Devil's Oven (7 page)

The smaller woman, the one with the light hair and twisted smile, set the food on the table and stepped away.

“Stay out of his way,” she said.

Then she smiled at him.

“Go ahead, Anthony.” She still smelled of garden flowers and he thought about her hands and how they had felt on his skin. It gave him pleasure to think of it, but his hunger overwhelmed him and he grabbed for the food.

He forgot the women as he ate, filling his mouth with the rich brown bread. It tasted like nothing he had ever eaten before.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“It’s sick, is what it is,” Thora said. “He’s not some stray dog. Good God, Ivy. He could kill us in our sleep. What’s in your head?”

She was following Ivy up the front porch steps. The monster her sister called Anthony had devoured the loaf of spice bread, shoving it into his mouth in huge, crumbling chunks. After drinking two tall glasses of water that Ivy filled for him, he sank onto the couch. She had watched as Ivy helped him stretch out on the cushions, and then tucked a throw pillow beneath his head. This man—if that’s what he was—was possibly the biggest one Thora had ever seen. He was so long that his lower legs and feet hung over the arm of the couch. He had looked up at Ivy, his eyes expressionless, but his chapped, full lips curved in a drowsy smile. His eyes were mahogany brown, like his hair. Through it all, he hadn’t said a word, making Thora wonder if he could talk at all.

“But he’s like a child,” Ivy said. “We have to help him.”

“I want to know how he came to be living in our trailer,” Thora said. On the porch, she propped the shovel against the railing, thinking,
We should have taken the shotgun.

They went inside.

Dear Lord, there’s a monster of a man in our trailer covered in blood that’s not his own. And Ivy is delusional.

“He came off the mountain,” Ivy said, continuing toward the kitchen. “I’m hungry. Are you?”

Thora, too, had awakened hungry; she always did. But her mouth had gone dry and she was so shaken that she thought she might be sick if she tried to eat or drink.

“What do you mean?” Thora said. “Ivy! Stop, now. Tell me!”

Ivy shrugged like a recalcitrant teenager. Outside, dawn was breaking and the first rumbling string of trucks from the quarry a dozen miles away had started its run out on the highway.

Thora had never liked to be rough with Ivy, but now she grabbed her by the shoulder to hold her still. “What do you mean,
he came off the mountain
?”

“I never ask you for anything,” Ivy said quietly. “Can’t you let me have this? Can’t you let me have
him
?”

“You met him up on the mountain? Tell me!” Thora said, shaking her. Despite the controlled tone of Ivy’s voice, Thora knew her sister wasn’t begging. She had already made the decision to have this
…
whatever he was. Ivy wouldn’t be moved.

Thora stared at her, feeling Ivy’s thin shoulder through the wool sweater she had thrown on over her pajamas. Maybe she had always doubted her half sister’s sanity. All the hours Ivy spent alone. All the hours she spent sitting behind her sewing machine, creating just the right shape of a wedding dress for some slut whose parents were able to come up with the seven or eight hundred dollars to fraudulently clothe their daughter in one of Ivy Luttrell’s innocence-white wedding dresses. Ivy, who had never to Thora’s knowledge been on a date with a man. Ivy, who had never displayed anything but shy deference, or a calm, businesslike attitude toward men and women alike. Ivy, who was almost pretty. Ivy, who wouldn’t say
boo
to a goose. There was something wrong with Ivy that had to have come by way of Mary, the slight, strange young woman who had seduced and married Thora’s father. Whatever that something was, it made Thora afraid, and had kept her from—did she dare even think it?—loving either Ivy or Ivy’s mother.

Ivy stood up straighter beneath Thora’s hand.

“His name is Anthony, and I made him,” she said. “I found him buried on the mountain, and I put him back together.” She held up her hands. “I stitched him back together with
these
.”

Thora looked more closely into her half sister’s angry face, at her lips with their sad, jagged scar. She looked closely, thinking it might help her understand what she had just heard. She saw only madness. She let her hand drop from Ivy’s shoulder.
What has Ivy done?

“You don’t believe me,” Ivy said, shaking her head. “I knew you wouldn’t. Nothing I do is ever good enough for you.”

After Ivy’s mother had disappeared, and Thora had discovered their father hanging in the woods, Ivy had retreated deep into a private world, making up stories about her mother coming back, about creatures she met up on the mountain. Thora knew she bore some responsibility. She had been too young to take on a child. Far too young. But hadn’t she tried? Hadn’t she done what their father would’ve wanted her to do? Now, if Ivy had truly gone mad—and
oh, yes
, it seemed that she had—Thora would have to do something. She felt a headache growing in the back of her skull and knew it was going to be a bad one.

“It’s not right, Ivy,” Thora said. “You can’t own people. I don’t know what you think you’ve done. That man is all wrong. He’s dangerous.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand,” Ivy said. “You’ve always hated all men except for Daddy.
You’re
the one who’s afraid.”

Before Thora could stop herself, she slapped Ivy’s cheek. She had never hit Ivy in anger before, and the act left her shaking and afraid of what she might do next.

Ivy didn’t run from her, or even jerk away. Her lips just tightened with resolve.

“I’m going in to work for a while,” she said. She started toward the workroom, but then turned back to Thora. “Don’t do anything to Anthony.”

Thora felt her body go cold.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Christ on a cracker, Tripp. Something popped this guy’s head like a bean.”

Tripp knew most of the troopers who worked this part of the state, but he considered Keith Caldwell a friend. When he had called Keith’s cell phone around six thirty, waking him up on his day off, Keith had told him it was no problem. Six foot two and a fit two hundred sixty pounds, Keith had been a talented lineman at the state’s technical university, but a knee injury had prevented him from moving on to the pros. When he got a few beers in him, he didn’t mind talking about his football career, but preferred to talk about coaching his son’s Mini League team. Tripp had waited for him down at the entrance to the driveway, watching a gray dawn spread through the sky and pushing away thoughts about reality in the harsh light of day.

“So you woke up this morning, came outside, and found him”— Keith swept his hand over the body—“just lying in your driveway? Seriously?”

Even as a kid, Tripp had been an unconvincing liar, so he tried to meet Keith’s eyes in a sincere, unblinking manner. If he couldn’t pull it off here in his own driveway, how would he hold up at the trooper station or in front of his own boss, who would soon be there as well?

“I don’t know what to say,” Tripp told him. “I came out to take a leak, you know, to wake up. I thought it was a dog or a deer or something.” He’d had the entire night to think about what his story should be and had decided to keep it simple.

•  •  •

“You know him?” Keith said.

Tripp shook his head. “It’s not like I could tell if I did.”

Staring down at the body, Keith gave a grunt of assent.

“Maybe check his ID?” Tripp said, hoping to take Keith’s focus off of him. He didn’t like the way he had to weigh every word against the lies he had already told. He had only been at it in the hour or so since he had called Keith, and he was already weary of the whole thing. It wasn’t even like he had murdered the guy or was hiding anything significant. That Lila—or anyone else for that matter—had been with him when the body had basically fallen from the sky and onto his driveway was irrelevant. They had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Period.

“I’ve got gloves in the cruiser,” Keith said. “Don’t suppose you could come up with any coffee there?” He nodded toward the cabin. “Somebody got my ass out of bed awfully early this morning.”

“I could probably dig some out of the freezer,” Tripp said, thinking about the instant he kept for his very occasional visitors. Then he remembered the machine on his counter. “Or, hey, I can do cappuccino.”

•  •  •

Getting Lila calmed down and into some kind of shape to drive herself home had been tough. As they walked past the body she had held tight to him, hiding her face against his shirt, and he had stayed at the truck with her for another ten minutes before letting her drive away. He had watched the taillights of the truck disappear into the dark, then reappear briefly as the road curved away and down the hillside.

Walking back up the drive, he had shined his flashlight on the body, not really wanting to look but feeling compelled. There was no way even to tell what color the guy’s hair had been. It was as though the skull had been sucked out the top of the head, leaving behind flaps of lumpy, chewed-up skin. The neck was twisted and stretched, longer and much thinner than it should have been.

Tripp stared, trying to imagine it wasn’t human, that it wasn’t real. But despite the hash atop the body’s shoulders, it was obviously a man. One of his arms had broken at the elbow and lay at an impossible angle. Tripp could only think it had happened as the body landed. He had knelt to take out the wallet whose shape had worn a faded square in the back of the man’s pants, but stopped himself, knowing he would be better off not touching the body at all. Later, as he lay in bed not sleeping, he thought he should have covered the body with a tarp or something. That would’ve been a bad idea, too. If only a bear or pack of coyotes had come through and dragged the thing away. It wasn’t a thought he liked; it just would have made everything easier.

Lila called him around four a.m. She had taken a sedative and sounded better, calmer, but wasn’t able to sleep, either.

“What will we do?” she said. Her voice was soft in his ear. Tripp hated that she might have been there beside him all night, if it hadn’t been for…well, if it hadn’t been for a lot of things.

“It’s handled,” he said. “You can forget about it.”

“Sure,” she said, giving a rueful laugh.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “I love you.”

“You sleep, too,” she said.

He held the phone to his ear, wanting to hear more, but there was only the sound of the call disconnecting.

•  •  •

“The body” turned out to be Claude Dixon, a dispatcher at Bud Tucker’s trucking company. When Tripp came back carrying the steaming cup of cappuccino, Keith showed him Dixon’s ID card with its two-inch-square photo. A grinning Claude Dixon hunched forward, squinting at the camera so that his narrow, freckled face loomed. But the eyes beneath his bowl haircut were bright and intelligent, and one got the sense he was born with a sense of humor.

Bud Tucker’s company. Lila’s husband’s company.

Tripp wasn’t even able to process the implications before the next thing Keith told him turned everything upside down in his head a second time.

 “You’re not going to believe this shit,” Keith said. “I just found out that Dixon’s wife—works at the Git ’n’ Go down in Alta—she called in around eleven thirty last night screaming that some giant hairy guy had beaten the crap out of her, assaulted Claude, and then ran off with him.”

“Ran off?” Tripp said.

“Threw him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, she said. Smiling like some kind of freak. And he wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes.”

Tripp shook his head, lost in both relief and confusion. “So how did he—Claude Dixon, I mean—get up here? You think somebody brought him all the way up here to do
that
to him?”

“All I can say, Tripp, is you should be damn grateful that you’re under six feet tall and not covered in black hair.”

•  •  •

Within the half hour, the hillside was crowded with uniforms and flashing red and white lights. Tripp shifted into professional mode, and with the shift came a huge sense of relief. He was no longer Keith’s sole focus and the area around the body in the driveway was an official crime scene. Everyone there—the state investigators, his DNR co-workers, and even his supervisor, Denise—could be counted on to keep the emotions to a minimum. His palms were still sweating, but he was finally sure he could handle things the way he knew he needed to.

     For now, Keith seemed to have his back and was sticking close to the state investigators. He had also sent away the guys who’d shown up from the county-licensed ambulance service. Word had spread about the mutilated state of the body. As people came and went all through the morning, Tripp’s front yard took on the air of an impromptu carnival, with Claude Dixon’s exploded head as the five-dollar sideshow attraction.

Finally, Burns and Johnson, two of the state’s investigators, got around to questioning him. Tripp led them to the front porch where they could have some privacy, and he was glad neither of them asked to go inside. He was fairly certain he had hidden Lila’s things, starting with the bra she had playfully left hanging off the back of a chair a few days before, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

Burns, sixtysomething and with the relaxed manner of a man who was only a year or two away from retirement, asked the questions. Johnson lounged against the porch railing, picking clean his nails. Easily twenty years younger than Burns, Johnson wasn’t as clean-shaven as the state liked their boys to be, and his jacket was badly wrinkled. When he leaned forward to introduce himself, Tripp had noticed a citrusy smell that reminded him of the cologne his kid sister had worn when she was a teenager.

He had also seen Johnson more than once at The Twilight Club. Somebody young like the Jolene girl would appeal to him. The whole Investigator Johnson package was distasteful to Tripp. He was glad it was Burns who spoke, asking him the same questions he himself would have asked of someone with a dead body in their front yard: Had he heard anything in the night? Had anyone been hanging around the cabin? Did he know, or had he ever met, Claude Dixon? Where had he been the night before and with whom? Tripp made sure to mention the name of the restaurant where he had eaten, and that he had stopped to fill up his truck on the way home. Was it his imagination, or did Johnson give a disbelieving snort when he said he had fallen asleep in front of the television before ten?
Believe what you want, asshole
.
As long as Lila’s name stays out of it.