A Minister's Ghost

by Phillip DePoy

  Orvid put his blade away and sat on the table in front of me, his hand on Judy’s.

  “My cousin Tristan, who owned the show for which your parents worked, was my hero,” he began. “He stood on his own two feet, eschewed family money, made a name for himself on his own terms, and retired rich without help from anybody.”

  “I thought you might be thinking about the rumors concerning Tristan and my mother,” I said directly.

  No point in beating about the bush. My mother had slept with half the population of our county, and her most notorious liaison was said to have been with Tristan, giving rise to the gossip that Tristan had been my father. He had not been, my father was the magician Fletcher Devilin, but rumors persisted.

  “No.” Orvid said slowly, “I don’t think we’re related, if that’s what you mean, but we do favor one another in several ways.”

  “I noticed that,” Judy interjected. “I told him so.”

  “I heard, sugar pie,” he said sweetly to her, then turned to me. “But I’ve been looking forward to meeting you because Tristan told me so much about you.”

  “He did?” I’m certain my voice sounded skeptical. “I only met him once or twice, when I was quite young.”

  “He kept in touch with your mother for a long while,” Orvid said, a light in his eyes. “You might not realize how much your mother bragged about you to other people.”

  “I generally prefer not to discuss my mother,” I told him, shifting uncomfortably on the sofa. “I knew her better by reputation than by experience, and her reputation remains something of a scandal here in Blue Mountain.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Judy said, grunting a single laugh.

  “All right,” Orvid said, “I’ll let it be for the moment, except to say that I’ve heard stories about you for many years. You’re a strange, complex man, and I think that we’re brothers of another sort even if we’re not related in any biological way.”

  “This whole matter of family,” I told him, clearing my throat, “it’s not something I can talk about.”

  He heard the clenched nature of the words, saw the tightened muscles of my neck. I watched him observe, assess, and decide.

  “I only bring it up,” he went on breezily, “because I think we could work together to find who murdered Rory and Tess Dyson.”

  I leaned forward a little, looked from Judy’s face to Orvid’s.

  “May I speak freely?”

  They both nodded, assuming I was about to reveal something important.

  “I think, Mr. Newcomb,” I began, “that you and I are alike at least this much: we’re both interested in helping someone we love deal with a traumatic event. Lucinda loved those girls, clearly Judy did too. I think the best way to help is to face facts: a train hit a car. Sad to say.”

  “Ordinarily I might be inclined to agree with you, Dr. Devilin,” Orvid answered, inclining his head toward the darker part of the room, “but not in this case.”

  “Why not?” I tried to hide my irritation.

  He smiled indulgently.

  “Because in this case, I saw the murderer.”

  I managed a wry tone despite Orvid’s insistent gaze.

  “Have you told Sheriff Needle?” I drawled, smiling.

  “That presents something of a dilemma.” Orvid’s voice was calm, but he suddenly looked to the floor, as if something there had caught his eye. “He was there.”

  “Skidmore saw the murderer too?” I pressed, still completely unconvinced that Orvid had seen anything.

  “Not exactly,” Orvid sighed. “He was busy.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Watching me.” Orvid sniffed and finally turned his face upward. “But that’s another story for another time. I did see something, and I’m convinced that there’s more to this situation than meets the immediate eye.”

  “You saw something,” I said hesitantly, “where, exactly?”

  “I saw something happen at the railroad crossing,” Orvid reported, “just before the girls pulled up to the tracks.”

  “Another car?”

  “No, I was trying to conclude my business quickly and had to fetch something on the other side of the abandoned station, but I could hear the girls laughing. I assumed everything was all right. The car sat at the crossing for as long as two minutes that way, and I think the engine was off.”

  “But you didn’t see any of this,” I said, absolutely certain he was lying.

  “I had some business to attend to,” he repeated at a louder volume. “The next thing I heard was the train leaning on its whistle. Then the crash.”

  Orvid shuddered without realizing it.

  “You stayed to talk to the investigators, of course,” I said, eyes half-closed.

  “I did not.” Again Orvid avoided my eyes. “My business was of a certain nature, a delicate nature, and I was not interested in explaining to the police why I was there.”

  “Especially since Skidmore was there watching you.”

  “Well, yes, but the train wreck distracted him.”

  “I see.” I sat forward. “Is any of this remotely true?”

  “What?” Orvid snapped back.

  “Skidmore was there?” I ignored his ire. “He saw the accident?”

  “No,” Orvid growled. “He heard it, exactly as I did.”

  “Only he went running toward it,” I sighed, sitting back, “and you ran away.”

  “Dr. Devilin,” Orvid said slowly, “it’s really ill-advised to take a tone like this with me.”

  “What was your business?” I asked him point-blank.

  “That’s off the point!” He stood, his volume cranked. “We have to get clear what happened at that crossing, what the girls were doing just before the train came! And you haven’t yet heard the most salient fact concerning the sheriff!”

  “Sweetheart,” Judy whispered gently.

  Silence dropped over everything in the room like a sudden darkness.

  “Yes, all right,” Orvid trailed off, realizing he was losing his temper.

  Judy sighed.

  “Different people,” Judy began meekly, looking down at her fingers, “deal with death in different ways. I look for who’s to blame. Dr. Devilin has more of an acceptance of things, Orvid. Most likely the better path. Maybe we should let this go. It was just an accident.”

  “You know you could talk to Lucinda,” I said softly. “I think she’d get a lot out of speaking with someone who loved the girls as much as she did.”

  “That would be nice.” Judy stood. “I’ll see you to the door.”

  Orvid had locked his eyes on Judy’s profile. He didn’t move, but a razor-thin smile was on his lips.

  As Judy walked me out of the living room, and she exchanged the same hint of a smile with Orvid, I realized that she did not actually believe acceptance was a better path than blame.

  She had suddenly given up on asking for my help. She was just getting me out of the way, making ready to wreak her revenge.

  Seven

  I was out the front door, down the sidewalk, and into my truck—still trying to fathom Judy’s dark thoughts—when it began to rain in earnest. It was a cold rain, brushing a gray metal sheen over everything, making all nature impenetrable.

  The truck rumbled, I turned on the headlights. I took a last look at the Dyson household. As I did, the front curtains trembled. Someone in the house had been watching me. I assumed that Mr. Dyson was deciding whether he should call the police. The police in this case meant an old friend of mine, or was he an ex-friend?

  The day had already filled with a sufficient amount of sadness to warrant a quick escape from that thought. I focused my mind instead on Orvid’s assessment of the facts surrounding the train accident.

  Obviously he had been engaged in some illegal activity along the train tracks and was inventing material to appease his girlfriend. I was interested in what his nefarious business might have been, and under ordinary circumstances I would simply
have gone to Skid and asked him why he was investigating Orvid. But there it was: the infamous “circle of thought,” and a tighter one than usual. Running away from an idea is always the surest way to run right back into it. Before I’d shifted the truck into first, my mind had already come back to Skidmore.

  I’d always been his staunchest supporter, and the innuendo that swirled in the town’s gutters about his relationship with his secretary, Melissa Mathews, seemed ridiculous to me. Skid loved his wife, Girlinda, who was not only the best cook in the county but the best shot as well: two primary ingredients of their marital bliss. Still, guilt makes a man behave more strangely than a rabid dog. A guilty man will contort his body to accommodate the thorns that grow on his soul until he’s hobbled and bent.

  And Skid had begun walking with a slight stoop.

  Such thoughts almost made me pass the hitchhiker by.

  When I was fresh out of college, I’d spent a year in Europe thumbing rides. I’d sworn then that I would never pass a fellow traveler without stopping. Even though years and an increasing malevolence in the world had separated my oath from the man I saw on the road, I hit the brakes nonetheless.

  I could see him in my rearview mirror. He wasn’t even looking my way. I’d passed him by, so he was waiting for the next car or truck. I backed up a little and honked the horn. It seemed to startle him. He looked all around, not in the direction of the noise.

  When he realized I was waiting for him, he nodded and walked, slowly, to the passenger side.

  As he drew nearer, I was glad I’d stopped. He was an older man, grizzled, white-haired, unshaven, dressed in black. And drenched from head to foot.

  I leaned over and opened the door for him.

  “Come on in.”

  He stood his ground.

  “I don’t want to get your seat all wet.” His voice rumbled so deep and hollow that it startled me. It sounded weirdly amplified, even in the jagged white noise of the rain and my truck’s engine.

  “I don’t care about the seat,” I told him honestly. “Where are you headed?”

  He hesitated, then nodded again and climbed in slowly. I could smell cheap alcohol oozing from every one of his pores.

  “Down the road,” he intoned.

  “You’re in luck then,” I said amiably, eyes back on the road. “That’s exactly my destination.”

  “Name’s Hiram Frazier.” His vacant eyes stared nowhere. “I’m a preacher, and the Lord’s whipping boy.”

  “A preacher.” I pulled onto the road, falling into my folk-collecting mode without realizing it.

  “Had a church in Pistol Creek, Tennessee, many years back. Good congregation: sober, plain, and mean. But the Lord took me as his testing scourge. I awoke one morning to find my wife, my jewel, stone-cold dead in the bed beside me. No warning, no word of farewell.”

  “I’m sorry.” I wanted to tell him that his story sounded familiar to me, somehow. Maybe I’d collected it somewhere. But he cut me off before I could completely search my memory.

  “Sh,” he snapped. “I’m not finished. Damn. Now I have to start over. I had a church in Pistol Creek, Tennessee, many years back. Good congregation: sober, plain, mean.”

  “I don’t need to hear the story,” I sighed.

  “She was dead,” he snarled, leaning forward, hands on the dashboard. “You’d best hear the story. We all come to death, brother, one way or another. This is my calling: to be a traveling creature, a beacon to woman and man. If you would shun that burning hell, you’d take a warning by me.”

  His vehemence took me aback. I stole a glance at his profile. He was staring out the window, eyes wide, face white and glassy as marble. I had a sudden realization.

  “I think I saw you the other night on my way home,” I told him. “Waiting by the railroad tracks in Blue Mountain.”

  “I ride the rails. I preach to those who do the same, poorly sojourners. But I have never been in this town before. I stay shy of Georgia. Had a bad experience once.”

  “What sort of experience?”

  “What?” He turned my way.

  “You had a bad experience in Georgia.”

  “Never been to Georgia before,” he shot back angrily. “I’ve had many a bad experience elsewhere, though. My wife, my jewel, she was stone-cold dead.”

  “You were a preacher, you say?” I lowered my voice, trying to calm him.

  “I’m the Lord’s whipping boy,” he said, slightly more subdued. “I take a warning with me wherever I go. I was in South Carolina yesterday. Or day before yesterday. That’s how I know I was not in Georgia. Preached a sermon there that set many a heart to fear. Fire on my tongue.”

  “In South Carolina,” I confirmed.

  “Had a vision,” he went on, mostly oblivious of my presence. “Two virgins in a pumpkin carriage. Happy children. Laughing. God smote them. For no good reason. Just took these sweet girls. Sent them a black snake belching smoke, which roared over them like an iron thunder. They were gone before the noise of it left the air. Gone.”

  I slowed the truck.

  “Wait,” I managed. “This was a vision you had?”

  “In a train yard.” He nodded curtly, then his voice rose, a grating crescendo. “The vision set my tongue ablaze. Words rose up like sparks from a coal. What the Lord would love He first rebukes. What God cherishes, he punishes. Good works are scattered like pearls before swine in this earthy prison. Evil deeds latch on. Evil deeds make a pallet where all the lost may lay a weary head. You do Evil in this world, God turns a blind eye. You do Good, it’s a magnet for His ire. This is a Universe of opposites, brother driver. God will not allow Good to go unbalanced. This is the message of Jesus Christ: Jesus came into this world shining such Grace that it soiled the lake of humanity. We cannot accept that much white light. We must be plunged into the depths of darkness lo these long years since His ascending to make a balance on the land. Excess of Good provokes excess of Evil. That’s the trick of our God, the God of Abraham. He sends us his Goodness, but it burns too bright and attracts the darkness. A black moth to a white flame. Do not perform good works in this world of woe, brother driver, or you risk the thunder of dark balance, the tipping of the scales. There is much work left to be done.”

  Instantly he fell silent.

  Shaken by the power of his voice and the absolute surrealism of his speech, I nearly stopped the truck. I realized I was shivering a little.

  “Here,” I stammered. “Let me turn on the heater. You must be cold.”

  “Don’t feel cold.” He sighed. “Nor heat. Nor hunger pangs.”

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” I said softly, hoping to rein him in.

  “Stone-cold dead,” he muttered.

  “What’s Pistol Creek like? Your hometown.”

  “Have not been there in many’s the long year,” he whispered. “But in my childhood there was red honeysuckle, I remember. You could eat the whole flower. Used to do that.”

  “It’s in the mountains?”

  “Hilly,” he acknowledged.

  “What else?” I prompted, attempting to keep him calm.

  “Long ago, people there knew me.” His voice was lead. “Someone knew me enough to love me, marry me. People were happy to ordain me into a ministry. Sold me a house, said hey to me in the grocery store, went fishing with me. Long ago.”

  “But you have the memories of that life,” I said slowly, encouraging him to recall the human being inside the shell.

  “You couldn’t tell it now, but they say I used to be good-looking.” He smiled. His face softened. “So good-looking, in fact, that it saved my life.”

  “How?” I smiled back.

  “When I was a young man,” he answered, settling back in his seat a little, “I was in love with a girl name of Frannie. We ran off one weekend and got married. Didn’t tell the families, just ran off. Of course, we went right on living at our parents’s homes, both of us. Hid the truth from our folks. But we’d see each other on the sly every
day, somehow.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell everyone you were married and live together?” I knew the answer, but I wanted him to keep talking.

  “You don’t know what a little town is like. Her father would have shot me dead.”

  “I suppose”—I laughed—“but he would have shot you twice as dead if he’d caught you with his daughter and not known you were married.”

  “That’s exactly what did happen!” He slapped his knee.

  “My God.”

  “That’s the point of the story.” He lowered his voice. “You understand, we behaved as married people do, and by and by Frannie found herself with child. At first we could keep it hid, but by the sixth month it was beginning to be obvious.”

  “I’d imagine.”

  “Frannie was bigger every day. Of course, her father finally realized it. Confronted her in the kitchen one suppertime. Says, ‘You’re pregnant, by God!’ Which was a shock to one and all. You did not say the world pregnant in those days. It wasn’t polite.”

  “In my hometown,” I agreed, hoping to turn our exchange into something like a conversation, “you could never say the word. Once when I was six or seven, I heard my parents were talking about a girl in church and shaking their heads. They said she had broken her leg, that’s the phrase they used. I suppose they thought it would explain why she hadn’t been in church in a while. But they all raised their eyebrows and nodded knowingly.”

  “Broke her leg.”He grinned. “Never heard that one.”

  “The problem was,” I went on, glad my passenger was mellowing, “I saw the girl the next day at the grocery store, and she wasn’t wearing a cast or walking with crutches or anything. I was very little, as I was saying, shopping with my mother, and I turned to her and said, very loudly, ‘That girl didn’t break her leg at all, she just got fat!’”

  “Oh, Lord.” He laughed. “Bet your mama wailed the tar out of you.”

  “It’s the only time I ever recall her giving me a whipping. And I believed even then that it was more for the benefit of the girl in the store than it was for me. The girl was quite embarrassed. I think she might have even started to cry. I had no idea what I had done, but for a considerable time after that, I thought that breaking a leg was something bad; wrong to talk about in mixed company.”