Fire Walk

by Melissa Bowersock

  “Firecloud, Samson Benjamin,” Lacey directed, “and Fitzpatrick, Lacey Cathleen.” She drummed her fingers on the counter to hurry him along.

  “Uh, Malby?” Bowen said in a quiet voice. “It’s here.”

  The senior officer jerked away from the counter and read over Bowen’s shoulder. As he did, the color rose in his face.

  “Fine,” he said. “Get out of here. Be on your way.”

  “We still have a job to do,” Lacey reminded him.

  “I’m canceling that job.”

  “We don’t work for you.”

  Malby stood upright and crossed his arms over his chest. “Who do you work for?”

  “Beau Hewitt.”

  Recognition registered in Malby’s eyes. “The builder?”

  “That’s right. He hired us to clear the ghost that keeps setting fires on that property, and that’s what we’re going to do.” She glanced at her watch. “As a matter of fact, we were supposed to meet him there five minutes ago.” She got out her phone and punched his contact number.

  “Hey, wait—”

  “Beau? Hi, it’s Lacey. Sorry we’re not there to meet you. We’re at the police station and we’re having a bit of a problem here. Can you come down? Great. Thanks.” She put her phone away. “He’s on his way.”

  Malby looked about to blow a gasket. He clenched his teeth and a tic jumped in his jaw. Bowen wisely kept his head down and stayed silent.

  In a quick minute, Beau stormed through the door. “Lacey? Sam? What’s going on?” He stepped up next to Sam, still filming, and tried to make sense of the tableau before him.

  “Officer Malby wants us to leave town,” Lacey said sweetly. “He doesn’t think we need to complete our job for you.”

  “Is that so?” Beau bellied up to the counter and leaned there conspicuously. “And why is that?”

  “Uh, uh…” Malby’s eyes darted around in panic.

  He doesn’t want ‘our kind’ in his town,” Lacey said.

  Beau’s eyebrows jumped up close to his hairline. “Really? Why, that sounds a lot like discrimination to me.” He smiled at Lacey, then glowered at Malby. “I know a little bit about that,” the black man said.

  “Now, hold on,” Malby said. He put his hands out, palms up.

  “You’d think, in this day and age, we’d be done with that.” Beau sighed heavily. “But apparently not.” He turned to Sam and Lacey. “How about we get your gear, get you out of that small-minded hotel, do what we need to at the site, then I’ll fix you up with a room in Meade Falls? I’m sure the hotel there will be… more welcoming.”

  Lacey exchanged glances with Sam. His mouth quirked in a small smile of victory.

  “That sounds like a great idea,” she said to Beau. “Let’s do it.”

  ~~~

  SIXTEEN

  Their rental car packed with all their luggage, Lacey and Sam parked behind Beau’s truck in front of the building site. The check-out had been chilly. Old Dorothy behind the counter had dispensed with any pleasantries, passing across the final invoice without a word or a smile. Lacey had signed off with a similar stoic attitude.

  So much for small-town hospitality.

  It was a slightly different scene at the site. Lacey could only wonder what rumors had already spread, as a handful of townspeople gathered in a small knot on the other side of Main Street. Were they hoping to see an exorcism… or a failure?

  Sam stood on the sidewalk and scanned the site, ready to walk. He had his knee-high suede moccasins on, his black hair pulled back in a ponytail. The Grateful Dead t-shirt lent an air of surrealism to the task.

  He stepped up beside Beau. “Do you know how the property was divided when the church was here? Where the church property ended and the graveyard began?”

  “Oh, sure.” Beau moved a few steps closer to the center of the ruin at the front of the property. “See this stake? That’s the dividing line between the two lots.” He motioned toward the back of the property, his hand following the line. “To that stake in the back.”

  “Okay, good to know,” Sam said. “I’m going to try to zero in on exactly where Harmony’s energy comes from.” He looked to Lacey. “You ready?”

  “Anytime you are.” She had her phone up and ready to video.

  Sam nodded and stepped out on the bare ground. Again he was going to have to stay fully aware of where he placed his feet, avoiding the compromised and unsteady construction. He moved into the ruins carefully, deliberately, arms held slightly away from his body.

  Lacey stepped up right next to the blackened studs that ringed the ruin and zoomed in on Sam.

  “The rage,” he said. “The rage is… palpable. Intense. It’s … consuming her.” He moved toward the back, bearing left. “The organ was here.” He moved one hand out in a flat motion. “She scattered the sheet music like so many white birds.” He stood still, his half-closed eyes seeing beyond the visible. “That’s how she started the fire; she lit the music first.” He turned slightly. “She broke up the bench; crashed it against the organ. Her rage gave her strength.”

  He stood still for a moment, frowning down at the ground, just breathing. Then he tipped his head up to the right. “Her anger isn’t just for herself. It’s for her child, too. The innocent.”

  Lacey flashed back to Sam’s first walk. She remembered he’d said something about the innocent. Apology to the innocent. As if Harmony owed her child that. As if Harmony herself were not the innocent.

  Sam strode more quickly to the right, until he approached the center line that divided the lots. He stood there, his toes at that line, staring out across the ghostly graveyard.

  “Consecrated ground,” he said in a low voice. “Doors closed; gates closed. No… redemption. The child… damned.”

  A heavy sadness gripped Lacey’s heart, whether from Sam’s words, Harmony’s essence, or her own imagination she didn’t know. It squeezed with a clawed hand; the paralysis of no way forward; the rage of being boxed in; the sorrow of having her dead child at her side. Unbearable. Unable to be borne.

  Suddenly Sam was on the move again. He picked through the charred rubble and headed toward the back of the lot. Once he cleared the ruins, he walked a direct but careful line, his right foot only inches from the center line of the lots. As he advanced, he slowed. He held both hands out beside him, flat, palms down. He stepped carefully. Lacey was reminded of a man in a mine field, feeling his way with light, cautious steps. The toes of his moccasins tapped the ground, questing.

  He stopped.

  Lacey took the opportunity to dash around the outside of the ruins, skirting the charred remains so she could get closer to Sam. She got within twenty feet of him and centered him in her screen.

  “Here,” he said. He held both hands out in front of him, directly over the ground before his feet. “Yes, here.” Without moving, he called out. “Beau, have you got a shovel in your truck?”

  Lacey kept her eyes on her screen, but heard the portly man’s shuffling steps. “Uh, yes, I think so.” Metallic clattering behind her. The scree of metal sliding on metal. “Yes. I’ve got one.”

  “Bring it.” Sam crouched low to the ground and smoothed the earth before him. With one finger, he drew a rectangle in the dirt.

  Lacey closed in, moving around in front of him so she had a clear view of the rectangle. She noted the size: about two feet by one foot.

  Beau trotted up with the shovel. Sam stood and took the tool. He moved around to the long side of the rectangle, set the blade of the shovel just outside of it and carefully pushed it into the ground with one foot. The ground was hard, packed, the shovel only slicing down a couple inches. Sam repositioned the blade and stepped on it more heavily. The blade sank deeper into the ground. Again. And again.

  Come on, Lacey thought. Be there. Be there.

  The thunk of the blade hitting something hard. Sam scraped some of the surface dirt away.

  Sunlight shone on old dry, gray wood.

  ~~~
/>
  SEVENTEEN

  Lacey settled onto the ground, sitting cross-legged, still filming. At sight of the wood grain, her breath had left her, taking with it the tensions and expectations that had kept her upright.

  Beau took the shovel and bladed away chunks of dirt while Sam looked for, and found, the edge of the small coffin. Together they cleared all the dirt from the top and around the sides. The plain gray box had no ornamentation, no incising, nothing to indicate what rested inside. It could just as easily be a box of oranges, Lacey thought, instead of what it was.

  Beau set the shovel blade down along the short side of the box, ready to pry it up out of the ground, but Sam stopped him.

  “We should get the authorities here,” he said.

  Beau blinked at him. “Oh. Oh, yes, of course.” The big man glanced up the street. “But not those yo-yos at the police station.”

  “Is there a medical examiner in town?” Lacey asked.

  “Not in Meadeview,” he said. “But there is in Meade Falls.” Beau got out his phone and grinned at her. “And he’s a good friend of mine.”

  The ME, Mike Thornton, arrived in twenty minutes. Beau introduced everyone and explained briefly what they had.

  Mike, a tall, thin man with short sandy hair, took copious pictures of the coffin and the site, making notes in a small notebook as well.

  “Any idea who it is?” he asked.

  “Oh, we know exactly who it is,” Lacey said. She pulled the sheaf of documents from her pack. “Claire Gabrielle Stowe. She died in 1928.”

  Mike did a double-take, patently surprised. He took the papers and glanced over them. “You’re sure?”

  “We’re sure,” Sam said. “Her mother dug her up out of the Paupers’ Field in Westbrook and buried her here. She couldn’t inter her daughter in the churchyard because she was illegitimate, so she put her as close to it as she could. Just outside the fence.”

  Mike turned, scanning the open ground. “Fence? Churchyard?”

  “It’s all gone now,” Sam said. “But it was right here.”

  Mike cast a sidelong glance at his friend. Beau grinned. “He’s telling the truth. It’s all there, in the papers.”

  The ME shrugged. He folded the papers and jammed them in his back pocket, then pulled out several pairs of blue nylon gloves, put on one pair and passed the others around.

  “Okay. Want to help me with this?”

  ~~~

  EIGHTEEN

  Two days later, Sam and Lacey drove from the hotel in Meade Falls to the small cemetery on the outskirts of town. This was a town cemetery, not a county one, and was tidy and well kept. Sam pulled into the parking lot next to Beau’s white pickup.

  “Morning, folks,” the portly man said cheerfully. He stuck his hand out and shook with both Sam and Lacey. “I’m glad you could stick around an extra day.”

  “We wouldn’t miss this,” Lacey said. “And we finally got in a little hiking around this beautiful area. We’re just so glad your friend Mike could fast track his investigation. Getting the remains back so quickly is pretty phenomenal.”

  “Well, this is not exactly LA,” Beau said, motioning around them. “We’re a little more able to cut through the red tape here. Plus he said all your documentation made it easy. The bones were absolutely consistent with a four day old infant female, and the remains were consistent with being in the ground for ninety years. The hardest part was finding details about the construction of the box, but once he verified that with old records from the cemetery in Westbrook, it was easy.”

  Just then another car pulled into the lot. Abby and Hazel climbed out, then helped Winona out of the front passenger seat. Abby retrieved a rolling walker from the trunk, one with a built-in seat so Winona could sit down.

  Lacey made the introductions. Beau greeted the two younger women, then went to crouch down in front of Winona.

  “I want to thank you personally for the information you gave Lacey and Sam. Without that, we might never have solved the mystery of the fires.”

  Winona took one of Beau’s hands in both of hers and held it in her lap. Her silver-haired head bobbed weakly. “You were the one who called them,” she said, smiling from Beau to the pair of investigators. “They freed that poor girl, just like they said they would.”

  “It was a team effort,” Lacey said happily. “We needed all the pieces to put it all together.”

  A man approached, coming back through the cemetery entrance from the interior. He wore black slacks, a black shirt, and a white collar.

  “Reverend Moynahan,” Beau said, stepping forward. “Thank you for coming. Let me introduce you to everyone.”

  Lacey liked the look of Moynahan; tall and lean with dark hair and lively blue eyes. His handshake grip was gentle but warm, and he was a fellow Irishman to boot. She couldn’t help but contrast his welcoming presence with the suspicious denial of Hillenbrand.

  “We’re all ready for you,” he said quietly.

  He led the small column of six people making their slow way along the cement path that bisected the cemetery. Winona set the pace, gamely pushing forward even as her arms quivered on the walker’s hand rests. Abby and Hazel walked on either side of her, supporting her gently.

  Halfway up the path, Moynahan guided them off to the right. A short way down the row was an open grave and a small white coffin beside it. Delicate gilt flowers ringed the coffin in a tiny but elegant design.

  Lacey caught sight of the coffin and swallowed down the sudden thickness in her throat. It was so small. At least it was more robust than the thin wooden box. She glanced around, at the grounds, the forest beyond and the blue sky above. She wondered if Harmony were there somewhere, watching. She knew the girl was no longer tied to the scene of the fire; finding her child’s grave had set her free. But was she there with them now? She hoped so.

  Sam took her hand and smiled down at her. As if in answer to her thoughts, he nodded.

  Lacey hoped Harmony liked the coffin. They had picked out the prettiest one they could find in the time allotted. Lacey particularly wanted white. White for the innocent. White for the child, not illegitimate, not marked by sin, but the child conceived with love—unfortunately misguided—and hope. And in a couple of weeks, a white marble headstone would mark the grave, as well. Claire and her mother would have a memorial that would speak their names. The story of two lives told in a handful of words. A cautionary tale to be sure.

  “Let us pray,” Reverend Moynahan said.

  Lacey, still clutching Sam’s hand, bowed her head.

  ~~~

  Thank You for Reading

  I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you did, I would greatly appreciate a short review on Amazon or your favorite book website. Reviews are crucial for any author, and even just a line or two can make a huge difference.

  --MJB

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Melissa Bowersock is an eclectic, award-winning author who writes in a variety of fiction and non-fiction genres: contemporary, western, action, romance, fantasy and spiritual, satire and biography. She lives in a small community in Northern Arizona with her husband and an Airedale terrier.

  For more information, visit

  http://www.newmoonrising.net

  or

  http://www.melissabowersock.com

  Find Me Online on Twitter and Facebook or visit my blog at:

  http://mjb-wordlovers.blogspot.com

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