Witch's Canyon

by Jeff Mariotte

  As she watched, he closed in on one of the Sawyers’ windows. He looked old for a Peeping Tom, but then again she wasn’t sure if there was a particular age range for that kind of thing. Either way, she didn’t like the looks of him.

  Then he turned a little and something in his right hand swung into sight. He was carrying a rifle!

  Brittany released the curtain and dashed to her phone, beside her computer. She dialed 911. A moment later a dispatcher came on the line.

  “There’s an old man across the street, in the woods, and he has a gun,” she said quickly. “By the Sawyers’ house.”

  “Do you know the address, ma’am?” the voice asked.

  “He’s across the street, not here. I don’t know their address offhand.”

  “I understand, ma’am. I have your address, and I’m dispatching a sheriff’s officer out there right away. Has the man seen you?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Stay indoors, ma’am. Officers will knock on your door and identify themselves, but don’t let anyone in until they do.”

  “Okay,” Brittany said. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  “Do you want me to stay on the line?”

  “That’s okay,” Brittany said. “I don’t think that’s necessary.” Hands shaking, she put the phone down and cautiously returned to the window. When she got close, she lowered herself to her knees and crept the rest of the way, peering out with only her eyes and forehead exposed.

  Snow had started to fall, big white flakes of it drifting slowly earthward.

  It wasn’t fair. She had been waiting for this moment, for the first falling snow, to go outside and revel in it.

  Across the way, she couldn’t see the man with the gun anymore. She hoped he wasn’t already inside the Sawyers’ house, terrorizing those nice old people. In the distance, she could hear an approaching siren. The sheriff’s car, already on the way. She allowed herself a smile. They’d be here soon enough, and the whole thing would be over, a strange adventure, and she could go out and luxuriate in the day, more alive then ever.

  A noise from behind startled her. Brittany spun around, rocking on her knees, barely able to keep her balance. Had he come into her place?

  But no—there was someone inside her living room, but it wasn’t the old man. The intruder looked like something out of a movie, an Indian, but old-fashioned, wearing leather leggings, bare-chested, with bands around his arms and legs and a red cloth wrapped around his head. He glowered at her through small, dark eyes.

  The most disturbing part was not his fierce gaze or even the tomahawk clutched in his fist, but the gaping wound in his broad chest, as if he’d been cleaved open by his own weapon. The sides of the wound were pale, not red, as if the wound was old. No blood ran from it, although she could see what must have been bone and muscle inside.

  A scream caught in her throat, and only the faintest squeak emerged. She could hear the sirens now, just outside. She had dropped to one knee, with one hand on the ground for support and the other clamped over her mouth, and she was frozen to the spot. The Indian walked toward her, stumbling a little, head lolling to the side. For an instant he seemed to change, to shift into something the same shape but made of glowing black light, then into a bone-and-muscle version of himself, but when she blinked he looked as he had at first. Brittany had the sense that he was already dead, that his wound was fatal, but he hadn’t figured out that it was time to lie down.

  “What do you…are you…?” She couldn’t figure out what to ask him, and her voice sounded distant, barely audible through the blood rushing in her ears. If he heard her, he gave no indication of it. She could hear wind whistling in and out of his chest wound as he breathed.

  When he reached for her, Brittany finally thawed, trying to break and run. He surprised her with his quickness, though, and got a fistful of her curly red hair. He yanked on it. Her feet went out from under her and she sprawled on the hardwood floor of her living room, breathing fast now, working toward a really good scream, the kind that would raise the rafters of this old place and bring the police running. Either they’d shoot the Indian or tell her that she had gone insane, and at the moment that seemed the likeliest prospect, because only madness could explain what she faced.

  The knee against her belly felt real enough, pressing her down against the floor, and the smell of the man, sour, like meat left too long in the sun, that was real too, and when he brought the tomahawk down against her chest, in the same place where his wound was, for just the briefest instant that felt staggeringly real too.

  “This is a mess,” Jim Beckett said. “A godawful mess, no two ways about it.”

  Deputy Trace Johannsen nodded soberly. “You’re not kidding about that.”

  Beckett looked at Brittany Gardner’s body again. She had suffered a massive chest wound, as if an unskilled doctor had cracked her open to perform emergency heart surgery but hadn’t bothered to close her up again. Until her heart had stopped beating, it had pumped blood out through the gaping wound, soaking her sweatshirt and pooling on the floor.

  Three bodies in less than twenty-four hours. He liked Cedar Wells because it was a quiet town, close to good hunting and fishing. The Grand Canyon was a bonus, although he rarely visited it; simply knowing it was there was good enough.

  Suddenly it wasn’t so quiet. Instead it looked like Detroit during its worst days, or Washington, or maybe L.A. when the Bloods and Crips went at it with knives and guns. Beckett was old enough to remember the good old days when youth gangs armed themselves with little switchblades and bicycle chains. Not that this looked like a gangster killing, but there was a principle involved, and the principle was that people in his town shouldn’t kill each other. Nor should strangers kill the locals, not near a national park that drew somewhere around five million visitors a year. He just wanted his old town back, the one where people rarely died violently.

  “Dispatch said she reported a prowler across the street,” Trace explained. He had already gone through the story once, but seemed compelled to tell it again, and listening to him was easier than thinking. “An old geezer carrying a gun. I checked over there, but the Sawyers hadn’t seen anyone. I knocked over here to ask her about it, and she didn’t answer. I knew she had been home just a few minutes before, so I looked in her window and saw her here.”

  “But no sign of an intruder?” Beckett asked. “No old man with a gun?”

  “Nothing like that. Anyway, if he had a gun, why would he open her up like that? Why not just shoot her?”

  “I wish I knew the answer to that. Did you find any footprints or anything, either here or by the Sawyer place?”

  “Some over there, across the street. Good one right outside one of their windows, like someone raising up on tiptoes to look in.”

  “Figure that’s our geezer?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “I had a call on my way over,” Beckett said. “Another sighting of the old man, less than a block away from here. I drove around for a couple minutes, didn’t see anything, and I don’t have enough bodies available for a full-on search.”

  “You think he’s looking for another victim?”

  “At this point, I don’t necessarily like him for the murder at all. Like you said, he’s got a gun. This lady wasn’t shot. I don’t know what opened her up, but that’s no bullet hole.”

  Trace fell silent. That was okay with Beckett. He didn’t want to have to think, but sometimes there was just no avoiding it. Mayor Milner didn’t want anything getting in the way of the mall opening, and he understood Milner’s position.

  But a man didn’t live for a long time in Cedar Wells without hearing whispers of a murder cycle, as that young reporter had called it. Especially when he made his living in law enforcement. People talked about it after a few drinks over at the Plugged Bucket, or at backyard barbecues in the summer when the beer came out of ice-filled coolers and the smoke was thick and nobody listened to anyone else’s conversa
tion. And sometimes a sheriff could just be walking down the street and one of the town’s oldsters would call him over, summon him with that imperious attitude the truly ancient sometimes assumed when dealing with whippersnappers who were merely in their forties or fifties, and whisper to him that it was this year, wasn’t it? Come summer, or spring, or whenever they got it in their head the fortieth anniversary was, people would start to die again. That, finally, was what had convinced him that it was all a local legend—the fact that none of the people who had been adults here forty years before seemed to agree on when it was supposed to happen.

  If he was wrong, though—if it was real, and the forty years was up, and it was all beginning again—then he would be in for a bad week or two, however long it would last. And opening a mall during that time would be a heroically bad idea. Bad enough when there were a few victims spread around the area. How much worse might it be if there were several thousand inside the mall, and whoever or whatever was behind the murder spree decided to try some kind of terrorist stunt? A bomb, a small plane flown into the mall, something like that. The death count could easily rise into the hundreds in a matter of minutes.

  The thing was, could he convince the mayor and the mall management to call it off?

  Not without more evidence than he had so far.

  He had to find that old man. Or the soldier from the mall parking lot. Or whatever had torn up Ralph McCaig. Ideally, they were all the same guy. Jailing one man was a lot easier than jailing a figment or a legend.

  NINE

  Mrs. Frankel, the silver-coiffed librarian, wore perfume just musky enough to make Dean wonder if she had a secret life. He and Sam had returned to the library after their mall visit, with a different goal in mind than last time. Before, they had been in search of information about the previous episodes of unexplained murders, in 1926 and 1966. This time they wanted to find out if the old soldier was the spirit of someone who bore a grudge against the town.

  The fact that neither of them were familiar enough with military uniforms to know precisely when the soldier might have lived would, they realized, make the quest somewhat difficult. Hence the up-close-and-personal conversation with Mrs. Frankel.

  “I’m surprised the Geographic is so interested in the minutiae of our history,” she said when Dean explained what they needed.

  “Our readers are an inquisitive bunch,” Sam said. “The more interesting details we can provide, the more they like it.”

  “Well, here in Cedar Wells and Coconino County, we certainly have our share of ‘interesting detail,’” she said. “Lots of kooks, I guess you’d say, have settled here or at least passed through. I can’t think of any off the top of my head who might have a grudge like you’re describing, though.”

  “Maybe the grudge would never have revealed itself,” Dean suggested. “Maybe he was just someone who felt like he’d been badly mistreated.”

  “That sort of thing happens all the time, of course,” Mrs. Frankel said. She twisted a thin gold necklace around her left index finger. Dean noted that there was no wedding ring on her ring finger, although she had definitely introduced herself as Mrs. Frankel. “People feel like local government singles them out for maltreatment, or like it has let them down in some way because their particular case or cause isn’t its top priority. And some, of course, have legitimate grievances. I can think of half a dozen of those, but those are all just in the last few years. Going back to the old days…well, that would be a matter of going through the newspapers, I guess. As far back as they go.”

  “How far is that?” Sam asked. “The soldier we’re looking for might have been here late in the nineteenth century.”

  Mrs. Frankel released her knot of necklace and tapped her fingertips against her chin. “Oh, I don’t think the papers go that far back. The Canyon County Gazette didn’t start publishing until 1920 or thereabouts. Well after the national park was established. Before that, there just weren’t enough people in the area to make a newspaper worthwhile.”

  “How can we get information on people who might have been here before that?” Dean asked.

  She glanced toward a series of wooden filing cabinets shoved up against one wall. “There are some records from Camp Hualpai, a local military post from the late 1860s to early 1870s. It didn’t exist for long, but you’re certainly welcome to see what’s there.”

  Dean caught Sam’s eye. That sounded like a lot of hard, boring work. He didn’t necessarily have a problem with hard, boring work that had a reasonable chance of success. The problem here was that they were hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack—complicated further by the fact that they didn’t even know in which farmer’s field the right haystack could be found. Sam gave a minute shrug.

  “Maybe a little later,” Dean said. “We’ll definitely keep that in mind.”

  Outside, Sam grabbed his arm before they even made it to the car. “I could tell you didn’t want to sit in there and read those old files, but do you have any better ideas? We’re kind of running out of time here.”

  “Of course I have an idea,” Dean said. Sam released him and stood on the sidewalk, waiting to hear it. The snow, which started out falling lightly, had intensified, as if the clouds themselves had shredded and spun to the ground as confetti. Since Dean didn’t actually have an idea, he watched the sky for a moment, hoping one would come to him. “Only not so much, at the moment.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Fortunately, I have one.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? What is it?”

  “We’re looking for a soldier, right? Someone who died in the area, which is why his spirit is still here. So let’s check the local cemeteries. We can scan them for electromagnetic frequency activity. If nothing else, sometimes military graves are marked, and if we can find one that’s out of the ordinary in some way, maybe we can kill two birds with one stone and dig it up right away.”

  Dean smiled. Little brother comes through again. “That’s good, Sammy. That’s good. Can’t be too many cemeteries around here, can there?”

  As it turned out, there were three.

  The first one didn’t have any graves older than 1954, which it took twenty minutes of wandering, bending over, sometimes scraping off snow that had started to accumulate on headstones, to determine.

  The second one was behind a Catholic church. A priest looked at them from inside, so they tried their best to appear solemn and respectful as they perused the graves. It was cold enough that Sam pulled up the hood of the sweatshirt he wore under a canvas jacket. Dean had a leather coat on, no hat, but in the pockets were gloves that he tugged onto his hands.

  Some of the graves here were older. They found a few from the 1890s, but none that could be identified as belonging to military people, and none that suggested unquiet rest, either visually or on their EMF reader.

  “One more to go,” Sam said when they were back in the car.

  “Yeah, this was a great freakin’ idea,” Dean complained. “Freezin’ our asses off out there in the snow. I see dead people.”

  “We’re looking for a dead guy!”

  “I know. I just…I don’t like the snow, okay? I mean, snow’s cool and all, but I like it better when I’m inside with a hot toddy and a roaring fire.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had a hot toddy,” Sam said. “I don’t even think I know what’s in it.”

  “I don’t, either,” Dean said. “But I like the idea of it more than I like the idea of losing a toe to frostbite.”

  “We’re not going to lose any toes, Dean.”

  The route to the third cemetery took them through what passed for a residential neighborhood in Cedar Wells, a couple of blocks off Main Street. The houses were old, mostly wood and brick, with snow covering their slanted roofs and fenced yards. Smoke wafted from a few chimneys, scenting the air and sending gray curls skyward. Snow gathered on the road, except where tires had carved through it, making black streaks that looked like miniature roads themsel
ves, viewed from the clouds.

  Dean slowed, fighting the Impala’s desire to fish-tail into a parked truck. “You’d think a town like this would have snowplows.”

  “They probably have a snowplow,” Sam said. “And they’re probably using it to keep Main Street clear. And maybe Grand Avenue.”

  “All three blocks of it.”

  “Hey, it’s a small town.”

  “Which is gonna get a lot smaller if we don’t find this spirit.” The more time that passed, the more possibility that other people were dying. Dean hated that possibility, and while he didn’t want to snap at his brother, anger pushed itself to the surface.

  Besides, what good was having a brother if you couldn’t snap at him once in a while?

  “Dean!” Sam grabbed Dean’s sleeve, startling him. He twisted the wheel to his right, started to slide on wet slushy pavement, corrected to the left. The Impala shuddered but maintained course.

  “Don’t do that, Sam.”

  “Dean, look!”

  Sam pointed to a house up the street, about a quarter of a block away. From the road they could see a screened-in porch in front of the door, three stairs up from the street.

  Emerging from the door was a big, dark bulk. The wrong shape to be a person. “What the hell…?” Dean stopped in the middle of the lane, watching.

  A black bear nosed out the screen door as if sniffing the air. Apparently finding it to his liking, he pawed it out of the way and dropped to all fours to descend the stairs. Rump swaying, he crossed the snowy yard and headed for the woods behind the house. The screen door, on a spring, slammed closed behind him.

  “A bear just came out of that house,” Dean said.

  “Maybe he lives there.”

  “Like what? A circus bear? I don’t think—”

  “I’m kidding. Come on, we’d better check the place out.”