November Mourns (5 page)

Leaning closer, Shad remained poised, but his father had hit the wall again.

“And what happened to her?”

“Nobody’s sure. She just . . . went to sleep there on Gospel Trail Road.”

“That’s not what you told me.”

“Yes it is, boy.”

“You said—”

“I know what I said. I told you the truth is what I did.”

His father’s voice had cracked painfully when he’d phoned the prison over a month ago. It was the only call Shad ever received on the inside. He knew it was going to be awful the instant he touched the receiver. Pa had said exactly thirteen words and hung up before Shad could respond.

Your sister’s been killed. Come home ’fore you get on with your life.

Pa couldn’t see the disparity of what he’d said on the phone and what he was saying now. Shad had to let it go.

He chewed his tongue, kept staring into darkness. “There’s nothing up that way at all. Gospel Trail leads to the trestle, doesn’t it? Why was she near the gorge?”

“I ain’t got no answers.”

“But what did she die from?”

“I don’t know that either. They never found out. Doc Bollar ain’t a big-city medical examiner. All he told me was her heart stopped. How’s that for putting a father’s mind at rest? That bastard!”

Mags had just turned seventeen. He searched Pa’s face to see if the old man was hiding anything, but there was only the usual frustration in his features, the endless disappointment.

“It’s a bad road, son.”

The words, spoken as if they held a terrible meaning. “What’s that?”

“I told you kids to keep off it, didn’t I?”

“The road? When did you ever tell me to stay clear of it?”

“Since you were both children!” The veins on his father’s wiry forearms stood out, the thick muscles in his neck corded and going red. “Not to go up there on Gospel Trail! It’s a bad road! Didn’t I say that?”

“Did you?”

“Stay away from Jonah Ridge! There’s nothing there but murder in wait. Don’t neither of you ever listen to me?”

Now that Shad thought about it some, he realized that he’d never been up there to the top of the gorge in his life. His father had told him, many times, but Shad didn’t stay away because of that. He simply never had a reason to go into those hills. And neither had Megan, so far as he knew.

“Tell me what you mean by that.”

“Don’t you know yet, boy?”

“No. Why would there be murder waiting?”

“I can’t explain it no better.”

His father stood, with that coiled explosive force inside him about to propel him forward. Shad reached out and took his father by the shoulders, held the old man where he was. They both began to tremble, fighting one another like that, will against will. Shad understood that his father was no longer going to be of any help. Whatever had to be done, he had to do himself.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“Don’t talk such damn nonsense!”

“It’ll be okay.”

The pressure inside Pa suddenly eased. He deflated and slumped back into his chair, weakly started to rock again. The dog began to crawl around in circles. Shad patted his father’s back, rubbing him, like,
Baby, baby, all will be fine, go sleep now
.

“Have you told Tandy Mae?” he asked. Shad didn’t feel comfortable bringing it up, but had to do so.

“I got no truck with her anymore, son.”

“She’s Megan’s mother.”

“That isn’t much of a truth to tell. Tandy gave birth to her, that’s all. ’Sides, she got enough worries with them other lame and afflicted children. Every one of us got enough burden already, don’t you think?”

When you got down to it, when somebody put it like that, you couldn’t do anything but agree. Shad nodded. “Yes.”

“You gonna stay the night?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think you would, but you’re welcome to stay, a’course. Your old bedroom’s still fixed up. Megan always cleaned it, put clean sheets on while you were away.”

His father’s steady motion began to waver. As if he consciously forced himself to keep going but kept forgetting, from second to second, what he was supposed to be doing.

Shad started to turn. His father was instantly on him, an inch away and hovering. “Son—”

“I want to see her room.”

“There isn’t anything left that might help you.”

“Show me.”

“It’s gonna do nothing but kill you, if’n you stay.”

Everyone thinking he didn’t have a chance, that he was already dead.

“What is?”

“The hollow.”

Shad spoke gently now, softly, the way you had to talk to Tandy Mae’s hydrocephalic pumpkin-headed son. “Pa, you wanted me to come home. Now I’m here. I want to check her room.”

The hound rose slowly and stood at Shad’s knee as he pulled open the screen door and pressed inside.

Immediately he could feel the oppression of common failure and everyday defeat. You could smell it like the stink of terror. Anybody who had it on him in prison was finished by the end of the first week.

You didn’t have to be murdered to haunt a house. And the place didn’t have to do anything more than exist to harass you. He wondered why he’d never felt it in his cell, with a century of caged men’s energy imprisoned along with him. No, only here, surrounded by family.

He entered Mags’s room and stopped short. All her belongings were still in their appropriate spots—the schoolbooks and teen magazines stacked neatly on her desk, closet door open and her clothes draped on hangers and hooks. Shad gritted his teeth and almost glanced away.

“You didn’t touch anything.”

“I couldn’t.”

“That’s not like you. She’s been dead six weeks.” About twenty minutes after Tandy Mae had taken up with her cousin, Pa had cleared every remnant of the woman from the house. Whatever she didn’t take, he burned in a bin out back.

His father shrugged, appeared almost sheepish. Was it because he’d lost yet another woman in his life? Or had he finally learned that removing the effects didn’t push out any of the memories?

“Five and a half,” Pa said.

“Did the police show up here?”

“Sheriff Wintel never came around at all, not even to offer his commiseration and condolences. Dave Fox searched through her things. Wore a pair of latex gloves the whole time. He inspected different parts a’the house, looked around the yard some. I’m not sure what he might’ve been hunting for. Drugs, I suppose. But she never touched none of that. There was nothing suspicious. So he told me, anyways. But if there was nothing peculiar, why was he lookin’?”

“Good point.”

So Dave didn’t consider her death to be from natural causes. Shad checked for something he could use to help him hold his course. “Letters? A diary?” He unmade the bed and, despite himself, tore away the blankets, and pulled up the mattress, the box spring Pa had made himself. He stared blankly at the clean slats of the floor beneath.

“Nothing like that. You knew your sister.”

Of course he had—but no, of course he hadn’t. Not anymore. He’d strayed off for two of the most important years in her life. When he’d gone into the can she’d just begun the transition from girl to young woman. It made him ache to think of what he’d missed.

“Don’t go up there,” his father said again, the man talking the way he did when Shad was a kid. “Stay away from them woods.”

“Pa, did you ever think that maybe someone just left her there? A boyfriend?”

“She didn’t have none.”

“Maybe you just didn’t know.”

“I knew everything about my baby girl.”

Except why she was dead. “They probably went up there to make out. Had a fight. She—”

“There wasn’t no boy, son.”

He’d been priming himself for weeks to avenge a killing. There had been cruelty in his father’s voice, whether the old man admitted to it now or not. He’d been calling down the rage, hoping to set it in motion.

Shad walked out but couldn’t help staring over at the chessboard. Both sides had mate in three moves. Pa always played a losing game.

Most of them did. Shad knew he had to fight, all the time, without hope of finishing, to keep from doing the same. The blood dreams had violent, beautiful needs that were entirely human.

Chapter Three

WHEN HE GOT BACK TO MRS. RHYERSON
’
S
boardinghouse he called Dave Fox from the phone in the hallway, and said, “It’s Shad Jenkins. I want you to show me where Megan’s body was found.”

Even a call at midnight didn’t surprise Dave. When you stood six-foot-four, went 250 of brawn and assurance, and could shoot the asshole out of a junkyard rat with an S&W.32 at two hundred yards, there wasn’t much that could shake you. He’d never been rattled in his life, over anything, but there was a trace of concern in his firm voice. “Maybe that’s not such a smart decision. The hell are you doing? You shouldn’t even be here.”

“It’s about time people stopped informing me of their opinions on where I should be.”

“You nearly gained yourself a college degree in the can. That puts you on the highway out of this county. You got a start on something new.”

It surprised Shad. He hadn’t known Dave Fox or the sheriff’s office would be so plugged in on him. He leaned against the wall, trying to ignore the pink wallpaper and a framed paint-by-numbers portrait of Conway Twitty shaking hands with Jesus.

“Is that how you’d play it?” Shad asked.

He was almost grinning and wasn’t sure why, until he reached up and felt his lips and realized it wasn’t a grin at all, he was baring his teeth. You could lose control for an instant and not even know it.

Never show what’s inside. If you didn’t hide it, they’d use it against you. He touched his mouth again and his expression was tranquil.

Dave still hadn’t responded and wouldn’t put it into words, but they both understood that hollow folks always paid their debts, and went after whatever was owed. “Will you take me up there?”

“Yes. I’ll pick you up at seven.”

“Thanks.”

It made sense. Dave had been keeping tabs on him and already knew Shad was staying at the boardinghouse.

He could hear it in the deputy’s voice, and sense his fortitude even over the phone. Dave Fox remained imperturbable, solid as mahogany, a tower of finely carved muscle, unwavering but purposeful. They’d never been particularly close but Shad guessed that was about to change now.

He hung up and thought of Mags’s beautiful face, dead at seventeen, laid out in the middle of a road no one ever traveled.

When he got back to the room his mother and the white bishop were waiting for him, standing there together smiling, breathing heavily as if they’d just been dancing. Shad looked down and saw himself sleeping on the bed with his eyes open.

It hadn’t happened like this for a while.

With her hand against the white bishop’s chin, drawing him to her, the robes flowed around them both as they whispered to one another and giggled. Shad noticed the inside of the window was steamed, and a word was written on the glass.

Pharisee

Someone had spelled it out using an index finger.

Shad stepped toward his mother but she wasn’t aware of him yet. It would take time, he knew, and he tried not to let the dread build within him. The bishop moved away from her and leaned over Shad’s body on the bed, put a hand on his shoulder as if trying to wake him. Failing that, the bishop slid away and came to rest beside Shad where he stood in the center of the room, and spoke to him from the corner of his mouth. As if they were conspirators in a grand royal treachery.

The white bishop’s voice was the voice of his father. “So there you are.”

“Yes,” Shad said.

The three roles of the bishop were illustrated in his vestments. His role as ruler was denoted by the crown. As a guardian, by the shepherd’s staff. As a guide, by the bells on the
saccos,
the short tunic with box sleeves. The sides were buttoned up with bells, beginning at the wrists and flowing to the bottom of the hem. The bells called worshipers to follow.