The shovel blade finally met a soft resistance, and David looked up at the sky. He hadn’t cut a sharp rectangle into the ground the way gravediggers shaped them to receive a coffin. David’s hole was sloped and uneven, showing the roots and gravel that had slowed his path through the clay. The wood was soggy, but preserved somewhat by the clay, and David had to chew through it with the shovel blade. He wouldn’t have to clear the entire lid of the coffin to find what he sought. He rammed the shovel down time and again, the sound of the blows baffled by the walls of dirt. The wood gave way, and David twisted the blade to widen the opening.
A foul odor arose from the voided coffin, like rotten eggs scrambled in formaldehyde and served up with slices of spoiled pork. David pulled a bandana from his back pocket and wrapped it around his mouth and nose, tying it behind his neck. He was reaching for the shovel when the sodden wooden planks gave way beneath him.
He plunged knee-deep into the gap, the stench rising around him in putrid waves. His boots splashed in unseen muck. He clawed at the clay banks, trying to pull himself up, but his movements triggered a tumble of loose soil from the rim of the hole. Clods rained down and bounced off his shoulders.
“You looking for something?”
The voice came from above and below at the same time, as if piped in by some insane and remote sound system. David recognized it from the night before. He looked up, and the Circuit Rider was framed against the blue afternoon sky, sitting astride his legendary horse. His back was to the sun, like the lone hero of a western, throwing most of his face into shadow.
David sank another six inches, the jagged wood scraping against his thighs. He grabbed the shovel and spanned the broken top of the coffin with the handle, hoping to halt his descent. He didn’t want to die this way, another one of Harmon’s victims. Even if it was predestined by God, David fought the urge to surrender. He could imagine his congregation whispering about his failure, he pictured the men casting votes for the next elder, he could see the church abandoned and forlorn, good for nothing but the winter nests of rodents.
“I was looking for you,” David said, his voice muffled by the cloth over his mouth. He braced against the shovel handle even though he was now waist-deep in the cool morass. The stench had grown even stronger, despite the protective bandana.
“You got your hold-up mask on,” Harmon Smith said. “You fixing to rob a bank? Or just a grave?”
“I needed to see how many pieces of you were buried in my churchyard.”
“To see if you got your fair share?”
“You’ve got three graves.”
“And I don’t have use for any of them,” Harmon said. He twitched the reins and Old Saint took a step forward, knocking a bucket’s worth of dirt around David’s waist.
David could feel things moving around his legs, loathsome and slithering creatures. He tried to tell himself that an underground spring must run beneath the graveyard, carrying water from the creek, and the creatures were salamanders preparing for a long winter’s sleep. But they were too big to be salamanders. And salamanders didn’t have teeth ...
Predestination. David looked past the gaunt face and potato-beetle eyes of the Circuit Rider to the faint rags of clouds above. Somewhere up there, God sat on His almighty throne and watched it all play out, even though He already knew the ending.
Must be kind of boring, even when the entertainment was as rich as watching a preacher die in a deep hole only to have his soul tied with Harmon Smith’s return to the area. How many times would David have to play out this little scene again? How many times would he have to die and be reborn, a puppet in Harmon’s little stage show? Jesus Christ may come again, but Harmon Smith would come back not only once, but over and over and over.
“I tried to follow Your ways,” David said, slipping another few inches into the mire. He could no longer move his feet.
“Well, that’s mighty obliging of you, Elder Tester. A shame your ancestors didn’t walk that path.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, you sorry bastard.”
The Circuit Rider laughed, a rattling ululation that silenced the birds in the trees surrounding the graveyard. Even Old Saint blew a moist snicker. He lifted a bony hand, one that was like parchment wrapped around a bundle of broken sticks. His index finger aimed at David as if preparing to shoot fire or a lightning bolt or a magic spell.
“No respect for a fellow man of cloth,” Harmon said. “That’s what caused such grief for the people of Solom. If they hadn’t given in to jealousy and coveting, all of us would have lived in peace. But they had to go and kill me. And I couldn’t allow that to be the end of it. Neither could He who gives life.”
David tucked his forearms over the shovel handle and lifted. He thought he was gaining ground, though it felt like one of his boots was sliding off. Something bumped against his knee and sent a sharp flare of pain up his leg.
“All the people who hurt you are long gone,” David said between tight lips. “Didn’t the Methodists teach you to forgive?”
“Oh, I gave up the Methodist ways. That’s why people got so riled. I went back to the older religions. If you want God to grant increase and to bless the orchards of your life, then you offer Him blood. Fair enough trade. Life for life.”
The dark morass sucked at David’s lower body, a moist, hungry thing. He wondered if this was really the way God wanted his life to end. What if he let go of the shovel and slid on down into the suffocating mud?
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Harmon asked, adjusting the brim of his hat. Old Saint kicked at the loose dirt, triggering another small avalanche onto David’s shoulders.
“I wanted to see if your grave was a doorway to hell. Or if the Primitive Baptists had earned their piece of your corpse.”
The Circuit Rider tipped his hat. “Well, I’ll leave you to your business, then. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
He whipped the reins against Old Saint’s neck, and the horse reared and whinnied, the front legs coming down with so much force that David feared the bank would give way and the horse and rider would fall on top of him. The horse wheeled and the hoof beats thundered off across the graveyard. David slipped another couple of inches into the mud and was losing his battle to brace himself with the shovel handle. How could God allow a true believer to die in someone else’s grave?
Something slithered into his remaining boot, then up his pants leg, scraping rough scales against his bare skin. David tried to kick, but the mud held his leg firm. In his struggles, he lost his balance on the shovel handle and slid into the mud until it was past his waist. The pressure on his abdomen made breathing difficult. He thought of offering a final prayer, but if God had already decided, as the Primitive Baptists believed, then it would be a waste of air.
He was just about to let himself slip down into Harmon Smith’s tainted coffin when a snake fell across the back of his neck. He slapped at it, frantic, and found it was coarse and fibrous. It wasn’t a snake.
It was a rope.
“He would let you die that way, but I won’t,” the Circuit Rider said. “After all, the Good Book says to bless those who curse you and do good to those who hate you.”
David grabbed the rope. The Circuit Rider had tied his end to the saddle horn and nudged Old Saint so the horse back away, chest and flanks flexing as it fought for purchase in the graveyard grass. The walls of the hole gave way in large chunks, but David wrapped the rope around his wrists and shielded his face from the barrage of dirt.
He thought his arms would be ripped off at the shoulder blades, but his body slowly pulled free of the mud and the two feet of loose dirt that had piled around him. He slid on his belly up the slope of clay and then lay gasping and shivering on the grass.
The rope fell beside his face in a rattlesnake’s coil.
“A good tree cannot grow bad fruit,” Harmon Smith said. “And a man cannot serve two masters.”
Once more, the horse’s drumming
hooves faded into the distance, leaving David weak and cold, and beyond the numbness, maybe a little angry. Whether at himself, or Harmon Smith, or God, he couldn’t be certain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Katy waited until Gordon excused himself from dinner. He’d eaten only half of his sautéed chicken breast and had barely touched his wax beans and sweet potato pie. Katy finished her own plate and began collecting dishes. Jett, who had remained sullen and silent throughout the meal, shoved her glass of milk away and crossed her arms.
“What did you tell your dad?” Katy asked.
“That’s between him and me.”
“Honey, remember the deal. We’ll get through this together, okay?”
“Okay, I’ll share if you share. What’s the deal with this ghost you keep talking about?”
Katy dropped a piece of silverware as she stacked dirty dishes with shaking hands. “Nothing. I think I was just suffering delusions.”
“And a ‘delusion’ just happened to give you a black eye while we were gone?”
“I was up in the attic looking for something—“
“Something in a long wooden box, right?”
“No. I found a key. And I thought it might fit one of the bureaus up there.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I found in the box. A scarecrow. Just like the one that used to hang in the barn. Not the one that’s hanging out there now. Somebody switched them.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they needed to borrow the clothes.”
“You didn’t tell your dad any of this, did you?”
“I told him everything. The parts I know, at least.”
“You didn’t tell him I thought I was being haunted—”
“He loved that part. I thought he was going to laugh right into his coffee. Good old Dad. He can’t handle any alternate reality unless it’s caused by drugs.”
“You shouldn’t talk that way. Mark loves you.”
“Yeah, but he loves drugs more. I could see it in his eyes. He’s still just a sniff monkey, despite all the big talk about being strong for the good of the family. But you’ve heard that line plenty of times, huh?”
Katy left the room, dishes piled against her waist and smearing butter on her blouse. She didn’t want Jett to see her tears.
They should get out of the house. Jump in the Subaru and drive down to Florida, stay with Katy’s mom for a while, dig in the flower garden and get sane. She needed time to sort things out. Rushing into a bad marriage was one thing, but dragging Jett along made it worse. And now she was hallucinating, or maybe cracking up.
Yet the smell of lilacs was real. It was strong in the kitchen, heady and thick, as if Rebecca had walked through the room only moments earlier. But Rebecca was dead. She’d had her head sheared off in a car crash. Rebecca wasn’t keeping house any longer, nor was she brushing her invisible hair. No scarecrow lived in the attic. The man in the black hat was probably Odus, dropping in at odd hours to catch up on chores. Jett had merely seen a shadow, a trick of the moonlight, and her youthful imagination did the rest.
They couldn’t both be going crazy.
But the goats were real. They were cunning and sinister and dangerous. Gordon talked of them as if they were family, and he showed them more affection than he showed his own wife and stepdaughter. He tended and nurtured his flock, but offered no warmth to the humans living in his house.
“Mom,” Jett said from the doorway.
Katy was at the sink, elbow-deep in suds. The clock on the wall read a quarter till six. She’d been standing there fifteen minutes. Only two plates stood in the dish rack, and she could see her blurred reflection in the nearest. For a flicker of an instant, she appeared dark-haired, smiling, eyes as mysterious as those in the locket she’d found in the attic. Rebecca’s face had superimposed itself over hers, and a ragged rim of flesh encircled her neck.
She reached up to touch the wound, but found only the lump in her throat.
“You’re blanking out again.”
“No, I’m not. Everything’s fine. We’ll get through this—” Katy couldn’t bring herself to finish. It was all hollow, the whole new life she’d tried to build was just a stack of cards waiting for a breeze. She despised cooking, and God had invented the dishwasher for a reason. These clothes were too cheerful and bold, too goddamned chirpy.
She was trying to be someone else. Someone whose head had never been found.
“Jett, I think we need to leave.”
“You mean go back to Dad’s?”
“No. That wouldn’t be right. But I can’t stay in this house another minute.”
“What about Gordon?”
“I’ll call him later.”
Jett grinned, the first real joy she’d shown since moving to Solom. “Wow, Mom. I’m impressed. You’ve really got some fucking balls.”
“So to speak.”
“Oh, sorry. I wasn’t supposed to cuss.”
Katy turned off the water. She didn’t even set the dirty dishes in the sink to soak. Let Gordon wash his own damn dishes. It was his house, after all. His and his dead wife’s.
“Go upstairs and throw some things in your knapsack,” she said, the weariness lifting from her body. “Clothes, toothbrush, pajamas. Just enough stuff for a few days. We’ll come back and get the rest after I’ve had a chance to talk with Gordon.”
Jett raced across the room and lifted her arm, open-palmed. Katy did the same and Jett leaped and slapped a high five. “You rock, Mom. I love you.”
“A hug and a kiss aren’t cool enough?”
Jett hugged her and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Ooh, gross, Mom. Where did you get that stinky perfume?”
“I’m not wearing perfume.”
“Smells like flowers.”
“Must be the cinnamon I put on the sweet potatoes.”
“Whatever. Let’s blow this nutty little peanut shack.”
Katy followed Jett up the stairs, wondering if she was making another mistake. She had probably stayed in her relationship with Mark several years too long, but what if she was skipping out before she’d given Gordon a chance? No doubt Gordon could explain everything and ease their fears, show them that ghosts weren’t real and scarecrows were nothing but straw and cloth.
No, he’d had plenty of chances. Katy couldn’t love him or even trust him, despite his pledge to protect her and take care of Jett. All she had to do was imagine his face during that morning they’d had intercourse, when he’d opened his eyes and seemed shocked to find her on top of him. As if he was expecting someone else.
Besides, as Jett would say, Solom was one seriously fucked up piece of real estate.
***
Alex fired up a bowl of sweet, home-grown weed and puffed it until his lungs were scorched. Despite the pleasant buzz from the smoke, Alex couldn’t relax. Something heavy was coming down in Solom. He had a feeling it wasn’t the secret agents he’d always feared, or the Internal Revenue Service coming to seize his land as punishment for his income tax evasion. No, this had all the vibes of a world-class clusterfuck.
Alex had convinced Meredith to stay in her apartment near the college. Despite her physical gifts and generosity, Alex liked his space. He needed to get his head together, which seemed to be a full-time job these days. He put the pipe away and went outside to check on the garden.
The garden did what drugs and sex couldn’t do: it filled him with a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Growing good crops, especially mythical motherlode mindfuck marijuana, was about as close to God as a human being could get. Crops made the world a better place, especially dope, which was the equivalent of Eden’s apple when it came to granting wisdom. As a fringe benefit, self-reliance also stuck it to the Man, because the government couldn’t tax such products.
Alex peeked through the curtains to make sure nobody was watching from outside. Dope possessed the strange power to make him feel bulletproof and paranoid at the same time. Behind the safety of locked
doors, he was master of his fate. When he stepped under the big sky, all manner of rules and laws took effect, whether they were natural or contrived by the two major political parties to ensure that nothing changed, that all the stars stayed fixed in the heavens and all the crooks in Congress defended their incumbency.
Looked safe outside. No cops, no Weird Dude Walking. The sun was about half an hour from hitting the tops of the trees on the western mountains. In September, dusk arrived quickly and the shadows stretched longer and longer until they tangled in dark armies. It was nearly six o’clock, which meant the bell in the steeple of the Free Will Baptist Church would soon sound its Sunday call. Birds twittered in the surrounding trees, as sacred a music as any that had ever droned from a church organ. If the birds were talking, that meant everything was normal, despite the eerie flutter in the pit of his stomach.
Alex went out onto the deck, binoculars in hand. Through a cut where the road wound among the trees, the Smith farm was visible. Focusing the lenses, he saw the new Smith woman, the redhead, walking toward the barn. Alex didn’t like spying, because it was too close to what the CIA practiced against its own citizens. But survival instinct told him there was a big difference between being nosy and being informed. As he watched, the redhead veered toward the fence, then pulled back as a clutch of goats came trotting toward her from the rear of the barn. Probably the same damn goats that had eaten Weird Dude Walking.
Alex shortened the lenses so he could scan his fence line. The spot he’d repaired near the garden was still intact. He’d fantasized about planting some sort of booby trap, maybe a razor-studded spring that could be triggered by a trip wire. But the fence was technically on Smith property, and that would be crossing the line. Neighbors deserved a little extra tolerance, even if their livestock fed on old preachers as if they were a Jesus biscuit in a Catholic chow line.
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