When the Bones Sing

Chapter Eighteen

Eighteen

Almost before we can react at all, Turley clicks on a flashlight and the shed fills up with light. He grabs Lo by the arm and drags him out the door into the dark. I grab his other arm, and for a few seconds, we play tug-of-war for my best friend. But the preacher has a good hundred pounds on me, and there’s no way I’m going to win. All I can do is stumble out of the shed and chase after Turley’s flashlight beam as he hauls Lo across the muddy churchyard toward the back fence.

Lo fights back. He’s kicking and clawing. Cursing up a storm. But Brother Turley is a big guy, and Lo isn’t.

I’m slipping and falling. Fighting to get on my feet again. Sinking up to my ankles with almost every step.

I’m so intent on doing battle with the mud and the dark that it takes me a minute to realize the rain and the hail have stopped falling.

“Let him go! Turley! You better let him the fuck go!” I’m screaming myself hoarse, but Brother Turley doesn’t so much as glance back in my direction.

When he hits the fence that separates the churchyard from the woods, he steps right over, dragging Lo with him like he’s a sack of laundry.

I’m still trying to catch up, but the preacher’s legs are so much longer than mine. I duck under the fence and keep going.

Turley’s pulling Lo up the dirt road now, in the direction of that little plank bridge across Lucifer’s Creek, and as soon as I hear the water, I get a sick feeling about how this is going to go down.

I scream out Lo’s name again when I come around a bend in the road and the scene comes into view. There’s enough moonlight peeking through the clouds now to make out Turley standing on the creekbank. He has Lo by the collar of his shirt, and he’s half dangling him over the raging water. That flashlight is clutched in his other hand.

The smell of hellfire fills up my nose. It’s fire and brimstone. The scent of the damned.

“Stay back, Dove Warner,” Turley yells in my direction and he pushes Lo farther over the edge of the bank. Lo’s feet kick helplessly at the water below. “If you love him, let me do this. For his sake.”

I stop cold.

“Go on, Dovie!” Lo shouts. “Get outta here!” He’s begging me, fighting with Turley, trying to push his hands away. I consider running home for help. I could get Daddy. Maybe someone else from town. But Lo will be dead before I even make it back to the church.

“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins,” Turley thunders, “and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

Lo wriggles in the preacher’s grasp and I scream again. “Lo! Stop!” Because the way his feet are fighting for traction on the slippery bank, even if he somehow gets free, there’s no way he’s not going to end up in the water.

“For we were buried therefore with him by baptism into death,” Turley goes on, “in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.”

“What about the murderers?” Lo shouts. “What about them, Turley?” He’s still clawing at the preacher’s hands. “The Bible says they will be consigned to a fiery lake of burning sulfur.” Lo glares triumphant in Turley’s face. “And this shall be their second death.”

“I’m glad you know your Bible, Lowan.” Brother Turley nods. “A foolish son is a grief to his father.”

“Proverbs,” Lo spits. “We know you’re the one who’s been killing the hikers, Turley.”

Turley growls and shakes Lo hard enough that it makes my teeth rattle inside my own skull just watching it. “Don’t!” I beg him. “Please!”

“The blood of those hikers is on our hands, Lowan Wilder. Yours and mine! We share that guilt before the Lord.”

“I’m not a killer! You are!” Lo’s struggling again. Kicking at Turley’s legs, but he might as well be a rag doll, for all Turley seems to notice.

“Don’t you see, boy?” Turley’s face is as red as those blood drops on the pages of his Bible. “God is punishing me—he’s punishing all of us—for my sins with your mother!”

“You keep my mama’s name out of your mouth!” Lo takes a swing at Turley’s head, but his arms aren’t long enough for the punch to land.

“I sinned against God and against the holiness of my own body with Claire Wilder, and then I turned my back on the product of that sin. On you, boy. Now those hikers have paid the cost of it! But you don’t have to, Lowan. Not anymore.”

Lo stops fighting. He looks confused. Totally thrown. And I don’t blame him. Whatever we expected to come out of Turley’s mouth tonight, it wasn’t that.

“What are you talking about?” he demands.

Lo’s two steps behind, but the truth of Turley’s words has already hit me like a mudslide barreling down a mountain after a rainstorm.

A foolish son is a grief to his father. Isn’t that what he said a few seconds ago?

And what did Turley shout after us when he caught Lo and me peeking in his shed earlier tonight before we went up the mountain to Granny Pearl’s?

The sins of the father shall be visited on the son!

Oh God. Don’t let me be right about this. If Turley doesn’t drown Lo in the creek, this might kill him.

Lo’s never known who his father is. Claire never said a word to anybody about it. Suddenly I’m afraid I know why.

“Claire told me the baby was mine,” Brother Turley says, and Lo flinches like the preacher hit him with a two-by-four. “She begged me to marry her. To give you a life as my son. But I couldn’t be husband to a witch.” Lo’s staring at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, dangling over Lucifer’s Creek.

“You’re a lying bastard,” Lo hisses. “You’re not my father!”

“I loved your mother, and I lived with her loss heavy on my heart for sixteen years. But I never reached out to save you—my own son—and that was my greatest sin.”

“No,” Lo argues. But the fight has gone out of him. “That’s not true.”

“I failed you. My own flesh and blood. Then God saw fit to punish me by making these hills run red with the blood of innocents. I brought death on this valley, and that is my cross to bear!”

“That’s bullshit!” It’s my turn to shout now. “God didn’t kill those hikers to punish you, Turley! You killed them! Not by your sin. You killed them with your own hands!”

“We found the bloody knife in your shed!” Lo adds. “The one you gutted Riley Alden with!”

The preacher lifts his flashlight to the sky, and the sleeve of his long, black coat slides down to reveal a pale arm marked with angry red scars and fresh scabs.

“I tried to cleanse these hills with my own blood,” he tells us. “But I failed. Leviticus says, ‘If the anointed priest sins, bringing guilt on the people, he must bring to the Lord a young bull without defect as an offering to atone for the sin he has committed.’?”

I remember reading that passage in Turley’s Bible the other night, all underlined in angry red. It made me shiver in fear then, but it makes me mad as hell now. I won’t let the preacher turn Lo into a guilt offering to his God.

“You’ve been sneaking around, trying to scare us!” I shout. “You left that white rose on Claire’s grave tonight, but we aren’t afraid of you.”

Turley stares at me. “I haven’t set foot on Wilder land in more than seventeen years.” He shoves Lo a little farther out over the creek, and I see the panic in Lo’s eyes. “Lowan Wilder, I commit you to our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

“Dovie!” Lo is pleading with me, but I can’t think what to do. I pick up a big rock and throw it as hard as I can at Turley’s head. I hear it hit his skull with a terrible thunk . He lets go of Lo and crumples in the mud, still holding that flashlight. I scramble toward the creekbank, but I’m too late. Lo goes over the edge into the torrent.

He’s flailing in the water and struggling to stay afloat. I throw myself down in the mud and slide out until half my body is suspended over the water, but I still can’t reach him. “Dovie!” he chokes my name before he sinks beneath the surface.

The water is black as the glass of that Howler that Daddy is making for Ira.

Lo pops up again. Just out of my reach.

“Lo, please!” I’m screaming at him. “Just reach a little farther.” Our hands are almost touching. Our fingertips brush, but I can’t get hold of him.

I feel the burn of that water on my skin.

“God forgive me,” Brother Turley moans from behind me. So I know he’s not dead.

“Help us!” I’m screaming at Turley now. “Goddammit!” He’s still sprawled in the mud. “He’s your son, for God’s sake!”

Turley crawls toward me on his hands and knees, and for a second I think he’ll push me over the edge, too. Lo and I will die together. But instead he lies beside me on the muddy bank and extends his arm toward Lo. He’s so much taller than me. His reach is longer, and Lo is able to grab his hand. I hold my breath as Turley pulls him to shore and drags him up onto the riverbank.

“Lo!” I yank him away from Turley to cradle his head in my lap. I’m shielding him from the preacher with my body. Running my fingers through his hair. Begging him to breathe as he coughs and chokes.

The preacher blinks at us as Lowan vomits up what seems like gallons of water on the creekbank. I know his throat has to be on fire.

“You are my son, Lowan Wilder,” Brother Turley finally says. “We’re two sides of the same coin.” It’s obvious the hellfire’s gone out of him. He’s a shell. Nothing but bones inside a preacher’s black coat. “I brought you here to save you.”

“You brought him to the river to kill him, Turley.” I spit the words at him. “To sacrifice him for your sins.”

“No.” Turley stares at me, then he shakes his head. “I thought that’s what God wanted from me. And I wanted to do it. Needed to. But I couldn’t obey.” Turley throws his head back and wails like the Howler. Strangled and tormented. The sound of the damned. “So I brought Lowan here to commit him to God through baptism, that he might be cleansed and forgiven.” Turley looks up toward the sky again. “So he might finally know a father’s love.”

The preacher stands above us with his back to the river and raises both hands to the stormy heavens. “Forgive me, God,” he pleads. “Let no more blood be spilled in these hills on my account.”

“What makes you think God would listen to an asshole like you?” I ask him.

Turley looks down like he’s scolding me for whispering in Sunday school. “Don’t throw stones when you’re living in a glass house, Dove.” His eyes harden. “You carry the weight of generational sin on your shoulders, too.” I wrap my arms tighter around Lo as the preacher leans down until his face is inches from mine. I shrink back. His breath stinks of sulfur. The kiss of hell. “You do penance for the sins of your grandmother and your mother every time you’re called into the night to unearth a festering corpse with your bare hands.”

“If there is a God,” I tell him through clenched teeth, “I hope you rot in hell.”

Turley leans in even closer, but suddenly a shape bursts out of the trees just a few feet away. The preacher throws up his hands and takes a startled step back toward the edge of the river, and I scream and lock eyes with Riley Alden. He’s flesh and blood. Soaked to the bone, shivering, and covered in mud. And he’s leveling Granny Pearl’s old rifle square at Turley’s chest.

I wonder if either one of them knows it’s so clogged up it’d never fire.

Everything is happening so fast. There’s no time to think.

Lo sits up, confused. He’s coughing again, holding his aching ribs and looking back and forth between Riley Alden and Turley with eyes that look like muddy water. I guess he’s probably trying to decide if Riley’s ghost has come to save us or to finish us off.

But this is not a ghost.

I’m staring at a drop of red that’s running down Riley’s arm.

We lock eyes again. His are milky blue like Lucifer’s Creek on a calm day, but they are anything but sleepy now. They’re wide and staring. Frantic. “You okay?” he asks me, and I nod. This is so surreal. His voice sounds like I knew it would. “Is he okay?” Riley jerks his head toward Lo.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think so.”

Starting with Lo sneaking into my room to wake me up and tell me about that knife in Turley’s shed, nothing that’s happened tonight feels real.

I glance up at Turley and the ground he’s standing on crumbles beneath his feet. I watch it give way in slow motion. Turley looks startled. Panicked. But only for a split second. Then, without a word, he vanishes, falling backward, like a diver off a high board.

“Shit!” Riley shouts. He races to the edge of the creek, and I wonder if ghosts curse. “Where is he?”

“Goddammit!” I shout at the top of my lungs. I’m pushing myself up off the ground. “Turley!” I grab the flashlight out of the mud where he dropped it and scan the water and the creekbank as far downstream as I can see. “Do you see him? Turley!”

It’s no use, the raging black water has already sucked Brother Turley under, like it wanted to drag him directly to hell. I get to my feet and help Lo up. He leans against me, still struggling to breathe, as the three of us watch and wait.

But Turley doesn’t resurface.

“He’s gone,” Lo says, and I know he’s right. “His soul is in God’s hands now.”

“Holy shit.” The blond boy holding Granny Pearl’s mud-clogged rifle runs his other hand through his hair, and he looks frustrated enough to pull it out by the roots. “What the hell is going on in this fucking town?” he demands, but I figure Lo and I should be the ones asking the questions right now. So I throw out the obvious one.

“Who the hell are you?”

My follow-up question is going to be Whose skeleton did I pull out of the ground a few days ago? But I’m saving that one until our ghost boy answers the first one.

“I’m Xander Alden.” He pushes his stubborn rain-soaked hair out of his eyes and looks at Lo, then back at me. I take note of his faded jeans, the cowboy boots, and the old gray T-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. “I’m Riley Alden’s brother, and I need your help, Dove.”