I came to a stop a little to their right and looked down the tracks, trying to sight a train.
“Hear it, Preacher?” Orvid went on.
“I do.” Frazier nodded without looking back.
I didn't hear anything.
“What are you doing, Orvid?” I whispered.
I glanced at Frazier. His face was transformed, the moonlight washed it clean, and his eyes were closed in ecstatic rapture.
“Are you ready?” Orvid asked.
“I am,” Frazier whispered. “God Almighty, I am.”
Tears fought their way past Frazier's shut eyelids, made silver rills down his cheeks.
I craned my neck, strained my eyes to see a train, but there was nothing.
“There's no train coming,” I said to Orvid. “Stop this. You're just tormenting him now. What's the point of that? We have to get him to my truck. We have to take him back to the sheriff.”
“All right,” Orvid sighed.
Orvid took one step backward, and faster than I could see, he raised his blade high in the air, snapping to an etched tableau for a split second.
“No!” I exploded, lunging for Orvid.
“Train's coming,” Frazier whispered, softer than the wind, his face shining.
A terrible, swift lightning cracked Orvid's tableau, the sword vanished into Hiram Frazier's back.
The body fell to earth, at long last dead.
There wasn't a single drop of blood.
I stood frozen, my face inches from Orvid's blade. The crescent moon dangled in the sky, a curl of pale thread. It was a hint of the light that might exist beyond the black sky, a promise of morning.
Sound resumed slowly in the clearing. Doves and tree frogs called, the wind picked up, a draft of cold water washing over everything.
“You're a monster.” My voice was leaden; my eyes steadfastly avoided the body by the tracks. “I have to ⦔
But I couldn't finish my sentence. I didn't know what I had to do.
Orvid's blade had disappeared, and he was leaning on his ornate cane.
“You were telling me at Judy's house,” he said slowly, “about the character who slew the Minotaur. There was a girl waiting for him at the door that led out of the maze.”
“Ariadne?” I mumbled, stunned.
“She gave Theseus a bit of thread to take with him into the labyrinth. He held one end; she stood at the doorway, in the light, holding the other. When he wanted to come home, he followed the thread to her.”
“Yes.” I tried to focus my eyes on Orvid.
“There you go,” he said, his voice a mixture of November air and the scent of last harvest, a warm sound despite the cold that encased it.
There was a rustle in the leaves behind us, and the half-expected voice came pouring into the air, cold and crisp.
“It's done, then.”
I didn't have to turn to see Judy. I could tell she was standing a few feet away.
“Done and done,” Orvid agreed. “Been a long day.”
For the first time his voice sounded tired, but only as if he'd just pulled a double shift at the textile mill.
“It's the end of the slope.” Judy came to Orvid. “All coasting downhill from now on.”
I had the idea that she meant something quite significant, but I just couldn't force my mind to stay with that idea long enough to explore it.
“You planned this all along,” I accused Judy, still unable to look at her.
“I told you this is what I wanted,” she said simply.
I glared at Orvid.
“You called her,” I stammered.
“Didn't have to.” A slight smile was or his lips. “She's been following us.”
“What?” I closed my eyes. “I led you both to this man so you could kill him?”
“You have to know,” Orvid told me firmly, “that I would have found him on my own eventually.”
I could hear the iron in his words and believed him. It was a merciful belief.
“Let's go, honey,” Judy said, taking Orvid's hand. “I've got everything packed.”
“I have to tell Skidmore what happened here,” I began, sounding a little like a child even to myself.
“I know,” Orvid sighed. “It doesn't matter. We really are going to disappear. He'll never find us. And, you know, if you try to stop us now, I'll just have to shoot you. I'm too tired to wrestle or anything, right?”
Judy was standing there, beaming at her beau. She took exactly one second out of her adoration to give me a nod and a wave.
“Good-bye, Dr. Devilin,” she said. “We won't see one another again.”
She returned her entire attention to the man standing beside her. The two of them started off.
“Was that true, Orvid?” I ventured. “The thing you said about the girls in the Thanksgiving play, mentioning Hiram Frazier's name? Or was that just something else to motivate me, like leaving the Bible verse open in my house?”
Orvid sniffed once.
“That's true,” Judy said. “They called the man's name. I heard it.”
“I don't understand.” I could barely see their faces in the moonlight.
Clouds were flying by the moon.
“Weatherman said tomorrow's going to be clear,” Orvid announced softly, readying to close the door. “Should be a bright, sunny day.”
“I could stand that,” Judy told him, smiling.
I couldn't do anything but watch them amble up the hill. Almost before I realized it, they were gone into the woods. A moment after that, car headlights pierced the night, making dancing shadows of a hundred trees. I watched until the light was gone. By then my muscles began to work again, and I headed away from the tracks.
I was afraid to look back at the body on the ground behind me.
Somehow I made my way back to my truck, through the old mill.
It seemed less haunted, more at peace. The brick walls were tired, but still managed to bathe themselves in moonlight and a reminiscence of former glory. Even the weeds had taken on a certain uplift, an aspiration to grander flora. Shadows hiding the corners of the building were purple, a royal cousin of the black that had crouched there before. One of the birds that called out might have been a skylark.
The chrome of the door handle on my truck was cold, but I was grateful for something solid, a clear sensation. I climbed into the cab of the truck. I tried for a while to start the engine. It seemed to take forever.
The drive home was perilous. My mind traveled, like Einstein's mind riding his famous beam of light, across the sky in search of any kind of dawn.
Instead, my thoughts were invaded by Promethean doubts and cold new astrophysics. I thought about
dark matter
. Anything to avoid thinking about the long night's events.
The primary dilemma, I mused, was that if Einstein's theory of gravity was correct, galaxies ought to fly apart in more or less the same manner as my flashlight had when hit by Orvid's knife. But clearly the galaxies were not coming unhinged, at least not ours. The road
before me seemed uncommonly solid, in fact. But if Einstein's theory of gravity was wrong, then nothing would be holding the universe togetherânothing but dark matter. And if initial observations were correct, then the
non
dark matter, the kinc that would make up my hand, the steering wheel, the road, the earth, the sky, and everything I would be capable of experiencing in this reality,
that
kind of matter was in the minority. The vast minority. The kind of matter we are, we and the stars and everything we know, may well occupy as little as 5 percent of the universe, barely a speck of all reality.
It was not the sort of thought I found comforting in the black hours before dawn, driving to Lucinda's house.
It didn't help that the image of Hiram Frazier's body dropping across the railroad tracks kept playing over and over in my head like a looped movie.
By the time I pulled my truck in front of Lucinda's, the mood had crystallized, and everything in my body and mind was hard and brittle.
I turned off the headlights.
I sat there in the truck, motor off, lights off, still in the dead night.
In my mind I was digging in the black dirt of Lucinda's garden with a blue-handled spade she had given me for a birthday long ago. I had just returned to Blue Mountain; she hadn't yet recovered from the death of her husband.
“What's that?” She stood over me.
“Fennel and dill,” I said without looking up.
“What for?”
“You like dill.”
“What about the fennel?”
“I don't know,” I confessed. “It was all they had left at Peterson's. It was a going-out-of-business sale. These little packs were only a penny apiece.”
“Peterson's is going out of business?” She shifted her weight and the full slant of late-afternoon sun hit me in the corner of my left eye.
“Yes. You don't remember driving by there last week?”
“I had a talk with Hammon today,” she told me softly.
Hammon was her dead husband, crushed by a tractor. She often spoke to him in those days, or so she would tell me.
I set down the spade and looked up as best I could in all that light. All I could see was a sepia shadow and a blast of gold. I waited for her to tell me what Hammon had said
“It's all set,” Lucinda said.
“What's all set?”
She was staring down at the seed packets. They were faded and wrinkled, even though they had never been opened. Stamped on the bottom in gray that had once been black was the announcement
Lot Packed for 1998 Season.
“You know these won't come up. They're expired.”
“Seeds don't expire.” I looked down at the packets. “Do they?”
“You'll never get dill out of those little black dots.” Her voice was ghostly.
“Maybe not. But I like being here with you, and digging up the dirt, and sitting out here in the sun.”
“I know. How many times do we have to have the âprocess over product' conversation?”
“As many times as it takes.” I smiled.
“I'm going in. I just wanted you to know that I had the talk with Hammon.” She was a shadow again, silhouetted in the setting sun.
“Okay,” I said quickly, “what talk?”
“Hammon said he's moving on now. He said it was our turn, yours and mine. It was okay with him.”
That was all. She went back in the house. She never brought it up again, and I never asked.
The seeds did come up. They appeared before Thanksgiving that year. The packets had been mislabeled. They were tarragon and mint. They were the first things I planted in Lucinda's garden, and still growing there. The tarragon was a perennial, and the mint had only taken over one small corner of the raised bed she'd reserved for spices. We never discussed that I thought tarragon belonged in every dish, so I always wanted a fresh supply; or the recollection that Hammon
had made mint juleps, his favorite dinner-party concoction, and so he always wanted plenty of mint growing in the garden.
I pried myself away from those thoughts, sitting in the dark in my truck, and tried to stare around the side of the house, see if I could see that raised bed. But everything I saw in the dark landscape, and most of the things I couldn't see, were haunted, wracked with longing memories.
I was startled from my melancholy reverie by a soft voice.
“Fever?”
I peered toward the house to see Lucinda standing in the open doorway, squinting.
“Yes,” I answered, disoriented.
“What are you doing sitting out there in the dark?” she asked me, amused.
I glanced at my watch. It was close to five in the morning.
“What are you doing awake at this hour?” I asked.
“Waiting for you,” she answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “When you didn't show up for dinner, I called Skidmore. He said you were out working.”
“I was supposed to have dinner with you,” I remembered, half-dazed.
“You okay?”
“I don't know.” I stared at her.
“Well, come on in the house,” she said, a gentle irritation edging her words. “We'll sort it all out together.”
She turned and headed into her living room.
“I don't know why a person would sit out in the cold and dark,” she continued, mostly to herself, “when there's a perfectly good fire in the fireplace.”
“There's a fire?” I called out weakly.
“I saved you some supper too. And a piece of that apple tart you like.”
That got me out of the truck.
I felt my legs move the rest of me across her lawn, up the porch steps.
“Damn it,” she said from inside.
“What?” I quickened my pace.
I shoved through the door and into the living room. Lucinda was sitting on the floor, poking at the fire. Her hair was pulled back and the blaze made her face flushed. The room was warm and dry; hickory and cinnamon apples filled the air. She was wearing one of her old shirts and a pair of faded gray jeans.
“I tore my favorite shirt,” she groused, “stoking this fire. Look.”
She held up the frayed shirttail, a long thread hung from it, and the heat from the fire made the thread dance upward in my direction.
“I see.” I rubbed my eyes. “I've had kind of a tough day myself. I have to call Skidmore.”
“Not right this second you don't. Sit down and have a little bite to eat. You'll feel better after that.”
The fire was bright, and I felt its heat on my face and hands, stinging a little. Lucinda was up, headed into the kitchen.
I sat down on the sofa, staring into the fire.
“Tess and Rory were laughing when they died,” I said, marveling at how exhausted my voice sounded. “And the man responsible for the accident has been killed.”
Lucinda dropped something in the kitchen, a plate or a glass; the sound tore into the air. She appeared in the doorway, face drained, staring.
“What?”
“I saw the man who was responsible for Tess and Rory's accident.” I wondered if my face looked as blank as hers. “I watched another man kill him.”
Lucinda started to speak three times before she decided on the perfect sentence:
“Maybe you did have a worse day than I did.”
“Maybe,” I agreed.
She paused a moment, then returned to the kitchen.
“Well, eat first,” she called gently, “then tell me all about it.”
I never ceased to marvel at the way the people in my hometown
handled shock: always pulled back, always burying something under mountain rocks.
A second later I could hear the musical sounds of plates and silverware and glasses. I tried to let the pleasant noise take my mind. Lucinda appeared soon with a huge plate in her hand. I reached into my inner coat pocket and laid two photographs on her table.
“Here,” I said softly. “I brought your pictures back.”
“Look at those faces,” she sighed.
“Beautiful.”
A smile touched her lips, an expression of sublime acceptance, if not complete forgiveness.
“I'm glad I knew them.”
Lucinda set the plate down in front of me, a full quarter of an apple tart filling a large part of it, and joined me on the sofa. She put her hand on the side of my head for a moment.
The food filled every sense: warm acorn squash with butter and brown sugar, fresh steamed chard with pine nuts, and a whole Cornish game hen that had clearly been slow-smoked over mesquite all day. The steam rising from the plate curled invitingly, and the fire in the hearth was a perfect backdrop, hissing pleasantly, casting its amber comfort over everything.
I went straight for the tart and had a bite of it in my mouth before I noticed a light disturbing Lucinda's front windows.
“Hell,” I mumbled, starting to rise from my seat. “Did I leave my truck headlights on? Can't I even sit still for one minute and enjoy this food?”
Lucinda gave the windows a slow glance.
“No sugar,” she said softly. “That's dawn.”
“What?” I said, sitting back, not quite understanding what she'd said. “It is?”
“Yes, Fever.” Her hand effortlessly slipped into mine. “It's morning.”