I swallowed.
“I want to go dig up the thing, the cross.”
He nodded. I don’t think he realized that he stepped a little harder on the accelerator.
“You know where to take it.” His voice had gone quiet. “I mean, you know where that thing belongs.”
I did my best not to give an indication of anything, but that in itself was a giveaway.
Andrews was sitting on the front porch when Crawdad’s car pulled up in my yard, and he got up and came into the yard before the engine was off.
“So?” He was tight-lipped.
“We found out where the thing is buried,” Crawdad gushed, “and what it is.” He lowered his voice. “And Dr. Devilin knows what to do with it, too, I believe.”
“You’re not going to believe this.” I was headed for the garden shed in the back of my house. “Is Skidmore still here?”
“He went into town. Detective Huyne is still here, and there was something about the blood they found on your window from the lunatic with the cricket bat. Where are we going?”
“There.” I pointed to a moss-covered boulder between two ancient cedar trees in the backyard.
Crawdad nodded and I was off.
My yard slopes down behind the house and is eventually lost in tall pines, thick undergrowth, and steep angles. It’s shady, and a little difficult to navigate when the incline gets too intense. There was a barbecue pit, a stone oven and chimney, about twenty feet from the back door. I have no idea who built it and I had never seen it used. Fire would probably never touch the stones again. Lucinda had planted some creeping ficus around it the summer I’d first come home, and it was climbing the rocks quite nicely.
The garden shed was a rustic affair, built by my father out of scavenged barn wood. It had a padlock on it, but I never clicked it shut. I went straight for the shovel; Crawdad and Andrews watched.
Andrews complained.
“What are we doing?”
“That’s where the thing is buried,” Crawdad explained, hushed. “We’re going to dig it up.”
“The Cherokee artifact is buried in your backyard?” Andrews was very amused. “Why?”
“Apparently, my mother was frightened by it,” I told him, striding toward the boulder. “She made my father bury it back here. She thought that would ward off the evil.”
“But Dan says it won’t work,” Crawdad went on. “We’ve got to get it back to where it belongs.”
“And where is that?” Andrews caught up with me.
“He’s not saying,” Crawdad allowed, “but he knows all right.”
“Exactly what is this thing?” Andrews tried to catch my eye.
“It’s a water curse,” I said, not looking at him. “Can you believe that? It’s a cross-shaped object that the Cherokee put near a stream to curse the water.”
“You’re kidding.” Andrews stopped. “What does Dr. There Is No Pattern ’Cause It’s All Random think of that?”
I turned to face him.
“Would you mind?”
He read my face.
“Fever? Are you all right?”
“Not remotely.” I hoisted the shovel.
Forty-five minutes and three sizable holes later, I had nothing to show for my efforts but the derision of Dr. Andrews and pain from my sciatic nerve.
Crawdad had gone reluctantly when a call over his police radio demanded his attention. He didn’t say what it was about—or maybe he did and I just didn’t pay attention. Either way, he’d made Andrews promise to call him the moment I found the cross.
Andrews had gone into the house for a Guinness—he’d brought a twelve-pack with him, apparently, and squirreled it in his room—and come back out, only to lean on the boulder and make pirate noises.
“The note from your father wasn’t very specific, then.” He sipped.
“Well,” I answered, leaning on the shovel and breathing hard, “who knows what’s happened to this piece of land in twenty years or more? Things grow; others shift. I’m in the right area.”
“Unless someone’s already dug it up.”
“We’d see that.” I stared down at the ground. “We’d notice the disturbed earth.”
“Not if someone dug it up in the years you were going to university, or teaching there. A couple of seasons of growing and shifting can cover a lot of ‘disturbed earth.’”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“What if it’s not even here anymore?” My voice sounded shaky to me.
“That’s what I’m saying.” He took another healthy sip. “Why don’t you come on in and let’s think about food. I’m hungry.”
“You go on in,” I told him, “I’m just going to try a bit longer.”
“God.” He finished his Guinness and headed for the house.
I have no idea how much longer I stayed in the backyard digging useless holes, losing hope that I would find the impossible object. Shadows were long, the sun was nearly down, and rain clouds threatened the horizon.
I leaned the shovel on the boulder, wiped my forehead with my sleeve, and started thinking about what would be good for dinner. I had some fresh trout in the refrigerator—just caught. My mind was occupied with lemons—trying to remember if I had any.
I barely heard the rush of running feet or the heavy breathing coming my way.
By the time I realized someone was there, he was on me, grunting and snarling, tackling me, knocking me back against the boulder.
With the breath knocked out of me, all I could do was drop lower when I saw the cricket bat headed toward my skull. The bat landed hard on the rock, and the impact must have stung his hands. I grabbed my shovel and poked it into his stomach as hard as I could, and he doubled over.
The shadows were too deep for me to see his face, but he was clearly the man who had broken into my house. And he was mad as a loon.
I scrambled away from the boulder, holding tightly to the shovel. When I got far enough away from him, I stood, planted my feet, and hefted the shovel to swing at him.
But he had recovered from the blow in the stomach and jumped back. He began swinging the bat in front of him like a scythe, back and forth, very quickly. He lumbered my way, head down, eyes up—a terrifying, mindless expression on his face. There was no reasoning human being in that body, only anger and the power of lunacy.
I cocked the shovel and let it swing, tip outward, with all my weight, knocking it against his bat. The impact stung us both. He howled; I hissed. But we both held on to our weapons.
If I could have gotten my breath, I would have hollered for Andrews, but I was afraid to use any effort that would distract me from defending myself.
The madman raised his bat over his head and shrieked, instantly running toward me, a Viking berserker.
I managed to get the shovel raised just high enough to bash the side of his head with the back of it on my upswing. It caught him under his jaw. It wasn’t as hard as I’d wanted it to be, but it stopped his progress.
Hadn’t Andrews heard his howling?
He stood a moment, dazed by the bash in his head. I used that pause to get a better grip on the shovel and plant my feet.
“The next one will take your head off,” I told him, trying to keep my voice low and threatening.
He squatted, started pounding his bat on the ground, apelike.
I relaxed—my mistake.
He leapt up suddenly, whirled the bat over his head, and sent it flying toward my face. I didn’t have time to duck. If I hadn’t turned away, the bat might have taken my eye out. As it was, it rocketed into my temple and I went down like a shot buffalo.
I fought to remain conscious, knowing the man would kill me if I passed out. I flailed the shovel blindly, hopelessly trying to fend him off. I could hear him moving around me, but I couldn’t concentrate—moments or hours might have passed.
Without warning, the back door of my house slammed open and I heard Andrews on the steps.
“What the hell is going on ou
t there?”
I scrambled up.
I could hear someone slithering toward me in the grass, but my vision was cloudy.
I held the shovel in front of me.
“I’m going to cut your head off with this shovel,” I growled.
It didn’t remotely sound like my voice.
The movement stopped.
“Fever?” Andrews kept his distance.
I blinked several times. My vision cleared a little. There was only one figure.
“Andrews?”
“What are you doing?”
“Heads up,” I whispered, “there’s someone else here. He just clubbed me. Look around.”
“What?” Andrews took a step in my direction.
“Look around.” I backed up to the rock, scanning the yard in the failing light.
“There’s no one else here.” Andrews moved closer. “Put down the shovel.”
“Oh.” I dropped it. “Sorry.”
“Jesus, look at your head!” He came to me instantly. “What happened?”
“The man with the cricket bat was here again!” I searched the ground around us for the weapon. “He threw it at me. It should be right here.”
“There’s nothing.” Andrews shook his head. “But you already have a nasty bump there.”
“It’s affecting my eyesight.” I closed my eyes.
“Oh my God,” Andrews whispered.
My eyes snapped open.
“What is it?”
He pointed. I turned.
Just under the boulder, about where I’d leaned on it, I could barely make out the top of a burlap sack.
In my kitchen, under the bright light, the Cherokee cross was beautiful, not threatening at all. Two carved branches of a river birch had been fixed in a cross with what appeared to be braided reed green cloth, very sturdy. There were several feathers woven into the pattern, making a circle around the nexus of the sticks. I couldn’t figure out how it had survived for so long intact.
There had been nothing else in the burlap bag—no note, no clue, no hint.
“Why was it buried out there, did you say?” Andrews couldn’t take his eyes off the thing.
“My mother was reportedly frightened by it.” I sat back, vision still a little on the jagged side. “But they say anything shaped like a cross makes a vampire nervous.”
“Stop it.” Andrews roused himself. “So—dinner?”
I glared in disbelief.
“You’re still hungry?”
“You’re not?” He tapped the cross. “You think you have to do something with this right now?”
“Yes.”
“No.” He reached for his cell phone. “I’m calling Crawdad.”
“Hang on.” I rubbed my face. “I was thinking of trout.”
“That’ll take forever! Cleaning and boning—”
“How about some of the leftover duck?” I shot back.
“It’s days old!”
“We’ll put it in a cassoulet, add some sausage, double-cook it, slather bacon on top.”
“I guess.”
“Rugby players don’t care about food poisoning.”
“Right,” he agreed, “but English professors do. I stride two worlds.”
“Do you want the cassoulet or not?”
He sighed heavily.
“Good, you get out the duck,” I instructed, “and I’ll get this cross out of the way, put it someplace safe.”
He went to the refrigerator.
“The bacon’s in here somewhere?”
“In the meat-keeper drawer on the bottom,” I assured him.
He mumbled something.
I picked up the Cherokee cross and headed for the living room. Before I knew what I was doing, exactly, I’d grabbed a light jacket out of the coat closet beside the door and stumbled out onto the porch.
I was in the truck with the engine running, cross beside me on the passenger seat, before Andrews appeared in the front doorway. He was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear it. I turned the truck sharply and ground a rut into my yard getting to the dirt road that led down the mountain.
Adairsville was at least an hour away, but that’s where Barnsley Gardens was, and that’s where I was going.
Eighteen
So that’s how I came to be standing in the moonlight in the middle of Barnsley Gardens on an odd September night.
What was left of the estate rose into view as I walked up the hilltop. A full moon made the mansion a skeleton, something from a grotesque animal more than remains of an antebellum home: a vision to match the story of its curse. A razor of wind cut across my fingers and kicked up leaves; I thought they might have been footsteps following behind me.
I’d parked my truck near the business office but hadn’t found anyone in it. The only other vehicle parked in the lot was a rented Mercedes, and I wondered how the place could make any money with only one guest.
I half-expected to be stopped by some sort of security guard as I wandered past the guest cottages onto the road that inclined toward the mansion, but I saw no one.
There were big open fields on either side of the road, and in the darkness and moonlight, all that open space seemed alive. Several deer were grazing so casually that they didn’t even lift their heads as I passed by. Fireflies, crickets, tree frogs, bats, and night birds all made their presence known. The wind gusted suddenly, hard enough to scramble the smaller pebbles in the road behind me, and it did sound like someone was following me.
But the silence in between all the noise was where the true menace lay, I figured.
Up the road and into a more wooded part of the land, I ran into a maze of dwarf boxwoods. In each open part of the design, different mass plantings had been established: roses, white gardenias, tall cleome and shorter cockscomb. The path twisted through the plantings enough to slow my progress, even if I hadn’t been fascinated by the flowers.
Once through the maze I was faced with stone steps, a pathway, and the front of the ruins. Only brick walls were left, no roof, no doors—an American Parthenon. But the places where windows had once been made it clear that the mansion had been comprised of several stories, and some of the windows at the front of the house had obviously been placed to overlook the maze and the steps, allowing residents to assess all visitors as they approached.
The air bit harder, and I completely gave over to the presence of Barnsley ghosts, my distant cousins. I carried the Cherokee cross in my right hand, but I had no hope that it would ward off any evil. It was an instrument of evil; it might even attract foul spirits. Leaves swirled on the ground around me, and for the third time I had a sensation that I was not alone, that someone was close to me in the shadows.
I stood staring up at the house, one more visitor the ghosts could evaluate, suddenly wondering how I’d gotten myself to that black moment, and, yes, I found myself in the middle of a very basic ontological dilemma: Who was the man standing in the dark garden holding on to a Cherokee curse?
I began to imagine myself standing in the upstairs window of the derelict mansion, looking down on myself. How did the man down there, I wondered, get to that desperate garden, wanted by the police and pursued by a murderer?
I moved slowly toward the house, replaying in my mind the whole history of the doomed Barnsley family, lamenting their great sadness as if it were my own.
Just as I stepped onto the stone stairs, I thought I saw something moving inside the mansion. I froze.
Wind batted tree limbs; here and there, it drove more leaves to the ground. Tree frogs and crickets had gone silent. The moon was suddenly bound by black clouds and the night was plunged into a deep well.
Just as I was considering walking very quickly back to my truck, I saw it again: a shadow moving in the shadows, a rustle of footsteps in the ruins.
I took a few steps as soundlessly as I could in order to get a better view just as the moon was released from its bondage. Light broke forth, poured into the mansion, and I saw, quite clearl
y, a woman in a neck-high aubergine dress, folds flowing in the wind. She was walking past one of the huge fireplaces.
I thought she must be an employee of Barnsley Gardens, a historically dressed figure who would lead tours and ooze charm. What she was doing wandering around in the dark at that hour, I had no idea—though I didn’t know what time it was. But I thought she might at least direct me to the springs that had once provided the mansion with its water.
“Hello?” I called.
She did not pause, heading toward the rear of the ruins.
“Sorry to bother you,” I stammered, taking a few more steps in her direction. “I was wondering—”
My plea was interrupted by a strange sound. I stopped, listened. The woman was crying.
“Are you all right?”
She paused, and I thought she’d heard me.
I made it to the front of the house before she moved again. I stood where the door would have been, holding the Cherokee cross; the moon was bright in the house, and she turned my way.
It was Eloise Barnsley.
She looked away quickly, tears in her eyes, and moved toward the back of the ruins.
I stood, baffled, for a moment before I followed, telling myself that the good people who ran the Barnsley Gardens Resort had out-done themselves in research and commitment to accuracy. The woman looked almost exactly like the portrait of Eloise Barnsley I had just seen.
“I’m trying to find the springs,” I called out.
She disappeared down some steps at the back of the house.
I followed her as best I could through the house, but the moon didn’t reveal everything. I tripped over stray bricks in the shadows, darker corners hid huge wisteria vines blocking doorways, and odd hidden steps jolted me downward twice. It all combined to make it more difficult to navigate through the ruins. By the time I reached the back of the house, she was nowhere to be seen.
The hill sloped down again behind the house. To my left, there was a gazebo and a rose garden. The wind filled the ruins with their scent, so rich that I closed my eyes for a second, taking it in.
A Widow's Curse Page 21