“Maybe it did.”
“That brings us to the fatal wound.”
“Now, that’s not been determined yet.” Littlefield felt the tingle of blood rushing to his cheeks.
“I saw the rip in the front of his pants.” She lifted the camera. “I took pictures, remember?”
“Guess so.” His tongue felt thick.
“With the loss of that much blood, I’m amazed he survived as long as he did.”
“You said the wounds were ritualistic. What’s that got to do with his . . . er . . .”
“Penis, Sheriff. You can say it in the company of a woman these days.”
“Of course.” His face grew warmer with embarrassment. He looked across the mountains. He would love to be walking a stream right now, flicking a hand-tied fly across the silver currents, the smell of wet stone and rotted loam in his nostrils. Alone. Anywhere but here with blood and the red church and Sheila Storie. “So what does it mean?”
“It may mean nothing. Or it may mean we have a deviant personality on the loose.” The flash of her eyes gave away her belief in the latter. Or maybe she was only hopeful.
“Is it because we haven’t found the . . . other part, either?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Think we ought to call in the state boys?” Littlefield knew Storie would bristle at turning the case over to the State Bureau of Investigation. She would want a shot first.
“That’s your decision, Sheriff.”
“I suppose we’ll have to wait for the state medical examiner’s report. Hoyle’s sending him down to Chapel Hill.”
“Good.”
Littlefield tried to read her expression. But the sun was in her face, so her half-closed eyes didn’t give away anything. He knew she thought Perry Hoyle had about as much forensic sophistication as a hog butcher. The whole department was probably a joke to her. Well, she was a flatlander, anyway. “Hoyle doesn’t think the wounds were made by a weapon.”
“You asked for my opinion, sir.”
Littlefield looked up the hill at the church. Suddenly he felt as if someone had reached an icy hand down his throat and squeezed his heart. His brother Samuel was on the roof of the church, waving and smiling.
His dead brother Samuel.
Littlefield blinked, then saw that the illusion was only a mossy patch on the shingles.
He sighed. “I’m putting you in charge of the investigation.”
Storie almost smiled. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
Littlefield nodded and stepped over the strings that marked off grids at the scene. He knelt by the toppled monument. “What do you make of this?”
“The boys’ footprints lead over here. I’d guess vandalism. Tipping tombstones is an old favorite. Maybe they were messing around when the subject heard them and tried to crawl out of the weeds.”
“Seems like they would have heard Boonie yelling.” He stopped himself. Boonie wouldn’t have called out, at least in nothing more articulate than a groan. Boonie’s tongue had been taken, too.
Hoyle rescued him from his embarrassment. “We’re ready over here, Sheriff,” the ME called. Littlefield winced and started to turn.
“I’ll handle it, sir,” Storie said. “It’s my case, remember? I might see something I missed the first two times.”
She was right. Littlefield’s shoulders slumped a little in relief. He hoped Storie hadn’t noticed, but she didn’t miss much. She had detective’s eyes, even if they were easier to look at than look through. “Go ahead.”
Littlefield headed across the cemetery and up the hill toward the red church. He glanced at the markers as he passed, some so worn he could barely make out the names. Some were nothing more than stumps of broken granite. Other graves were probably forgotten altogether, just the silent powder of bones under a skin of grass.
The ground was soft under his feet- good mountain soil, as black as coal dust. Almost a shame to waste it on a graveyard. But people had to be buried somewhere, and to the dead, maybe the most fertile soil in the world wasn’t comfort enough. Maybe his kid brother Samuel had yet to settle into eternal rest.
The names on the markers read like a who’s who history of this end of the county. Potter. Matheson. Absher. Buchanan. McFall. Gregg. More Picketts than you could shake a stick at.
And three Littlefields off by themselves.
He knelt by two familiar graves. His mother and father shared a single wide monument. He looked from the gray marble to a smaller marker, which had a bas-relief of a lamb chiseled in its center. Its letters were scarcely worn, and the fingerlike shadows of tree branches chilled the stone. Littlefield read the damning words without moving his lips.
Here Lies Samuel Riley Littlefield. 1968-1979. May God Protect and Keep Him.
His heart burned in his chest and he hurried away, his eyes frantic for a distraction. He stopped by the dogwood. The thing looked like it was dying. But it had looked that way for the last forty years, and every spring it managed to poke a few more blossoms out of the top branches. A memory stirred and crawled from the shadows before he could beat it back.
The red church. Halloween. The night he’d seen the Hung Preacher.
The night Samuel had died.
He shuddered and the memory fell away again, safely buried. The sun was warm on his face. Down the slope, Hoyle and Storie were hauling Boonie’s body to the back of the overgrown station wagon that served as the county’s non-emergency ambulance.
Littlefield moved away from the tree and put a foot on the bottom of four steps that led into the church foyer. The door was large and made of solid wooden planks. The cracks between the planks were barely distinguishable due to the buildup of paint layers. Over the door was a small strip of colored glass, two deep blue rectangular planes separated by an amber pane. Those had survived the onslaught of juvenile delinquents’ rocks.
The sheriff climbed the rest of the steps. The top one was a wider landing, scarred from the tailgate of Lester Matheson’s truck. Littlefield examined the thick hinges and the door lock. There was a lift latch in addition to the dull brass handle. Littlefield put his hand on the cool metal.
Wonder if I need a warrant to open it? Naw. Lester won’t mind if I have a peek.
There was a small chance that if Boonie had been murdered, some evidence might be hidden inside. Or the door might be locked, but he didn’t think Lester would bother keeping up with a key just to protect a hundred bales of hay. People didn’t steal out in these parts. The thieves and B&E addicts kept to Barkersville, where the rich folks had their summer homes.
Littlefield turned the knob and the catch clicked back into the cylinder. He nudged the latch up with his other hand, and as the door creaked open and the rich dust of hay hit his nostrils, he realized he hadn’t set foot inside since shortly after Samuel’s funeral.
Please, God, just let it be a plain old ordinary murderer. Some drunk who got mad because Boonie took two swigs before passing the bottle instead of one. A Mexican Christmas tree worker with a grudge. I’ll even take a crazy if you got one.
His palms were sweating, the way they had when he was seventeen and he’d first heard the laughter in the belfry.
The door opened onto a short, windowless foyer. A shaft of light pierced the ceiling from the belfry above.
Where the bell rope used to hang.
The bell rang in his memory, a thunderclap of angry bronze, an echo of the night Samuel died.
The plank floor creaked as Littlefield crossed the foyer. Golden motes of dust spiraled in the draft. What must it have been like a century ago? The worn wood had endured a hundred thousand crossings. Trembling and red-faced virgin brides with their best dresses dragging on the pine, solemn cousins come to pay their respects to a dear departed, women in bonnets and long swirling skirts gathering for Jubilee. Littlefield could almost see the preacher at the steps, shaking the hands of the menfolk, bowing to the women, patting the heads of the children.
The sheriff peered up through the tiny ro
pe hole, an opening barely large enough for a child to scramble through. The hollow interior of the bell was full of black shadow. But that would tell him nothing. He returned to scanning the floor for signs of blood.
The foyer opened onto the main sanctuary. The chill crawled up his spine again. He didn’t know whether it was caused by childhood legends, or the chance of finding a killer hiding among the bales of hay. For a frantic moment, he almost wished he wore a firearm.
The bales were stacked to each side, forming a crooked aisle down the center of the church sanctuary. Lester had left the altar undisturbed, probably because lifting hay over the railing was too much work. The altar itself was small, the pulpit hardly more than a rectangular crate with a slanted top. A set of six wormy chestnut beams, hand-hewn, crossed the open A-frame overhead. The interior walls were unpainted chestnut as well. In the dim light, the woodwork had a rich, deep brown cast.
The bales were packed too tightly against the walls to afford hiding places.
Unless somebody had removed a few bales and made a hollow space inside the stacks.
He’d done that in his family’s barn, when he wanted to hide out on an autumn day, or when he and his brother played hide-and-seek or army. But few hours could be stolen back then. Crops, livestock, firewood, fence mending- a long list of chores was waiting at six every morning that never got finished before dark. But back then, Littlefield had slept in dreams and not bad memories.
Nothing stirred amid the hay. The church was silent, as if waiting for a congregation to again fill it with life. Littlefield walked to the dais. The chill deepened even though the air was stuffy. A small wooden cross was attached to the top of the pulpit. Like the cross on the church steeple, it was missing a section of the crosspiece.
Littlefield leaned over the waist-high railing and looked into the corners of the altar. The small vestry off to the side held nothing but bare shelves and cobwebs. He didn’t know what he expected to see. Maybe he was just trying to ease his own mind, to reassure himself that old rumors and long-ago strangeness were put to rest. Boonie was dead, and that had nothing to do with the red church or Samuel or the Hung Preacher.
As he was turning to leave, he noticed a dark stain on the dais floor. It was the kind made by a spill. Maybe Lester had stored building materials in here once. At any rate, the rust-brown stain was far too old to have been made by whatever had killed Boonie.
But something about it held his attention. The shape seemed familiar. He tilted his head, as if stumped by an inkblot in a Rorschach test. When he realized where he had seen the form before, he drew in a dusty gasp of air.
The dark shape in the belfry, that long-ago Halloween.
Littlefield strode back through the church, suddenly anxious to be in the sunshine. He was going to go with the animal theory for now. If Storie wanted to play her forensic games, that was fine. But he wouldn’t allow himself to believe that something masquerading as human had ripped apart good old Boonie Houck. Not in Pickett County. Not on God’s ground. Not on his watch.
As he closed the door and looked across the graveyard where Storie searched the weeds for clues, the chill evaporated. Something fluttered in the belfry.
Bird or raccoon, he told himself without looking up. NOT the thing that had laughed as Samuel died.
He hurried down the slope to see if Storie had found any of Boonie’s missing parts.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bummer.
That was Ronnie’s first thought when the gray blindfold of unconsciousness dissolved into light. And that was the last thought he’d had when the anesthesiologist had pressed the mask to his face. Or maybe not. He’d been so stone-black-buzzed from the injection that he couldn’t be sure if he’d had any prior thoughts at all.
His face, at least what he could feel of it, was like a molasses balloon. Pain tingled and teased him through a curtain of gauze. It was a sneaky, funny pain, a bully that skulked around the edge of the playground, waiting for you to chase a stray kickball. Once you were alone, it would jump on you and beat you and kick you and rip you--
More of the druggy haze fell away. Ronnie opened his eyes and the light sliced at his pupils. His eyes were overflowing, but he couldn’t feel the tears on his cheeks. His stomach turned crooked flips. Mom and Dad were blurry images beside the bed. A man with a mustache whose eyes looked like licorice drops leaned over him.
“I think we’ve got somebody waking up.” The man’s mustache twitched like a caterpillar on a hot griddle. He wore a white coat.
Doctor. Ronnie’s thoughts spun, then collected. Pain plus doctor equals hospital.
He opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue was too thick to find his teeth.
“Easy now, little partner,” the doctor said. “Take it slow.”
Slow was the only way Ronnie could take it. His arms and legs felt like lead pipes. He turned his head to look at his parents. Despite the numbness, he felt a warmth growing in his chest. Mom and Dad were together.
Well, they weren’t holding hands, but at least they weren’t yelling at each other. And all it took to make that happen was for Ronnie to . . . what had he done?
He slogged through the tunnels of his memory. He remembered the ride to the hospital, Dad holding him in the back seat, Dad’s shirt against his face. The shirt should have smelled of sawdust and sweat and maybe a little gasoline, but Ronnie had smelled nothing but blood.
Then, farther back, before that, the little footbridge, falling, the rocks . . .
Ouch.
Ronnie was old enough to know that the memory of pain could never quite match up to the real thing. Which was a good thing; otherwise, everybody would be running around as crazy as old Mama Bet McFall, or Grandma Gregg down at the Haywood Assisted Care Center back before she slipped into the grave. But even Ronnie’s memory of the pain was strong enough to wipe out some of the numbing effects of the drugs.
Dad stepped forward, his lower lip curled, his face made sickly green by the fluorescent strip lights. Dad never looked quite right indoors, sort of like the tiger Ronnie had seen in a pen down at the Asheboro zoo. Both of them nervous and impatient, pacing, too large for walls or bars.
“Hey, Ronnie,” Dad said, unsuccessfully trying to funnel his deep voice into a whisper. “How are you feeling?”
“Muuuuhr.” Even Ronnie couldn’t translate the sound his vocal chords made.
Mom leaned over him, a tight smile wrinkling her face. The skin under her eyes was dark blue. She reached out and brushed hair away from his forehead with a clammy hand. “It’s okay, baby.”
The doctor checked Ronnie’s pulse. “Coming around fine. You’ll be able to take him home in an hour or so. Buzz one of the nurses if you need anything.”
The doctor left the room, and the draft from the closing door swept over Ronnie like a tide of water. Being a molasses-head wasn’t all bad. His thoughts weren’t dropping as fast as usual, but he was thinking wider than he ever had before. If not for the pain bully waiting behind the numbness, Ronnie wouldn’t mind hanging out in this half-speed dreamscape for a while.
This was almost peaceful. If he closed his eyes, the white walls fell away and the sky got big and he could float on a cloud and no one could bother him, not even dingle-dork—
Tim. What had happened to Tim?
The molasses of his face rippled as his eyes opened wide. Mom and Dad and . . . where was Tim? Because suddenly it was all coming back, the molasses creek turning a bend and flowing into sunlight and, now hot and golden, churning over a precipice in a sugary waterfall. The run home, the hand on his foot, the bleeding thing—they got livers for eyes—the toppled monument, the red church, the graveyard.
Had the bleeding thing trapped Tim?
Dad must have sensed his agitation, because a hand on his shoulder prevented him from sitting up. “Now, you heard the doctor, son. Just rest up.”
Mom chewed on the skin at the end of her thumb. “You got busted up pretty good when you fell. Broke your no
se. The doctor said you were lucky you didn’t crack your skull.”
Good old Mom. Found the bright side to everything. So he had a broken nose. He thought of some of the players on his football cards, how their noses had great big humps across the bridge or were twisted off to one side. Just what a guy like him needed. Now Melanie would never talk to him.
The molasses mask slipped a little more, and the pain bully chuckled from the shadows, knowing an opportunity was drawing near. Ronnie became aware of a lower portion of his body, where the knot of snakes nested in his stomach. He was going to throw up.
Total bummer. He groaned and his tongue worked.
“What is it, honey?” Mom said, her face now paler and her eyes wider.
“Poooook,” he said. His right arm flailed like a water hose under pressure.
“Puke?” She looked at Dad. “Oh, Lord, David, he’s going to throw up.”
Dad looked helpless. The situation called for quick action and compassion. As a caregiver, Dad made a good pallbearer.
Mom spun and began searching under a counter beside the bed. A mirror ran along the length of the counter, and Ronnie was startled by his own reflection. His nose was purple and swollen, little clots of bloody gauze hanging out of his nostrils. His eyes were like green-brown marbles pressed into ten pounds of dough.
The image accelerated his nausea. He turned his body with effort, and now Dad helped, putting a hand in his armpit to lean him over the steel railing of the bed. The scene in the mirror was doubly disorienting from being reversed. The greasy snakes crawled up Ronnie’s throat.
Mom found a plastic pan made of a yucky aqua color, but that was okay because yucky was just what the situation required. She held it under his face, and the snakes exploded from his mouth. His eyes squeezed shut in the effort of vomiting, and drops of something besides molasses beaded his forehead. His abdomen spasmed twice, three times, four, a pause, then a fifth eruption.
“Oh, my Lord,” Mom exclaimed to Dad. “Call the nurse.”
“He said this might happen. And look, it’s stopped now.”
“But it’s blood.”
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