by Edward Lee
“Because of me,” Patricia realized.
“Uh-huh. I think tomorrow you’ll be drivin’ back to Washington.”
“What?”
“You’ll be drivin’ back to Washington, and you’ll have an unfortunate accident in that nice Caddy of yours. Far enough away from here that your people in D.C. will believe it.”
“They’ll never believe it, Trey. And I’ve already told my boss and my husband that I suspected you and Felps of having something to do with all these murders.”
Trey smiled. “I know shit when I hear it, and what just came outta your mouth is a crock of it.” He took a breath and stood up. “Come on. Fun time first.” He stepped right up to her.
Patricia’s heart began to slug in her chest. “I have a lot of money, Trey.”
“Not enough.”
“Don’t be stupid. If you kill me, someone will find out.”
“No, they won’t.” And that was when his hand blurred upward and smacked the side of his pistol across her temple.
Was it the dream again, the nightmare? Patricia lay on the bed, naked, splayed before the window. The curtains were open now, the moonlight pouring in.
It’s the dream again, she felt sure, the dream I had before I found Judy’s body. . . .
But in the dream there’d been no curtain at all, and the clock had been ticking madly, whereas now it ticked normally. In the dream she’d been lying paralyzed on the bed, but now . . .
She craned her neck in four directions and saw that her wrists and ankles had been lashed to the bedposts. She felt as if she were drowning in dread, remembering the scene from the kitchen. Trey had murdered Judy, then staged the appearance of suicide. He and his cohorts had been doing all the killing, not a drug gang, to frame the Squatters, to get them off the land, thinking Judy would finally sell out to Felps.
But Judy didn’t, so they killed her too. . . .
Patricia gulped, nauseous.
And now it’s my turn.
Trey would probably strangle her here, then stage some kind of car wreck. But not before he had some fun with her first.
He’d been standing there all along, hidden in the shadows of the corner of the room. He took several steps until the darkness expelled him into the blaring moonlight. He was shirtless, and unbuckling his gun belt now. Then he took his pants off. Patricia was grateful there was only moonlight and not the lamp; it reduced the details. Trey’s body was lean, like a jackal’s. The thrill of murder—and of what was to come—had already erected his genitals.
“Good, you’re awake,” he said. “Ain’t no fun pluggin’ a gal who’s unconscious. Let’s see if you’re a screamer like your sister. Yeah, baby, that turns me on. And ya can scream all ya want, ‘cos there ain’t no one to hear ya.”
Now the dread was piling up on her like a physical weight. Tears drew lines from the corners of her eyes. I should’ve gone home to my husband days ago. Why did I have to stay?
The moonlight painted one side of his body icy white, and left the other half black. He pointed to the window. “Bet‘cha don’t know that a buncha’ nights since you been back, I come up here and watched ya through the window. You are some sight, I’ll tell ya, all naked and tossin’ and turnin’, playin’ with yourself in your sleep. Dirty girl.”
Her nausea trebled. “Jesus, and I thought it was Ernie.”
Trey sputtered. “Ernie? That shuck-‘n’-jive piece a’ shit? I busted his back before I lowered him in the water . . . so he could. see the crabs eatin’ him alive. The fuck.”
“But he was helping you too, wasn’t he? He burned the docks last night—the state police told me.”
Trey frowned. “That redneck couldn’t burn shit. I burned the fuckin’ docks. He tried to stop me, so I whipped his ass, flaked him with dope, and let the crabs have him.”
Even in her horror, Patricia felt astonished, even relieved. “I-I didn’t know that.”
“Bet‘cha don’t know somethin’ else too.” Trey’s voice darkened. He reached up toward his face, and then . . .
Patricia squinted in the dark.
He took his denture piece out, a bridge of some sort. Patricia came close to swallowing her own vomit at the recognition.
Now Trey’s two front teeth were missing.
“You remember me now, don’t’cha?” Trey guttered.
“My God,” she choked, “I thought it was Ernie. His two front teeth were missing when the EMTs were taking him out of the bay.”
“Aw, shit, that ain’t nothin’. When me ’n’ him got ta fightin’ on the docks, I knocked a couple of his teeth out, busted a rib too, ‘fore I jacked him out the rest a’ the way. I don’t like Ernie gettin’ credit for my balls—so make sure you know that. It was me who split your cherry on Bowen’s Field that night.”
Patricia wished she could just die now.
“I done saw ya skinny-dippin‘in the water,” Trey admitted. “Couldn’t help it—hell, I was a young buck myself back then. Chick skinny-dippin’ in the woods at night, all by herself? She’s asking for it.”
“You make me sick,” Patricia managed, her muscles tensing against the bonds.
“You were quite a prize back then, and still are,” Trey said, feeling her body up with his eyes. “’N fact, you’re a damn sight better-lookin’ now. And ya know what else I remember, baby? I remember how much you liked it. . . .”
Trey stuck the tip of his tongue through the gap in his teeth, and then the rest of the disgusting memory swamped her: her clitoris sucked through that same gap over twenty-five years ago when she lay lashed to the ground in the middle of Bowen’s Field, much the same way she lay lashed to this bed now.
“Yeah, you liked it then, and you’re gonna like it again tonight,” he promised. “You ain’t gonna be alive much longer, so you might as well just lay back and get into it.”
He began to walk toward the bed. . . .
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Answer me one thing.”
He chuckled. “Guess it’s the least I can do.”
“Set me straight on something. You’ve been killing the Squatters and making it look like drug dealers were killing them. Right?”
“Yeah. And it worked.”
“So you’ve been killing them,” Patricia repeated. “But who’s been killing you?”
Trey fell silent in the moonlight.
“Come on, Trey. Tell me the rest of the story. Dwayne was murdering Squatters; then someone murders Dwayne. Junior Caudill murdered the Hilds; then someone murdered him. Right?”
Trey hesitated but said, “Yeah.”
“And what about Junior’s brother? He was working for you and Felps, too—you said so in the kitchen. He killed the Ealds, didn’t he?”
“That’s right. Burned ’em up in their shack.”
“Why do I have this funny felling that Ricky Caudill is dead now, too? Is he?”
Trey nodded. “He died in the town jail cell, some disease.”
“Some disease? What happened to him?”
Trey was growing flustered. “I don’t know—I ain’t a doctor. It had to have been some disease or somethin’. Nobody killed him—he was in his jail cell when it happened.”
“When what happened?” Patricia insisted.
“He lost all his blood, it looked like.”
“Really? And Dwayne lost his head, but there was no evidence of a wound, and Junior lost all of his internal organs. I saw Junior’s autopsy, Trey, and the inside of his body was empty. But there was no sign of an incision. How do you take a man’s organs out of his body without cutting him open first?”
“I don’t know,” Trey said.
“Ricky Caudill lost all his blood. Were there any cuts on him? Did somebody cut his veins?”
“I didn’t inspect his fuckin’ body; all I did was bury it.”
“You said he died in his jail cell. So I guess his blood was all over the cell floor, right? Right?”
“No!” Trey yelled. “The floor was clean, and th
ere weren’t no cuts on him!”
Silence.
The clock was still ticking, and outside Patricia could hear the cicadas’ drone. “Answer me one more thing, Trey.”
“No. Fuck it.” He grabbed a pillow off the bed. “I got me a piece a’ your ass when you were sixteen—that’ll have to do. I’m just gonna smother your ass right now and be done with it.”
He raised the pillow and was about to position it over her face, then began to lower it.
“Did Ricky Caudill get a letter on the day he died?” Patricia blurted.
The pillow froze, then fell away.
“How did you know that?” Trey’s voice ground out.
“He did, didn’t he? A sheet of paper with one word on it, one handwritten word. Wenden, something like that, right? It looked like it was written in some kind of dust or chalk. That was the letter he got, wasn’t it?”
Agan’s Point’s new chief of police just stood there in the moonlight. He didn’t reply.
“Dwayne got a letter like that, too.”
“Bullshit!”
“He did. I found it in the garbage can in the den. The postmark was the day he died. Go look if you don’t believe me. It’s probably still there. And Junior Caudill got a letter just like it, too.”
“No, he didn’t!”
“Yes, he did, Trey! I saw it in an evidence bag at the county coroner’s.”
Now Trey stood with his jaw dropping and his eyes wide, contemplating something in utter dread.
“Trey?” Patricia asked.
Trey just stared.
“Trey?”
He looked down at her almost beseechingly.
“Trey, did you get a letter like that too? Did you get one today?”
Trey’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he gulped. “It’s in my pants pocket. The postman delivered it today. No return address. But I know who it’s from, and I ain’t afraid.”
“Who’s it from, Trey? Is it from—”
“It’s from Everd Stanherd, that little shit. Just some a’ his backwoods superstitious bullshit, tryin’ to scare us. But I ain’t afraid.” He gulped again. “I don’t believe in black magic or whatever fucked-up mumbo-jumbo he thinks he’s pullin’.”
Now it was Patricia’s jaw that began to drop. “Everybody who got one of those letters died. They died because something was taken from them. Blood, organs, Dwayne’s head.”
“Ain’t nothin’ been taken from me.” But even then his words began to slur. . . .
“Trey,” Patricia implored. “I think you should turn on the light and look at yourself in the mirror. Something’s happening to you.”
“Ain’t nothin’ haplen-in’!”
But what was it? Patricia’s eyes were riveted.
“Ain’t blow-one play-ken bluthin’ flum me!” Trey shouted. He turned shakily, tried to stride out of the room, but as he did so, he wobbled in his gait. When he reached out for the doorknob, his fingers turned limp as cooked pasta; then his arm slowly bowed, then fell, tentacle-like.
Before he fell over altogether, Patricia saw his head . . . collapse, as though his skull had dissolved within the sack of his face.
A few seconds later the door creaked open, figures entering. Some held candles made from rendered fat, and in the flickering light Patricia recognized the face of Everd Stanherd.
“Wenden,” came the bizarre word from the even more bizarre Squatter accent. “It’s from our holy language, from a time even before that of the druids. . . .”
Patricia had been untied, dressed in a robe, and carried out. Then they’d driven her to someplace in the woods, for the woods truly were their home.
Everd Stanherd, his wife, and a few of the elders sat with Patricia in a circle, their candles guttering.
“We owe you no explanations, for they are all secrets. But remember this: long before Christ, God said ‘An eye for an eye.’ ”
Patricia was still regaining her senses. I’m alive. And it wasn’t a dream. . . .
“You’re a wizard or something,” she managed.
“No. I am the sawon—it means seer,” Everd intoned. His face was barely visible—all of them were.
The moonlight shimmered through the branches.
The cicadas thrummed.
“Sawon.” Patricia remembered the word. The Squatter on the pier had told them. “You’re, like, the clan wise man, some kind of ancestral leader?”
“It means . . . seer,” he repeated.
“What does wenden mean?” Patricia asked next.
One of the other elders’ voices fluttered like a death rattle. “It means gone.”
Gone. Patricia thought. Dwayne’s head. Junior’s innards. Ricky Caudill’s blood. And Trey’s bones . . . all . . . gone.
“You cursed them,” Patricia observed. “Any of them who harmed the Squatters. It was magic.”
“We can say no more,” Marthe Stanherd whispered.
Patricia couldn’t resist. “But . . . how?”
“We can say no—” Marthe began, but Everd leaned forward, overriding her. He held something in his crabbed hand. A jar? Patricia wondered. A clay pot of some sort, the size of a masonry jar. A cross adorned with the familiar squiggles and slashes of Squatter artwork had been etched into the pot.
“The burned blood,” Everd told her. “It’s our sacrament, from the sawon before me. And when I am dead, my blood will suffice for the next sacrament, for the sawon who is to follow. One of these men here tonight.”
Several of the faces in the circle looked startled when Everd removed the strange jar’s lid and passed it to Patricia.
She looked in and saw . . .
Dust?
Brownish dust. The dull chalklike substance with which the death letters had been written? There was very little left, just enough to form a rim around the bottom.
Burned blood, Patricia repeated in her mind.
“It’s consecrated,” someone said.
And someone else: “Through faith older than any religion . . .”
Patricia was confused, but she also knew that there were some things she was not meant to understand. No one was.
“I’m dying,” Everd said next, through a smile that seemed to float around them in the dark. “I will soon become the next sacrament. I will soon be wenden. I will soon be gone.”
They were all getting up now, blowing out their gullfat candles.
“You’re a good woman.” Everd was the first to walk away. “Continue to be good.”
“But where will you go?” Patricia blurted from where she sat
“From whence we came: nowhere. Everywhere. Anywhere.”
Like shifting ink spots, one by one they disappeared amongst the trees, blending into darkness.
But a final question assailed her. “Wait a minute! What about Gordon Felps?”
A hand patted her shoulder. The creviced face of the final elder whispered, “Don’t worry about Gordon Felps. We took care of him.”
When Patricia looked again, they were . . .
Gone.
It was an hour before daybreak when Patricia pulled through the gates of the compound. A sign on the fence read: FELPS CONSTRUCTION, INC. BUILDER OF FINE HOMES FOR LUXURY LIVING.
This seemed the most likely place to check first; she had no idea where Felps was staying in town. From the road she could see his truck parked in front of the office trailer.
Gravel crunched under her feet when she walked across the lot. She climbed the short wooden steps before the trailer, then paused. It occurred to her to knock but . . .
She tried the knob. The door clicked open.
He must not be here, she deduced. Darkness seemed clotted in the trailer. For some reason she wasn’t afraid of what she might find.
“Felps? Are you here?”
A voice rattled back. “Who is it?”
“Patricia White.”
A pause. “Thank God.”
“Trey’s dead. I know what happened, your plan, the people you paid to
frame and murder Squatters, all of it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He must’ve been at the very back of the trailer; she couldn’t see anything. And his voice now was beginning to scare her. Something about it sounded so hopeless.
She felt around the wall for a light switch but couldn’t find one. Damn, I can’t see!
“Please come over here,” Felps stoically begged her. “There’s a gun in the top drawer of the desk. I want you to take it out and kill me. For God’s sake—please. Kill me.”
She never found the light switch, but in the little bit of moonlight coming in through a tiny window, she saw a flashlight sitting atop a file cabinet.
“Please,” Felps pleaded.
She snapped on the flashlight, pointed it, and . . .
Stared.
Gordon Felps looked normal at first glance, sitting in a comfortable office chair. But then Patricia noticed . . .
Oh . . . shit . . .
His sleeves were empty. She lowered the flashlight. The legs of his pants were empty as well. On the desk before him lay the letter she didn’t even need to look at now. Wenden, she thought. Gone. Gordon Felps’s arms and legs were gone.
“Don’t leave me! I can’t live like this!” he shouted.