The Searing

by John Coyne

  THE SEARING

  By John Coyne

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Crossroad Digital Edition published 2019

  Previous publication by Necon E-books—2011

  LICENSE NOTES

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  Meet the Author

  John Coyne is the author of 26 books of occult, mainstream fiction and non-fiction, several of which has been bestsellers. He also wrote the novelization of The Legacy, starring Sam Elliott. His novel Hobgoblin was re-published by Dover Press in November, 2015. John has published three novels focused on golf, his secret passion. His last novel, published in 2014, was entitled Long Ago and Far Away and set in Africa, Spain, and the United States. A collection of his short stories A Game in the Sun was published in 2019 by Cemetery Press. His articles have appeared in dozen of national publications including Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure, Glamour, Foreign Affairs, Redbook, Diversion; he has written reviews for The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. John, who has lived in Ethiopia, Menorca, Spain, and Washington, D.C., now resides in Pelham Manor, New York, and is married to the book and magazine editor, Judith Coyne. He can be reached at:www.johncoynebooks.com

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  For Al Montesi, my teacher

  Acknowledgments

  For their help in the research and writing of this novel, I would like to thank Derek V. Goodwin, Tom Hebert, Susan Goodman, Gerald Allan Schwinn, Misty Kuceris, John Payne, and once again, my editor, Judith Wederholt.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Fall, 1608

  In the patch of woods above the river, the white-tailed doe woke with the sun. She raised her delicate head and sniffed the wind. She caught the scent of rabbit a hundred feet higher on the hill and heard a beaver slap the water as it slid from the shore into the river. These creatures she did not fear.

  Yet she hesitated, camouflaged in the brown brush and short grasses of a thick stand of trees. She sensed no predators and, unfolding thin legs, she gracefully stood, a young deer, barely four feet tall, brown, silky, and fragile as she picked her way from the bed of leaves.

  The sun had cleared the horizon, and was high enough to shine on the water that ran from Fairfax Stone in the Appalachian Mountains down to Point Lookout in the Chesapeake Bay. The young deer did not know the source or length of this river, or that the Algonquin Indians called it Patawomeck.

  Nor did she know, this bright fall morning, that a white man named John Smith was sailing up river to plot the unexplored territory of the New World for European settlers. The year was 1608, and this anonymous white-tailed doe had less than one hour to live.

  Only the unexpected snapping of a dry twig or the fluttering of quail from grass startled her, and then she stood perfectly still, hidden by natural camouflage in the wild woods, her heart throbbing against her side.

  When her fear subsided, she stepped out of the woods and into the meadow. The grass here was taller than she, and swept down to the river’s edge in a smooth, unbroken yellow patch. This meadow was contained in a natural amphitheater, formed as if a giant thumbprint had been pressed into a half-mile of soft soil above the riverbed.

  The white-tailed doe moved tentatively forward. This meadow was new to her, but she had picked up the scent of a buck and, excited and frightened by the urge that raced through her, she pursued the scent, moving deeper into the meadow, and disappearing finally in the long grass, her progress marked only by the irregular wave she caused in the still field.

  He stood in the woods beyond the open field, and the strong scent of him filled her damp nostrils, which quivered at each rush of wind. Intoxicated, she leaped forward, racing across the field, her fair brown body leaping clear of the grass with each long bounce; her sharp hooves barely touched the ground and she was up again in a graceful leap.

  It was while she was in midair, in that long split second of sailing over the tall grass, that she was struck. The unseen, incomprehensible bolt of pain and passion pinned the doe in mid-flight and ripped through her brain.

  She fell to the ground in an awkward scramble, flattening the grass as she tumbled out of control and rolled to a quick death. No marks punctured her skin and only a bubble of blood dropped from her nostrils. She lay abandoned in the long grass, wide- eyed and innocent.

  The buck had seen the doe falter in flight and he turned away abruptly, raced into the dark woods, and ran for miles along the shores of the Patawomeck. He never again returned to that meadowland.

  The deer lay abandoned and untouched, her slight body gradually stiffening under the sun, and by late afternoon the scavengers of the woods had found her carrion and begun to tear away the flesh. Later, rodents and ants and a variety of field insects picked the bones clean, leaving behind the skeleton of a white-tailed female deer.

  Those remains lay perfect in the meadow, disturbed only by the changing weather, rain and snow storms, and the annual growths of flowers and grass that grew up between the thin bones and the finely shaped rib cage.

  In time, of course, even this skeleton disappeared as the bones shifted, broke apart, and sank into the soft soil, leaving no witness or reason of death.

  It was simply an unaccountable death in nature, the killing of a female deer on a fall morning in 1608, in the middle of an empty meadowland shaped like a thumb and pressed into the bank of a river the Indians called Patawomeck. It was not the first death in this odd shaped tract of land, nor would it be the last.

  September, 1973

  The child had been with her in the kit
chen, playing on the linoleum floor of the farmhouse. It was a hot afternoon and she had opened the back door to catch what little air there was in the day. She could see across the sloping yard to the barn, where her husband moved slowly in and out of the dark shadows, doing a few odd jobs around the place. It was too hot for any hard work. The heat hung in the air like wet sheets.

  She paused in her own work of canning to glance down at her daughter. The child was rocking back and forth on the floor, her attention concentrated on her right hand, which she held close to her face. She kept turning her hand, endlessly fascinated by the mystery of this small part of her own self. The woman sighed. Just to look at the child made her sad.

  At the age of six, the girl was not like either of her parents. She did not have her father’s dark and blunt body, nor her mother’s thin, hollow looks. Her skin was clear and soft and as translucent as china. Her eyes were dark, and her features perfectly shaped and very fine.

  “Cindy?” The woman spoke, but the child continued to be absorbed with her hand, turning the open palm back and forth, inches before her eyes. She knew the child did not hear her. The doctors had told them that much.

  She was in her own world, safe and secure, and completely cut off. The doctors gave them a word for her illness and books to read, but she had not read them. She did not need a doctor to explain the consequence of her sin.

  She was being punished for her sin. God had given her a daughter and then taken away the child’s mind, leaving her as dumb as one of the farm animals. It was her punishment for what she had done.

  The woman went back to work, losing herself in canning. She kept busy. She drove herself every day on the farm so at night her exhaustion forced her to sleep. She kept at her work for another fifteen minutes, boiling the mason jars in hot water and then filling them with the first of the fall fruit, and did not think of Cindy until she glanced up from the sink and saw that the child was no longer on the kitchen floor.

  The woman glanced around the kitchen and under the table. She peeled off her rubber gloves and turned down the gas flame. She wasn’t worried. Cindy had only just begun to walk, and her progress had been slow. She knew the child couldn’t have gone far.

  But Cindy wasn’t in any of the downstairs rooms or the closets. Her mother even opened the basement door and went down to search the dark cellar. They had found Cindy before hiding in a damp corner, curled up in a fetal position and rocking slowly to the beat of her heart.

  But Cindy wasn’t down there, or anywhere in the house, and the woman ran out and across the yard to tell her husband.

  “She ain’t here,” he said quickly. He stood in the bright sunlight of the barn door, looking toward the giant sycamore and the white farmhouse. He had bad eyesight and he squinted into the distance, squeezing his expression into a tight, fierce grimace, as if he were making a fist of his face.

  “She’ll get into the fields,” she said to her husband. “You know she don’t know about cattle. She’ll get hurt in those fields.” Her husband looked at her, at how the worry consumed her face. She was only twenty-four, but the child had made her an old woman.

  “You go into the cow pasture,” he told her. “I’ll look in the field.”

  And then he struck off, moving slowly, deliberately, toward the open field beyond the farm road. He walked with his head down, as if bent against the wind, but there was no wind. He planted each foot as if claiming the space with his footstep.

  The green alfalfa field swept in a clean, unbroken pattern from the country road that paralleled the river, up the hillside to the crest of the hill. It was only a quarter of a mile wide and less than a mile to the ridge, and the hay field fitted snugly inside the natural amphitheater.

  At the top, where the farm road ran left and circled the cow pasture, he set off and followed a footpath to the Indian burial mound. Standing on the old rocks would give him a high, clear view of the field below. As a child he had played there himself; he and his brothers had made the mound into their fort and fought Indians in the oak grove beyond.

  Weeds and wild flowers had grown up to obscure the structure, and plowing along its banks had further disguised its shape.

  He came up behind the mound, climbing through the thick brush until he was on the flat dirt roof of the rectangular rise. Then he saw the child below him, digging furiously.

  He climbed down, went around the piled mound, and came up behind her. She was kneeling in the long grass, digging into the bottom of the mound, and already she had exposed the cornerstone of the burial site.

  “Cindy,” he said. He was behind her, an arm’s length from his daughter, and he could have easily reached out and enveloped her into his arms. Yet he waited. This sudden, unexpected behavior of hers puzzled him. The child had never left the house before.

  “Cindy…?” He spoke again, but she continued to dig, scooping out the dirt with her small hands, clearing away the face of the flat cornerstone.

  The stone, he saw now, had been cut. A few rough-hewn marks were carved into the face and Cindy had begun to clean them of dirt. She worked carefully, taking meticulous care with the carved lines. When she was finished, she sat back on her haunches and began to rock, the slow, steady monotonous movement that filled her days.

  He studied the crude marks in the flat stone. It wasn’t any kind of language, just a set of awkwardly slanted, meaningless gashes made, he supposed, by the edge of an old plow glancing against the rock. Reaching out for Cindy, he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her closely to him.

  But Cindy wouldn’t be held. She struggled in his arms until he let her free. Then she leaned forward again, closer to the rock, and carefully touched the crude inscription, ran her fingers across the lines slowly, almost reverently, as if she were trying to memorize them:

  ONE

  May, 1980

  Doctor Sara Marks spotted the child standing in the shadows of the barn doorway and was struck immediately by the girl’s exquisite beauty. She could not have been older than twelve and had the thin, long-limbed body of a preadolescent. Her dark eyes, however, suggested she was older. They implied sadness, perhaps even tragedy; it was this look of suffering that made the girl so beautiful.

  In spite of her striking appearance, her face and arms were unnaturally white, and Sara thought she might be ill. She seemed apprehensive, standing in the shadows and staring with hostility at the crowd of people circled around the auctioneer. But then Sara realized, with the intuition gained from years of medical training, that the young girl was not normal, that she was retarded in some way.

  “Doctor Marks!”

  Sara glanced over her shoulder and saw Lewis Magnuson walking toward her, pushing through the crowd to where she stood alone in the shade of the barnyard’s great sycamore.

  “I was thinking you might come,” he said, his loud voice attracting attention. His hand was extended, and she reluctantly submitted hers to his grasp. He shook it violently, and she was thankful that soon she would have nothing more to do with him.

  “Find anything that’s caught your eye, Doc?” He winked.

  His country boy come-on she had experienced before, but it always angered her. Her face flushing, she looked across the yard and saw the young girl rush out of the dark interior of the barn and around the corner. She ran awkwardly, arms and legs flying out in her haste.

  “Who is that child?” Sara asked.

  Lewis Magnuson glanced up to see the girl disappear into the field of corn, thrashing through the stiff stalks, stumbling forward as if pursued.

  “That’s Cindy, Bruce Delp’s girl. She’s got that autism. Can’t talk. Lives in her own little world. No one knows what causes it.” He would have continued, but Sara quickly silenced him, saying, “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, yes, I guess you would.” The big man chuckled. “Is that your specialty, Doc? Children, I mean? You’re a pediatrician, aren’t you? Or one of those gynecologists?” He was grinning good-naturedly, as if her medical degrees
were all a joke.

  “I’m a pediatrician doing research in endocrinology.”

  Magnuson snapped his fingers and responded. “You work for the government?”

  “At the National Institutes of Health.” She replied curtly, but her coolness was wasted on him.

  “Well, there’s so many of you moving out here, it’s difficult remembering who’s a doctor, or an undersecretary, or a White House aide. I’m just a country boy myself, and we’re not used to so much importance.” He kept grinning, and now there was perspiration above his lips and across his forehead. It made his face shine like silver.

  “And just when will we be moving out here, Mr. Magnuson?” Sara gestured toward the meadow beyond the barnyard. “Those houses don’t seem anywhere near completion.”

  “Another three or four weeks at the most,” Magnuson declared, his voice booming again. He was being expansive once more, taking credit.

  “Now have you found anything among all this old farm equipment that you’d like for your new home?” He gestured toward the crowd gathered in the yard between the barns and the farmhouse.

  The crowd was getting larger, and people were getting restive, waiting for the auction to begin. Most were farmers from farther south in Virginia, and from across the river in Maryland. Sara could see the license plates of trucks and cars parked in the open field below the farmhouse.

  “It seems a shame,” she remarked.

  “What’s that, Doc?” Magnuson had taken out an enormous handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his face. He used the handkerchief like a wash cloth, and it left his face polished.

  “That he had to sell the land, give up his farm.”

  “You can’t make a living today with a small place like this, but old Delp did all right. It’s about the last farm left on the Potomac within commuting distance of Washington. He got himself top dollar for these acres, and all you people got yourselves a new co-op village.”