“The new tests? The blood that was on the little shard of glass?”
“Yes indeed. Now, you’ve never said whose blood that is. Am I to assume that it was from your friend Mr. Cottonwood? In which case, I’m afraid, our efforts have been in vain. And you, young man, know with a certainty few others possess just who your father is.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Alan. He hung up the phone and looked up at Louise, who was already staring at him.
“Was it bad news?” she asked.
He nodded his head.
Louise sighed. “Well, you did your best, Alan. That’s all any of us can do. I’m sorry. Sorrier than you, I guess.”
He looked up, realizing how she’d mistaken his meaning. But how could he explain?
She set down the big tin of green beans and came over to him. “So it looks like you’re a Cottonwood after all.” She bent down and placed a kiss on the side of his head. “And I got myself a grandson. Well, God bless you, boy.”
He could feel the tears coming to his eyes. He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t say she was wrong, that he was not her grandson, that Jim Cottonwood was not his father. That his real father was a man he hated more than anyone else in the world, his own grandfather, the Reverend Martin Johnson.
“Now, where you going?” Louise asked. “At this time of night?”
It was a good question, and he had no answer. “Out,” he said. “Just out.”
“Well, put a jacket on anyhow. It’s cold out there.”
Alan did as he’d been told, feeling resentful but grateful at the same time. Was there anyone in the world who actually cared a damn for him besides Louise Cottonwood?
He realized there was, and that she was the only person in the world that he could talk to at this point.
Diana Turney.
She didn’t know that he loved her, or how much. But she was kind, and he could talk to her, and where else was there to go? Who else would understand?
Who else was there to love?
21
It amazed her how much she was still in control. After all that had happened. And still might.
If only the Camry’s spare didn’t give out. Tommy had said it was low. How far had she to go to get home again? She looked down at the trip odometer. It registered only 6.7 miles. How could that be? Oh yes, she’d reset it after she’d backed out of the entry ramp to 371, where this whole nightmare had begun. Another 7 miles or so. She must drive slowly and watch for potholes.
Was there something she’d forgotten? Some telltale item of her own that had been left in that hellish cabin? No, no, she’d been quite careful. She’d taken her clothes, her purse. She’d washed the glass she’d drunk from, but there was no knowing how many other things she might have touched. But no one would think to look for her. No one had seen the two of them together. And she had not murdered Tommy. It was not even Tommy who’d been murdered.
A dog had killed a deer inside his house. A freakish accident. That’s what would be discovered.
And yet she knew otherwise. She could remember every moment. How she had led him from the sauna toward his death, and called him “dear.” She’d not meant “deer,” not consciously. How could she have? But it had been a part of her witchcraft.
She was a witch. She’d always wished it, and now here it was, the capability, the power. The very deed.
She regretted the man’s death, and she could not truthfully say she had not willed it. Beauty had killed him, his own dog. But had she not given the command? That much blood was on her hands. And on her clothes, a great deal more, quite visible, an accusation, for as the dog had torn Tommy apart—or the deer he had become—the blood of that contest had drenched her clothes where they had lain on the recliner.
She must burn those clothes as soon as she got home and forget what had happened, blot it out and never think of it again. One could do that. By an act of will. Just as now, by an act of will, she was driving her Camry home. Bad things might happen, but they might also unhappen. She would burn the bloodstained clothes. She would erase the horror from memory.
Here was the turnoff. She hung right and tilted her head back with a silent rejoicing. She checked the clock on the dashboard: 8:42. Could so much happen so quickly? It could. And there was her house, her home, safety.
She’d already thought out what to do. She would take the soiled clothes, everything she had taken from the chair in Tommy’s cabin, and burn them on the grate of the smokehouse. There seemed an almost mathematical equivalence in that act, a biblical exactness of justice.
The moment when she stepped out of the car and the cold air hit her face and her bare legs was pure bliss. She had been burning up alive inside the car, even with the heater off and her wearing nothing but her shearling coat. Which she unbuttoned now and opened to let the chilled air minister to her naked body. It was like standing under a cold shower on a sweaty summer day, first the shock, then the shiver of pleasure—a shiver not of the skin but arising deep within, mounting her spine, like water surging from a fountain, until it hit the base of her neck and then exploded inside her brain like fireworks. It had been years since she’d felt this orgasmic rush of liquid pleasure course up her spine—always at moments of supreme drunkenness, and never singly but in waves.
When it had passed, the chill of the air no longer felt like a balm, and Diana wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes and cinched the coat closed with its belt. Brenda had a name for such moments, when your emotions seemed to move in the opposite direction to the real events in your life, depression after some big success or, like this, elation in the face of a major disaster: I.A.—inappropriate affect.
The clothes, she reminded herself. She unlocked the Camry’s trunk and gathered them up from where they lay atop the flatted tire. There would be a lighter and starter fluid in the crevice of the barbecue, where the Kellogs burned their trash. And where Diana might more easily burn these clothes. Except that that rite had to be performed on the smokehouse grate. She did not know why that seemed so necessary, only that it was an essential part of her witchcraft to stand by the fire and bask in its heat. Tonight she would be Ishtar ascending to heaven, one piece of clothing at a time. The Snake Woman shedding her skin.
It was Wesley, of course, whose will impelled her, whose power was now so much greater that he could summon her without exertion. Day by day, as Diana had busied herself about the farmhouse, she had been tangling herself in the cilia of that swollen, invisible anemone that Wes Turney had become, that sac of blind hunger that at last was being offered nourishment. As Diana approached the smokehouse across the hard-packed snow, bearing her offering—her own clothes moist with the blood of her first victim—those cilia were all atremble.
She placed the clothing on the iron grate, doused it with the fluid, and applied the butane lighter at arm’s length. It flamed with the first ratcheting of the wheel. A foot of the pantyhose caught fire, and the flame lengthened and brightened, spreading quickly to the heavier fabric of the jeans and shirt. Another wave of pleasure coursed through Diana as the fire flared up, and she let the shearling coat fall to her feet.
It seemed as though her flesh and the flames were a single entity, and that within the circumambient air was yet another entity, etheric but real, like the fires of Pentecost, a living Wisdom that entered her shocked flesh at each pore.
“Go to the door,” Wes urged her. “To the door that you closed so long ago. Open it. Let me see what you’ve become.”
When the flames within her flesh had diminished, she obeyed that prompting, thinking to herself as she did so that there might be something in there that would be stained by the soot. For our conscious thoughts, even when our actions are least our own, still have some little film of plausibility, like the reflective surface of a pool of water.
And yet, when she did open the door and saw her father hanging there, upside down, bleeding, in pain, she was neither surprised nor dismayed. For he appeared just as she had left him. It was not
a winter night but an autumn afternoon…
… and she had wished his accident. She had seen him on the roof of the smokehouse, and all the resentment she had felt at lunchtime and for every waking moment for the past two weeks focused on his crouched body, hating him, wishing him dead. It was just then, as he brought his hammer down to nail another shake in place, that the main crossbeam collapsed and he toppled forward into the smokehouse. There was one sharp yelp of pain, and then a long silence.
It was what he deserved. She wasn’t the least bit sorry for him. He had always been against her, always favored Janet, and today was just the crowning example. Janet was heading off with her Brownie troop for a weekend holiday in the Twin Cities, a $22 extravaganza including a Disney ice show, while Diana had to go with her mother to visit her grandmother in the hospital in St. Cloud and miss her best friend’s birthday party because her father didn’t have the time to come pick her up when the party was over. She would have to sleep on the couch in her uncle Maurice’s trailer while her mother and uncle and his stupid friends got drunk. It was all hugely and horribly unfair, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
It was then that her mother, from the back of the house, had shouted out her name. “Di! Di, we’re leaving!”
She hated being called Di. She hated everything about her life, but she especially hated her father, who now, from inside the smokehouse, also called her name. She could not resist the temptation. She went to the door of the smokehouse and opened it and took one look, and sealed her heart against him.
And closed the door.
When they were in the car, her mother and Janet and herself, her mother asked, “So, is your father finished up there?” and Diana had answered, “No, he’s still pounding away.”
And the next day, when they came back from St. Cloud and there was no sign of her father, and his pickup was still inside the garage, Diana didn’t say a word. She left it to her mother to find him in the smokehouse hours later, hanging the way Diana had left him, with the meat hook lodged in the back of his knee and the blood that Diana had seen dripping down from his face all dried, and the flies swarming about. And even then, sneaking her second look while her mother blubbered into the phone, she had not felt the least bit sorry.
It was what he deserved.
“So,” Wesley said, reading her thoughts, “I deserved to die? Because you couldn’t go to a birthday party? Or because I raped you? Which is it?” The flies were swarming about his staring, upside-down eyes.
“You’re dead,” she told him.
“And you?” He answered the question himself: “You’re a witch. Full of hatred. Always have been.” He tried to spit at her, but his blood, even as a ghost, was clotted, and the red drool didn’t reach escape velocity. It ran down his cheek and then along his eyebrow.
She offered no denial. She felt the old hatred firm in her heart again.
“You’re dead,” she insisted again.
“But I would be alive today—alive and lame—if you’d acted like”—one of the many flies flew into his mouth, and he spit it out—“like a daughter!”
“You break my heart.”
“Your heart cannot be broken. It isn’t there. You’ve become a witch. No love left in you. There was never much. Now there’s none. You will kill everyone you once loved, as you killed me. And I’ll help. I’ll help.”
“Go to hell,” she told him.
“Where else?” he answered.
And was gone.
“Diana!” a familiar voice called out.
Familiar, but even so she could not recognize it. She stood there naked, freezing, aware, for a moment, of some awful emptiness and then of nothing at all.
22
He’d never seen a live woman entirely naked before—and there Diana was, the woman he loved, unconscious, spread out before him, the way he’d imagined her once: in a dentist’s office, anesthetized, her mouth slightly open. In his fantasy he hadn’t imagined the drool seeping out from the corner of her mouth. He’d imagined only their kiss, and then backed away from the daydream guiltily. But here was that daydream actually happening, and it was sinister much more than romantic.
“Diana?”
When that produced no results, he tried again, a little louder. Still she didn’t stir. He wanted to know what had happened, why she was lying in the snow, naked except for her winter boots. But the first order of business was to get her in out of the cold. He got down on his knees beside her and tilted her forward and got her right arm over his left shoulder, then tried to lift her into a standing position. But she was too heavy, or he was too weak. He stooped lower and got his right arm under her knees and then, still kneeling, lifted her legs up separately and got a better grip on her upper body. This time he got her off the ground, except for her back end, but he was on his knees and could rise no higher with her in his arms.
At last, by tilting her forward into a sitting position, he was able to lift her up by her armpits and drag her along backwards with her bootheels tracing two lines through the fresh snow. He almost took a tumble when his feet tangled in her sheepskin coat, which was lying on the snow in front of the brick barbecue attached to the rear end of the little shack where he’d found her. Was it an outhouse? Was that why she had no clothes on? Why would an outhouse have its own barbecue?
She began to groan when they were halfway to the back door of the house. Alan was frozen from sheer embarrassment. For a moment he considered just dumping her there in the snow before she awoke and recognized him. And then he remembered how she had found him in almost the same way, unconscious in the snow. Just before the phone call from his lawyer had awakened him, he’d had a Winner’qus fortune message playing Taipei. It said, “Strange new experiences will add to your joy of living.” Maybe his Taipei obsession was like believing in fortune cookies—or maybe, as Diana so often insisted, there are no coincidences and the world is full of signs and omens. Maybe, as another Taipei message he often encountered explained, unseen forces were working in his favor, prompting him, bringing him here at the moment Diana needed him most.
At the door Alan found himself with a new problem: it was locked. The key might be in a pocket of the coat he’d tripped over, or in her car on the ring with the ignition key. But he couldn’t go on dragging her about through the snow while he looked, or set her down on the freezing concrete steps. He managed to shrug off his coat and position it underneath her like a cushion.
The keys were in the pocket of her coat, and soon he had her inside the house, slumped across the kitchen table, her sheepskin coat spread over her like a blanket. Strangely, her flesh seemed hot and was beaded with sweat, as though she’d just stepped out of a steambath.
Having accomplished this much, he could not think what else to do. Repeating her name did not rouse her, nor did gently shaking her shoulders. He looked about for a blanket or articles of clothing he could help her into, and returned with a pair of fuzzy blue slippers.
She woke as he was on his knees under the table, trying to position her left foot (from which he’d removed the boot) to accept the slipper. She shouted out, reared back in the kitchen chair, and kicked Alan in the face. He felt a thrill of gratitude to know that she’d returned to consciousness. “Diana!” he cried, backing out from under the table, “it’s all right! I’m here.”
“Alan?” She looked down at her bare breasts and pulled her shearling coat tight about her torso in a gesture of belated modesty. “What are you doing here? Where are…?”
“Your clothes? I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “I found you like that outside that little shack behind the house. Lying in the snow. I couldn’t wake you up. So I carried you in here the best I could. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“Hurt me? I don’t understand.”
“I mean I had to drag you through the snow. Why were you…?”
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I still don’t understand why you’re here. How you got in the house. Where my clothes
are. Why you’re taking my boot off.”
“Something happened that I had to talk with you about. So I drove here. And when I got here, there were tracks up the driveway and your car was standing with the door open. I called out your name a couple times.”
“We’ll have to discuss all this later,” she said, rising from the table, glaring at him. “I have to get some clothes on.”
He remained as she’d left him, crouched on the kitchen linoleum, her fuzzy slipper in his hand. Did she think that he was responsible for her nakedness? Had there been some act of violence that had left her in a state of shock?
Had she been raped? The possibility so alarmed him, it seemed at once so likely, that he sprang up and ran from the kitchen to the foot of the stairs. “Diana! Are you all right?”
Halfway up to the landing she paused to remove her unlaced boot. It was then the lights went off all over the house.
“Alan! God damn you!”
“It wasn’t me, Diana, I swear. A power line must have gone down somewhere. The snow’s been piling up.”
“Well, then,” she said in her familiar tone of voice, “I’ll change that to just God damn the snow.”
“Diana? I’ll tell you what. I’ll just sit here on the stairs. You get some clothes on. It’s kind of cold in the house. Maybe the furnace is on the blink. Is there a flashlight up there? Or candles? I better not go stumbling around or I’ll knock something over for sure.”
“You do that,” she agreed.
He listened to her irregular footsteps. One boot on and one boot off. He fingered his jaw where she’d kicked him, and smiled. People behaved weirdly in a crisis. Why had he fussed with her slippers, he wondered now. Here was the boot she’d taken off and left on the stairs. He sniffed at the fleecy inside, and grimaced. A ripe smell. But hers, and so he sniffed again, and the second time it seemed almost pleasant. Maybe feet were one of those things like cheese or olives that you had to learn to like.
THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 13