Hallowed (39 page)

My father simply gave him a nod.

The two of them stood there staring at the computer screen like an open coffin at a funeral.

“There’s one other thing, Uncle Hank,” I said, handing him my cell phone, displaying the text message that I had been sent.  “It was sent from Claudia’s cell phone at three-forty this morning.”

Uncle Hank’s lips moved.  His face was pale when he handed the cell phone back to me.

Less than ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door.  As I watched Mom open the front door of our house and found Tracy Tatum standing there, I couldn’t help but appreciate the long strange road that had led my family to this moment.  Upstairs was a man, my only uncle, who had entered our house for the first time in over five years, while here was a woman who my father had rescued thirty-five years ago and for all intents and purposes was dead, entering the personal space of the our family for the very first time.

“Come in, Tracy,” my mother said holding the door open for her.

Hesitantly, Tracy Tatum entered studying the foyer and living room with the practiced eye of someone whose survival might depend on knowing every angle.  “You have a beautiful home, Mrs. Graves.”

Mom closed the door behind her, shutting her in protectively with the rest of our family.

“Do you want an iced tea or water, Tracy?”  It must have been the first time I had called her by her first name.  I could see from the way her brows moved at the word that she indeed noticed.

She smiled appreciatively.  “Water would be great, Paul.  Thank you.”

My mother started upstairs, inviting Tracy to follow.  As she reached for the banister, the ever-present leather bag dangled from her open palm by its strings.

After Mom had disappeared upstairs, I called out to Tracy.  “If you don’t mind me asking, what is that in the bag?”

Tracy turned and smiled warmly.  “I always pictured it would be Claudia who asked instead of you,” she replied with a smile.  “It’s called a gris-gris bag.  It was given to me by a very dear shaman friend of mine from New Orleans.  It’s my talisman.  When I feel afraid, I imagine I can hear a voice in the darkness telling me not to worry.”  She reached out and took my hand.  “C’mon, we better get upstairs.  Never mind the water.  Claudia needs us.”

On the way up, I showed Tracy the text message.  She gave a nod and swallowed audibly, passing the phone back to me.  “Well, there is it, then,” was her only response.

Upstairs in the office, Dad paced, taking the leadership role out of simple necessity.  I caught the end of a conversation involving Sheriff Brannigan.

“We can’t involve the Sheriff’s Department or the FBI, Jack,” Uncle Hank demanded.  “They’ll never let us go inside.  We’re civilians.”

“Go inside?  We shouldn’t be involved at all at this point,” Dad countered.

“3 must return.  That’s what the text message read,” Tracy said in an even modulated tone.  “It’s clearly a threat.  If we don’t go back in—all three of us—Claudia will die.”

That was the first time that I realized that the purveying view was that I wasn’t going with them.  I opened my mouth to protest but my father’s voice cut me off.

“Is that your expert interpretation?” he snapped.

“It’s what I feel to be true,” Tracy responded.

“That’s psychic bullshit speculation,” Dad roared.  “I don’t live my life by what-if’s.  That’s how an inexperienced officer gets himself killed.”

“I wish this were only an educated guess, Mr. Graves, but it’s a cold truth,” she said in a quiet, mousy voice that nonetheless commanded complete and utter silence from everyone.  “This girl will die if we involve any others.”

“Who’s to say that we won’t kill her ourselves?  There could be all sorts of dangerous traps in there in anticipation of some police raid.  All we’d do is blunder in and possibly get her killed.  I couldn’t live with myself if I knew that I was responsible for that little girl’s death.”

This sort of logic versus emotion argument went on for another good ten minutes as I disappeared from everyone’s radar from my position just inside the open doorway.  Then finally, Uncle Hank said something that stopped the conversation cold.

“Why don’t we just talk about what this is really about, Jack?” my uncle said to his brother in a low almost conspiratorial tone.

“What do you mean?” my father snapped, his voice only getting that much louder in direct opposition.

“Do you think you’re the only one that doesn’t want to go in there again?”  A look passed between him and Tracy.  She lowered her eyes to the folded hands in her lap.  I considered for a moment then what a huge reservoir of strength she must have had.  Out of the surviving three that had been inside the house, she seemed to have the most to fear and had reacted the least to the prospect of going back in again. In fact, she seemed to have reached some sort of peace with that fact.

“What are you saying,” my father said in a hushed yet accusatory tone.  “Say it, Hank.  Don’t beat around the bush.”

“For God’s sake, we’re all scared, Jack!”

My father got this look on his face and actually began to smile, but it was something that I couldn’t decipher, because there was a pinch of maliciousness and hate added to the recipe that I’d never witnessed in him.  “You’ll never let it go, will you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I had a wife and son, Hank,” he snapped.  “Why didn’t
you
go when Ronnie called, huh?”

Mom stared from my father to Hank.  He turned away from my mom in something that resembled shame.

“Goddamit, I had a family, Hank.  What did you think I was going to do?”

“I never brought that up, Jack.  Why do you feel you need to now?”  Hank rose and glanced at one of Dad’s old framed black and white pictures of grandma and grandpa.  “I’m afraid.  Tracy’s afraid.  To not feel fear would be foolish, but try and ask yourself the same question I’ve been asking myself for the last hour:  Is the source of the fear that you might not be able to save Claudia… or fear for yourself?”

The room fell silent for the first time since I had entered.  I heard myself, as if from a short distance away, clearing my throat.  “I just want everyone to know,” I began in a voice that sounded incredibly insecure in that room full of adults, whose eyes were swinging around and seeking me out with a sort of wide-eyed confusion that told me that they really had forgotten I was even in the room.  “I’m going with you all.”

“Sorry, pal.  Out of the question!”  Dad shook his head and this time my mother was right in sync with him.  “Your father’s right, Paul,” Mom completed his thought for him.  “No way.”

I was about to raise my voice in protest but they turned away from me, showing me their backs.  Even Tracy turned her attention back to the debate at hand after one final look that I couldn’t read.  Something snapped in me then.  A boiling rage took over, and I knew exactly in that moment what I must do to break this stalemate of inactivity, this filibuster that did nothing but waste more and more precious time.

Dad gave a grunt and turned back to Hank.  “Let’s just try analyzing the facts here for once.  If it’s true what she says,” he continued, pointing at Tracy, “this guy is expecting us and lying in wait.  He has every advantage.  I’m still not completely convinced that she isn’t in cahoots with this guy.”

Tracy’s face contorted and she finally lost her temper.  “I’ve done everything humanly possible to help you!”

“And you think by giving us information after the deed’s been done, that you’ve actually helped!”

“If you think I’ve stood by all this time while innocent people died, then you’ve got a more twisted mind than…”

“Thinking like a twisted mind has kept me alive all these years, lady!”

“Distrust and paranoia isn’t helping anything,” Uncle Hank added.

“It’s only paranoia if it’s not true, Hank!”

The voices faded into the background as I made my way quietly and as stealthily as I could down the carpeted stairway into the kitchen, and out through the garage to my car, waiting in the driveway.

I was already ten minutes gone, a good deal longer than I had wagered on, driving an average of sixty, when my cell phone rang.  I stared down at it and let it ring, hoping that I could at least get to highway 71 and just far enough ahead of them to remove the possibility of them catching up to me before I had reached the town of Eden.

This was the only way, I had decided.  Something had gotten so firm a stranglehold on my father that I knew that he would continue to come up with reason after stubborn reason why they shouldn’t go in alone.  Hour after precious hour would slip by until by sheer force of will he would have his way or someone would reach the conclusion that I just had: That they would have to go on without him.

Going in before him was the only way I could think of to remove that option.  I still wasn’t completely sure that he would come after me.  I had never seen him like this before, so I had no clue just how powerful a control this fear held over my father.

But I hoped his love for me would be stronger.

According to Tracy Tatum, it could only be my father, my uncle, and the woman they had rescued as a child who entered that house.  Graham already had Ronnie Wicke’s daughter.  Without the four main players in this game, the final solution--the rescue of Claudia Wicke--couldn’t happen.

So what role was I playing here?

I guess I was the wild card in this deck.

It was just after nine and I had missed rush hour traffic.  I was well over thirty miles further along when my cell rang again.  I picked up this time.

“Paul,” I heard my father’s voice say.  “Where are you?”

“I’m on my way to Eden.”

“Son, I want you turn around right now and head on back here.”

“Sorry, Dad,” I told him.  “I’ve made up my mind.”

I hung up.

I tried to think like my father, considering his various options.

First, he could keep this strictly between us and our little group and follow, hoping to catch up to me before I could find a way inside.

Second, he could follow and alert the local law enforcement that I would be trying to trespass on private property.  Not an offense that I could be arrested for, but it might put up a barrier long enough for them to catch up with me.  The only problem with that plan is that it would involve the locals, making it nearly impossible to get inside without their cooperation, which meant more red tape and more time.

If he truly needed a good excuse to avoid going inside the house, this option might work to his advantage.  The only flaw in this plan would be if I were to get inside the house before the locals caught up with me.  If that happened, I would truly be on my own, as he would have blown the whistle and, as a result, any advantage he might have had to go in secretly and without outside involvement would have been lost.

Knowing the thorough mind he possessed, I decided that he would choose to leave the local authorities out of the loop and choose what was behind door number one.

Traffic was a lot worse than I had expected.  It was already past eleven before I had Austin in my rearview.  Up to this point, the only map I was working from was the one in my head from what I had seen on the internet.  Rummaging through my glove compartment, I found an old state highway map, not very detailed, but there was a tiny dot and the word Eden about fifty miles northwest of Austin.

That would get me roughly into the same neighborhood.  I figured if worse came to worse, I could stop and ask directions from the locals.  The town of Eden was bound to have a barbershop or feed store.  There were always healthy veins of information to be mined from those places.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.  I made every turn at each foreign intersection with no hesitation and found myself driving straight to the water tower as if returning home from a long trip.

It felt like fate was riding shotgun beside me.

Just under an hour later, I sat in my car outside a brown rain-starved field, studying the water tower, a phantom from a distant dream.  A big faded red apple faced the east bound lane of Farm Road 3165 entering town.  I followed the skyline and saw the hills in the distance.  Marching up the hill was a series of trees; apple, I was guessing.

I continued on down the farm road, passing one left turn then another, eventually driving another two miles before squealing to a stop when a bell seemed to go off in my head like a microwave timer.

Sailing by in a car, there was no way a person could have spotted it, a non-descript iron gate, so overgrown with weeds and branches from surrounding trees that it formed a natural camouflage, until your eyes were only a few feet from it.

I pulled over and climbed out.  There was a gravel path barely visible leading up through the densely growing maple, then disappearing around a right hand curve.

Problem was, there was a chain on the gate.

Out of frustration, I grabbed it and gave it a hard tug.  With a rattle and clang, I watched the ends of the chain drop and dangle just inside the gate.  I pulled one end of the chain through and pushed the gate open.

Taking one last glance into the dirt beside the gravel road, I spotted the lock.  It had been cut cleanly with bolt cutters.  Pocketing the lock, I pulled my car just up the road far enough to get the gate closed again.

Just as I started to close the gate, I realized that if Dad had any chance of following me, I had to leave him a big sign or he’d pass the gate entirely.  So, for starters, I left the gate wide open.

Stomping down the overgrown weeds on the shoulder of the road, I laid the long chain from the gate in an obvious arrow position pointing toward the gate.  If someone were looking, they would spot it.  Hopefully.

For good measure, I pulled the lock from my pocket and set it conspicuously atop the gate above the chain.

Figured I would give him a call and give him a head’s up just in case, but of course, my cell phone had no signal.