“Then Blessed grabbed the kid by the collar and told him he was going to run back to his boss at the newspaper and tell him he quit. And he said, ‘If I catch you around here again, I’m going to put you in one of those graves, you hear?’
“I remember the young guy was moaning, said his head hurt. I watched him run, just like Blessed told him to, trying to hold his head at the same time. I watched Blessed take the smashed camera and throw it into the open grave. He said, ‘Now Martin can take pictures of all the saints.’ He turned to his mother, Shepherd, and she nodded, didn’t say a word, simply nodded, and it was over.
“I was so shocked, so terrified, I stood there like a stone, my hand over Autumn’s eyes. She was plastered to my side. I could hear her breathing.” Joanna stopped a moment, looked over his left shoulder toward the grand piano.
“Since it happened, I’d been thinking about it, though, what we saw, and it seemed that being shaken or hit, or jarred, is what brought the boy back to himself. That’s what I was trying to do last night with Ox. I have no idea what Ox would have done, though, if you hadn’t hit him so hard. No, I do know. He would have killed us to get Autumn.”
He nodded. “It was like he was hardwired to do whatever he had to do to get his hands on her. Dr. Spitz still won’t accept that Ox was under the control of someone else. He checked him for drugs and alcohol, and he wants Ox to have an MRI and an EEG, to see if his behavior was the result of a seizure or a brain tumor.
“You spoke about a cemetery, and you mentioned your husband, and you were there for his funeral. Tell me about the rest of the family, and why you were there with them.”
“I hadn’t met any of them before last week.” She didn’t say anything else, just began to worry her thumbnail.
Ethan said, “Blessed—his name makes me think of some sort of weird-ass preacher for one of those off-the-wall religions that doesn’t have much to do with God.”
“All their names are like that. For example, Grace.”
“Grace? Yes, you mentioned his whispering to you. Blessed and Grace? What, they’re brothers?”
“Yes, Martin’s brothers.”
“Okay, what can you tell me about Grace?”
“Grace is thin as a rail, holds himself real quiet. But you’re always aware of him when he’s around. He’s creepy.”
She started to say something again, and he sat forward, touched her wrist. “What? Say what you have to say.”
“I could be wrong, really wrong.”
“What, Joanna?”
“I only heard Grace speak a very little bit. His voice was soft, sort of hollow, almost dead.” She shuddered. “That sounds ridiculous. I can’t really explain it, but—”
“But what?”
“Ox, last night, when he spoke—”
He waited.
“Ox sort of sounded like Grace. Not all soft and quiet like Grace, but the cadence of his voice.
“It sounds crazy, I know. It’s not that it was Grace’s voice, but it was the way he spaced out his words, like I said, the cadence—it was so familiar.”
17
LATER, HE THOUGHT, he’d visit that snake pit later. Ethan knew there was even more; he knew it. He had to keep her talking. Maybe all of it would come out at last.
“Are you ready to tell me where this happened? Where they live?”
“In a strange little town called Bricker’s Bowl. It’s near the Alabama border.”
“Bricker’s Bowl? I’ve never heard of it.”
“It really is more a bowl than a valley, curves up on both sides with houses marching right up the hills. I guess, from the air, what with the houses on the surrounding hills, it does indeed look like a bowl. Their family’s been there for generations, his mother told me.”
“Tell me about Ma.”
“She’s rich. She, Blessed, and Grace live in a huge Victorian mansion, filled with expensive antiques, mostly nineteenth-century English, and lots of manicured grounds. They have a six-car garage, although I never saw the cars inside, so I can’t tell you what they are. They’ve got their own private cemetery.
“She’s very proud of their wealth. She loves to show you every antique in the place—and there are a lot of them, since there are maybe fifteen rooms. She told me this is all due to her husband’s talent.”
“Was the husband around?”
She shook her head. “He’s dead. When she first told me about him, I thought she was batty, but now I’m not so sure. She confided in me that Theodore had the most useful talent in the family. That’s what she called it—a useful talent.”
Ethan found himself sitting forward. “What could Theodore do?”
“She said he had this beautiful gift, discovered quite by accident when he was in Las Vegas once and played the slot machines. He won.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Evidently he won a great deal. Actually, she told me he never lost.”
“What? You’re telling me Theodore Backman was some sort of diviner?”
She had to grin, but it fell off her face fast enough. Ethan was staring at her, an eyebrow arched.
“As Shepherd explained it, where the reels stop is supposed to be random, but somehow Theodore could make the reels stop where he wished. She said he talked to the slots.”
“Oh, come on, Joanna. You mean he had this force field that reacted to the reels themselves? Or he had this internal magnet that brought the reels to a stop? What?”
“Look, I thought it was nuts too, even though Mrs. Backman told me he’d made them all rich.”
“It sounds like one of the crazy stories they’d tell us in the DEA as a cover for illegal income,” Ethan said. “It never flew in court. How’d he die?”
“Mrs. Backman told me he walked out of a casino in Reno and a mugger killed him. He hit the mugger with his cane, but the mugger hit him on the head with a hammer and left him to die, which he did.”
“A cane? How old was Theodore when the mugger got him?”
“Mid-seventies.”
“How old is Blessed? Grace?”
“Blessed is in his fifties. Grace is a bit younger, late forties, maybe.”
“So you’re telling me Blessed and Grace and their mother—what’s her name?”
“Shepherd.”
“Like the guy on FOX News?”
“More like the guy who herds the sheep. She told me, all preening, that her husband gave her that name, the mother of his small flock. I wondered what her birth name was, but I was too freaked out to ask.”
“Okay, so these folk say they’re rich because of a man who could line up three cherries. Now the million-dollar question. How did you hook up with these people? If they’re your husband’s family, why did you only just meet them?”
When she remained silent, he said, “You might want to consider me the prince of bad, Joanna. I can handle just about anything.”
That made her laugh, then draw a deep breath. “All right. Martin, my husband, was the third and youngest brother. Autumn and I met them for the first time at his funeral.”
“But he couldn’t have been as old as Blessed or Grace, was he?”
“No, he was thirty-six when he died, much younger than both his brothers. Shepherd was in her forties when she birthed him.”
“Your husband died—a natural death?”
Her mouth seamed tight, but the words were pushing to get out. Why didn’t she want to tell him? Was she still grieving too much?
He pulled on a thread hanging down from the left sleeve of his sweatshirt. “An accident of some kind?”
She shook her head, looking hard at him pulling that thread, and the words came out in a burst, but lifeless and without fury or pain. “He died in prison,” she said, her eyes still on that gray thread.
He nearly fell off the sofa with surprise. He stared at her, unable not to. “Why was your husband in prison?”
She shook her head. All right, so she wasn’t ready to face that yet with him. He shifted ge
ars. “So you found his family’s phone number—where?”
“The warden sent all Martin’s stuff to me. There was pitifully little, to be honest. There was this lone phone number in a small black notebook—no name, only an out-of-state phone number—and so I called it to see who it was he knew in Georgia. It was his family.
“I spoke to his mother and told her Martin was dead. She wept, Ethan. Then she begged me to have him buried with his family, not in cold Boston where he hadn’t known anyone except me and his daughter. Did we feel he had any deep roots there? ‘No, not really,’ I told her. ‘Then please,’ she begged me, ‘please bring him home.’
“She begged me, Ethan, and she was crying again, so I said yes because she was right. I didn’t have family in Boston—no family anywhere, for that matter. And so after a memorial in Boston with all our friends, Autumn and I drove Martin’s urn from Boston to Georgia so his mother could bury it in the family cemetery.”
He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She sat there as if frozen, as if her words were stuck in her throat.
He said quietly, “Your husband never told you about his family. You never asked?”
“Yes, of course I was curious, but Martin refused to talk about them. They are not the sort of people you want to know, Jo. Neither do I. I ask you to accept that. I remember he once said unwittingly that he’d managed to escape them, that they didn’t know where he was. I didn’t know what he’d meant about escaping them, and he never told me. I suppose I thought it was a runaway-kid sort of thing.”
“He didn’t change his name? He kept Martin Backman?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder why he didn’t change his name. With the Internet, you could probably find a missing pet. Didn’t he care if they found him? Bigger question—why didn’t they find him? They found you and Autumn, didn’t they? Real fast.”
She nodded. “They did find us fast, but I don’t understand how they did it.”
“You must have talked to them some about your own family. Did you mention Titusville?”
“I’m sure I didn’t, not directly. When I first met him, married him, I simply let it all go as not being important to me, important to us. I loved him, found him fascinating and funny. But now—it’s obvious I didn’t know him, didn’t know a big part of him at all. Who was the man I married? Believe me, I would really like to know.”
She lowered her face into her hands.
“I’m sorry, Joanna.”
She jerked up and Ethan saw sudden anger and pain radiating off her, like waves of heat laced with poison.
18
HE ROSE. “I’m going to lock us in for the night, Joanna, then we can go on.”
She followed him out to the foyer, watched him lock and dead-bolt the front door, and turn on the alarm.
They checked Autumn. She was curled up asleep on his bed, Mackie in her arms. Ethan covered her with an afghan.
He got them two mugs of tea and motioned her back to the living room.
“You started to tell me about his mother when you first arrived in Bricker’s Bowl.”
She nodded. “His mother was alone when we drove up. At first I thought she was his grandmother, but she wasn’t. Like I told you, Martin was born long after Grace.
“She was very nice, showed me the Backman cemetery, but I knew she was upset that I’d cremated Martin and brought him in an urn, not in a casket as she obviously expected. There were a lot of graves in the cemetery, maybe upwards of forty, maybe more. Must be an old family, I thought, looking out over it. I remember all the graves were set in overlapping triangles, so there were no rows or paths. I asked her about all these triangles, and she said her husband’s grandparents designed it that way when they’d moved to this spot from the other end of the bowl, and had all the caskets moved here. Then she said the weirdest thing: ‘They knew to keep the old ones with them, because the old ones know how to draw the power from the earth.’ I was so surprised—so creeped out, really—that I didn’t pursue what that meant.
“There were all these oak trees, nearly growing together, some branches pushing down on others, vying for space, and they seemed to huddle over the graves as if trying to protect them, or hide them.
“But then, the next morning, I thought I’d overreacted because it was peaceful and warm, a sun bright overhead—serene, even. It felt right that Martin would end up being buried with his family. His grave was already dug. It hadn’t been there when we’d arrived the day before, so I guessed Blessed and Grace dug it out after Autumn and I went to bed. She told me the space was meant for her, but she could always move, now, couldn’t she? I remember watching her wrap the urn in a lace tablecloth she said her mother had made herself. I watched Blessed climb down a small ladder and lay the urn on a wooden platform at the bottom of the grave. It looked so small in that deep hole. Then she handed Blessed a wood-framed mesh sort of thing that looked like a chicken coop and he set it over the wrapped urn. Grace climbed down and smoothed another white tablecloth over that. Both Blessed and Grace were wearing shiny black suits, and they took turns filling in the grave. It was just the five of us, no one else, not even a minister. Blessed read from an ancient Bible—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—read on and on for quite a while, in a low drone. When I realized no one was going to say a prayer, I did. Then we all stood staring down at Martin’s grave, the raw dirt piled high, all loamy and black. Autumn was clutching my hand, but she wasn’t crying. Her hand was terribly cold. She was so still, never made a sound.
“I wanted to leave immediately after we’d buried his urn, but his mother begged me to stay, just one day, she said, only one single day so she could spend some time with her granddaughter. She reached out to touch Autumn. Autumn didn’t move, didn’t seem to even breathe when her grandmother stroked her hair.”
“And did you stay for one more day?”
She shook her head. “We couldn’t stay, not after what Autumn saw—”
She looked terrified. He waited a beat, then asked, “What did Autumn see, Joanna?”
“She said she saw them burying dead people in her daddy’s grave.”
She’d said it, insane words, unbelievable and terrifying.
Ethan’s expression didn’t change, but she saw clearly he wasn’t going to accept that.
She saw them burying bodies? In her daddy’s grave?
Ethan knew there were all kinds of monsters out there, but this was a story from a little girl. He said, “Who did she see burying dead people? Blessed? Grace? Shepherd? All of them? Come on, spit it out.”
“It was that night—”
Autumn appeared in the living room door. “What’s wrong, Mama?”
Joanna looked pale and exhausted, but she looked up and smiled. It was well done, Ethan thought, but Autumn wasn’t buying it. She came running to her mother, grabbed her arm. “Mama, you were telling Ethan about Daddy’s funeral, weren’t you? You look all white and stiff, like you did that day.”
There’d been too many lies, to her daughter, to herself, to others. And so she told her daughter the truth. She nodded. “I was telling Ethan about your daddy’s family, sweetheart, about how they behaved, what they were like.” Autumn tightened all over. Joanna said, “Did you get some rest, sweetie?”
Autumn nodded. “I woke up from my nap, Mama. Big Louie was licking my toes and Mackie hissed at him.”
Ethan asked, “Big Louie only licks big toes. Did you keep them from fighting?”
“I guess because my feet are a little smaller than yours, Ethan, he got them all. Mackie only swatted his nose once.”
“And what did you do?”
“I hugged him, kissed his nose, and then he nearly licked my face off.” She pressed closer to her mother and whispered in a small voice, “You told Ethan what I saw them doing?”
Joanna nodded.
Autumn looked at Ethan. He saw such fear on that little face, it was like a punch in the gut. Joanna held her hand tight and said, “Why don’t you tel
l him about it yourself, Autumn?”
She licked her lips. “It’s too scary, Mama.”
Ethan said, “You tell me and then it won’t be so scary anymore. I promise.”
She thought about it, then slowly nodded. “I was supposed to be asleep beside Mama, but I couldn’t stop thinking about them, how scary they were, how I knew they didn’t like Mama, even though they pretended they did. And they looked at me funny, you know, trying to pretend they weren’t looking, but they were.
“Mama started moaning in her sleep, so I got up. I put on my clothes without waking her and climbed out the window.” She swallowed. “I walked to the cemetery, and that’s when I saw them, and they were digging up my daddy’s grave and there were these bodies on the ground beside them.” She was shaking, both her voice and her small body, and she pressed even harder against her mother’s side, as if she wanted to become part of her.
Joanna gathered her close, kissed the top of her head, whispered, “It’s okay, sweetie, I swear it’s okay. Ethan is—” Joanna cleared her throat. “Ethan is going to help us.”
He swallowed hard at that vote of confidence. He looked at the mother and daughter and marveled at what life had dished onto his plate in a single day. He said, “Autumn, I told your mama I’m the prince of bad and that means I can help you with just about anything. Now, kiddo, tell me who you saw out there.”
“Blessed and Grace were digging, and Shepherd was standing beside the dead people.” Her voice caught, and she looked terrified.
“Okay, Autumn, that’s enough for now. I want you to take some deep breaths and shake your arms around; it’ll loosen you up. That’s it—good. Now, let your mama talk for a while. Joanna, let’s back up. After the funeral, what did you and Autumn do?”
Joanna said, “I made some excuse, and I drove us to Bricker’s Bowl, only about a half-mile away. Like Autumn, I wanted to get away from all of them. I was tempted to keep driving west, let me tell you. I wish I hadn’t gone back there now, wish I hadn’t taken Martin’s urn to be buried in a chicken coop.”
The FBI Thrillers Collection: Vol 11-15 Page 75