Surprised by Robins’s words as well as by his tone of voice, Charlie raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Old Doc brought him here, just as he told your son. I found out through my grandfather’s lawyer. Old Doc left the boy nearly everything. He was the one who arranged for Abigail to take him in.” Robins hesitated. “I know it sounds hard to believe, but according to Abigail, my grandfather told her that Jamey was his child.”
“Who by?” Charlie asked, obviously stunned, and then, before Robins had a chance to provide an answer, said, “I mean, that’s kind of crazy, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Robins said. “The only problem is, I don’t know how else to explain why my grandfather would have even known the boy, much less whv he would make him the major beneficiary of his will. And there’s something else. Last night, I found a hidden room up in the attic of old Doc’s place. There was a crib in it.”
“Jesus.” Charlie shook his head. “It’s pretty hard to swallow. But then I’m finding a lot pretty hard to swallow right now,” he said, rubbing his head. “I need to shift through some of this stuff first. . . kind of think it out on my own.” He waited a moment, then said, “I guess I’ll be going over to Tommy Lee’s.” He drew a deep breath. “You mind staying here with Lou Anne?”
“Sure,” Robins answered.
2
At the Anderson Funeral Home Charlie got out of his car and went to the front door. When there was no answer, he walked around the side of the house. The first thing he saw was the back door standing wide open.
“Tommy Lee? You in here?” Charlie called out. He waited, then walked inside. At the end of the little hallway, he turned and looked into the main room. The room where old Doc had been laid out.
“Shit,” Charlie whispered.
Doc’s coffin lay overturned on the floor. Around it was a pool of blood. Charlie stood there staring down at it, then walked to where the coffin lay. He nudged it with his foot. It slid across the blood. There was no point in turning it over: Charlie could tell by the ease with which it had moved that the coffin had to be empty.
He kneeled down anyway and lifted the coffin up. Something tumbled out. Charlie dropped the coffin and jumped back, then saw that it was only clothing. He lifted the coffin again and pulled out a pair of men’s black trousers, a shirt, a pair of shoes, some socks, necktie. They all belonged to old Doc; they were the things he had been laid out in. But there were a few other items, too. A pair of men’s pajamas, soaked in blood, shredded. As if something had not merely ripped and sliced them up, but also had half devoured them. Charlie held them up, then dropped them, the blood sticky on his thumb and index finger.
Shakily Charlie got to his feet and looked around the parlor, wiping his fingers off on his trousers. He went to the steps that led upstairs, to the living area of the house. Something was lying on the middle steps. Charlie went up four steps and stooped over.
It was a woman’s housecoat, a nightgown, and a pair of once pink powder puff slippers. They were soaked in blood. But there was something else on them, too, something that had seeped not only onto the slippers and nightgown but on the steps as well. He put his fingers to one of the steps, then smelled it. He had noticed the same smell the few times he had gone back to see Tommy Lee in the area where he worked on the corpses. It was embalming fluid.
Charlie rubbed the stuff on the side of his trousers, then walked quickly up the rest of the steps. The door at the top was open and, as he stepped into the upstairs hallway, he called out Tommy Lee’s name, then Priscilla’s, and then Alvin’s. But there was not a sound.
They were gone, every one of them.
Charlie sat in his car and stared at the Andersons’ house. What do I do now? he thought.
He started up the car and drove directly to Abigail Parkers. Not that he figured Jamey would be there, but maybe Abigail would be able to shed some light on why old Doc had brought him to Lucerne in the first place.
He got out of his car and went up to the front porch. He knocked. No answer. “Abigail! Miss Parker!” he yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth. There still was no response, so Charlie walked around the side of the house where Abigail s battered old Studebaker was parked. He looked around and saw that on the back porch the screen door was open. He walked up the outside steps and looked around the cluttered porch. “Jamey! Abigail!” he called, but the only answer was the creaking of the boards under his feet.
He went up the steps and found Jamey’s room. The bed was just as Larry had described. Charlie picked up the end of one of the pieces of rope and stared at it. Then he went back out into the hallway and walked to Abigail’s room.
The door was shut. He knocked on it, then tried to push it open, but something was in the way. Something heavy. He leaned his shoulder against the door and began to push. Little by little the door gave, allowing him to see through the crack at what was blocking the way. It was the unfinished back of a huge piece of furniture. An armoire. Charlie swallowed hard, then commenced pushing with all his strength until finally he had pushed the armoire far enough hack for him to slip through the doorway into Abigail’s room.
“Shit,’’ he said aloud.
He saw the hatbox on the floor and picked it up. He turned it over. Four neatly tied packets of money dropped to the floor. But Charlie didn’t even look at them. He was staring at something else at the foot of the armoire. It was a woman’s nightgown. And like the one he had found at the Anderson Funeral Home, this one, too, was covered with blood. He looked around the room. There was not a trace of Abigail.
3
“Honey? What’s wrong?”
Charlie stood at the doorway into his kitchen. He glanced at his wife, then quickly looked away. “Nothing.”
“What did you find?”
He hesitated. Then, looking at Robins, who was seated at the kitchen table, he said, “You want to step outside a second?”
Lou Anne looked from Robins back to her husband. “What is it, Charlie?”
“I just need to talk to Jerry here a little bit.”
But Lou Anne was firm. “You can say it to me, whatever it is. If it’s important, I want to know, Charlie.’
“Lou Anne, I—”
But Lou Anne shook her head. “I’ve lived with you for twenty years. Don’t you think I can tell just by looking at your face, Charlie?”
Charlie stood there a moment longer, looking confused, dazed, unsure what to do next. Then again he nodded and sat down. “Okay.”
When he had finished telling Robins and his wife what he had found and what he hadn’t found, he suddenly got up. “Shit, I don’t know anymore. I just don’t know anymore. We got to figure something out, though. Some way of making sense of everything. Without going crazy.”
“How?” Robins asked softly.
As the two men lapsed into silence, Lou Anne stood up quickly and walked out of the room. Charlie looked over at Robins, then followed her.
She was sitting in a chair in their living room, her eyes fixed on the floor. Charlie went over and put his hands on her shoulders, in her hair. “You okay?” He kissed the top of her head.
She nodded. Then, still without looking up at him, she said, Didn’t it remind you of something, Charlie? Finding their clothes like that, just lying on the floor?”
“Of what?”
“All I could think of when you told me was that newspaper Aura Lee Hargis carries around with her, the one she clips out pictures from and puts on her walls.” Charlie realized what his wife was talking about. The staged photographs from The Rapture Gazette, the ones that showed what the moment of rapture would be like, just before the Last Judgment when the righteous were to be bodily transported to heaven. The empty bicycles, the beds left vacant except for a discarded pair of pajamas.
Except what you found was all upside down, twisted around, a deliberate mock
ery of what people like Aura Lee think it’s going to be like, Lou Anne whispered.
Charlie frowned, moving around in front of the chair. “What exactly are you getting at, honey?”
She looked right into his eyes. “What else has to happen, Charlie? What’s it going to take to convince you that something terrible is taking place here? Right here in Lucerne. And that it’s been building up to this for years and years? Simon, Luther, Catherine.”
For Christ’s sake, honey, don’t you hear what you’re saying? Charlie said. “If you’re right, then”—he shook his head, unable to countenance the idea—“then the whole world is upside down.” He walked to the window. Everything out there—the sunlight in the leaves and on the grass, the cloudless sky—everything told him that the world was just as it had always been, that everything would be okay.
And as if Lou Anne could read his mind, she stood up and said, “Remember what you thought the night Catherine disappeared? You thought it would be all right then, too, didn’t you? You couldn’t even imagine things turning out the way they did. But they did turn out like that, Charlie. Didn’t they?”
Charlie nodded yes. “I don’t know why, but I just can’t let go of the idea that there’s always a way of working things out. I guess it’s how I was brought up. To look on the bright side, I reckon,” he said, looking up, his eyes smiling despite the irony of what he had just said.
“I know you were. And everybody admires you for it. But Charlie, there’s another side, too. It’s dark, darker than we’ve ever wanted to see. But it doesn’t help to pretend it’s not there. To wish it away. Or even just to wait and hope it will go away on its own. Because it won’t. Christ, Charlie, haven’t we learned that vet? We kept saying: ‘It’s in the past. Let the dead bury the dead.’ But they won’t. They keep coming back. Over and over. Simon, Luther, Catherine. They’re still out there, whispering to that boy. And to us, too. Haunting us.” Charlie noticed then how ferocious Lou Anne could look when she said something she really meant. Like now. Her eyes were flashing and the sunlight was streaming in through the window behind her like a halo. She looked beautiful.
“But if it’s as you say, what can I do? I just can’t accept not being able to do something. I guess I have to feel that I can make a difference. Do something to straighten everything out.”
“I know.” A cloud had blocked the sun now and she was just Lou Anne again. Charlie stood and embraced her, breathing the smell at the hollow of her neck.
Lou Anne said nothing. Charlie waited, then let her go and walked to the door. “I can’t give up the way I think. I just can’t, honey. No matter what, I have to go on the way I am. I don’t know what’s wrong with Jamey, but whatever it is, I’m going on the assumption that there’s something I can do to help. Him and Larry both. I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up on either one of them.”
4
This time Robins went along with Charlie. The two men first drove down to Charlie’s office. Inside, Charlie picked up the telephone receiver. “I got the number of the GBI someplace around here,” he said, opening the top drawer of his cluttered desk. “Just never have had much call to use it.”
“The Georgia Bureau of Investigation? What are you going to tell them?” Robins asked.
Charlie shook his head. “Problem is, if I tell them too little, they won’t pay it any attention. And if I tell them too much, they’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t call them at all,” Robins said after a moment. “What exactly would you say about Jamey? Or about what Larry told you he saw last night? You just going to leave it out? And if you do, what do you have to go on? Some bloodstains on some clothing? People who should be there but who aren’t? More than likely, they’ll figure it’s a hoax. At least until you can come up with a body.”
“You got a point.”
“Basically, we got two choices here. The first is that Jamey—or some part of Jamey—is behind what’s going on. Maybe he’s killing these people in his sleep or when that other personality takes over. The second choice is ...well, that something’s going on here that’s way out of anybody’s control, including the GBI. If it’s just Jamey doing it, then you and I probably can take care of it. At least we can find him and lock him up by ourselves. And if it’s more than Jamey, then I’m not sure what anybody can do.”
Yeah, Charlie said. He had found the number of the GBI, had written it on a piece of paper, and was staring down at it. “I just keep thinking that there must be some other way of explaining it. Something I’ve overlooked.” Charlie held up the piece of paper, then let it flutter down onto his desk. “Maybe it would make more sense if you and I just tried to handle it ourselves. At least for as long as we can.” Charlie paused, then picked up the slip of paper, folded it, and put it in his pocket. He stood up. “You feel like doing some exploring?” Charlie headed for the door. “This hunch I got. Something Larry said. About what Alvin told Larry last night. How they were all going out to wait at the well. I think we’d better check it out—that is, if I can still find the place. Anyway, you up for it?”
Robins nodded. “Sure.”
A few minutes after Charlie and Robins left the sheriff’s office, Lou Anne walked back to her bedroom. She found her copy of The New English Bible and sat down on the edge of her bed. She had just started to read in it when she heard a peculiar noise. She got up and called out Charlie’s name, thinking he must have forgotten something and come back. But then she realized the sound had come from Larry’s room. She went to his door and quietly opened it.
The bed was empty. And his window was standing wide open.
“Larry?” she called out. But she knew there would be no answer.
It was nearly one o’clock when Charlie pulled his car onto the shoulder of the dirt road. He got out and stood in the dust. “I think this is about as close as we’re going to get to it from the road,” he said.
“How far back is it?”
“A pretty good ways. It took me nearly an hour to get there the one time I went out to it, and that was only because your granddad was leading the way, nearly fifteen years ago.”
Soon the two men were deep in the woods. Charlie stopped to help Robins disentangle his foot from the ground crawlers. “I wish I could tell you that any of this looks familiar. But it doesn’t.”
“Are we lost?”
Charlie didn’t answer. “Let’s try this way.”
Another twenty minutes passed and the two men seemed to be going in a circle. “Shit,” Charlie whispered. “Sorry I got you into this.”
“You think we should just try to get back?”
“I reckon.”
“Which way is back?” Robins asked, looking around him at the nearly impenetrable wall of forest.
“I think this is.” And so they again started up. Nearly a half hour passed before they stopped. Charlie looked around. “Seems like we’re just getting in deeper.” He glanced back at Robins. But Robins was staring off to his right.
“Look. What’s that over there?”
Charlie squinted. “I’m not sure.” The two men pushed their way through a clump of privet and looked down into a little clearing.
“Is this it?”
Charlie nodded yes. There, in the middle of the clearing, was the old well, its walls crumbled down, its mouth covered with a thicket of vines and leaves. But there was something else, too.
The two men stared at it. It was a rope. One end was tied to a nearby tree, the other descended through the leaves into the well. It was taut as the string of a bow.
Robins went down the little slope. When he got to the well, he bent over and pulled away some of the leaves. “Something’s down there,” Robins said.
By this time Charlie had come over to where Robins was standing. Without saying a word, Charlie took the rope in his hands and began to pull. Robins went around behind and began
hauling on the rough rope. As the two men pulled in silence, Robins kept his eyes on the leaves covering the mouth of the well. Suddenly, and at the same moment, both men stopped.
Something was sticking up from the mouth of the well.
Robins stared at it. “Hold on, Charlie,” he said, letting go of the rope. He went over and pushed away the leaves from around the thing.
It was a foot.
He could see only a little way into the darkness, but enough to make out the spot where the rope was tied around the ankle. He reached down and took hold of the wet and slimy leg. “Christ,” he said with a gasp, then began to pull the body up.
Suddenly the face broke through the leaves, a vine catching around the boy’s neck and holding it there.
Robins stared at it.
The face was covered with leeches. Over the eyes and all through the wet scalp. Down the neck and under the wet shirt. Everywhere. Even in the limply open mouth.
Suddenly Robins felt himself getting dizzy and, before he could recover, the body had slipped out of his grasp. “Grab it!” Robins yelled. But Charlie didn’t move. He just stood there, watching as the body plunged back down through the leaves. The old damp rope went taut against the sharp edge of one of the rocks that made the mouth of the well. A second later, it snapped. Robins listened, then heard the sickening sound of the body hitting the muck at the bottom of the well. He pushed the leaves aside and peered down but saw nothing but the darkness.
“Who was it?” Robins asked.
“Tommy Lee’s boy. Alvin. The one Larry said he saw last night. The one who kept talking about how they were all coming out to the well.”
The two men just stood there, not having any idea what to do next.
“God knows how many more could be down there,” Charlie said. “It’s a mighty deep well.”
Robins looked through the entangled vines and leaves at the black patches. He understood what Charlie meant. “Christ,” he whispered.
Deliver Us From Evil Page 28