Authors: Jeanette Battista
Long Black Veil
LONG BLACK VEIL
Jeanette Battista
3 Jeanette Battista
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Discover other titles by Jeanette Battista at Amazon.com:
Leopard Moon (Volume 1 of the Moon series)
Jackal Moon (Volume 2 of the Moon series
)
Hyena Moon (Volume 3 of the Moon series
Hunter Moon (Volume 4 of the Moon series)
Dead Harvest (with Tracey Phillips)
To readers everywhere and lovers of great music
She visits my grave, when the night winds wail.
Nobody knows, nobody sees,
Nobody knows, but me.
-
Long Black Veil
Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill
Table of Contents
Devon stood at the base of the steps of the Town Hall, her shadow thrown out behind her like a cape from the street light above. It was early-March cold, and her breath frosted the air around her. She wished Brock could have picked a warmer place to meet, oh like say, anywhere else, but knew why he hadn’t. There still weren’t many places they could go and not attract attention. There was no way they could go to his house since he was grounded and his parents were actively pretending she didn’t exist, and Gammy’s trailer was out of the question. So Devon was stuck waiting around after her shift at the drugstore, jumping up and down and hoping she didn’t turn into a Devsicle before he got there. She could only hope he’d be on time—it was nearly eleven o’clock already—because she couldn’t stave off frostbite forever.
It was sort of creepy, with the lights glinting off of the snow and the rest of the street so dark and quiet. Knowing about the two murders that had taken place here didn’t dial down the eerie vibe either. Granted, she and Brock were probably the only ones who did know about them, as much research as they’d been doing in the past months, but that didn’t help her insides, which were busy tying themselves in knots. She knew it was just the lateness and the cold making her jumpy. But knowing it and knowing it were two entirely different things.
She heard a sound and turned toward Main Street. There was Brock cutting across the parking lot on his way to her with a smile on his face. She waved, relieved, and began to cross the road to meet him.
A car engine roared to life. She stopped, turning to see the silver flash of a car’s grille bearing down on her. Devon tried to get her legs to move, even as Brock yelled at her to get out of the way, but they didn’t seem to be working.
Something slammed into her and she was flying through the air, and then falling in a cloud of her own breath and white mist.
Devon liked winter in the mountains the best. She knew it was weird, as everyone else—including the tourists, the ones who bothered to stop in town anyway—loved autumn. It was because of the riot of color from the leaves turning that transformed the mountainside into a visual brushfire. It was a feast for the senses: the bright blast of color like a Crayola bomb going off, the smell of wood smoke and leaf rot, the sound of small animals crashing through piles of dead leaves, and the feel of bite on the wind, as if the very air had developed teeth. Taste was covered by the hand-pressed apple cider sold at the general store and along the roadside near a particularly beautiful vista of nature that had a convenient turnoff.
To Devon, that was just a prelude to the real show: winter. That was when the bones of the trees were visible against a pale grey sky, when the clouds lowered their fluffy white heads and shook the snow from them. Winter was when twilight seemed to last forever, and the wind had not just teeth, but the jaws to go with them. It was air so cold it burned your nose, causing pain to shoot up into your sinuses until your head pounded. She loved it.
But winter was still months away as Devon stepped off the bus, minding the rainwater that gathered at the side of the road. She waited until the bus drove away, then turned and began the long trudge to her grandmother’s place. As she tried to avoid the puddles made by the light rain—she hated getting her boots all wet since they took forever to dry and smelled like boiled cat poop until they did—she thought about how she still didn’t think of her grandmother’s house as home, not even in her head. Devon had been living with her Gammy for ten years now, and it still wasn’t home. Granted, she wasn’t big on cross-stitch samplers or ceramic dogs that seemed to follow her with their eyes to the point she thought she might need to stock a baseball bat for the inevitable time they came alive to murder them, but Devon had expected to feel some kind of connection to the place by now.
She’d been eight years old when her mother had been arrested for drugs, theft, prostitution, and heaven alone knew what else, and Gammy had been called to come and get her. Gammy couldn’t come right away, so Devon had been sent to a group home for the several days it took her grandmother to arrive. When she laid eyes on her, Devon had almost cried with relief to be gone from that place and the kids in it. The fact that she’d no longer be dragged pillar to post around the Shenandoah Valley was a bonus.
She hadn’t cried though, and Devon knew her grandmother had appreciated it. Gammy was imminently practical. There was no point in crying over something that couldn’t be helped, over something that was as immoveable as the mountains her people came from. Gammy had gathered her up in a tight hug and collected her things and then took her back to the mountain town her family had left nearly eight years before. They passed the hours in silence, with Devon slipping in and out of an exhausted sleep.
The gravel road became a dirt track that led up to the foothills at the base of the mountains. Devon followed it, her backpack full of books heavy on her shoulders. The day was grey and misty, the tops of the mountains wreathed in clouds like smoke from a pipe. It was still warm during the day in late September, but the humidity and the rain made everything feel clammy and sick. It was almost like the world had a fever.
She passed by the old stone church, no longer used and worn out in a tumble-down sort of way. There was a small cemetery adjacent to it, the stones still sticking up out of the overgrown grasses and choking weeds. Devon kept walking. She let her gaze wander as the path opened up on her left to give her a glimpse of the dense green hills seeming to roll on until they broke like a tide against the mountain’s base.
Devon stopped as her eyes caught movement. Someone was walking on the hillside. The rain had mostly stopped, so it wasn’t that strange, but they didn’t get many visitors up this way. Devon looked closer and saw black fabric spooling out behind the figure in the gentle wind. It was a woman; Devon could tell by the way she moved through the grass and by the ripple of movement in the long clothing she wore. She was dressed all in black, including a veil of some kind that covered her head and face.
She was too far away for Devon to call to her. The woman probably lived high up on the mountain and was off to visit a friend, although she couldn’t recall any neighbors of her Gammy’s that dressed like this. The cut of the clothing seemed odd, almost like it belonged to an earlier time, and most of what Gammy’s friends wore came from the nearest WalMart.
The corner of a book began to dig into her back and she jostled her pack to readjust it, taking her eyes off the woman for a moment. When she looked back up, there was no one walking the hills. Devon looked around slowly. The woman was just…gone. Devon stared at the place where the woman had been, wondering if she had just had a hallucination brought on by too much studying.
A gust of colder wind blew droplets of rain down on her. Devon gathered her rain slicker closer, ducked her head and continued trucking up the path that led to her Gammy’s trailer. Better to think about the there one minute, gone the next hill walker where it was dry and warm.
A chorus of meows greeted her as the trailer came into view. It was an old single-wide on a poured foundation. The beige siding was showing its age, although how old that would be Devon didn’t know; Gammy had lived here for as long as she could remember. The steps that led to the front door had seen better days, but the window boxes were full of flowers and greenery and Gammy still kept the yard neat as a pin.
Devon looked down as two cats took turns winding around her ankles. She petted each of them, making sure to keep the affection equal. “Hey Eden. Lambert.” Eden was a petite black shorthair with a splash of white across her chest and nose. Lambert was their tom, a huge grey monstrosity that was the scourge of small rodents this side of the mountain. A purr like a backhoe rumbled deep in his chest. She was surprised that they had come to greet her even though the rain was passing. They both hated getting their fur wet. She knew that the rest of the afternoon and evening would see them sitting on the front steps grooming themselves to within an inch of their lives.
The cats followed her as she climbed the sagging steps and let herself in the front door. A strong odor declared war on her nostrils as soon as she stepped inside. Eden and Lambert fled back to the yard. “Gammy?”
Her grandmother came from the small but neatly appointed kitchen, wiping her hands on the dishtowel she had tucked in her apron. Devon moved further into the house, toeing off her boots and stacking them in the rack by the door before going any farther. She hung up her rain slicker on one of the coat hooks. The trailer was small, but was pleasant and tidy. Gammy didn’t allow clutter inside; she said it made the house look ratty.
