“Wait a second,” Marlene said. “You going to help clean up the kitchen?”
“It’s the least I could do,” Roby said.
VII.
He’d washed the last round of dishes, including another go at Jacob’s denture glass, before he tried anything on Marlene. He knew he didn’t have Harold’s good looks or charm or pure heart. All Roby had was a stubborn streak. And a crumpled piece of pie.
“Want to go for a walk?” he asked, careful to keep his voice even.
“I don’t know. I’m awful tuckered.”
“Just to get some fresh air. I’ll have you in bed before you know it.” He realized what he’d just said, how she might take it. “I mean—”
She grinned and shook her head. “Roby Snow. I thought you didn’t have a single bad thought in your head.”
“I don’t—I mean, well, it’s a pretty night, and I could use some fresh air. This kitchen has got me feeling cramped.” He thought of Jacob, who’d soon be confined in a casket.
Marlene looked toward the kitchen entrance, considering. “Well, okay. Just don’t try nothing. I’m not in the mood.”
“I’m not, either.”
She gave him that patented Marlene pout and put away the last of the food. The Frigidaire was jam packed, the freezer so full that bags of raspberries fell out when the door opened. The top of the refrigerator was covered with the remnants of cakes and homemade loaves of bread.
They went outside into the cool darkness. The dew had settled early, fat and slick on the blades of grass. Alfred had put the cows in the barn on his way out, and now the pastures were empty under the weak gleam of moon. Black trees stood like long, scrawny scarecrows along the fence line.
Marlene walked a few steps ahead, following the worn path that bordered the garden and led to the creek. The water was silver in the night, gurgling and licking at the smooth stones. The aroma of cow manure and cut hay filled the sky. The tobacco had been harvested and speared on stakes to dry, and the silent rows seemed alive with small moving shadows.
“How could you ever leave this place?” Roby asked.
“Easy. If you lived here, you’d want to be gone, too.”
“No. I’ve been out there, to other places. The big city. I’ve been places where you wouldn’t believe, even if I told you.”
Marlene stopped along a broken wooden fence and leaned against a post. Her face was turned to the moon, its light soft on her cheeks. Roby realized she was probably beautiful. Maybe this is what Harold saw in her, what all those other men had seen in her. A glow that came from inside.
Maybe that’s why people gave their hearts to each other.
No. That was foolishness. Roby had a job to do. Something more important than the things between a man and woman, the twin beating of hearts. His business was between life and death.
“Can I ask you something?” Roby asked.
“You just did.”
“Something scary.”
She looked at him, then back to the house with its distant squares of light. “Roby, I do believe you’re trying to get fresh.”
“Hey, I’m serious.”
“Yeah. Just like every other man.”
“It’s about your daddy.”
The crickets chirped louder. Something moved in the shrubs along the creek.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” she said, so low that Roby could barely hear her.
“This is important.”
“I don’t care. He’s dead.”
“I know. But he talked to me, told me what you folks ought to do.”
“Well, he told Momma, too. And Barnaby Clawson. And just about every damned body except us. The ones who have to decide.”
“He told me last night.”
Marlene had no answer for that. Her breath came fast and shallow, her eyes wide and wet with moonlight. “Don’t talk like that.”
“He come to me, Marlene. While I was asleep.” A little lie, but he’d told worse. In truth, he hadn’t been asleep at all.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those crazy people who dream about dead folks? I liked you better when you was just another guy trying to work his way inside my dress.”
“This ain’t about liking or not liking. It’s about doing what’s right.” Roby eased forward, his boots hushed in the grass.
“Marlene turned, tried to run, but was cornered by the fence and the underbrush. “Get back, or I swear I’ll scream.”
He stopped a few feet from her. She could scream, but Buck and Sarah wouldn’t find them for at least two minutes. Plenty of time. “I ain’t going to hurt you. I just want you to do one thing.”
“Sure you do. And I was ready to do it. Only now I don’t want to.”
Roby reached into his pocket and brought out the mashed and balled wad of sweet potato pie. He held out his fist, hoping his hand wasn’t shaking. “Here.”
She was suspicious. “What’s that?”
“For you.”
She looked at his hand as if he held a snake. “What is it?”
“Eat this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Eat it. It’s what your daddy wanted.” He used the past tense, to make it easier for her.
It’s what your daddy wants. Because he loved you, and you have to love him in return.
“I ain’t eating that. Whatever it is.”
“Pie. It’s good.”
She looked up the path, at the house that now probably seemed a hundred miles away. “I’m sure it’s good. Because Beverly Parsons made it, right?”
Roby smiled, but the expression felt wrong on his face. He pressed his lips together. “She made it special for you folks. Wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings, now. That wouldn’t be neighborly.”
“What about my feelings, Roby? You got no right to scare me out of my wits. You’re a real creep, you know that?”
“Eat up. It’s good for you.”
“No.” She eased deeper into the shadows, edging for an escape up the path.
“Your daddy wants it this way.”
“Leave me alone.”
“You won’t scream. You won’t, because then I’ll have to tell.”
“Tell what?”
“About Alfred’s fifteenth birthday present. Behind the barn.”
She said nothing. There was nothing she could say.
Roby held out the clod of pie.
“Nobody . . .” Her voice was like a wind over ice, brittle. “Nobody saw.”
“Family secrets. We keep it in the family.”
“Nobody saw.”
“Somebody did. How do you think I found out?”
“Nobody saw.”
“Your daddy did. And he told me all about it. Last night.”
Her words were like notes played on the wet rim of a crystal glass, uneven and piercing. “My daddy was dead last night.”
“I know.”
“My daddy was dead and nobody saw and you’re crazy and you and your pie can go to hell.” She sprang forward and slapped at his hand.
The pie flew from Roby’s open palm, parted some leaves in the underbrush, and landed in the creek with a liquid thunk. Marlene clawed her way past him, screeching. He looked at his empty palm under the moonlight, then watched her grow smaller and darker until she was nothing but a moving shadow. Then her figure was outlined in the light of the screen door. She went inside and the door to the kitchen slammed closed.
After a minute of listening to the creek, Roby walked to his truck, started it, and headed for Clawson’s Funeral Home.
VIII.
The back room of Clawson’s was dim and still and clammy as a cellar. The room smelled like Barnaby, or maybe that was the other way around. Roby knew that death could get in you, worm its way through your pores, crawl down your throat and into your lungs, sneak into your eyes and inside your brain. Death could surround you and suffocate you. Death could stiffen you up. Death could swell you and then shrink you. Death could do it a
ll, change your face, give you a tight grin, take you places, open doors.
But first, you had to shake its hand.
Jacob Ridgehorn looked good. One of Barnaby’s finest displays of talent. The cheeks were smooth and pink, the eyes closed peacefully, the lips full. Under the shop lights, his forehead shone with the faintest luster of wax. The sparse hair was combed into place, more neat than it had ever been in life.
Roby looked at the clock above the workbench, carefully ignoring the sharp tools, surgical saws, thread and glue and buttons and rubber bladders. Five-gallon plastic containers of chemicals lined the floor beneath the bench. A long stainless steel table stood in the middle of the room.
It was nearly midnight.
Roby listened to the rodents in the storage room and waited.
Jacob’s body spasmed when the clock’s thin hands both reached straight toward heaven.
“I tried,” Roby said.
Jacob’s mouth had parted as the skin tightened in death. Barnaby hadn’t gotten around to running a stitch through the inside of the corpse’s mouth yet. Roby was relieved that the dentures were in place. It made Jacob seem less dead somehow.
The thing that bothered him was he could never be sure if the dead person was really dead. Or if it was a ghost.
He’d have to ask Barnaby about that one day. Or the old man at the broken-down garage at the end of the world.
As if the old man would tell him anything.
But maybe Jacob would, the way he had the night before.
“I fed them the pie,” Roby said. “You never tasted such a heavenly thing.”
Jacob twitched, maybe one corner of his mouth lifted in appreciation.
“It was good.”
No answer except the soft settling of cloth.
“You should have seen Alfred. He was a tricky one, all right. Had to get a little feisty with him.”
Jacob said something about how Alfred always was a bit stubborn, maybe he was too much like his Daddy that way. Or maybe what Roby heard was just the whisper of a car passing on the distant street outside.
“And Sarah. Fine girl, that one. She and Buck will give you some great grandkids once they get around to it. I know, I know, a little too late, but at least you can be content that your blood line will be carried on.”
Jacob said he figured there were plenty of Ridgehorns in the world already.
“Anna Beth is my favorite. No, don’t get mad, I don’t mean that way, I just think she’s got spunk and will do all right for herself.”
Jacob said that a father wasn’t supposed to say such things, but now that it didn’t matter what opinions he held, he could admit that Anna Beth had been his favorite, too.
“Marlene,” Roby said. “Now, Marlene is a horse of a different color.”
Jacob waited silently, hands folded across his waist, as patient as a saint.
“But she . . . she didn’t have none of the pie.”
Another thirty seconds of silence passed, the tick of the clock filling the gap of missing heartbeats. Jacob looked sad, even with eyes glued shut.
“I’m sorry. But I ain’t give up yet. I just have to talk to Johnny, is all. And Barnaby. We’ll sort it all out.”
And this after I told you all the family secrets, Jacob said.
“I know, I know. Don’t make me feel worse than I already do. And it ain’t just because I let you down. It’s because I’m—”
Roby looked at the clock on the wall, mad at himself for expecting sympathy from a corpse. The deceased deserved all the sympathy. That’s what this was about. Honoring the dear departed.
Jacob said it was hard to feel honored when a man’s own flesh and blood turned against him.
“I don’t think she did it out of spite,” Roby said. “And maybe it ain’t my place to say, but your family got the worst grieving manners I ever did see.”
Jacob said that every family was different, that you couldn’t understand unless you were on the inside. Roby didn’t know whether he meant the inside of the family or the inside of the coffin.
The family, Jacob said. Though laying stiff in a coffin was no way to spend an eternity, either. That was for them who were too unlucky or too despised to get their pies eaten. Nothing sadder than to cross over with a sack of soured deviled eggs and moldy cake and a whole pie. That was no way to meet Judgment.
“You don’t have to paint me a picture,” Roby said.
You’ll have to go see him for yourself, Jacob said.
Roby pressed his tongue against his teeth. He didn’t want to go out there, not tonight. He wasn’t sure he could find the place again. Or maybe he was scared that he would.
Because he’d found it every time he looked. Or else it had found him.
And every time, whether it was midnight or sunrise, the old man was sitting there, waiting, as if the last Greyhound had rolled through forty years ago but he was still determined to catch the next.
Except Johnny Divine’s type of waiting had no end.
I know you’re scared, Jacob said, but I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat. Ha ha, that’s supposed to be funny.
Roby nodded.
See you at the viewing, Jacob said.
Roby nodded.
And bring the family, Jacob added.
“I won’t let you down,” Roby said.
No, Jacob said. That’s what old Barnaby’s for.
Roby said nothing, looked at the clock and its slow countdown toward tomorrow.
A joke, Jacob said. He’s the undertaker, get it?
Roby’s sense of humor was not in the best of shape. “Sleep tight.”
Jacob said he’d try his best.
Roby headed for the door, feet as heavy as gravestones.
And, Roby . . .
Roby turned, looked at the sallow corpse, the rigid mouth, the sunken cheeks.
Don’t forget to lock up behind you, Jacob said. Wouldn’t want nothing getting stolen.
IX.
It had been dark the first time, three in the morning maybe, the hour when even the night creatures were bone lazy and dawn seemed like it was as far away as forever. Roby had taken a wrong turn down the back country, through the little community known as Mule Camp that had once been a whistle stop on the old Virginia Creeper railway. The town had died with the passing of the locomotive era, but a few people still kept up shops in the area. Roby hadn’t been through those parts in years, not since he gave up bow hunting for deer, but that night he’d been drinking and hell bent on speed.
He passed an old gas station he never remembered seeing before. Something about it, the suddenness of it, made him fumble for the brakes, the way it gleamed skull-white in the moonlight, its windows nothing but blank holes and the cinder block walls weeping rust and cracks. He lost control and skidded off the road, smacked a tree and bumped his head. It was a miracle he wasn’t killed outright.
He got out of the truck and that’s when he first saw the old man sitting in shadows.
That was the night his life changed.
Tonight, as he pulled beside the gas pump that was so old it had a hand-operated suction pump, the same figure sat in its usual place in a warped rocking chair. Roby had the feeling that, if he dropped by during the daytime, unexpectedly, the side of the road would be barren, or he’d find only a stand of stunted jack pines. He had an equal belief that the garage could be found in other places, on other dark stretches of roads that led to nowhere. The same garage, the same old man.
“Been expecting you,” Johnny Divine said. His eyes shone, the only features visible amid the dark face.
“I got what you wanted,” Roby said. He pulled the suitcase off the passenger seat, slid out of the truck, and walked across the crumbling old concrete tarmac.
“It’s not what I want, Mr. Snow,” the old man said. “It’s what you need.”
“I don’t need this. I never asked for this.”
Johnny Divine’s laughter crept from the shadows, around the chipped c
orners of the low structure, down from the moon and up from the cold ground. “You most certainly did, sir. The first night we met. Said you’d do anything.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
The scratchy voice was almost sad. “They never do. I guess they never really do, when you get right down to it.”
Roby held out the suitcase. “Here.”
Johnny Divine didn’t take it. After a moment, Roby set the suitcase down near Johnny’s moccasined feet and moved a couple of steps backward. He heard a tapping sound, then saw the head of Johnny’s cane poking at the suitcase.
“Are you sure that’s the right one?” Johnny asked.
“Barnaby sent it special,” Roby said. “Fresh.”
“Unh-huh.” Johnny leaned forward and Roby got a brief glimpse of his face, the blank eyes, the dark caverns of cheeks and eye sockets. A face that looked to have drawn its substance from the surrounding blackness, cobbled and knitted itself from the dirt, shaped itself in the cold forge of the night.
Johnny pulled the suitcase into the shadows and flipped the brass latches. Roby didn’t want to see what was inside.
On that first night, Johnny had sent him to Clawson’s Funeral Home with the empty suitcase. Barnaby hadn’t said a word, just looked him over as if they shared an unspoken secret, then took the suitcase. Roby had waited while Barnaby attended to some work in the back room. Barnaby then gave the suitcase back to Roby, several pounds heavier. And Roby had driven back out to Mule Camp and made the delivery to Johnny Divine.
Then Johnny had instructed Roby to go to the home of the deceased’s family and help ease the grief.
Roby hadn’t understood then, but now he knew plenty enough.
Enough to hold out his hand when Johnny Divine passed him the wrinkled sheet of paper.
“Would you please, sir?” Johnny Divine said. “My eyes aren’t so good anymore.”
Roby read the name that ran across the top of the document. Glenn Claude Isenhour.
Roby didn’t know Isenhour, but he had a feeling he would soon be his second cousin. A member of the grieving family.
“You wouldn’t mind reading it aloud, would you?” Johnny said.
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 63