Devil's Oven (13 page)

His aura flickered as he talked. Clouds of black—an absence of light—bled into the green and brown and gold. Death was breaking through. He was lying! But why? She didn’t really need to see his aura to know that the picture he was painting for Lori Ann was all wrong.

Lori Ann left the table, finally satisfied. She hadn’t acknowledged Jolene at all, but turned around when she got close to the kitchen.

“You ready for more coffee, honey?”

Jolene shook her head.

They sat for a minute, Tripp staring into his tea. Jolene noticed how rough his hands were. A pair of loaded coal trucks broke the quiet, rattling the picture window as they passed.

Tripp sat back and took his watch from his wrist. “It’s this kind of stuff I don’t need from Lila,” he said. “I need
her
.” He slid the watch across the table and Jolene caught it before it slid off the edge.

She held it close so she could see the diamonds beneath each numeral on the watch’s face. She had never worn diamonds before. Byron, Ivy’s father, had given her a narrow rose gold ring that bore a single fashioned heart at their Justice of the Peace wedding. It was the sort of ring high school boys gave their girlfriends, but she had worn it lovingly until the day he chased her into the woods. She had thrown it back at him, frightened, tired of his insane accusations. It was the last day she had seen Ivy.

“Why are you telling
me
this?” she said.

“I don’t know why I’d tell you anything,” Tripp said. He leaned closer to her and lowered his voice. “I don’t even know why I felt like I had to come and find you today. When you’re riding in my truck or we’re sitting across from each other in a public place like this, I think I’m okay.” Jolene saw fear and something else—hate, or passion, or both—in his eyes. His aura surged. “But when you’re in my head, you scare the hell out of me. And I want to know why.”

Jolene wanted to look away, but found she couldn’t. She knew why she frightened him. She just couldn’t tell him. Not in words.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

He woke curled in an earthen pocket beneath the base of an uprooted hickory tree, his skin still damp from the morning mist. The sun was high overhead, but the niche was sheltered, still shaded. As he stretched his legs to climb out of the hole, a sluggish blacksnake that had been sleeping at his back broke ahead of him. He watched it muscle its way through the roots and into the brush.

He was hungry again. The woman’s food had become a habit, but he was nowhere near the house now. Standing outside the hole, he unzipped his pants to urinate. When he was finished, he went in search of the creek he had heard running during the night. He found it a little farther down the mountainside, near the uppermost branches of the fallen tree. The creek was shallow and rocky. He lay down on his belly and splashed the cold water on his face, then drank his fill, his mouth to the water’s silver surface. Resting there, the smell of dirt and water and new growth filling his nostrils, he knew he could get up to follow the creek and eventually come close to the town. There was no telling how he knew this. Some things he knew, some things he didn’t. In between there was no frustration, no worry. There was simply a need to go forward, to follow a path whose destination he couldn’t see. He would get there soon enough.

The shoes the woman had given him were too small. He had only been walking a few minutes when he had to stop and sit down on the ground to pull them off. He bent and twisted them in his massive hands, trying to make them larger, or at least more comfortable. But they weren’t good shoes and when he put them back on, they still wouldn’t yield. With a great cry—
Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
—he took them off again and threw them into the trees, out of sight.

He hated to wear shoes, especially the white vinyl ones his mother brought home from the thrift store. Everyone else, even some of the girls, wore expensive basketball shoes with famous logos or players’ names stitched on them. Today he would just wear his boots. He would have to sit out P.E. and get a zero, but that was fine with him.

He lay on his stomach, sliding the shoes with his fingertips as far back as he could beneath the bed. He heard the school bus’s brakes sigh at the corner, then the grind of the engine as the bus pulled away without him. Then came her footsteps. He gave the shoes a final push and eased himself over the gritty carpet. By the time she appeared in his doorway, he had pretty much brushed all the cat hair and crumbs off his navy blue shirt.

“Hey, Ma,” he said. “I missed the bus. Can you take me?” He smiled at her because sometimes it worked and she would just laugh and tell him to get in the car. For someone who almost never laughed, her laugh was pretty. Contagious.

But she already had the thing in her hand. It was just a handful of unbent wire hangers tied into a bundle. They didn’t need a name for it.

“Uncle Abram said I’m too old for that,” he said.

“When your uncle starts paying my bills, I’ll let him tell me what to do for five minutes. Maybe.” She gestured with the thing. “Hurry up. You’re not going to make me late for work today.”

Which meant she had someone coming to the house because she didn’t work at the nursing home on Thursdays. He had heard Uncle Abram warn her about the men who came to their apartment. Uncle Abram didn’t like the way it made their family look. Maybe Uncle Abram needed to know she was back at it.

“Sure, Ma,” he said. “Whatever you say.” He smiled again and his acquiescence confused her for a second. But she didn’t leave. He unbuttoned his blue jeans.

 As he crossed the mountain, he was watchful for anything that might be food. It wasn’t until he had gone almost half the distance he needed to go and the sun was much lower in the sky that he found a single, intact apple tree in the remains of an orchard. The other trees had long since crumbled, their insect-eaten trunks lying in pieces. The tree had no leaves, but its fruit—four perfectly shaped apples, each about the size of his fist—shone bright yellow in the hazy sunlight.

Saliva warmed in his mouth. The apples were too high for him to reach, so he climbed the tree’s fragile lower branches, snapping several as he went higher. Anyone watching would have seen the smile on his face. It was a different smile from the one the woman was used to seeing. Bracing himself in an elbow of the tree, he reached out with both hands and picked two at the same time.

Once he was back on the ground, he put one in the pocket of his pants. He pressed the other against his nose to smell it before opening his mouth and biting into its tender flesh.

A handful of March flies, drawn by the scent of the unseasonable fruit, dove at his head, biting wherever they landed. Their bites on his neck and ears were painful, and he stood up to slap them away without losing the apple. Finally, he slammed one against the back of his left hand, dropping it onto a pale leaf at his feet. With two flies still crawling on his neck, he stooped to examine the dying fly, which was on its winged back, waving its bent legs in the air. He flicked it onto its abdomen with the ragged edge of a chewed fingernail, but it didn’t stir from the leaf. Picking up the leaf, he held it to his face. When his tongue met the fly, its wings stuck to him. The thing buzzed frantically in his mouth. Even mixed with the sweetness of the apple, it tasted bitter. Foul. He spat the thing out onto the ground and finished the apple.

•  •  •

He stood on the mountainside looking down at the blue rectangle of concrete sitting in the center of the parking lot like some kind of giant, ugly cake. There was a sign—a glowing white figure of a large-breasted woman, featureless except for a pair of pouting red lips—astride a shining yellow neon star. It wasn’t the image of the woman that stirred something deep inside him. It was the building itself, and what it contained, that aggravated the small semblance of feeling he had left. It wasn’t anger. It was something more substantial, something elemental. It was a slow-burning, constant hum like the buzzing of the flies. If he had words for it, he would call it rage. But he couldn’t go down to the building. Not yet. He was following the path. He couldn’t veer from it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tripp waited for Jolene to put up the passenger window before he released the key from the truck’s ignition. She had spent the entire drive up the mountain pressed against the door, her face to the wind.

“I had a dog that used to ride that way,” Tripp said.

“What did you call her?” Jolene said. Already she looked better. Her cheeks were chafed pink from April air and she looked more awake, less tense than she had seemed down at the diner. When she’d asked if he would take her up on the mountain, he didn’t question why she wanted to go there. There was a new kind of understanding between them. Not a comfortable understanding, but something.

“Peaches,” he said.

“Peaches.”

“She was small and kind of—I don’t know. Kind of a brownish peach color.”

“Oh,” Jolene said.

“I didn’t name her,” he said, embarrassed.

He saw she wasn’t listening anyway. From the truck, she headed straight for the sad mix of moss and yellowed grass filling his front yard. Dropping to a squat, she ran her hand over it thoughtfully, as though it were fine silk. He had to look away from the inch-wide stripe of porcelain skin that appeared between the top of her jeans and her black cotton pullover.

“I want to take a walk,” she said, standing. “Will you come with me?”

She looked young and untouched. He had the feeling she would go on without him if he told her no.

“Nowhere I need to be today,” he said. He was officially off the clock, and it suited him to stay away from the post, where they would all be talking about Claude Dixon. Burns and Johnson, the detectives, had said they wanted to talk to him again, something he definitely didn’t want to do. “It’s cold up here. I’ll get you a jacket from inside.”

“Sure, thanks,” she said, turning away toward the woods.

•  •  •

He had never hurt a woman before.

Tripp held on to the thought like a talisman as he followed her over the mud-slicked trail. It seemed like it had rained almost every day since Claude Dixon was murdered. No big storms like the previous month, but a continual pattern of morning showers that left each afternoon draped with a dull silver sky. The air was heavy all the time. Even his legs felt weighted and reluctant to carry him.

They hiked across the mountain’s southern face on a trail that eventually dumped out on a state road on the other side of the mountain. Every so often it branched off and led to smaller, less-traveled trails. They talked little, and always about what was around them. Not about Alta or Claude Dixon or Lila or even the club.

Where was Lila in all this? Lila was still his. Lila was his love. This girl was something altogether different. This girl felt
necessary
. Like breath. Like air. But if she was like air, why did he feel as though he would suffocate if he got too close to her?

Unlike Lila, there was no feminine scent trailing her, no perfume of roses or lilacs or other summer flowers. Today her hair was loose like it was when she danced. Before she put on the navy wool jacket his sister had sent him for Christmas, she had pulled her hair over one shoulder so that it framed her face like a satin hood. What would that feel like spread over his face, caught between his fingers? His lips? Along with hundreds of other men, Tripp had seen almost every inch of her skin under the stage lights. She was here now and he could reach out and touch her shoulder or her waist if he wanted to. He tried to keep his voice under control when they did talk, and not be distracted by the way her ass moved in her tight-fitting blue jeans or the tilt of her head when she laughed, the sound spilling through the trees like music.

“Here,” she said, slowing.

At some point they had taken a branch of the trail that joined the old logging road the department used—
he
used—to access this part of the forest. He hadn’t noticed when the ground beneath his hiking boots changed. They had just kept moving. Time seemed to be closing in on him again, just as it had when he was last with Lila.

“Ah, this place,” he said. They stood at the edge of the remains of a cabin site. He had heard the story repeated his whole life—how a woman had gone mad at the end of a starving winter and murdered her husband and two children, one of whom was an infant boy.  If he remembered correctly, though, the daughter’s body had never been found.Jolene was naïve, and young enough to believe any story, of course. There were plenty of them, but none got to the heart of what he believed was wrong with Devil’s Oven. He was certain it had to be some kind of mineral buried here, perhaps something magnetic. The ground was somehow dead. Murders had happened here, yes, but he was always careful to differentiate between causalities and correlations.

 
Where did Claude Dixon fit in?

 “You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?” he said.

“No. Not ghosts,” she said.

“How’d you know about this place?” He left her on the road and started through the brush surrounding the cabin site. “I can’t imagine how hard it was to live up here—what? A hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Maybe they didn’t know it was hard,” she said. “It sure had to be lonely.” She walked around the eastern edge of the site, disappearing behind the small stand of wild rhododendrons.

He waited for her to appear again.

It was part of his job to remind people to stay on their guard when they were out in the woods. Snakes, bears, wolves, falling branches. Now there was whatever the hell had killed Claude Dixon to worry about. He never worried for himself. He knew every acre of his territory and knew, for the most part, where the dangers lay. Others depended on
him
when they got lost or injured or too drunk to find their way out.