The Dead Past (25 page)

"Okay," I said. "Take me to the Field."

"It's too dark."

"The moon on the snow makes it bright outside."

"All right, Jon." He placed the Bible on his chair and put on his shoes. They were still laced, and he had to shove and grind and coerce his feet into them. He whirled his dirty coat around himself like a cloak, and we walked south to Potter's Field.

Crummler
had done the work of an entire Boy Scout troop in the two days since I'd last been here. No wonder he looked such a mess; the amount of effort it took was amazing. The underbrush had been cut down and smoothed back. Grappling, diseased trees had been pruned. He'd hacked away at the confines of the landscape, clearing the grade, digging up ancient stumps from the frozen earth. Fallen headstones had been righted, and he'd carefully piled the broken bits of those that had crumbled into gravel. Meticulously,
Crummler
had even cleaned out the worn, carved numbers of identification.

And he had taken pains to arrange the willow swatches in a decorous fashion on that particular marker.

"I keep the Field clean now," he said. "That is why there is some mud on my shoes. But not too much."

I bent and examined the area. "Who's buried here?"

"The ghost of a ghost."
Crummler
liked that and smiled pleasantly. "The chance of a ghost. The father of ghosts." He stooped and carefully realigned the swatches I had knocked out of position. "Nobody. Only had a pauper's funeral."

"You sound as if you know who he was. Do you know his name?"

"No, they have no names," he said. "It's better to let them stay buried."

"Yes, you've told me."

He pointed at nearby graves. "Here is Louise May Murphy's abortion. Twelve years ago, no name. And there's the hitchhiker who died outside town, hit and run. No name. And over there is…"

"And here?" I asked.

"The man the sheriff shot."

"
Broghin
killed this man?"

Nodding, he swooped closer. "Know you not, Jon?" He was surprised it had taken me this long to only get it to half-speed. "A long time ago, it was. Maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago, but I remember. He wasn't sheriff then, and did not have a big fat belly. The mayor made a speech and gave him a medal. Then the sheriff who wasn't the sheriff yet made a speech and there was a parade and the people bought lemonade on the corner. I only listened for a while and then I had to go to the hospital and then come here to rake."

"Why did
Broghin
kill the man?" I asked.

"He was a bad man."

"But what did he do?"

Crummler
mimed handing me gifts. "He came from the blackness and left things for the women. Nice things, I think, sweet things, things I wish someone had brought me back in the hospital. Three of them. Three women, three presents. It went on for a long time, they said. Candy and letters. That was not the bad part. I heard people laughing about it. It was a lot of fun, they said." A single large shudder passed through him from head to toe as if somebody had wrung him out like a wet towel. "Then they found two of the ladies dead. The last was saved by the sheriff who was not the sheriff yet, who killed the
villian
." He turned and the moon caught the energy in his eyes. "The flower lady," he said.

Margaret Gallagher had been stalked twenty-five years ago.

"And now the ghost comes here at night," he sighed. "To yell at me for not taking good care of the Field. And sometimes it brings the baby."

"The baby."

Crew cut's face flashed the same way as his knife, and other faces came into focus too; the scrawled script of a letter written in a dangerously romantic tone, pieces pulling together like film of a mirror breaking, running backwards, reforming.

And those words:
How could it mean anything?

~ * ~

The unplowed back trails made driving difficult, but I kept to the twin grooves cut in the deep snow by other trucks before me. The tires of the Jeep threatened to get stuck twice, but I kept the speed at a constant forty and managed to buck free both times.

The houses east of Warner Fork looked like they'd been cut from crystal. Spray from the river added extra layers of ice to the eucalyptus and pine. I slowed and parked up close to the house. The river raged, chops louder than earlier in the week, wind playing eerie pipes of Pan all along the length of the woods. Flickering lights of a television and receding smoke from the fireplace proved somebody was home. I got out and quickly crossed the yard. The motorcycle leaned up against the side of the house. I checked the engine. It was warm. I thought the recent snowfall would have kept everybody to cars, but I suppose bikers don't mind being out in any kind of weather.

I knocked on the door and had a long wait. Drapes rustled at the window. Deena finally appeared. At her side, Fred and Barney stuck their noses out, black shale eyes fixed.

Deena had expression this time; red and toxic hatred swarmed her face, those mismatched lips immediately tugging and crawling as if the dogs' command to kill kept passing half-formed over her tongue. Her eyes remained uncannily calm. We were close. I couldn't quite be sure if I was smiling. The sexual charge had become even more powerful.

"Hello," I said.

The breeze tugged her scarlet hair across her face, obscuring that weird mouth. She breathed softly, "What?" She didn't sound like she was asking me what I wanted but rather what was going to happen next. I wondered.

"I need to speak with Tons for a minute."

"No." The word fell like a stone.

My voice grew almost as tight as hers. "It's extremely important."

"He's asleep."

"He does a lot of that."

Her bottom lip curled, really
curling
, twisting and rearing ugly the way the Wicked Witch of the East's feet curled under the house Dorothy dropped on her. "What?"

"Please," I said, trying to keep it together and feeling my tolerance slipping off me like dead skin. "I know I've been something of a bother the past couple of days, but I need to speak with him."

"No."

She went to shut the door and I jammed my foot inside, got a position on the jamb and shoved.
Dogs
, I thought,
be careful of the dogs
. The front door flew open and blasted back against the wall. The Dobermans had been ready to get into me for days; they darted forward, keyed-up yet silent. If dogs really could smell fear then they weren't getting much of a
noseful
off me. Instead they looked surprised, catching the lingering scents of crew cut's blood. Fred came low and Barney hit high, one tearing at my ankle and the other standing on his hind legs and going for my throat. If I hadn't seen Anubis in action I wouldn't have known what to do. What irony if I
died
the same way. Deena vanished. I caught Barney's collar as he snapped at my neck and tugged him up and over my shoulder and hurled him out the storm door, which smashed and went flying on impact. Fred had already started chomping at my leg. His snout was dabbed with two thin streaks of my blood. I brought both fists down heavily on top of his skull. The dog let out a yelp and slumped to the ground, and I grabbed him by the collar and flung him on top of his brother. I slammed the door shut.

A baby cried in the far room. I stepped cautiously into the kitchen, checking, then walked into the living room. Tons was sprawled out and sleeping on the couch, undisturbed by the commotion. One arm was flung over his face and the other rested on the floor near another empty bottle of JD. I moved into Richie's room, where Deena was loading the Winchester.

She spun and pointed the rifle at me, but she hadn't locked the barrel. I said, "You shouldn't have wasted time loading so many bullets," and took the Winchester from her and laid it on the bed behind me.

"You," she said. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Saving my life, probably."

The baby still cried. Deena slung that emotionless gaze as she slid past and went into the baby's room across the hall and picked up her daughter. The room was filled with the usual amount of stuffed animals, toys, and clothes she wouldn't be able to appreciate for another year or two. Deena rocked and shushed her daughter. The infant sat wrapped in a large, black and red wool blanket, and Deena buried her face in the cloth as she hummed to the baby. The scene would have done Norman Rockwell proud, if only there wasn't such a hideous underside to it.

"You keep ol’ Maurice on a shorter leash than you do your dogs," I said. "Whenever you want to go out alone or keep him home, you hand him a bottle and a handful of downers and he puts himself to sleep."

"You were stupid to come alone," she said.

I tried imagining her with that fun scarlet mane buzzed off. "Not only do you act like him but you sound like him, too." She wasn't going to attempt lying her way out of anything; she didn't have the temperament for theatrics. "That is who the guy with the crew cut was, wasn't it? Your brother?"

"You murdered him."

"Not exactly."

Her hair jounced like crashing waves and turned me on even more. How that kind of sexual quality had led her to Tons
Harraday
I'd never know, but it blasted out at me in a torrent of rage and sorrow. "I'll kill you for that."

"He was staying here in the back trailer."

"For that." Deena repeated herself, stuck in the moment as she pressed her face to the infant again. "For that."

"You were doing it to her as well, weren't you? Harassing Margaret Gallagher, the way your father had twenty-five years ago. Why?" It had taken time to decipher
Crummler's
monologue. He'd said the ghost of a ghost, the chance of a ghost, the father of ghosts. "How long had it been going on? How long did you hound that woman before she finally died of a heart attack?"

"Not enough. Not at all. It wasn't like that," Deena said. "I just wanted to talk to her. You don't understand. I tried talking to her on the phone, I wanted to see her, to know what my father felt, and why. I just wanted to look at her, I wanted to know why she"—gain the curling lip, and the tide of hatred rushing up, making speech difficult—"broke my father's heart. I never knew him, but he loved her; I think he loved her. The letters he wrote, they were beautiful. He deserved a proper burial. They should have done that for him. I wanted to talk but she kept hanging up on me."

Here I'd been wallowing in my own past, believing myself haunted in some way: just look into those eyes, deader than her dogs'—what had driven her and her brother to Felicity Grove after twenty-five years to complete a madman's insane agenda? Displaced, I thought, all that fury. I should've been listening more closely to my grandmother. Anna had called it venom. Deena's face, body language, every nuance was angled wrong as if she'd been crushed and tied up again with chicken wire.

"Why did you wait so long? You were living in town for almost a year."

"Because, you damn fool . . ." Her breath came in gasps; there'd be no logic to this. Insanity might've been learned or genetic, but whatever its cause, she'd caught it good. Stray tears of fury dripped and clung halfway down her cheeks. "Because I didn't know that this was the damn town. I'm from Gallows, about a hundred miles west of here. I met Tons and I loved him, and I didn't know. My mother died two months ago and my brother Carl found a carton filled with our father's belongings: some of the letters he never sent, and newspaper articles. Mother clipped and pasted them on black cardboard just like school pictures. She knew what he was, and how he'd been killed, but never told anyone, and let them bury him without a name. It didn't matter that we didn't know where he was really buried; they all could have been him. We simply picked a site. Where that filthy, idiot grave keeper let the weeds cover my daddy—that retard's lucky Carl didn't break his neck. That's how I learned about why my father left when we were only three and four years old. Who he was, what he did, and how he died."