The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

I half-expected Jolon wouldn’t be there that morning, after my stupid behavior in the nettles the previous day. But I found him in the barn giving Zar an apple.

  “Mea culpa,” I told him.

  “That’s what the Brothers used to say. I always thought it was a slippery way of apologizing. You know, saying it in Latin was almost like absolving themselves. It made the original wrong less real, somehow.”

  “I’m sorry, then.”

  “Ah, I didn’t mean you. You don’t have anything to be sorry for. It was my fault. I pushed you, and I had no right.”

  “Well, let’s just say we’re both sorry.” I stood next to him, leaning against Zar’s stall door. “I guess you’d have told me right off, but is there any news?”

  “Not much. We’re still in Savoy.” Jolon hoisted the full bucket, started carrying it to Zar’s stall. I tried to grab it from him, but he calmly lifted the bucket to its hook.

  “I can do that,” I sniped at him. I made myself take a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll try to be civil. Why are you still searching Savoy forest? Do you really think the horse they found might have been Brio?” I held my breath, waiting for his answer.

  “It’s unlikely, but not all the DNA tests are in. And it’s possible the girls rode through to Savoy. It’s not far, after all. We’ll be searching again in Hawley tomorrow. There are other factors, though.” He didn’t volunteer what they were.

  I could feel my temper flare again. “Oh? Is that so?” I grabbed Zar’s halter, led him to the cross ties, and started currying him.

  “Yes, it’s so,” Jolon said. He was weary. Or exasperated. “Reve, you’re welcome to bring in a private detective, another tracker. Hell, bring in a damn psychic if you want. But the way the search is being conducted is not the problem.”

  “Then what is the problem?” I snapped, and immediately regretted it. He looked pained, and exhausted, and older. The case of my missing girls was aging him. He sat on a stack of hay bales, ran a hand through his hair and pulled at it, as if he could coax answers out of his head that way.

  “Ah, what do I know? I’ve been in the woods most of my life. I know this part of the world better than anywhere. I’ve led searches all over New England. But this … it’s different.”

  I put the curry comb down on the tack box and went to sit on the bales with him. “So, where does that leave us?” I took another deep breath, forced myself to heave it out. My lungs felt like I’d been holding my breath for days. “Look, I know you’re doing the best you can. But you think what? That they’ve been abducted by aliens?”

  He gave me a look, and there was weariness in it, but also a kind of letting go. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what I think.”

  “Jolon, I know the stories about this place. And I’m hearing more, whether I want to or not. Although mostly, no one tells much. I’d forgotten what a closemouthed set you Yankees are.”

  “You’re one. You grew up here, after all.”

  “And I used to ride in the forest, too, don’t forget. There was a strange feeling to it then. You of all people know that. And my family … Look, do you want some coffee? Mrs. Pike won’t be here for a while.”

  He checked his watch, nodded. “I ought to be in Savoy soon, but it can wait a little.”

  I put Zar back in his stall, to Miss May’s delight, and Jolon followed me to the house. My mom was still asleep upstairs. My father and Caleigh were consulting the Ouija board in the parlor.

  I poured coffee for Jolon and myself. I sat across from him, watched him spoon sugar, stir his coffee, all the time listening as if what I was saying was already known to him, was perfectly normal. “You know some of the stories. My family came here to Hawley early on. Were the first settlers, actually.”

  “I remember Nan’s tales, yeah.”

  “And now I find out there were … disappearances in the fall of 1923. Children in the town. Then in 1924, the whole congregation of Hawley Five Corners, just gone. You know about that, right?”

  Jolon nodded slowly. He paused to sip his coffee, then told me, “Most people think the church disappearances didn’t really happen. That it was exaggerated over the years, that everyone just moved out.”

  “Not at Pizza Earl’s they don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t put too much stock in what Earl and them say. The search for your girls, well, it’s got some people stirred up. They’re afraid that it maybe could lead to … trouble. Stupid, but you know what small towns are like. Mostly people just like to hear themselves talk.”

  “Not about this,” I insisted. “No, everyone has been strangely quiet about the disappearances in the ’20s. I wouldn’t know anything about it, only something Carl Streeter let slip. Then an old guy named Hank told me about it at Earl’s. He also told me a girl named Hannah Sears disappeared, then came back, months later.”

  “Well, he was around then. He’s in his nineties now.”

  “But, Jolon, my Nan’s name was Hannah Sears.”

  “Have you asked her about it?”

  “Yes. She says it’s true, all of it. And more. But she wouldn’t have told me, except for …” I wouldn’t say anything about the Book, not if I didn’t have to. “And Hank.” I went on. “It was as if he was telling me something he oughtn’t. Carl Streeter tried to pass it off as just some kind of mass migration, everyone moving west all at once. But I know now that’s just the story told to strangers, like me.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  I waited for some time while he looked down at his boots. This wasn’t something that came easily to him, skirting the edge of the supernatural. He finally said, “I didn’t know about any of this when we were kids, and I guess you didn’t either. It was just an old story then. Lately, though, folks have been dredging it up again. The real story is that children were kidnapped … and killed, more than likely. The killer was probably around for a few months, was never caught, then moved on. No bodies were ever found. Then maybe everyone in town did just pack it up and move out, they were so traumatized by what happened.”

  “Then you don’t believe that the forest is haunted? That it’s a place that can swallow people up, never to be seen again?”

  “I won’t say it’s not a strange place. But it’s a touchy subject. It’s still part of the culture here, thinking the forest is haunted. People believe it. So what? People believe a lot of crazy things. The Hawley ghost town is just another story they like to scare themselves with. But at the bottom of it is a real fear. Fear that it could happen again. Almost everyone in town was affected by those murders, then had some relative, some great-grandfather, or great-aunt or -uncle, go off in 1924. It stays in the families. Most people are still a little spooked by it.”

  “And you?”

  “I like facts. That’s what I live by. I think all the paranormal stuff is bull.”

  “I really don’t care what they say. The forest can be haunted or not. I just need to find my girls. Where are Grace and Fai? Where the hell are they? Where do we go from here?”

  Jolon chose to bring us back to the real world. “Savoy today, like I said. Then a more detailed search here, if we don’t find anything. Ten or twenty abreast, covering grids over every inch of Hawley Forest. It’s bound to turn up something.”

  “But searchers have already covered the forest.”

  “Not like this. Not as many. We’ll have more searchers on the ground tomorrow than during the Molly Bish search.”

  “Molly Bish!” I remembered her, a sixteen-year-old gone missing from her western Massachusetts town. Her body had been discovered years later, just miles from her home.

  Jolon winced. “Reve, I didn’t mean to make a comparison. This is not the same situation. Your girls have each other, and their horses.”

  “Which makes it even more strange that they haven’t been found.”

  “We have to face the fact, sooner or later, that they may have run away. Ditched the horses somewhere. Some of their texts—”

  “No! I don’t want to thin
k that. It’s just not who they are.”

  Jolon stirred the remains of his coffee, silent. “Don’t you think it’s crossed my mind?” I asked. “Of course I blame myself for Jeremy’s death, and for them having to leave all their friends, their home. But I honestly don’t think that they blame me. Even if they have a right to. That’s in the texts, too.” I felt the sting of tears behind my eyes. Jolon placed a steadying hand on mine. His touch didn’t comfort me. I was beyond any feeling at all.

  “You know I’ll keep doing everything I can. Everything I can think of.”

  “I know that.” And I did. I really did. But it seemed impossible to wait. Some part of me just wanted to sleep through this, hibernate until the twins were back, miraculously found. But I knew it didn’t work that way. I had to keep trying, keep searching for them, for the key to this whole mess.

  I sighed into my empty coffee mug. “Time to saddle up.”

  “Shit, Reve. I can’t forbid you, but I don’t want you riding in the forest alone. There’s no one out there today. What about your Fetch?”

  “He’s gone again. He’s not in the forest now. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”

  Exasperation and unease warred in his eyes. “All right. Where are you going?”

  “Cemetery Road.”

  “The old King Graveyard.”

  “And around, and about.”

  “Reve … be careful.”

  “Being careful isn’t getting me anywhere. Maybe it’s time to be more careless.”

  2

  Jolon needn’t have worried. I didn’t run into another soul on the road. Saw no ice-eyed Fetch, no strange men. No mysterious cows. No girls, either. It was a peaceful ride, another gorgeous day to be out if you weren’t searching for your missing children. The weather, warm and dry so long into October, seemed unnatural even to a Nevadan. After all, I’d grown up in New England and expected a killing frost by the end of September, the ground to be frozen by early November. But we were nearing the end of October with not so much as a light frost. I rode in a T-shirt, carried a full water pack, stopped Zar at streams to drink often. The leaves were still turning and a few falling, enough so Zar crunched through some trails. But other trails were curiously summer-like, bedded in soft pine needles, some deciduous trees still green overhead. You could chalk it up to global warming, but it seemed even more unnatural than that.

  The cemetery that gave the road its name was blazing, dazzling in scarlets and every shade of yellow. It was called the King Graveyard, as it was begun by the King family, but most Hawley Five Corners families lay there finally as well. There were Searses and Kings and Warriners. I tied Zar to the gate and walked through the graves. The last time I’d been there, Grace and Fai had been with me, laughing and teasing. I remembered the shadow passing over the slanted stones, then the scent of lilacs. Why had it been there? Was it my first warning that the twins were in danger?

  I concentrated on the headstones. There was Jonas King, whose gravestone was taller than my horse, and boasted of his son’s adventures as a missionary in India and Palestine. Jonas King, Jr., was probably buried under some burning sun in a land that was strange to his kin. So this Hawley monument served as his memorial in his hometown, as well as his father’s. There was a beautiful headstone with a sleeping fawn carved on it that I remembered from my childhood. But in the hundred or so gravestones that remained, all of which I examined that day, there were none that marked a death in the year 1924, and none after. The boneyard itself bolstered the theory that the town had simply vanished one fine day. Other than that, it told me nothing, and smelled only of freshly mown grass.

  I rode out toward Hitchcock Meadow. Just as I got to the meadow pull-off, I heard the sound of a pickup lumbering down Cemetery Road. I trotted Zar behind a lean-to at the edge of the meadow, rested him in the shadows, held my breath. Hoped it wasn’t the weird men again.

  It was Jolon. He jounced the truck into the pull-off, leapt out. He’d changed out of his uniform of the morning. His black hair needed combing, and his jeans and T-shirt were faded beyond recognizing their original colors. His tracking clothes. A tide of fear washed over me. He was back from Savoy so soon, it must mean something. Probably nothing good.

  He made for the trailhead, but then he turned toward me. Of course he could find me. Even if he hadn’t been a tracker, he could always find me. I stepped out of the shadows.

  “You said you’d be somewhere on Cemetery Road.”

  “What is it?” My tongue felt thick with dread.

  “Just wanted to let you know, it’s definitely not your daughter’s horse.”

  I sighed out a long, relieved breath. If that was all, I’d take it.

  “It means one less possible bad outcome, anyway,” he told me.

  The cold crept up the back of my neck again. I shivered. Jolon had seen so many bad outcomes. Had brought them to light.

  “I don’t know how you do it. I couldn’t do what you do.”

  “But you are.”

  “Only because I have to. You have a choice. I wish to God I did.”

  Jolon turned and looked up at the sky, a rich blue. “God doesn’t have anything to do with it.” He did not turn back to face me. “The Brothers thought they were doing God’s work. Tried to make me feel that, too.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I mostly don’t allow myself to think or feel, until I find the one I’m looking for.” His back was tense, and I knew it cost him an effort to talk about this. He kept looking up at the sky, the trees, as if he thought something he’d lost might be wedged up there.

  “Dead or alive.” I couldn’t help thinking it, speaking it.

  He looked at me then, a questioning look, searching for a clue to my state of mind, probably. “Most times, it works out fine, Reve. I find hunters and hikers who just got disoriented in the woods.”

  Ninety-three hours, the internal clock told me.

  Jolon read my thought. “Sometimes it does take days. Once I found a girl, seven years old. Went off on her bike while her mother was hanging clothes. One minute she was there, the next, like she fell off the face of the earth. Found her five days later. Halfway up a mountain, lost and scared and cold. But not hurt.”

  “A happy ending.”

  “It’s why I do it. Not for God. For the happy endings.” He sucked in his breath, in that Irish way of affirmation or denigration, according to context. His parents had brought it from their home country, passed it on to him. I was not sure how he meant it, but it was strangely comforting to hear that sound again. It was one of the things that made him himself. Without thinking, I reached for his hand. I felt my own pulse beating with his. Maybe it always had, after all.

  “We were too young, then,” I said under my breath. Maybe I didn’t know I was saying it aloud.

  “Too young not to be pulled apart by circumstance.” He finished my thought for me, like he used to.

  “It’s strange how things turned out.” My feelings were slithering every which way. I was sad for all the lost years that we might have known each other. And then I had a flash of longing for Jeremy. Wanted desperately to rush home, open the Book for another sighting of him. I wanted Kilcoole Beach, the rustling of stones lapped by small waves, Jeremy’s hand in mine rather than Jolon’s. That finished it. I pulled my hand away, leapt upon startled Zar’s back while he was peacefully cropping grass, put him into a big trot, and rode away with Jolon calling after me.

  When I got to the smaller trails off the main road, where I knew Jolon couldn’t follow, the tangled skein of regret and self-loathing began to loosen. My feelings for him were like a new shoot off an old, shattered tree stump. But it did no good to think of. It had no place in my life. I wanted to bury it as deeply as Jonas King in his boneyard.

  Caleigh’s Vision: “The Star”

  Caleigh was bored without the presence of her sisters, even though when they were with her she felt as if they used up all the air in the house. Nathan and her
Grand and Gramps tried to keep her entertained while her mother searched for her sisters, but there was only so much that could be done, cooped up in the house.

  At least she had her string. In Hawley, she’d found her power to conjure with the string was even stronger. She’d had those visions of the past. She’d also made up new patterns: “Fox in the Morning,” and the shining red animal slunk across the paddocks, sniffed delicately at the fire pit where Nathan had grilled their supper once. “Bell in the Steeple” and she’d made a bell toll in the church, on the morning of the fair.

  She was lying on the couch in the parlor, working on the “Skipping Rope Girl” again. She couldn’t seem to perfect the pattern. Conjuring people was harder. But she was getting more adept at using the string to see both the past and the present. She could see her sisters when she wove the “Twins” pattern, just vaguely, in a place that seemed to be under the ground. She thought that wasn’t really right, somehow, so she didn’t tell anyone yet, even her mother. She kept trying to get it right before she told. It was too important. It comforted her in a strange way.

  She sometimes could see the magician Setekh weaving a huge pattern above a stage with clingy silk rope instead of string. She could see her mother in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. She looked up then from the chopping block, distracted, and the knife clattered to the floor. Her mom said “Caleigh?” to the disturbed air around her. Then Caleigh saw Setekh again, weaving his web and laughing.

  She suddenly felt very sleepy. She let her “Skipping Rope Girl” slide into the “Star” pattern. “A man is coming,” she murmured. Then she fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Hell’s Kitchen Road—October 30, 2013

  1

  Mrs. Pike was just pulling out of the driveway when I got back to Hawley. She’d left us another meaty dinner. “Shepherd’s pie,” she informed me. “From the church supper recipe book.”

  “Great,” I told her. “Perfect.” I went in the house to check on Caleigh. I found her stringing on the couch.