"Yuck," Lonnie said.
"Others said he never did die. They say he still comes back every decade or so to toss a body on his killing stones. And it ain't animals no more."
"What is it, then?" Walter Buck said and his voice was low and reverent and maybe just a little bit spooked.
"Now nothing will do for Harmon Smith's garden but a bad little young'un."
Granny Hampton lifted herself up with a groan of both breath and chair wood, took up her cane, and headed for the screen door. She paused and looked out at the mountains once more and said, "Praise the Lord, I'm mighty glad I'm old. Not much left to be scared of anymore."
She went inside, her chair still rocking, the runners whispering against the night like a language two hundred years lost.
Odus never forgot that story, and more than once he'd found himself alone at night on a dark trail or stretch of pasture and recall that image of Old Saint prancing down off Three Top. Except, in the image, a soapy, pale figure was perched on the horse's back, the head beneath the black hat swaying back and forth with the horse's motion. For those who had ever heard Granny Hampton tell the story, it was easy to believe Harmon Smith was still riding the circuit.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Katy asked.
"What?"
"The thing you don't want to talk about."
Katy turned her back to him and shimmied out of the dress with the autumnal print. She hung it in the closet, though she'd spilled some butter sauce on it during dinner. She felt oddly exposed in front of her husband, though she was in her bra and panties and he'd certainly viewed the marital merchandise on at least one occasion.
Gordon was in his pajamas, in bed, pretending to be engrossed in a Dostoyevsky novel. He had changed in the bathroom, locking the door so she couldn't enter while he was taking a shower and brushing his teeth.
"You mean Jett?"
That wasn't what she meant, and she approached the dresser for the sole purpose of glancing in the mirror to see if he was looking at her body. His gaze never left the book. "What about Jett?" she asked.
"I know a counselor. He teaches part-time at Westridge, and I'm sure he'll give me a discount if insurance doesn't cover it."
She removed her earrings, a set of sterling silver crescent moons, and put mem in the cedar jewelry box on the dresser. Only after she closed the lid did she realize she'd never seen either the earrings or the box before. "What?" she said, too loudly for bedtime.
"For her problems. The drugs, the wild stories, the way she dresses to intentionally offend. She's making a classic ploy for attention."
Like mother, like daughter.
Katy removed her bra and let it slip to the floor, still looking into the mirror. Her freckled breasts were high and firm, even though she had breast-fed Jett. Katy picked up the silver-handled brush on the dresser and began running it through her red hair, flipping her head so the sheen would reflect in the bedside lamplight. Gordon was reading the Dostoyevsky.
"Do you think I'm prettier than Rebecca?" she asked.
Gordon closed the novel with a slap of pulp. "That's a hell of a thing to ask a man. It's like asking if I think you're fat."
"I've seen her picture. She's not like me at all. Brown hair, dark eyes, fuller lips. They say some men have a 'type' and go for it time after time, even when it's bad for them."
"We were talking about Jett."
She turned to face him, her nipples hard in the cool September air. "You keep changing the subject."
"The subject is us. All of us." His eyes stayed fixed on hers, resisting any temptation he might have had to let his gaze crawl over her figure. Perhaps he had no desire and nothing to hide. Maybe this morning's sex had been his version of a personality warp. Jett might not be the only one in the house who had hallucinations. Then again, Katy had been the one to wear a dead woman's dress without a moment's consideration of how strange that was, especially when the dress belonged to Gordon's first wife. Even stranger, Gordon had not commented on it.
Were they all going insane? What if Jett was spiking their food slipping LSD or some other brain-scrambling substance into the recipes she'd found scattered about the kitchen? No. Jett was off drugs. She had promised.
"We're trying, Gordon," she said. "You knew we came with strings attached."
"You look cold. Why don't you put on a robe?"
"I'm fine."
"I'm worried about you."
"Maybe you should save your worry for what's happening between us. We screwed each other's brains out this morning, and it was the first time you ever touched me in any way that mattered. I thought I'd finally broken through. Now you act like nothing happened."
Gordon never looked embarrassed but his cheeks turned a shade rosier. "It's complicated."
"Not really. Either I'm prettier than Rebecca or I'm not. Either you want to screw me or you don't. Either we're married or just people who sleep in the same bed. Sounds pretty damned simple to me.
"You're not from Solom."
"I am now. I moved here, remember. I said 'I do' and I gave up my stable if unspectacular career in Charlotte and yanked my daughter's roots out of the Piedmont dirt and dragged both of us up here because I thought we had a future with you. Only it turns out I'm second on your 'honey-do' list behind your dead wife."
Gordon exploded out of the blankets, rising from the bed with an angry squeak of springs. His pajamas were askew, one tail of his shirt dangling across his groin. "Leave Rebecca out of this."
"How can I? I thought you wanted me to be her."
"You'll never be Rebecca."
Katy stormed out of the room, tears blurring her vision. She slammed the bedroom door as punctuation to her unspoken comeback. Her curled right fist ached and she looked down to see the silver-handled hairbrush with the initials R.L.S.
Rebecca Leigh Smith.
Katy flung the hairbrush down the hall and ran to the top of the stairs. The air coming up from the landing was cool and drafty, moving around her flesh like soft hands. The smell of lilacs wrapped her, carrying a faintly sweet undercurrent of corruption. She leaned against the top post, the landing spread below her like still and dark water.
Maybe if she died, Gordon would love her as well.
"Do you love him?"
The words crawled from the hidden corners of the kitchen, out from the cluttered pantry shelves, beneath the plush leather couch, off the mantel with its dusty pictures and Gordon's collection of religious relics, up from the dank swell of the crawl space. Katy thought she had imagined the words, that the voice was the whisk of a late autumn wind, or the settling of a centuries-old farmhouse. Better that than to accept she was losing her mind. Because, however briefly and innocently, she had just contemplated suicide.
The realization brought fresh tears, and behind them, a surge of anger. She had always thought herself strong. After her divorce, she had maintained a household, provided for her daughter, and resisted any temptation to reconcile with Mark, who would occasionally make overtures that seemed more like the pat chatter of a horny male than the sincere revelations of a man suffering regrets. She had moved on, moved up, and though this new marriage hadn't been the stuff of dreams, she was determined-
"DO YOU LOVE HIM?"
This time the breeze was staccato, deep, the sounds rounded off into syllables. The voice was female, as frigid and calm and dead as the lost echo from a forgotten grave.
"Who's there?" Katy said, not really thinking anyone was there. The house was locked. Only crazy people heard voices when no one was there. And she wasn't crazy.
"Mom?"
The voice was behind her now. Younger, higher…
"Jett?" She turned. Her daughter stood in the shadows of the hall, her silhouette visible against the slice of light leaking from her room. Katy was aware of her exposed body and wrapped her arms around her chest.
"Are you okay, Mom?"
"Sure, honey. I was just checking on something in the kitchen."
; "I thought I heard you talking to somebody."
Had Katy spoken? She couldn't be sure. A horrified part of herself wondered if she had actually answered the Voice's bare and bald question. But the Voice wasn't real and the house was quiet and it was always easy to lie to yourself when you didn't like the truth. What she couldn't avoid was her daughter's stare. Katy had never been a prude about nakedness, but there was an unwritten rule that you didn't go starkers around your kids once they passed the toddler stage.
"It's okay, sweetie," Katy said. "Go on back to bed. You have school tomorrow."
"It's not even ten yet, Mom. That's pretty lame even for Solom."
"Well, go read or study or something. Listen to some music."
"Are you sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine."
Jett stepped back into the light of her doorway. Her dyed-black hair was tied back in a ponytail, her face bare of makeup, braces glinting silver. A sweet, round-eyed child. Not a drugged-out potential menace to society, as Gordon saw her, and not a disruption to learning, as her teachers claimed. Just a sweet little girl. Her baby.
"Whatever," Jett said. "It's not like we get through problems together or anything. That's just a line we use for the counselors, right?"
Jett was about to close the door, but men stuck her head back out and said, "By the way, what's that smell? Like somebody farted flowers or something."
The door closed with a click and the hallway went black and Katy slid down the newel post and sat on the top stair until her tears had dried.
Chapter Eighteen
Elliott was being a total dick. Carolyn Everhart didn't like to think of her husband in such bald, crude terms, but he'd taken the whole vacation as a measure of his testosterone levels. From booking the rental car ("Let's go with the guys who try harder") to deciding on restaurant stops on the trip down, Elliott always had a snappy answer for her every question, and a good reason why he knew best. As they'd followed the Appalachian foothills south, Elliott seemed to have grown wax in his ears and a fur pelt that hadn't graced humans since they'd started shaking their Neanderthal origins.
Solom had been picked almost at random. Elliott worked at PAMCO Engineering with a guy who'd attended Westridge University and said the North Carolina mountains were relatively unspoiled ("A perfect place to get away from it all while still having it all"). An Internet search and credit card reservation later, and they were booked in the Happy Hollow retreat for a week, and since September was leaf season, the cabins cost a premium. A two-day drive from White Plains, with a Holiday Inn Express layover ("Complete with a 'lay,' what do you think, honey?") in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and they had arrived with not a single argument over road maps.
But here in the failing light, she couldn't get Elliott to even look at the map, much less admit they were lost. The pocket map they'd picked up from the outfitters' had been fine as long as they stuck to the river road, which was flat and gently curving. But Elliott had insisted on what he called "a little off-roading," though after two hours her legs had begun to cramp and the air temperature dipped into the low forties. Instead of complaining, she pointed out that the bikes were geared for road racing and not mountain climbing. Too late. The name "Switchback Trail" had intrigued him. Besides, he'd complimented her on how the biking shorts snugged her ass, and that had bought him a little slack. Elliott chased down a forest trail barely wide enough for a fox run, and that trail branched off twice, crossed a narrow creek, and cut around a cluster of granite boulders that had risen like a backwoods Stonehenge from the swells of the earth. Two forks later ("The road less traveled or the road not taken, what do you say, you liberal arts major, you?") and he'd juddered over a root in the gathering darkness and been thrown over the handlebars. No bones broken, but some serious scrapes that would require antibiotic ointment.
Now they stood in a cluster of hardwood trees whose branches were nearly devoid of foliage. If any houses were around, their lights didn't show. Small, unseen animals skirled up leaves around them and darkness was falling harder and faster than a Democratic presidential hopeful's poll numbers. Carolyn, a homemaker, Humane Society volunteer, member of the Sands Creek subdivision bridge club, and devout Republican, resisted the urge to say, "Well, we really got away from it all, didn't we?"
Elliott pulled a penlight from his fanny pack and played it over the bicycle. "I think the front wheel's warped. We'll have to pay for the damage when we get back."
"You mean 'if we get back."
"I know exactly where we are."
"Show me, then." She pulled out her copy of the fourfold pocket map. It was bordered with ads for area tourist attractions, fine dining establishments, and investment Realtors. The river road was marked by a series of arrows, and the Solom General Store and Back2Nature Outfitters were marked with red X marks. State Highway 292 leading from Windshake was clearly delineated in thick black ink. Tester Community Park, about five miles from the outfitters' judging from the scale of the map, was the last recognizable landmark they'd passed.
"We're right about here," Elliott said, running the beam of the penlight over a printed area that represented two square miles.
"There aren't any lines there," Carolyn pointed out.
"Sure. But we were headed east, remember? The sun was sinking behind us."
Actually, Carolyn recalled only vague glimpses of the sun once they'd left the relatively familiar flatness of the pavement. What bits of scattered light did break through the gnarled and scaly branches seemed to originate from a different position with each new slope or fork. When the sun had settled on the rim of the mountains, the entire sky had taken on the shade of a bruised plum, and Carolyn was thinking by then that even a trail of bread crumbs out of "Hansel and Gretel" wouldn't have led them home before midnight.
"Can the bike roll?" she asked.
"Sure, honey." Elliott lifted the bike by its handlebars and spun the wheel with one hand. The wheel made three revolutions, the rubber sloughing erratically against the tines, before it came to a complete stop. "Well, it can work in an emergency."
"At what point does this become an emergency?"
'Take it easy, Carolyn. We can walk out of here in no time. Once we find the river, we'll be home free."
"Do you know where the river is?"
"Sure, honey." He took the map from her, and fixed the penlight on the place he'd decided as their present location. With the beam, he traced a line to Blackburn River on the map, which was conveniently marked with a sinuous swath of blue. "We're here and the river's there. A half-hour's hike, tops."
"I see the river on the map, but where's the river out here?" Her voice took on the tiniest bit of sarcasm despite her best efforts.
"Water runs downhill. Ergo, we walk downhill, and there will be the river."
"Ergo" was one of those annoying, know-it-all, engineering-type words Elliott occasionally sprang on her when he was feeling defensive.
"I'm glad we wore athletic shoes and not moccasins," Carolyn said. Elliott had stopped at a little souvenir stand when they crossed the North Carolina border, one with a fake moonshine still by the front door and a wooden bear that had been sculpted with a chain saw. She'd talked him out of buying the Rebel flag window decal and the Aunt Jemima figurine-and-syrup decanter ("Just wait till the guys at PAMCO get a load of these!"), but he'd gone for the jen-u-wine hand-stitched leather Cherokee mocs at $29.95 a pair.
"Do you have any water left?" He'd used up the last of his water rinsing his wounds.
"A little," she said. Though she was under no illusions that they'd be back in the comfort of their rental cabin within the hour, she didn't think they were at the point where they'd need to conserve water to survive. She handed him her bottle and he dashed some in his mouth and swallowed.
"Okay, let's rock and roll," he said, walking his bike back down the bill. There was just enough daylight left to see the darker cut of the trail against the thick tangles of low-lying rhododendron. She tucked the map in the t
ight pocket of her biking shorts and followed, the bike leaning against her hip.
They had gone fifteen minutes before the invisible sun slipped down whatever horizon led to morning on another side of the world. Elliott switched on the penlight and its weak glimmer barely made a dent against the walls of the forest.
"Remember those big rocks we passed?" Carolyn asked, the first time she'd spoken since they'd started their descent.
"Yeah."
"We should have come to them by now."
"They're probably uphill from us. We're at a lower elevation now."
"'Probably'?"
He flicked the beam vaguely to his right. "Sure, honey. Up there. We'll come to that creek soon, and then we can decide whether to follow it down to the river or stick with the trail."
It was the first time he'd hinted that any decision would be mutual. That should have given her a cheap glow of victory, but it actually made her more nervous than she wanted to admit. She looked behind her, hoping to recognize the trail from their earlier passage, but all she could see were hickory and oak trees, which stood like witches with multiple deranged arms.
"Let's hurry," she said. "I'm getting cold."
The colorful nylon biking outfits gave a pleasant squeeze to the physique, but they were designed to let the skin breathe so sweat could dry. Breathing worked both ways, though, and the soft wind that came on with dusk made intimate entry through the material.
"I think I remember this stand of pines," her husband said. He gripped the penlight against one of the handlebars as he walked so the circle of light bobbed ahead of them like on one of those "follow the bouncing ball" sing-along songs on television. Carolyn thought the perfect tune for their situation would be AC/DC's "Highway to Hell."
It was maybe a minute later, though time was rapidly losing its meaning during the interminable trek, that Carolyn heard the sounds behind her. At first she assumed they were the echo of her own footsteps, or maybe a whisper generated from the bike's sprockets. She breathed lightly through her mouth, or as lightly as she could given the fact that she was bone tired, a little bit pissed, and more than a little scared. Leaves rustled. Something was moving, larger than squirrel-sized, churning up dead loam and breaking branches.
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