“Slow down, Ike. I didn’t hear a word you said. What was it?”
The nervous little farmer grabbed Ned’s door frame and stood in the way. “I said they was all dead when I got here.”
“Well, get out of the way so’s I can get out and stand up.”
Isaac backed up as Cody slid to a stop behind Ned’s car. Leaving the El Camino door open, he joined them. “You know, Ned, you really should have let me lead. I have lights on this thing.”
Ned shot a glance at the single red light on the driver’s side of Cody’s El Camino. “We didn’t pass a single car on the way over here and besides, nobody’ll get out of the way of that thing. They know my car.”
“Y’ain’t the law no more, Ned.”
That slowed the old man down as he realized the truth. “That’s what I keep telling folks.”
Ignoring their exchange, Reader backed away and waved his hand toward the house. “Listen, I wasn’t paying any attention when I got here. When I glanced up I thought Josh was asleep up there, but when I got out of the car and saw him like that and the flies…and…everthang.”
Cody considered Josh’s remains across the roof of his car. Reader was right. The man almost looked normal in his rocker, except that his head was gone.
The three paused in the yard. Cody cleared his throat. “I suspect he’s for sure dead.”
Reader nodded. “He’s cold as clay.”
“Did you touch anything, Isaac?”
“Listen, Cody, you know better than that. Listen, I scatted off the porch right after I saw them in there and come out here to the car.”
“Then how’d you call the sheriff’s office?” Ned knew his old friend better than most folks. “Did you go call from somewhere else and drive back here?”
Isaac dropped his gaze to stare at his dress shoes. He wore his best clothes for the visit. “Well, I might have stepped inside to use the phone there by the door.”
Ned sighed. Talking to Isaac always made him tired, even though he’d known the man since they were kids. In fact, Isaac too had been in Onie Mae’s class in school, but she always had eyes for Edward.
“Did you touch anything you haven’t told us about, or see anything else?” Cody led the two men across the yard.
Isaac followed closely behind. Ned trailed in the rear. “Yeah, I saw Beth and Onie Mae laying in there in front of the fireplace like they was taking a nap. Listen, there’s blood everywhere in the kitchen.”
“You went in the kitchen, too?” Ned felt the heat rising in his face.
“Listen, listen, it smelled like there was something burning on the stove since I was here for dinner, so I wanted to turn it off in case the house caught afire, but the pans was cold, so somebody turned them off after dinner had done burnt up, but I don’t think she was cooking today, so I bet it happened yesterday.”
“You may be right, but you need to slow down now and let us handle this. Stay out here while me and Cody check things out. If anybody comes up, you keep them in the yard. Better yet, stop them back there at the top of the drive.”
“Listen, I won’t let no-one else up here lessen you say so.”
Ned started up the well-worn steps behind Cody and stopped. “Do they have their heads, inside?”
Isaac nodded quickly. “They’re whole.”
“Thank the lord.” Relieved that he wouldn’t have to endure still another horror, Ned joined Cody and knelt beside the rocker and Josh’s remains.
Isaac was right. The man had been dead for hours and flies droned in a cloud around the body. At the moment Ned didn’t know how or why, but he was sure the murders were tied to the escapees from Tulsa.
Leaving Josh, Ned opened the screen door and Cody followed him inside the immaculate living room, closing the screen quickly to keep as many flies as possible outside.
Apparently Isaac hadn’t taken such care, for they crawled on the bodies carefully laid out on a gray and blue rag rug in front of the fireplace. The women hadn’t died easily, and Ned figured they probably heard the murderer kill Josh, giving them time to fight back.
Ned felt light-headed. “I’god, look at this.”
“Lordy. I’ve never seen so much blood.”
“Folks have a lot in ’em.”
A lake of congealed blood in the living room of the country home told the story of Onie Mae’s arthritic struggle with the assailant who cut her throat. Ned noted the marks where the killer dragged her to where she now rested. He edged around the enormous pool and stepped into the kitchen.
Beth died in there, but she went down fighting. The knife drawer was open and a pump twelve-gauge with a broken stock lay covered in flour. Neither man entered, preferring to let the sheriff’s department and the Texas Rangers make that investigation later.
Despite his military experience, Cody had never seen such a slaughter in his community and wasn’t even close to being prepared for the sheer violence in the farmhouse. He breathed deeply to clear his head.
They returned to the living room. Pulling a yellowed handkerchief from his back pocket, Ned knelt and gently wiped a small spot of blood from Onie Mae’s forehead. Then he carefully draped the handkerchief over her face, hiding his old friend’s half-open eyes.
“Should you be doing that?”
Ned rose on cracking knees and wished he had another one for Beth. “I shouldn’t be doing a lot of things here.”
The sound of crunching gravel signaled the arrival of another vehicle. Ned carefully picked his way back around the blood and bodies when he heard Isaac’s voice. Through the screen he saw Isaac Reader standing with his hand out in front of a deputy sheriff’s car. Unfortunately, the little farmer was taking Ned at his word.
“Nossir, you cain’t drive no futher. Listen, I got my orders from both Constable Parkers and they said no one drives in this yard.”
The highly agitated deputy had opened his door and was obviously about to put Isaac in handcuffs. Cody stepped outside. “It’s all right, Isaac. Good job, but let the deputy on up here, and the ambulance too when it gets here.”
“Listen, you can drive on in now. Cody said it’s all right. No hard feelings. Listen, listen, I was just following orders.”
Instead of venting his anger on Isaac, the deputy punched the gas. He shot into the yard and parked beside Ned’s car. He stepped out. “We got a call that a family was dead here.”
“That’s right.” Ned came down the steps, more to get away from the flies than to make conversation easier. “That’s what’s left of Josh Brooks dead there in the chair, and his wife and mama are laid out inside.”
“How’d they die?”
“Hard.”
The deputy thumbed his hat back. “Are they…like that?”
“They’re just dead.”
Cody joined Ned at the car, breathing deeply to rid himself of the smell, and his mind of the sight they’d witnessed. “I’m liable to have bad dreams tonight.”
“I have ’em ever night.”
The younger constable studied Ned’s lined face for a long moment. It hadn’t occurred to him that the old man carried the burden of many years’ worth of incidents and horrors on his shoulders. “I might need to talk to you about that later.”
“Any time.” Ned passed the deputy’s vehicle and opened the door to his own car. He unhooked the microphone and pressed the key. This time it worked. “Martha. This is Ned. Tell O.C. they’re all dead here for sure and have been for a day or two. We’ll need Arthur Myers to pronounce them.”
The deputy left his car and stopped. “Hey, what are you doing with a radio? I thought you was retired.”
Ned blew like a horse. “I’god, I thought I was too.”
The fitful Motorola’s speaker crackled. “All right, Ned. The ambulance will be there in a little bit and Arthur won’t be far behind. You need anything else other than them and the Justice of the Peace? Is Cody there with you?”
“Yep, him and Deputy…?” he raised his eyebrows.
&
nbsp; “Collier. Peter Collier.”
“Deputy Pete Collier. I’m gonna let him and Cody take this over and get out of the way. You tell O.C. I suspect this is the work of whoever killed that feller we found in the river this morning.”
Martha’s voice sounded sad through the tinny speaker. “This is a busy day for you, ain’t it? I thought retirement was supposed to be relaxing.”
“Well, it ain’t.”
Chapter Seven
Even before the horrific Brooks murders, Cody Parker was often awakened by screams in the night; shrill screams borne of terror and ghostly pain. No matter how long he lay there in the darkness, heart beating fast enough to explode in his chest, the shrieks never repeated. He was surprised that Norma Faye didn’t feel his heart pounding on her side of the bed.
It wasn’t always mental screams that jolted him awake in the early morning hours. At first he marked it down to too much work, but each time he awoke with a strong emotional residue from those subconscious experiences.
If that wasn’t bad enough, he constantly dreamed of houses. He recognized them in his sleep, structures as familiar as if he’d lived in them all his life. Once, Cody attempted to draw on the collected memories of those nightmares and the rough set of floor plans quickly sprawled beyond the paper’s edges.
Maybe he built them with his own hands in other dreams.
Hidden rooms filled his dreams, rooms that he knew and recognized, but had never entered. Sometimes he moved confidently though spacious, well-lit attics, bright with golden yellow light, and planned to add bedrooms designed to fit the roof’s slope. He walked confidently through the bright spaces, striking the rafters with the sure feet of a mountain goat. The rafters often led to enormous floored areas smooth as those in a ballroom.
A number of forgotten items waited there, things he remembered from other dreams. Lost backpacks, toys, tools, household items, and boxes never opened, yet he knew the contents.
Desiccated rats. Disgusting bundles of bones and hair.
The night after finding the bodies at Onie Mae’s farmhouse, he dreamed of a long, coffin-like box in an attic, positioned near a crumbling brick chimney. The lid lifted slowly, silently, and a long, four-fingered hand emerged to reach over a pile of rubble to pluck a wriggling rat from its nest in the insulation. The door slammed closed and he heard obscene slurping sounds.
He opened the lid.
A horrible caricature of a clown emerged and attempted to paralyze him with its eyes. Cody backed around the chimney, closed his own eyes so he couldn’t see the monster hiding behind a false face, and emptied his .45 at the creature.
Unopened boxes and lost items.
Those kinds of dreams weren’t unusual for the Parkers. The foreboding “gift” they handed down allowed them to sense only fuzzy details of a coming calamity without the luxury of knowing when, where, or if the incident would occur. The sheer uncertainty was frustrating, because like Top’s dreams of drowning in the Rock Hole, it gave him nothing more than a sense of dread.
The finely detailed dreams themselves were relentless.
From childhood his subconscious entered dark warrens burrowing under houses as he slept. He’d been in them, also. The tunnels began at the dream building’s foundation and led downward toward even darker, unexplored recesses. Sometimes he wormed through a mine, and other times he wriggled like a mole through confining spaces barely wide enough for his shoulders.
One familiar passageway led to a large, cave-like area with a constant dribble of pure, drinkable water and boxes of ammunition stored off the damp floor. There, a large tree grew high on a ridge overlooking an unpainted, rundown house. Behind it, a wide pasture bordered by leafless trees ended at a fence row, and beyond that, a cultivated field led to a river.
He suspected his newest tunnel dreams came from his experiences in Vietnam. After being shot down in a helicopter, Cody liked being on the ground best. He volunteered and spent months exploring tunnels originally dug during the war against the French. But upon the arrival of the Americans in that tropical jungle, the tunnels quickly expanded into a network of mazes hiding those who fought against the U.S. military.
In Center Springs, as he lay awake in the darkness for hours beside the red-headed wife he loved so much, Cody wondered why he specifically dreamed of burrows.
His family had always dreamed.
At times their dreams and nightmares came true.
Chapter Eight
Pepper and I had been playing in the hay barn most of the morning one soft rainy Saturday. I made sure to stay on the alfalfa side. The Johnson grass baled and stacked on the right was full of dust that made my asthma act up. When we spent all day on the sweet smelling alfalfa bales, I never once wheezed.
The weather was cool enough that we played on the bales near the rafters without worrying about the heat coming through the sheet metal. It was safe there, because by fall, the yellow jackets and wasps mysteriously vanished in anticipation of the coming winter.
We built a fort, but after that, there was nothing to do but sit inside the walls and shoot my BB gun at the deserted wasp nests. Great-grandpa built the barn, and after years of baking in the sun, the rough sawn oak rafters were like iron. If I happened to hit one with a BB, it whanged off the hard wood like I shot an anvil.
I was listening to the rain shower on the tin roof when a splash in the nearby pool caught my attention. Peering through the open side, a swirl right beside the bank told me a fish was feeding. “Did you see that?”
Pepper turned around and shrugged. “The rain on the water?”
“No, a big fish just broke the water down there. We oughta go try and catch him.”
“Have you forgot it’s raining?”
“It ain’t much more than a shower now. I don’t intend to spend a long time down there getting wet, but our crawdad poles are right there by the feed barrels. Let’s go down and see if we can catch that fish.”
Our crawdad poles weren’t anything more than two long sticks with heavy twine wrapped around one end. When the weather was nice, we snitched a couple of strips of bacon from Miss Becky’s icebox and tied them onto the twine. Crawdads love bacon, so we spent hours sitting on the pool bank waiting for the line to twitch. When it did, that meant a crawdad was on the bait and we’d lift it carefully out of the water and onto the bank, hopefully before they let go with their big claws.
“Listen dumbass, twine on a crawdad pole won’t hold a fish, and besides, we’ll need a hook.”
I thought of the smokehouse, where we kept the fishing gear. “Let’s run down and get the poles then.”
“Miss Becky’ll make us stay in if she sees us out in the rain.”
“We’ll loop around behind the smokehouse. She won’t be able to see us if we go that way.”
Pepper gave in and we slipped out of the barn. I was surprised to see two extra cars in the drive. I thought I recognized one of them. It belonged to Miss Ethel Fay, who was older than dirt. She still drove, but most folks tended to get over on the shoulder whenever they saw her coming. I didn’t recognize the other car.
“Shit,” Pepper said. “The place is full of them old quilting women again.”
It was one of those gray days that made women want to yap, so they rounded one another up to drive over and gather around the quilt rack hanging from Miss Becky’s living room ceiling. That old living room saw a lot of uses, both happy and sad. It was full of laughter when they were quilting, or during Christmas and reunions, but it also was where they laid out great Uncle Vestal when an Hereford bull went crazy and stomped him to death one hot summer day during the war. They always said that even though they fixed Uncle Vestal’s head, it was lopsided during the viewing. For once Grandpa didn’t have to listen to folks say, “Don’t he look natural?”
“Good.” I realized the quilting party was working in our favor. “They’ll all be in the living room and not paying attention to what’s going on outside the window.”
We c
ut through the wet grass behind the chicken house and from there it was nothing to slide carefully through the barbed wire instead of getting muddy by slipping under the gate.
Pepper waited while I peeked around to be sure the coast was clear. It was, and I darted through the partially open door, grabbed the rods, and ran back outside in seconds. Handing Pepper one of the rods, we slipped back through the fence and repeated our route back behind the barn. From there it was only a hundred yards to the pool.
We were soaking wet from the rain by the time we got there. I slowed down. “Shhh, there’s crawdads peeking out of the water. That’s what the fish are eating. All this rain is drawing them out of their holes.”
“You run over there and grab us a couple. The last big crawdad I picked up pinched the piss out of me and I don’t intend to get pinched again today.”
“All right, titty-baby.” It felt good to be able to call her that for once. I crouched down and walked carefully up to the bank and stood real still for a minute. It didn’t take long for a big old crawdad to work its way through the shallow water. I snatched him up and in less than a minute later, I had two.
I handed one to Pepper and she carefully held it between two fingers, so it couldn’t pinch her. After I threaded the hook through my bait, I did the same with hers, and we cast toward the middle of the rain’s dimples.
It didn’t take more than two or three minutes before Pepper’s crawdad attracted the attention of a bass. It slammed her bait with a hard thump and the rod bent toward the water. Pepper reared back and the line snapped with a crack.
“Shit! I done lost my whole rig!” She slammed the butt of her rod into the mud, stomped her foot, and marched over to the shelter of a big red oak to finish working out her mad.
Trying not to let her see my grin, I twitched my rod tip and felt the hard pull of a big fish. I set the hook and the rod bent almost double. But unlike Pepper’s, the drag on my reel was set properly. The line sang through the guides for a moment, and I was in a fight. It didn’t take long for the fish to tire, and I soon brought to hand the biggest bass I’d ever seen in that pool.
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