The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

  “He has come this far?” the wisp of smoke, which sounded weary of mind and at the same time exhausted physically, said. The wisp of smoke, which ordinarily would hover tall and thin over the ground, was pooled close to the earth, like a fog weighed down by gravity.

  His companion, who resembled a more solid figure but flattened to nearly two dimensions, a kind of cardboard cutout with burning yellow lamps where his eyes would be and a mouth too wide for the face, with just enough depth to give him viability, said in a voice filled with apprehension, “Yes. In two of their weeks there may be nothing left to save.”

  “Don’t say that!” the wisp of smoke shot back angrily; the outburst seemed to weaken him further, the cloud that contained him sinking ever lower to the ground.

  “The girl—” the cardboard man began.

  “The girl is only our backup plan,” the wisp of smoke said. It was measuring its words now, speaking slowly, almost whispering. As it did so it began to elongate a bit. “She was to be used in case there was a standoff. But now …” It added after a moment, “I don’t know if the young man is capable.”

  The wisp of smoke was quiet, watching the roiling sickly fog in the distance, the ruined, blackened rolling hills, the emptiness at the horizon.

  “The Dark One may win—” the cardboard cutout said.

  “No! That can never happen. It would be the end of everything. For all of us.”

  “But we knew he would try this in the end.”

  “Yes. I think even he knew his other attempts, through Samhain, would fail. It was more of a game to him. He would have taken the easy way if it had worked. But now …” The wisp of smoke gave his version of a grim smile. “Now he’s taken the hard way. And the girl cannot be readied later. We will have to prepare her now, so that she can be used if necessary.”

  “But she is so young—”

  “It can’t be helped. We have no choice. I … feel sorry for her. For them both. But it’s for them as well as us …”

  “I understand,” the wisp of smoke’s companion said. “We will do what has to be done.”

  “All of us,” the wisp of smoke said. Again he gave a grim smile, watching the edge of the world grow emptier before his eyes. The cardboard cutout moved silently away, leaving him to his own thoughts.

  “All of us …” he repeated, sighing.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Gina, it’s time for bed!”

  Marcia Bright could hear her daughter playing in her room, even though she had tucked Gina into bed a half hour before. The child never stopped. She was what Marcia called an Energy Vampire — she sucked the energy out of any room, and humans that were in it, and used it all in her little dynamo way. She never stopped. From seven in the morning when she got up to go to school, to ten at night when she finally went to bed, she never stopped.

  “Ginaaaaa!”

  There was no answer from upstairs — but still Marcia could hear her daughter talking and laughing—

  “I’m gonna kill that kid—” she said wearily, getting up from the family room couch with a groan and putting her slippers on. Beside her, half asleep in front of the sitcom rerun they were watching on TV, Ted grunted and said, “Want me to go?”

  Marcia watched him close his eyes as the words left his lips. “I wish,” she said, under her breath.

  She walked three steps and then turned around, seeing him open his eyes again and reach for the popcorn they’d made.

  “You faking bastard,” she said.

  Ted laughed. “I’ll leave you some popcorn,” he said, changing the channel to a basketball game.

  “Jeez …”

  Marcia shuffled in her slippers to the stairs, and then up them.

  She was surprised to see no light beneath Gina’s door. But from experience, she knew that meant nothing. There was probably a flashlight missing from the kitchen junk drawer, and Gina would be under the covers with a book, or a stack of Legos, building a castle or tearing it down …

  There was still plenty of noise issuing from the room — grunts and yelps and hoots of laughter.

  “Ginaaaa!”

  The sounds continued.

  She eased open Gina’s bedroom door, and was again surprised — no glow from beneath the covers.

  “Did you just switch that flashlight off—?”

  The noises continued in the darkness.

  “Young lady—” Marcia began, switching on the room light.

  It flared on overhead — showing her daughter peacefully asleep in bed.

  “Wha—”

  Marcia walked purposefully over to the bed and looked down. Gina looked asleep, her head denting her pillow, her thumb planted just at her lips, her rag doll nested nearby.

  “If you’re faking like your father—”

  She reached down to shake her daughter, then hesitated.

  Gina looked so peacefully asleep.

  Marcia retreated to the doorway, flipped off the light, frowning.

  The noises immediately started again in the room — hoots, whistles, a clang like a fire bell …

  Marcia had a quick intake of breath; she flipped the light switch on—

  The sounds vanished.

  Switch off: a ripping sound, hissing laughter that faded into a basso chuckling voice—

  “Ted!”

  The urgency in her voice brought her husband bounding up the stairs. It also awoke Gina, who sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes.

  The noises were gone.

  Marcia flipped the switch on and off, then on again, but nothing happened.

  “What is it?” Ted said, reaching the doorway. He looked into the room. “Was she asleep?”

  Gina yawned and looked at them. “Time for school do I need to get up is the sun up—?”

  “No, baby. Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

  “I was dreamin’ about the time we went to Disney World just like we were there again nothing strange like in dreams and Dad was yelling on the water ride just like he did—”

  “Hush,” Marcia said, putting her finger to her lips. “Go back to sleep. Back to Disney World.”

  “What’s wrong?” Ted said.

  “I … nothing, I guess,” his wife answered. Gina lay back down in bed. Marcia’s fingers hesitated on the light switch, then flipped it off. The room went dark and silent.

  “What the hell—” Ted began.

  “Sorry,” Marcia said. “Thought I heard some noises in the room. It’s all right.”

  “But—”

  “Let’s go finish the popcorn.”

  She took his arm, and steered him downstairs.

  Later that night, much later, in a quiet dark time before the world rolls toward dawn, Marcia Bright sat up in her own bed, with her husband gently snoring beside her, and heard from her daughter’s room across the hall what sounded like the whistling of a teakettle, the snapping of many fingers, a chorus of ghostly singing voices …

  Chapter Twelve

  Jerry Farrow had never, as far as Grant knew, been a happy man. He had spent his entire career in the police department clawing his way to the top. From the moment he had hit the pavement as a beat cop, that one goal — to be Captain — had possessed and overwhelmed him. Grant had never heard him speak about his family, his vacations, his hobbies; never heard him talk about sports, or women, or even the crazy things that happened on the job. When he drove a cruiser, his partners, who didn’t stay that way long, disliked him with a passion. When he was promoted from uniform to detective, just after Grant, he looked at Grant as a rival, not a colleague, and treated him as such. When Grant called him on it, he never forgot. And when he finally made Captain, he made sure to remember.

  Captain Farrow sat behind his desk with his perpetual scowl on his face — he held up a file and shook it in Grant’s direction.

  “Something tells me you were looking at this,” Farrow nearly spit. His close-set, small dark eyes tried to bore into Grant, who merely stared over the top of
Farrow’s balding head.

  “And that would be—” Grant began mildly.

  Farrow let the file drop onto his desk. “Corrie Phaeder. You know damn well he’s back in Orangefield. I want you to leave him alone.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Farrow made a noise in his throat that sounded like a spit. “Don’t go anywhere near him. If you do I’ll suspend you so fast your ass will pucker.”

  “Is that all?”

  Farrow tried to measure him with his eyes, but Grant continued to stare blithely over his head.

  “Get out of my office.”

  Grant turned to leave, thinking, What I do on my own time has nothing to do with you, bastard.

  The drive out to Riley Gates’s farm was a pleasant one. It was one of those perfect autumn days in upstate New York, cool yet mild, sun bright, with a sky as deep and clear as blue ice. Grant had the window down in the car, and the radio on, and examined the farms to either side of the road — it seemed like every square inch of Orangefield was overgrown with pumpkins. The hillsides were so bright orange it hurt his eyes. The fields were one huge blanket the color of Halloween.

  The farms looked so much alike that he drove by Gates’s, then immediately braked when he passed a sign that read Riley’s Pick Your Own Pumpkins. He backed up and there was the rutted road that led to Gates’s place. He carefully drove his Taurus through untended potholes toward the distant farm house and barn. It was all out of a picture book: white clapboard house, faded red barn, the fields full of pumpkins.

  And Riley had been the best cop he ever met.

  His friend, looking like any other stout farmer in bib overalls and faded baseball cap, was waiting for him in front of the house. Grant parked the car by the open barn and got out.

  “When the hell you gonna fix that drive of yours?” Grant complained.

  Gates laughed. “Never gonna fix it. Keeps the riffraff out.” As Grant ambled up to him he put out his hand. “How the hell are ya, podner?”

  Grant took the large, rough paw in his own. “Passable.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve got that look in your eyes.” Gates took his hand back and turned toward the house. “Come and have a little lunch. We’ll talk.”

  “You’re not gonna drag me up to the attic to look at your model trains?”

  Gates laughed. “Not today. Got a new diesel engine I want to show you, but we’ll save it for next time. Other stuff we need to talk about today.”

  Grant followed Riley to the back of the farmhouse, where a meal was waiting on a table covered with a red and white checkered cloth flanked by two white wicker chairs, set back out of the sun under an overhang of the house that formed a natural patio covering. A basket of chicken was flanked by a bowl of potato salad and a plate filled with ears of corn. Next to the table was an open cooler filled with iced beer.

  Grant put his hand into the cooler, savoring the chill of the melting ice; he looked at Riley. “You?”

  “None for me,” Riley said, sighing. “Diabetes says no. I sneak one every once in a while, but I pay for it.” He patted his stomach as he sat down with a grunt. “Feet hurt all the time, when they don’t go numb on me. I should lose the weight, but then I wouldn’t feel like me.” He turned his piercing stare on Grant as he sat down. “So how’s Jerry Farrow?”

  Grant twisted the cap off his bottle of beer and took a swallow. “Same as ever. Grade-A asshole.”

  Riley grunted a laugh. “Was a fine day when I retired, just to avoid that prick.” He loaded his plate with a single small chicken drumstick, a half ear of corn, a spoonful of potato salad. “And how’s Rose?”

  Grant, in the middle of filling his own plate with considerably more food than his host, furrowed his brow. “Not so good, Riley. I may have to put her in Killborne again.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “She’s getting worse. And no matter what her doctors seem to do with her medication, it doesn’t work for long. When the side effects start she stops taking it altogether, and then …” He shrugged.

  “God, she was a wonderful lady, though.”

  Grant picked up the past tense, and didn’t dispute it. Riley had never been one to dance around anything. “Yes, she surely was. About the most wonderful woman I ever met.”

  Grant nodded his assent.

  Gates went on, “I can’t imagine how hard it must be to see someone you love change into … something else.”

  “It happened to her mother, too. We should have seen it coming—”

  Riley waved a hand in impatience. “Pah. The reason’s irrelevant. It happened, and you’ve got to deal with it. Just like I had to deal with Deirdre leaving me.” He laughed. “The witch.”

  Grant laughed, too. The mood had lightened. He pointed to the chicken and was about to speak when Riley cut him off.

  “The bucket’s inside. They deliver now. You didn’t think I cooked this stuff, did you?”

  Grant howled and reached into the cooler for another beer. For a moment he was at peace, the day perfect, sun warm on his back, sky deep blue from horizon to horizon, having lunch with his closest friend and mentor …

  “What’s troubling you, Billy boy?” Riley said in a soft voice. He was sitting back, regarding Grant with an almost magisterial look. He would have made a good judge.

  Grant sighed. “Weird shit.”

  Gates’s face broke into a wide grin. “Ha! I had an inkling we’d be having this conversation someday. You always were too hard-headed for the soft sciences.” He leaned his bulk forward, resting his forearms on the table. His eyes squinted in concentration. “Let me tell you something about yourself, boyo.”

  “Uh-oh,” Grant warned himself. “Lecture mode.”

  Gates nodded once, briskly. “Just that. I happen to know a thing or two about you, that you’re not aware of yourself. I was born here in Orangefield. I know you always thought that was a disadvantage to you, but it wasn’t. Gave you a perspective us natives didn’t always have. But, on the flip side, it made you crazy when you came up against some of our little burgh’s … peculiarities, shall we say.”

  “Weird shit.”

  Riley hooted laughter. “Exactly. You didn’t know how to handle it back when, and you don’t know how to handle it now.”

  “Well, how do you handle it?” Grant briefly told his friend about his visit to Fred Willims’ home, what he had found there, and what had happened to the bee keeper.

  Riley sat back and whistled. “That’s a good one, I’ll admit. A real good one. You noticed that the Herald only said suicide was suspected. Now they know how to handle a story.” He couldn’t keep the irony out of his voice.

  “Anything to protect the tourist industry,” Grant huffed. “But you and me—”

  “I’ll tell you how I handled it, always,” Gates said. “I officially ignored the hell out of it.”

  “But—”

  Gates held up a hand. “Let me finish. As far as police work went, I did my job, as you know, and did it damned well if I say so. But let’s just say I kept two sets of files. One for the police department, and,” he tapped his baseball cap, “one in here. And then, on long winter nights, when the cold winds were blowing and when I wasn’t missing my Deirdre, the witch, I’d take out my second set of files and look them over.”

  “You never talked with me about this,” Grant said.

  Gates smiled thinly. “Never talked with anybody about it, boyo. Nothing but trouble to do so. And they’re my files. You’ve got to make your own.”

  Grant said, “They’re growing thick, the last year or so.”

  Riley nodded. “I thought as much. You’ve got the look, the hard head getting a little soft. My advice, and it’s free, is to do as I did, and keep those two file systems separate.” He looked first at one index finger, then the other. “Police shit over here, weird shit over here. Now regarding Corrie Phaeder, for instance …”

  “You old goat!” Grant said, stunned.

  Riley smi
led enigmatically. “I knew that’s why you came out to see your old friend, Billy boy. Little birdies still talk to me, or I talk to them. I knew the Phaeder boy had come home to roost, just as I knew that you wouldn’t be able to stay away from him. It was, if I recall, Jerry Farrow’s single biggest fuckup, was it not?”

  Grant sat silent, and nodded.

  “Sure as it was. I would imagine that by this time you’ve been to see the boy, at least once. And I imagine you looked through the old file, and Farrow has given you a warning, which you have no intention of heeding.” Gates made a steeple of his fingers, and looked over it. “Am I warm?”

  “Very.”

  “Good. And my advice …” Gates suddenly leaned forward, and made a gimme motion at the cooler. “Let me have one of those cold ones, Billy boy. I’ll pay for it later, but I don’t care.”

  Grant dutifully uncapped a beer bottle and handed it to him.

  Riley made a great show of drinking the beer, and put it down, half finished, on the table. “Listen close now, because pretty soon all these beautiful pumpkins around us will be picked, and I’ll be spending all my time out on the side of the road in my little farm stand making a buck or two.” He finished the beer, belched, and put his hands on the table. His eyes became hard as marbles. “Two things here. One: that Phaeder kid did not, I repeat, did not kill his mother. And two: someone else did.”

  “Wha—”

  “Let me finish. Unbeknownst to you or Farrow or anyone else, I made a little file of my own on this one.” He tapped his head. “Let’s just say it bothered me the way it was handled by the department, and the reaming out you took on it. I even tried to talk to the kid, but he was gone by then. I did get the real estate agent, that bitch Linda Williams, to let me have a look around the house. And my own conclusion is that everyone, including you, bungled that one.”

  Again Grant tried to interrupt, but was kept at bay.

  “Look at where she was found, Bill. The crime scene photographs. She had multiple stab wounds. The boy was confined to a wheelchair upstairs. For him to kill her he would have had to stab her at the top of the stairs. Yes, she was found at the bottom of the stairs, on the landing. But her neck wasn’t broken. There was barely a mark on her, Bill.”