Dead Willow (15 page)

Colonel William Morgan Davis ran a gnarled finger lightly around the tiny square photograph that was all that was left of Crystal Ambrose. She was one of the last that he had put in his collection, and that had been so many years ago.

He stepped back and admired his masterpiece. It was really quite an astonishing feat. He had done it ages before the ancestry websites had enabled people to it with the few clicks of a mouse. He had done it by hand, tracing the lineages with trips to the libraries in Jackson, Chillicothe and Athalia. He spent afternoons in the stacks, poring over every family history with ties to Willow Tree and the residents of the soil. He had been charged with the eradication of all links to an existence before the tree.

When he left, those entries would have mysteriously disappeared from their genealogies. He would scrub the paths that led back to Willow Tree, while creating a new family tree that rivaled all others.

This family tree actually
was
a tree.

Davis remembered distinctly the crisp autumn morning when he had taken the shot of the Willow in the early sunrise. This was back in the Dark Ages when photographs were taken on a thing called “film” and then had to be “developed” into “prints” in order to be seen. One might wait days to find out if the shadows and lighting and focus and framing had come together to create the image that had been in the photographer’s mind when he had pressed the shutter button.

That morning, the planets had aligned.

The majesty of the tree, towering over the seventy-eight white stone tablets resting in the soil, as the sunlight streamed through the branches was an image worthy of a museum.

The tree had rewarded Davis with a glimpse into its soul. Now, it was Davis’ turn.

He had sent the negatives to a special photo lab and had it blown up to the size of a mural. It adorned the wall of his study and he had spent years working on it. Davis was meticulous in his research, and he had found and photographed every resident of the soil. Their images now dotted the mural’s landscape, placed lovingly over their gravestones, until a pattern emerged.

The oldest of the Willow Tree residents had risen first from the roots nearest the tree. His own marker had been just a few yards from the base of the tree, and Fenton Baybridge had been resting not twenty feet away.

The images and the names and the dates all painted a grand picture of the origins of Willow Tree … and as such, should probably be destroyed. No one could know the origins of Willow
Tree.

The original seventy-eight were now lost in a pool of over twenty-eight hundred, and it would be better that they stayed that way.

It was the evolution of the community; the young ones took over as the old ones faded. Except, young and old had no meaning in Willow Tree. It was a confusing differential. The elders of the town were considered older and wiser, but what difference would seventy or eighty years make in the landscape of eternity? Davis knew they were all swimming in uncharted waters. The best the council could do was to keep everyone swimming in the same direction. The tree would know where they were headed. The tree always knew.

As he looked lovingly at his creation, he knew that he could never destroy it. It proved that their roots were roots indeed, that they were children of the merciful soil. If God had come to Earth in the form of a tree, then they were His disciples, and Davis refused to tear down this monument to His work.

He also refused to destroy his one glimpse at the mystery that had haunted him for one hundred years.

Eunice Pembry was not in the soil.

There was no gravestone to mark Eunice’s place beneath the tree, and that confounded Davis more than he cared to admit. She clearly belonged in the soil. It welcomed her back every New Moon as lovingly as anyone, and released her into the world when she was ready. But, where had she come from?

Davis had run across Eunice Pembry in the county records. She had married Josiah Pembry in 1862. He went off to war and she went … where? Records of her did not exist after the wedding. Josiah died in battle and his widow went … where?

Davis had broached the subject with her once, but the response he elicited dripped with anger and contempt, and it wasn’t directed at him. At that moment, she seemed to be the one person in Willow Tree who hated the tree for giving her life.

Davis believed that Eunice spoke for the tree, and that had to be a complicated relationship he would never fully understand.

But, she had been the first person to help him from the soil all those years ago, and she had told him of his new place in the universe. He felt guilty questioning one who had done so much for so many people.

So, the mural would stay as a reminder that, for whatever reason, the tree had chosen her. Colonel Davis would put the mystery aside for now. It would be there when he came back.

“Admiring your handiwork, I see.”

Davis whirled around, his right hand moving to his sidearm. Eunice sat, quite at home, in his massive leather chair, her arms draped delicately over the tall armrests. The chair looked small in her presence. Davis let out his breath and dropped his arm to his side.

“Madame … apologies … I did not …” He stole a glance to the doors of his study, both closed as he had left them. “… I did not hear you enter.”

The leather of his chair hadn’t even crinkled. Yet another mystery.

“You seemed preoccupied,” she remarked, her eyes on the mural.

Davis looked back at Crystal Ambrose. “Just noting our recent losses.”

“There will be another to take her place,” Eunice said flatly.

Davis turned to face her, his hands clasped behind him.

“Well, Madame, to what do I owe the -”

“Pleasure? Please, Colonel, let us not delude ourselves.”

Eunice cast an eye to the laptop on Davis’s desk and icy fingers ran up the back of his neck.

“I understand you have news,” she said, and there it was.

How? How could she know?

Apparently, she also read the question on his face.

“Do you really believe that you can do anything out from under the shade of the tree?”

Davis clenched his hands into tight fists, but kept them behind his back. He did his best to maintain a civil tone.

“Madame Pembry, I have never deceived you. Nor have I once put the welfare of this town in jeopardy for my own personal … Madame?”

But, he had lost Eunice somewhere, her focus drifting away from the space between them. Her blue eyes flitted amongst the books and bric-a-brac lining his shelves, finally settling on the mural behind him. Davis witnessed a wonder spread across her face, much like a child in a museum who had seen their first mummy.

“Madame?”

Her eyes came back around to Davis, and she seemed genuinely surprised to see him. She took a quick stock of where she was, laying her hands flat on his desk, which seemed to serve as an anchor for her. Having settled into this time and place, she looked up at him with her usual solid composure, as if it were he who had drifted off point.

“So … Colonel, you were saying?”

Sadly, this was not the first time. Not the first time the tree had slipped in unannounced. Slipped in without the soil.

Her connection to the tree was growing stronger. In the beginning, it was only in the soil, only during the joining. Back then, everyone came to the same joining. It was observed during the New Moon for privacy’s sake, but Eunice was never one to let modesty get in the way of a good speech. She would regale their ears with visions of the future of Willow Tree, like sprinkling fairy dust on their dreams. In the beginning, her words were anticipated almost as much as the joining.

Then, little by little, another voice started to filter in. The words spoken did not encourage. These word did not dream, and for a long while, neither did those in the soil. An anxiety swept through the cemetery like a virus as they began to realize that they were not alone in the soil, that something else lived in the dirt … and in them.

From time to time, they could hear the words in their minds, but Eunice was the only one who spoke them … and only in the soil.

Eunice had a connection with the tree that no one else had, and no one
else wanted. When the Others had sprouted … the second and third and fourth generations and more, and the joining had become more frequent; she would visit the gatherings and speak. Her words would be shared in whispers.

She began to be treated like any god-thing would be; some would bow in her presence, still more would cross the street to avoid her.

But Davis always saw the Eunice who had helped him out of the soil.

“Colonel?”

Now it was Davis’ turn to pull himself back to the moment.

“Apologies, Madame. Yes … I was …” His gaze fell on his laptop. “… I was about to show you some surveillance video from a few days ago.”

Davis opened the laptop from his side of the desk and woke it up from its sleep. With a few clicks on the keyboard, he pulled up video from the infirmary. Eunice leaned in curiously.

“Why are you just now showing me this?” she asked with a frown.

“Well, with our recent … unpleasantness, certain duties had to be postponed. I’ve only now seen the files myself.”

“And this requires my attention why?” she asked, her fingers drumming impatiently.

“The woman who walks into the infirmary here,” he said, pointing to the screen, “I believe you know her.”

Eunice drew closer, examining the grainy black and white image. When the woman he spoke of entered the frame and began speaking to the doctor, she eased back into the leather chair.

“It’s the journalist I told you about. What’s she doing there?”

“Seems the doctor stitched up her hand,” Davis replied, “and they talked … for quite a while. Like old friends.”

“Talked? About what?”

“We do not know. We have no audio from their conversation. But, when I saw who it was, I thought you should be informed.”

“I see,” she said, settling down into the chair. She folded her hands in her lap, and Davis could see the dark wheels turning behind her steely eyes.

“More unpleasantness, so soon, Madame?”

The wheels flashed red. “Do you question my methods, Colonel?”

“Never, Madame,” he assured her, bowing his head slightly. “I simply grieve the loss of three of our family in as many days. I would not like to lose another before the festival has even ended.”

She bristled at his insinuation. “Crystal chose her fate, Colonel. Mister Greggson … he was a victim. We … eased his pain.”

“And Miss Jeffers?”

Her eyebrows curled. “Miss Jeffers?”

The surety in her voice quavered. She looked passed Davis to the wall behind him. Her eyes scanned the faces in the mural as she hunted for a memory. Eunice was obviously lost in the tall weeds. He knew she had been there, in the cemetery with Annabel Jeffers. She had ordered the girl interred in her own grave. If she could not remember her name, then things were farther along than he had imagined.

Davis had always respected Eunice for being able to make the difficult choices. During the war, he had sent men into their final battles, and he knew a steel core when he saw one. But, more and more lately, he had begun to wonder who was making those decisions.

Sending men to their deaths was the hell of war. To not know you were doing it, that was a different kind of hell.

“Miss Jeffers,” Eunice continued, the memory retrieved, “selfishly brought the outside world to us. She made her bed, so to speak. Now, what of our young journalist?”

Davis conceded the point and put off discussions of the tree for another day.

“Madame, we control the information coming and going from this place. Cell phone transmissions are intercepted and screened. The internet access we offer is monitored. No secrets have escaped thus far. I recommend we continue our surveillance until further action is warranted.”

“And should Miss Granger decide to leave our town with the secrets tucked safely inside her head?”

Davis ran a hand through his dark beard. “Then, I suppose we find a place for her in the soil.”

He had hoped to impress her with his own show of steel, but Eunice was never one to relinquish the last word.

“She will make excellent fertilizer.”

Jess sat on the scratchy wooden bench with an unwanted cigarette smoldering to a long snake of ash between her shaky fingers and tried to figure out her next move.

Whose bright idea was it to come to this fucking town anyway, she wondered? One by one her assumptions about this story had come unraveled like threads from an old lady’s quilt. She had been told it was ghosts, until she was told it wasn’t. Then, she saw the cemetery and it was ghosts again. When she met Josiah Pembry, it became zombies or vampires. After she saw the pictures of Cyrus
Randell’s church … she was back to ghosts. Now, after seeing that business in the cemetery last night, it was zombies again.

The whiplash should set in any minute now.

Jess ran her fingers over the rough hewn wood of the park bench in the back of the
Rusty Gate
and imagined that it was a pew from Reverend Randell’s sanctuary. Her mind conjured the scorching heat and flames it would have experienced, and the feeling of melted flesh sticking to glowing wood.

The bench flashed a charred black beneath her fingers, and she jerked her hand away.

“Shit!” she gasped, folding her fingers into a fist and covering them with her cigarette-hand. Her fingers were not burned; she knew that. She knew that! But, she decided not to look at them just now, just in case.

“Get it together, Granger,” she muttered through gritted teeth.

The crowds swarmed the streets a little less this morning, the moms and dads and little kids all subdued. The festival was winding down.

Cotton candy cones and dropped pinwheels and busted balloons littered the sidewalks, as the fall wind rolled empty cups passed her feet. Balloons that had floated up and burst in the trees clung to the spiny branches, their long white strings hanging down. They gave the impression of weeping willow trees, and Jess found that more than a little ironic.

She looked down the crooked path leading to the rusty gate, the one that had bitten her finger. Her eyes charted the length of the black iron fence, running beyond her vision in both directions. The rear of the cemetery ran to the horizon.

That’s where she really wanted to go, the cemetery. She couldn’t help but feel that that’s where the story lay, and she would need to see it and
feel
it before she could really know what the story was.

The grounds always looked as if they had been recently plowed, the dark soil so loose and … inviting. Part of her was afraid that if she stepped into the soil, she would sink below the surface and that would be that. End of story. Her phone, which never left her pocket, would go down with her, but she would never be able to dial 911, or Jameson, or … anyone. Her abandoned car would be towed to the junkyard, her belongings, gathered from her room at the
Rusty Gate,
would be donated to the Salvation Army.

She would disappear down into the face of the earth … and no one would miss her. Seven billion people on the planet; why would they?

Jess had to admit that sinking down into the cemetery soil would be nothing compared to her ability to sink down into depression.

She scooted to the end of the bench and mashed her unsmoked cigarette into the pot of sand put there for her use. Willow Tree was nothing if not accommodating.

What was her next move? What would a real reporter do?

They would find a way into the heart of Willow Tree.

And, for that, she would need some help.

“You wanna go
where
?”

Patrick was not so much intrigued by her idea as he was … pissed.

“Look,” he said, a little too calmly, “I have to work with these people, but I am not a part of their … culture. I leave them alone; they leave me alone.” He pointed a calloused finger out her window. “Breaking into their cemetery is
not
leaving them alone.”

“I’m not going to
break
anything,” Jess explained. “I checked the
Weather Channel
and it’s supposed to be overcast tomorrow night. If I could just sneak in under the cover of darkness, I could scope the place out a little.”

“And, what is
my
role in this felony?”

Jess swallowed hard. “Well, I figured, you know … if they were talking to you …”

“You want me to be a
diversion
?” Patrick paced the room, his hands folded on top of his head.

“For just a few minutes, tops!” she assured him, tracking him back and forth across the room.

Patrick turned on her. “Don’t you watch movies? Don’t you know what happens to the ‘diversion’?”

“He gets a big kiss from the perky female lead!”

She had a feeling her banter was starting to wear thin.

“And, are you gonna squeeze your big fat lips through the prison bars?”

Jess ignored the insult.

“You’re not going to prison! It’s a misdemeanor at best.” She took hold of his hand, which wasn’t as warm as the first time. “All you have to do is talk. You’re good at that; I’ve heard you!”

“But, you haven’t heard me pee myself in front of a big man with a gun.”

“If I thought this was going to be dangerous, I wouldn’t have asked.” She walked her tiny fingers slowly up his chest, swaying her hips a little, hopefully just enough. “Come on … for me …”

“Oh, no, you are not doing
that
!”

She stomped her little foot. “Then, what do I have to do?”

Patrick turned away, the heel of his hand rubbing a circle into his forehead, ostensibly massaging away the migraine Jess had given him. Men were such pussies, she thought.

He stopped before the window and glared out at the graveyard.

“There’s still plenty of room out there for two more graves,” he said soberly.

“Well … you’ll be in good company,” she replied, as soberly as she could manage.

Patrick dropped his hands to his sides, his gaze to the floor, and his shoulders slumped under the weight of her insistence. It was the universal sign for surrender. He let out a long, slow sigh, and Jess’ fists shot into the air. She was about to do a little
Rocky
dance when he turned back. She assumed her sober position.

“Have you thought about how you’re going to get over the fence?” he asked her. “It’s about seven feet tall with nothing to put your feet on. You got monkey in you I don’t know about?”

“Yeah … about that …” she said, curling her fingers together nervously. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a stepladder you’re not using, do ya?”