADELLE TEMPLE MICHAELS. LOVED, LOST, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. There were dried flowers in a vase sheltered from the wind by the marker itself. Her father must have brought them, she thought. She touched the smooth cold stone. This wasn’t Dell, though her bones lay underneath. It was just a place, and Dell was gone from it.

  She took Beth to the next row over, underneath the shade of the same tree Dell was also buried under, to visit her mother’s grave. It shouldn’t mean that much. Hallie of all people knew where the dead went, what happened to them. But it meant someone remembered, meant it had meant something that they were here. Her mother’s marker was smoother, colder, worn down from more than ten South Dakota winters. But there were flowers here too. And a plaque that Hallie hadn’t seen before, something her father must have added recently. She wondered if he’d saved for it, set aside wrinkled fives and singles until he had enough. It was copper she thought, already turning green, backed on something solider and riveted right to the stone.

  BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH …

  “Thank you,” she said to Beth back in the parking lot.

  Beth shrugged. “I guess I have an affinity.”

  “I guess you do.” Hallie’d thought she had an affinity, but maybe it was just an attraction. “I’m not going to open that door for you,” she said.

  “I know,” Beth said. “It doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking.”

  “Good luck,” Hallie said.

  “Yeah.”

  Yeah.

  17

  It was just after noon when Boyd drove out to Jasper, or to where Jasper had been before it was flattened by a tornado twenty years earlier. The sky had turned storm gray, and it was sleeting. The temperatures had been in the high twenties since before noon, and the old road he was on was slick, mostly frozen, with maybe a half inch of melt on top.

  He parked on the old road, pulled a slicker, rain pants, and a waterproof baseball cap from the trunk. He donned the rain gear and walked the length of the former town—a hamlet, really, with twenty or thirty houses, a garage–post office–diner, a small church, an open area close to the road that had once been a small park with a freestanding metal pole barn (long gone), a wooden shelter (of which two broken poles and a stone fireplace remained), and a baseball diamond (which was little more than the suggestion of a baseball field in the way the
vegetation had grown up over time).

  The photographs Boyd had taken from Prue’s house showed the inside of an old foundation, and he’d thought when he looked at them last night that the best place to start looking for the particular foundation pictured would be Jasper. It was one place where he knew there were lots of old foundations. But even overgrown and twenty years worn by winter and weather, it was still clear that none of them fit the photographs. Either the dimensions were wrong or the foundations were concrete block or brick rather than poured. There was one larger basement at the western edge of the old town that he thought might be it, but once he was down inside, he could see that the windows weren’t in the right place and he tripped over a furnace pad that was three feet too close to the south wall.

  He climbed out, the holds slippery in the continuing sleet and drizzle. He looked east then west, saw a vehicle sitting up on the main road, engine idling, but as he trotted back to his patrol car, the car—black, he thought, and not a sedan—pulled back onto the road and drove off, not in a hurry, more like they’d stopped for a minute for some reason and then gone on.

  He considered his situation. He was wet and cold, his waterproof boots weren’t as waterproof as advertised, and he wasn’t even sure what he’d find if he did locate the source of the photographs. He walked back up toward the road, turned when he reached the old baseball field, and looked back. From here he could see all four streets. Could he have missed a foundation? Overgrown as they were, it would be easy enough to do, though the time of year helped, since the native grass and nonnative invasives had been beaten down all winter by wind and snow.

  Of course, there were lots of old foundations scattered all over Taylor County. Some of them didn’t have roads or drives or rutted muddy lanes leading to them anymore, places where someone had tried to make a serious go and failed—bankruptcy or fire or tornado had knocked them down and they’d stayed down. Aerial photos might help. And he could talk to old ranchers who not only knew where many of those abandoned places were, but also knew everyone who’d ever lived there and what had happened to drive them out.

  He pulled the photographs out of an inner pocket and looked at them again. The poured foundation ought to be a clue. It wouldn’t have been built somewhere too remote. It would be a place someone had spent money on. At least to build it. He returned to his patrol car, backed around, and was almost back out to the road when he remembered the old farmhouse. It wasn’t in Jasper proper, but down a lane and close to the spot where Hallie’s sister, Dell, had died. He reversed back up the old road, his tires slipping on the slick, half-frozen, half-melted surface, turned, and drove along the barely visible track.

  Where the house had once stood, there were the remains of two old fireplaces, stacks of scattered bricks from the chimneys. Old timbers lay in the grass and Boyd could see immediately that the house had burned. It didn’t mean that it hadn’t first been hit by the tornado that leveled Jasper, but it had definitely burned, most of the old timber charcoaled and black. It was a deep foundation and definitely poured, weeds and grass growing up through cracks in the floor. Boyd pulled out the photographs. He walked around the opening, careful not to get too close to the edge. There was an X, not large, but visible underneath one of the windows on the west side. The second window on that side had a circle inscribed underneath it, both of them faded with the passage of time but clearly visible.

  He went back to his car, pulled a spade, a rope, and a couple of tie-down straps out of the trunk. He radioed his location back to the office.

  “Does Ole know where you are?” Patty Littlejohn asked.

  “Tell him I’ll fill him in when I get back,” Boyd told her. “If I find anything,” he added to himself after he signed off, though he was pretty sure he’d find something. Had already found something—the place where the photos had been taken, the symbols in them.

  He fastened the rope to the base of a volunteer tree and used the tie-down straps to secure it, dropped the other end of the rope down the old wall, then lowered himself down through one of the old window wells. The floor was half dirt and half concrete, though it took him a while to figure that out, all of it covered with dirt and vegetation from years of wind and winter.

  He taped the photographs up underneath the symbols that they matched, stood six steps away and halfway between them, scraped away the dirt until he found an arrow carved into the concrete, faded almost to nothing so that he had to feel it with his fingers. He took three steps in the direction the arrow indicated, felt the change between concrete and dirt. The last two photographs had been pictures of the same thing—a small area of bare ground—like it was never going to change.

  He scanned the area. The sleet was coming harder now. It made a sound as it hit his slicker, like the slap of a wire brush. To his left there was a big crack in the upper wall—a tall bull thistle and some dried lamb’s-quarter, bursting through. He looked down, and just in front of him but obscured by an old timber laid crossways, was a patch of ground a foot or maybe a foot and a half square that was green with foxtail actually starting to seed out, barnyard grass, and chicory in flower—all of it growing in the hard-packed dirt of an old cellar in March, when everything else was still brittle and brown. He took off his glove and felt the ground—soft and muddy and definitely not frozen, felt the dirt floor to the right of the green patch. It was much colder, still frozen hard.

  He wiped his hand, pulled his glove back on, and dug.

  He had to go down nearly a foot and a half before he found it, and by then he’d more or less guessed what would be there—another stone. It was larger than the others and a deep purple that looked almost black in the gray afternoon light. He picked it up with his gloved hands and wiped the mud off. The sleet had lessened by the time he finally climbed back out of the old cellar, though there was a steady drizzle, like cold mist. He could hear cars up on the main road, tires sounding loud on the wet pavement. He was careful—had always been careful, it was how he knew himself—but after scanning the area to see if there was anyone or anything around, he took off the glove on his left hand and dropped the stone into it.

  He didn’t see anything right away, and had nearly decided that maybe what happened the last time had been a peculiar combination of a particular stone and a particular person, when he smelled the faint odor of sulfur and smoke, the scent of gunpowder, and then the sound of the shot, which came loud, like it had been fired right beside him. He dived sideways without even thinking about it, the stone gripped tight in his hand. After a moment—when there wasn’t another shot and he didn’t see anyone close enough to have fired the one he’d heard—he picked himself up. He kept the stone in his hand and snapped open the flap on his holster with his right. It was another vision, he was sure it was, but picking up the stone was enough risk, and he was going to be careful about this.

  The sky overhead was the same as it had been all afternoon, but the ground in front of him—or the ground of the vision—looked like it had been cast in deep shadow. Night, maybe? A body lay there, the face turned away from him. His heart thumped hard once as he moved closer, then remembered that he couldn’t. The body would never be any closer than it was or look any different than it did. He heard a siren, someone shouting. But what was important was the body, the blood that trickled slowly along the curve of the neck.

  Because whether he could see her face or not, he knew that it was Hallie.

  * * *

  Something was following Hallie, had been following her since she left the cemetery. Her instinct was to run, to run forever, out of Taylor County and South Dakota and the world if she could pull it off, and that was wrong, so wrong because Hallie didn’t run. She’d known that one thing about herself for years, got her through her mother’s death, through basic training, through goddamned Afghanistan and dying, through Dell’s death, through everything. She didn’t run. She stood and she faced things.

  She did.

  She slammed on the brakes and pulled over to
the side of the road, her truck slanting toward the ditch. She got out, grabbed the fireplace poker automatically, then deliberately put it back behind the seat, shut the driver’s door, and crossed behind the truck. A semi hauling hay stacked five tiers high blasted past her on the road so fast, it rocked her truck. Maker appeared beside her.

  “Is it Death?” she asked. Her voice sounded like it had when she talked to Beth, too high-pitched and thin. Damnit. She wasn’t going to be afraid. Not anymore. She wanted this life. Here. The way it was all coming together. She couldn’t have it if she ran, if she hid out on the ranch. It wasn’t life then. It was just … living.

  Grass heeled over way out in the field.

  “Not Death,” Maker said.

  “What, then?” Hallie asked.

  But Maker barked once, something Hallie had never heard it do before, spun around twice, and disappeared.

  Her cell phone rang, rolled over to voice mail, then rang again almost immediately. Without taking her eyes off the open field and the spot where the grass lay flat, Hallie pushed it to vibrate. It vibrated twice in quick succession. The thing in the field didn’t move.

  Hallie took a deep breath and stepped off the shoulder into the grass, wet from sleet and a hard rain that was almost ice. She hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when she was soaked to her knees. Her phone vibrated again, then again. The thing in the field moved away from her—at least the grass heeled over like something was moving south, like it didn’t know she was even there.

  Hallie pulled her phone from her pocket. Three texts and two missed phone calls, all from Boyd. She looked at the texts without taking her eyes off the field.

  Answer your phone!

  All the texts said the same thing, even the exclamation point at the end. Boyd never spoke in exclamation points.

  Hallie called him back.

  He answered on the first ring, said her name—“Hallie”—then didn’t say anything, though she could hear him breathing hard, like he’d run a race.