Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (36 page)

The cats found the
blankets immediately, and Barry's flashlight bounced off the walls,
the dirt floor, and the ceiling as he began shoving boxes aside.
Molly heard a smash as he knocked over one of the jars. The light
quavered, and she
knew his hands were
shaking. She resolutely punched in num
bers
on the phone, dialing Faron and Ellie's number.

She heard two rings, and then the sirens and
the roar filled the cellar, followed by a crashing, grinding,
smashing noise overhead.

* * *

The answering machine at Faron and Ellie's
house received no message except the din created when the twister
picked up the Curtis house, tore it from its foundations, and
carried it into the sky to whirl it to pieces, some of which
smashed into adjacent houses, some of which would be found miles
from the original site. By the time the phone was on its fourth
ring, the Randolph house was also torn from its roots, and a great
part of it ended up as the second story of a house across the
street before both homes crumbled into the back of the next house
over, which was otherwise unharmed.

Faron and Ellie, fortunately, were not home.
The call they had been waiting for had come: Callie and Aldin had
finished the instrument that was heir to the banjo's magic parts.
They had been very secretive about the nature of the object but
sounded tickled with themselves. So while their house was being
smashed to smithereens, Faron and Ellie were on their way to the
Arkansas border.

Just ten miles from the
turnoff to Callie and Aldin's house, the Randolphs heard the
tornado reports on the car radio and pulled off at a minimart to
use the phone. When there was no answer, they got back into the
car, turned it around, and headed back to Tulsa. Ellie told herself
things were okay, she
was a fool to worry,
she was just being overly dramatic. She
pictured her mom and dad out eating someplace, laughing it up
with the Richardses.

The picture exploded when
they hit the roadblock on the highway just before they got to their
exit. Policemen in raincoats and boots splashed around near the
roadblock, and people got out of their cars and dived back and
forth in the rain trying to find out what was happening. Spotting a
woman and
child walking back toward them,
Ellie rolled down the window
and asked
her, "What's going on?"

"Cyclones," the woman
said. "More than anyone has ever seen before in one storm. Whole
neighborhoods just blew
away, I heard, and
half the city is flooded. We're going to be
stuck here until they get rescue areas set up for the
evacuees. The streets are choked right now, I guess. Probably the
best thing is to turn around and go back."

"Home," the kid said, pulling on its
mother's coat.

"Can't go home now,
baby,"
the
mother
said, but the kid kept repeating, whining, demanding, "Home,
home,
home."

The
mother shrugged, picked up the kid, and headed back for her
car again, and Ellie heard the kid crying to go home after she
could no longer see either one of them.

Wet leaves picked up in
the wind and whirled high over the
car so
that Ellie felt as if she were a figurine in one of those
snow domes you bought for children, the kind you
turn upside
down so that the snow swirls
and drifts down on a house or a Santa or a reindeer. The leaves
plastered themselves to
the
windshield while the trees beckoned and bobbed,
mocking like dirty old men, "Come on, little girl, come over here.
Whatcha afraid of? Come on, I got something to show
you."

* * *

"Sold my flax, sold my wheel

To buy my love a sword of steel

So it in battle he might wield.

Johnny's gone for a soldier.

Shool shool shoolaroo—"

Julie sang in time to the stitching at the
meeting of the local quilters' guild.

One lady looked up and asked, "What's all
those funny words for?"

"They probably used to be
Gaelic," Julie explained, "but
when the
song got translated into English, they got left out. Other people
say they're some kind of magic words, but of course, later on
people might have thought some old language
had magical abilities. Or maybe they really were magic, I
don't
know. Sometimes too, when they held
dances in poor places where there are no instruments, or like in
Scotland once the bagpipes were banned or in Ireland after the
harps were burned, or in Nova Scotia in the old days when the ships
came in and sailors wanted to dance but had no instruments, some
people knew how to make mouth music—just imitating the sounds of
instruments with their voices. Maybe some of the nonsense words
came from that."

The lady nodded. "How does that go
again?"

"Shool shool—" Juli began.
But all at once her hands stopped sewing and her mouth stopped
moving. Her face felt
suddenly wet, and
her ears were filled with a roar of wind and
thunder. Her eyes turned inward, and she saw only darkness
and felt only dampness and cold. And the husband of
the
woman who was
hosting the quilting bee stepped into the doorway from the living
room, where he'd been watching TV.

"Beryl-Bee," he said, "do you suppose we
ought to call up the Bible college and make sure Lucy Dawn is
safe?"

"Now, Henry, why would we do something like
that?" the hostess asked, and Juli could almost hear past arguments
about him wanting Beryl-Bee's attention while she was busy with her
ladies' groups, even though he probably ignored her for months at a
time when it was football or baseball season.

"They just now interrupted the game to tell
about the terrible storms they're havin' down in Tulsa. Floods and
cyclones. Lots of 'em."

"Lord have mercy!"

And Julianne was rocking back and forth,
singing under her breath, "Wasn't that a mighty time?" about the
Johnstown flood. Her hair was blowing and wet around her face, and
big drops of water fell onto the quilt. Tears ran down her face to
mingle with what looked like rain water, and Beryl-Bee looked
sharply at her husband and back up at her ceiling, which she was
sure from the looks of her guest he'd forgotten to fix. It was dry
and white and plastery-textured like always.

* * *

Tom George had asked Anna Mae if she could
speak to the health workers' union at his sister's hospital. His
sister two RNs were the only professional medical staff. LPNs were
not exactly considered professional or management, but neither were
they welcome in the union. Tom thought maybe if Anna Mae talked to
some of the members of the health-care workers' union, she might
encourage some of the more talented Indian aides and orderlies to
seek further training, better incomes, and maybe encourage the
union to include the LPNs in their structure.

Anna Mae Gunn thought she would rather have
put up with old-time company thugs than with the union stewards of
the present day.

"If our workers want
something, lady, they get it by negoti
ating. We don't have to have a lot of show-business
types
coming in to lead them in a
singsong. These are serious work
ing people
you're dealing with here. They
need
their jobs."

"Look, yourself,
lady,"
Anna Mae said.
"Music helped or
ganize unions to begin
with. Men and women singing of their struggles were part of what
got other men and women to band
together
for better treatment. I think your workers would
re
ally like to know these songs. It would
help give them some
pride in their jobs,
put them in touch with what it is they're achieving, help
morale."

"You saying maybe they
don't have pride in their jobs or know what they're doing? I keep
morale pretty high already, you know." The fact was, the woman was
worried that Anna Mac was going to convince her membership to do
something that wasn't in the settlement the woman had already
negoti
ated with the bosses. You couldn't
trust workers to know what
was good for
them, and this Indian broad had a way about her. She had star
quality, the woman figured you'd call it. She wasn't beautiful, but
she moved a certain way and her voice rang with authority and her
face and body seemed to be just what they should be. A person would
trust her. And she'd sung a couple of the songs for the steward and
told her the background. Oh, no. This gal wasn't getting anywhere
near the union's workers. She was a troublemaker.

The phone on the steward's desk rang and she
picked it up.

"I'd like to speak with
Ms. Gunn, please," said a man's voice, as ringing and important
sounding as Gunn's voice. In
the
background was a faint babble of voices and what sounded
like music.

"Who did you tell you were coming here?" the
steward demanded.

"Nobody," Anna Mae said. "Why, should I
have?"

"Here, dammit. But keep it short. This is a
business phone."

Anna Mae took the receiver.

"Mae? Sam Hawthorne here. Look, I hate to
bother you with another one of these phone calls from the dead
again, but there's work for you down Tulsa way. They're going to
need a good organizer down there, and you're the best we've got. Go
stand at the corner of Twentieth and Garfield and I'll have the
ghost of the last run of the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe pick
you up in twenty minutes, okay?"

"Okay, Sam," she said. But the line, of
course, was dead.

CHAPTER 23

James Francis Farnham had
been ingratiating himself with the
singers—mostly the men—for the last couple of months. One
problem was, the women moved around. He saw the young
one occasionally, but the old biddy hardly ever
showed up. He
also sort of liked the black
guy. There was something about him that soothed Farnham and shut up
his voices for a while and reminded Farnham a little of a teacher
he used to have, though all Brose wanted him to learn was songs.
Farnham
proved to be good at them, and the
voices were quiet when he
sang
them.

But they wouldn't stay
quiet all the time and had to be obeyed, so one night when the old
gal came to pick up Brose and Dan, Farnham hid in the back while
they were talking.
She would lead him to
the other women, he thought. When he
got
her alone, he'd do her and then go find the others.

Except that on this night, Dan took the
wheel and the woman scooted outside. Farnham had to risk peeking
out the window at a dreary-looking little ranch-style home among a
bunch of others. He noted the house number and that it was pink,
which he naturally hated.

As soon as the van stopped
and Dan and Brose emerged and walked away, leaving the van parked,
Farnham started to
leave the vehicle,
brushing Brose's coat hanging from the back
of the seat. The coat jingled, and Farnham, on sudden
inspiration, fished in the pocket until he found a duplicate set of
keys.

He drove back there,
though it took him some time to find the address again, since he
hadn't been watching where Dan drove. Cars crowded the double
driveway and lined the street on both sides, so he had no
difficulty looking natural as he
pulled up
in front of a red Pinto and walked toward the house,
keeping close to the shrubbery. He peered in the
side window to get the house's general layout. The women were all
sitting in the living room, except for a few who were back in the
kitchen fixing eats. He might get them first. He took the antique
switchblade out of his pocket and fingered it. He still
hadn't been able to get a gun. That was all
right. Maybe there
was one in the house.
Besides, a bunch of women like this, he
could pick off one at a time, or by taking a hostage. That
was half the fun of it. Knowing the odds were really against you,
but the dumb bitches were too scared to turn on you. He felt like a
fox in a henhouse and smiled a foxy smile.

* * *

The new group of
music-party women were very skeptical about the benefits of the
party, but between Gussie's story and
Terry's songs, they soon relaxed and were singing along.
Terry
had a new planxty all composed for
the hostess, a woman who in her time had hosted coffee houses and
even strummed a little guitar herself. Many of the people who came
to these parties had past connections with the music, severed when
their lives grew more demanding or because the music was no longer
popular.

"Oh, God, I hope they don't sing
'Kumbaya,' " said one woman the hostess had known since her hippie
days. She had bright red hair and rolled her eyes and spoke in a
world-weary manner. "I'll just puke if I have to hear it one more
time."

"Was it that bad a song?" asked a younger
woman.

"Well, no, but
honey,
overdone,
let me tell you."

"How did it go?"

"I—" the woman hadn't tried to remember it,
naturally, since before the songs had been erased from memory, and
she wrinkled her forehead trying to remember. "I dunno—say, Terry,
honey?"