The Witch's Grave

by Phillip DePoy

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “I still think Truevine gave me a stone circle healing.”

  “Yeah, tell me about that.” He shifted in his seat. “What was with the stones and candles?”

  “Oddly,” I said more softly, “I was thinking about that while I was unconscious.”

  I told him about the stones in the fire circles on the Isle of Man. I wavered on the edge of also revealing that my great-grandmother had come to me, but I was still unsettled by her voice, the story she’d told.

  “While you were out,” he said, smiling down at his glass, “you recited part of the introduction to your doctoral thesis to yourself?”

  “Sort of.” I had to agree it was a little amusing. “I think I was in shock from the bullet. Maybe my heart did stop, or maybe I went into a kind of coma.”

  “The ambulance guy tried to revive you,” Andrews said, avoiding my eyes. “Pumped your lungs, massaged your chest, gave you two jolts from the whatever-you-call it.”

  “Defibrillator.”

  “If you say so. He pronounced you dead.” He took a healthy swig. “I’ll tell you what: saying it now is worse than when it was happening. At the time I think I was probably in shock too; it didn’t exactly register. Couldn’t believe it. I was staring down at your dead body and I was thinking, That can’t be right, like it was a misadded column of numbers or something. You know?”

  “No.”

  “I mean now I’m starting to get really freaked out about it,” he went on, “but at the time, I was calm. Cool as a cucumber.” He looked down. “Christ.”

  “I think the body has a way of helping you out in those situations,” I offered soothingly. “You get some kind of natural anesthetic; you cope biochemically. It’s supposed to be like that.”

  “All I know is that Able and I were helpless,” he said, words trembling in the air, “and that girl knew exactly what to do.”

  “She’s a concern,” I said, staring into the fire.

  “How do you mean? The murder?”

  “No. A few days ago I had her pegged as a genius, the Einstein of natural phenomena. When I saw her in the cemetery, later in the house, it was clear she was a simple girl with an IQ lower than most, making the best of her limited abilities, coping with a difficult social situation. Now I have to come up with a third portrait.”

  “She’s a shy girl,” Andrews said simply. “You always do this, you know: make too much of the mystery of the eternal feminine. She’s a person with no more or less strangeness and charm than anyone else. Sit down with her when this is all over, if you can, and try to get past your furtive little fantasies and academic attempts to solve her. Just talk. Maybe you’ll meet the real Truevine Deveroe.”

  I raised myself on one elbow, eyes wide, forehead tingling.

  “I don’t know if it’s that I’m tired—or that I’ve been shot and pronounced dead—but I think you’ve forced a bit of old-fashioned satori into my mind.”

  “Sorry?” He squinted my way.

  “I’m saying I think you’re right. I’ve tried to see Truevine as an icon, the embodiment of a certain ethos, a human reliquary, repository of ancient lore. That’s a lot to pile onto one young person with a fifth-grade education from Blue Mountain, Georgia.”

  “I’d say,” he agreed, settling in.

  “You really pegged a foible of mine.”

  He raised his glass. “To pegged foibles.”

  “Nice going, Andrews,” I said warmly, lying back under the quilt.

  “Actually, this is what I’m always on about,” he said evenly, swirling the cognac in his glass. “Takes a bullet through your heart before you’ll admit I’m right about anything.”

  “Well, be fair: you weren’t right so much as you were pointing to something right,” I corrected.

  “Uh-huh,” he grunted. “Aren’t we lucky that bullet missed its mark?”

  “Or it wasn’t a silver bullet.”

  “Well, there you are,” he said, drinking. “I’d be quietly planning my very touching eulogy now instead of enduring your increasingly faint praise.”

  “I shudder to think what you’d say at my funeral.”

  “If you like …” he offered.

  “Not for a thousand dollars,” I told him.

  The fire settled to gold, the room was warm. Outside the night may have been wet and cold, filled with black dogs and wandering spirits, but there beside the hearth everything was bathed in light and the world seemed finer to me than it had in recent memory.

  Fifteen

  The next morning I was up and making espresso before I remembered I’d been dead. I’d apparently fallen asleep on the sofa by the fire; Andrews had gone upstairs to bed. The sun was out, seven in the morning, world washed with rain, sky as brilliant as a polished stone. The espresso machine roared; my head was as clear as the air.

  Cup in hand, I moved deliberately to the trunk in the back corner, the story my great-grandfather had written. The light wasn’t as good there; the western window had not yet been touched by the new sun. Some corners remain dark even on the brightest morning.

  I clicked on the nearest lamp, the cold thrill of its touch engendering more memories of Adele. The lamp had been made from a crystal candleholder of hers, a hole up the middle for the power cord, a cheap socket. What had once depended on wax and match now gave illumination with a touch. The age of miracles was safely at hand. But the lead crystal was cold and seemed not to care as much for electric brilliance as candle flame. Its light was characterless and empty.

  The trunk complained when I opened the lid. I had reached for the story of the lily so often that it felt odd just to stare down at the contents. Comparison to coffin too obvious, I tried to filter everything I saw and everything I was feeling through my discipline as a field collector. Start from the beginning: What did I see in the trunk? Look at it with new eyes.

  I tried conjuring up a memory of the day the trunk arrived, but that was no use. The thing had not been remotely important to me until I had grown a little older and could understand the melancholy poetry of is contents.

  I returned my attention to the immediate, taking note, with only a modest embarrassment, of all the burnt sage stems littering the interior. Reading the story always brought ghosts, and the smell of smoldering sage was the only thing that banished them.

  Yellow paper, scent of cedar, torn lining where I had looked for the silver pin Conner had made—it was all as familiar as my own face. I wanted what I had always wanted from this casket: answers, some explanation of a certain kind of human nature. What made a man capable of emotion that could not be extinguished—no matter what a woman did? Such inquiry only brought me to more personal questions. Why was my mother incapable of fidelity? What in my father’s nature had allowed her to wander? Did I have those same propensities? Was there anything in the trunk or the story that would admit me to the chamber of my own heart, explain some of the dark corners there?

  Alas, overwrought self-examination aside, such answers are simply not to be found in furniture. I closed the lid.

  Maybe I’d wanted to conjure my great-grandmother’s ghost, ask her about the strange community she had founded. I still didn’t believe she’d done it, though evidence seemed to support the notion.

  But the day was too bright; All Saints’ Day, lonely spirits were cast out. Let the dead bury the dead. Once planted, a corpse is best left in the ground. Gloom could not linger. It turned to mist in sunlight and was gone. Even the dark corner where I sat seemed brighter as the sun rose.

  “Should you be up?” Andrews stood at the top of the stairs, wrapped in a patchwork quilt, rust and gold against a buttery background.

  “I’m fine,” I answered, getting to my feet.

  “Doubt that.” He began his descent, mock regal in his robes.

  “I feel better than I have in a year,” I insisted, going for more espresso.

  “God,” he whispered, “look at that sky.”

  “Coffee?
”

  “I could murder a cup of espresso.”

  I started the machine, caught my sleeve on its edge, only then realizing what I was wearing.

  “Maybe I should change,” I said. “I’m still dressed in the clothes I died in.”

  “And shower,” he added. “God knows what voodoo gunk Ms. Deveroe used to swathe your wound. It smelled like a bog.”

  “I won’t be a moment.”

  I took the stairs three at a time, bounded into the bathroom. Peeling the clothes away, I felt refreshed just standing naked. The water began to steam the room; sun from the window infused it with white luminescence.

  The shower was heaven; its warm pounding urged my shoulder muscles to relax, neck knots to untie. For Andrews, I’d put out some guest soaps, an unused Christmas present from some student. They smelled of lavender and honey. In the heat and light, those smells were spring. I was transported. The mountain was covered in new wild primrose, blackberry blossoms, air thick with white song: chickadee, whippoorwill, cardinal.

  “Are you staying in there all day?” Andrews’s voice from the other side of the door roused me from my reverie.

  “Sorry.” I turned off the water. “Didn’t I just come up here?”

  “You’ve been showering for forty-five minutes!” he called through the wood. “You’re clean!”

  “Are you sure it’s been that long?”

  “All right, half an hour,” he sighed, “but I’m hungry.”

  “There’s a surprise,” I said, grabbing a thick white towel.

  “What are the odds,” he went on, “that we could lay about today? Do nothing?”

  “Not that good,” I told him, briskly thrumming my head, drying my hair. “I have to find Truevine; my job’s not done yet. And aren’t you the least bit curious about who killed Harding Pinhurst?”

  “I thought we said Truevine did it,” he said. “Accidentally.”

  “Do you really believe that’s what happened?” I wrapped the huge towel around my upper chest; it still dragged on the floor.

  I opened the door; the steam spilled out into the hall. Andrews was leaning, back against the wall, staring into his cup.

  “Who killed Harding Pinhurst?” He wasn’t talking to me. “And who scared Able off that same night, if anyone did?”

  “Is it just coincidence that the drunken teenagers stumbled on the body,” I continued, moving toward my room, “when the Deveroe boys, who were avidly looking, couldn’t?”

  “What if it was that black dog?” Andrews’s voice grew excited.

  “You’re an idiot, you know.”

  “All right,” he conceded, “but get dressed, would you. We have to go find Truevine Deveroe.”

  I stopped in my doorway. “Now all of a sudden you want to find her.”

  “Dev,” he said slowly. “Do you know what I’m thinking?”

  “Hardly.”

  “She may be in some danger.” He pulled his left earlobe; his gaze was vacant. “The scarecrow and his dog, that’s my theory now. The scarecrow killed Harding; the dog was protecting the girl. But she knows who did it, and she’s hiding out from the murderer. And he’s looking for her. He wouldn’t do anything with all the other homeless people around him, but once he’s got her in the woods alone, I’m afraid he might kill her too, keep her from telling Skidmore.”

  “Completely far-fetched,” I pronounced.

  But I moved quicker. Out of the towel, into new clothes, a sense of urgency swelled in my chest like the chill of a gunshot wound.

  “‘In that sleep of death, what dreams may come,’ is that how it goes?” My truck was barreling around the mountain, nearly fifty miles per hour even on the treacherous turns, veering to the edges of high overlooks, a panoramic view of the deep valleys into which the truck would surely plummet. We were careening toward the Deveroe place. We’d already argued about leaving the house. He’d threatened to call the hospital if I set foot out the door. A second shouting match erupted over whether to go to the cemetery or the Deveroe cabin, a third about calling Skidmore. In the end Andrews had been forced to give up in favor of the vibrancy of my enthusiasm and superiority of my weight. We were careening toward the Deveroe cabin, unbeknownst to Deputy Needle.

  “Yes, Hamlet.” Andrews clutched his door handle, grinding his teeth. “Why?”

  “When I was out, shot, I had a strange dream.” Wanting to dissociate myself from any taint of the previous day, I had found my old black leather jacket. It was good against the wind but left something to be desired in the arena of warmth, so I was also sporting the dark green turtleneck Lucinda had given me for my birthday, and black corduroy pants.

  “We should have called Skidmore.” He was barely paying attention to my conversation. He’d been less concerned with fashion and appeared to be wearing exactly what he had worn the day before. “Look, I want to get there too, but is it necessary to go this fast?”

  “I can usually distract you with a good game of ‘Shakespeare Quotes,’” I said, slowing the truck a little.

  “I’m in fear for my life.”

  “Don’t you want to hear the dream I had when I was dead?”

  “Look,” he said, relinquishing the handle and turning my way, struggling with his seat belt. “You’ve gotten about as much mileage out of the ‘when I was dead’ game as I can take. Could we leave it be?”

  “Sure.” I could see out of the corner of my eye he was upset.

  “Okay, tell me your damned dream, if you think it’s so important.”

  “That’s just it,” I told him. “It is, somehow.”

  “Stop the presses.” He turned again, squirming in his seat. “Alert the Jung Patrol. Dr. Devilin’s had a dream.”

  “A dream,” I went on, ignoring his tantrum, “is a message from the subconscious to the conscious mind, a telegram. I know something that I don’t know I know.”

  “Diction Check.”

  “My subconscious has taken in some facts that my waking mind has ignored,” I explained. “When I was unconscious these facts surfaced, but they came in a code.”

  “All right,” he conceded, “I’ll sort of buy that.”

  “In the form of a ghost story,” I went on.

  “Appropriate.” He was beginning to calm. “So tell.”

  In shorthand I told him the tale my great-grandmother had given me, the nature witch, the lover called out of his body, the rescue by the blacksmith, the ghostly couple united on All Hallows’ Eve.

  “Is it a story you already knew?” he asked when I was done.

  “Not that I’m aware,” I answered.

  We were nearing the cabin. I slowed the truck.

  “What does it mean?” he said, eyes glued to the door of the Deveroe place.

  “What do you think?”

  “Too distracted now,” he whispered, as if the boys could hear. “Do you really think Truevine came home? Is she in there?”

  “We have to eliminate the obvious before we go chasing through the woods again,” I said, voice equally still. “I’m not certain how capable I am of a third day romping through the corpse-infested forests of my childhood.”

  “Which should be the title of your biography.”

  The cabin was still, even as the truck rolled its last few feet toward the front walk. No shifting of curtain, no crack in the door—not a sign of life.

  “Are they hiding?” Andrews wanted to know.

  “Not likely. What do you think those boys are afraid of?”

  “Nothing in this world.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “They’re not home.”

  “Are we getting out?” His voice was barely audible, and he was clutching the door handle again.

  “I am.” I shoved the door open and was headed for the cabin before Andrews knew what to do.

  “Truevine!” I called into the house. “It’s Dr. Devilin!”

  Helloing the house used to be a common custom in Blue Mountain, in most places in the hills. Always a good idea to
let the occupants know you’re coming, identify yourself. Sneaking up on a family like the Deveroes could get a body shot, and I’d had enough of that for one week.

  The house remained still.

  I heard Andrews getting out of the car behind me, but I kept my eye on the front door. I didn’t want any unpleasant surprises heading onto the porch.

  The first step creaked loudly. I froze, but that didn’t take the sound back. I half-expected to see a face in the doorway, but there was still no evidence of occupation.

  “Boys?” I called again. “It’s just me. And Andrews. No Deputy Needle.”

  Silence reigned.

  “There’s no one here,” Andrews said, frozen on the walkway somewhere behind me. “Can we go now?”

  I turned. “What are you so nervous about?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” His voice rose. “These are the people who shot you last night!”

  “They didn’t mean to,” I explained reasonably.

  “Oh my God.”

  “They didn’t even know we were in the Newcomb place.” I stepped up onto the porch, went to the window. “Do you really think they would have shot into the house if they’d known their sister was inside?”

  He paused. “Good point.”

  I put my hand over my eyebrows and pressed my nose to the window, hoping to see through the opaque curtains into the cabin. I could only see shapes and shadows. Nothing was moving.

  “Should I check the door?” I said, still gazing in the window.

  “No, Christ!”

  “Hey.” I turned to him. “Come up here. You’ve got to feel this thing at the doorway. The geothermal shot.”

  “Not for a thousand dollars,” he said, not budging, “to coin your phrase.”

  “Come on,” I urged. “It’s really—” My words stopped short when my eye fell on what was arranged neatly in the sunniest part of the porch corner.

  “What is it?” Andrews asked urgently. “Do you see them?” He readied himself to run.

  “No.”

  Standing in the corner were two clay pots planted with sedge and contorted hazel, ringed in dried weeds, as well as a wooden bowl of water, a smooth black river rock, and a dead salamander.