Chapter 21 #3
I spun around, preempting the hand I sensed was reaching for me. But instead, Perry’s hand shot to his holster, and his gaze was focused on the deep woods.
“Who’s there?” he shouted.
There was no answer.
“Identify yourself!”
“Who the hell are you talking to?” I snapped, his fear rubbing off on me.
“There’s—there was a man. Right there.”
I followed his pointing finger. “That’s a dead tree.”
“You don’t see the eyes?”
I plunged back into the woods, ignoring his warning shout. I could see how his eyes would play tricks on him; the tree had been burned or struck by lightning, and the dark pattern on the bark created the shape of shoulders, the suggestion of a face. But there were no eyes—
I stopped.
Sprouting from the blackened wood, right below where a shatter of bark gave the impression of familiar wind-whipped dark hair, were two sprigs of ghost pipe, just sprouted, silver as coins.
A breeze rustled around us, and even standing close enough for the illusion to be dispelled, I could’ve sworn they moved like eyes.
Perry puffed to a halt behind me. “Well, that’s just uncanny.”
I reached up and grasped one of the flower bunches, expecting, inexplicably, warmth.
The stem was cool to the touch, and I tugged gently at first to see if it had been placed there, but when it resisted, I pulled harder, harder.
A long, vascular string of roots ripped free of the rotting wood, fine as hair and pale as bone, shivering as each successive strand was torn from its purchase.
After my grandmother died, I’d nagged my mother for days to tell me the secret of the spell to bind the devil.
She desperately wanted him gone, so the cost must’ve been something terrible, and I longed to know the whole of it.
She told me again and again it was best I didn’t know, and then she found me tearing apart my grandmother’s room in search of her grimoire.
“It’s a child’s blood,” she snarled, ripping my grandmother’s journals from my hands.
“A child’s death. Are you happy now? Now will you leave it alone? ”
I had left it alone. I finally understood the impossibility of it; they both would’ve died before they let any harm come to their children. The devil came year after year, and I accepted that he was a fixture in our lives, and would always be.
But now, when things were most dire, it seemed he was gone, leaving nothing but his likeness in the forest to taunt me.
I dropped the little bunch of ghost pipe to the earth and ground it beneath my heel.
“Just a tree,” I said, “but what if it had been the pastor? Were you going to pull your gun on him?”
“I knew it wasn’t him.”
We headed back, Perry taking the lead this time.
He cut over several yards, splitting the difference between our first path and the next set of volunteers.
He thrashed his way through the brush like a drowning man, slipping in the mud and pausing occasionally to disentangle the cord of his radio from the branches, and I trailed silently in his wake.
When we finally broke through the trees back onto the drive, most of the other volunteers were already there, clustered around in an unbalanced half circle.
The voices were loud, and I could hear a grating, high-pitched voice repeating, “Isn’t there anything else you can do?
Isn’t there anything else?” It wasn’t until I glimpsed David, a head taller than most of the volunteers, that I realized the voice was Rachel’s.
I’d never heard her speak so loudly, and from the strain in her voice, it might have been the first time she ever had.
David looked more like Zeke than he ever had before, as if his father’s spirit had suckered to him like a lamprey when it lost its hold on its own body.
His mouth was drawn into a deep frown, creating the lines that had been permanent on the pastor’s face and that would, someday, etch into his own skin, if—
I paused.
If what?
I wished I could scrape away the unfinished thought. I needed to find a way to talk to him, to gauge what might happen next. Would he take up his father’s cross, or would he abandon it?
But Rachel was clinging to him as if she couldn’t stand on her own two legs.
Her hair was flat and lank, a few days unwashed, and the skin around her eyes was puffy and blotchy.
As she stood there, looking desperately at the other volunteers, she lifted her arm several times to scrub her sleeve roughly across her face, like a child would.
I would never be able to have a conversation with him while she was wailing at his side.
Ironically, it was Broder who gave me the chance I was looking for. He’d briefly conferred with Perry, then walked over to the group of volunteers and clapped a hand on David’s shoulder.
“Son, can you come take a look at the truck with me?”
Rachel was a well-trained woman, and she fell back without argument, allowing Evelyn and Christine and Georgie to fold her into their protective circle while her son took on the role of man of the family.
Broder walked David over to the truck as if he needed a guide to find his way there, and another officer handed him a polyurethane bag.
I drifted closer, trying to blend in with the other stragglers from the search party, and caught a glimpse of the leather portfolio inside the bag.
“This is everything we found inside,” I overheard Broder say, and the fact that it was bagged told me he already considered this a crime scene. “Can you take a look through and tell me if you notice anything missing?”