The Hawley Book of the Dead (11 page)

When I got to the office, I turned on the computer, and the usual morning
spam greeted me. Offers to update my wardrobe, my body, my car. Nothing crucial, so I
logged off, went out to the widow’s walk. Something shone metallic in the white
steeple of the church across the common. A breeze came up, and I heard a faint sound, a
resonance, almost like singing. I whirled, thinking the sound came from the portrait
behind me. But the woman’s smiling face was as serene as ever. Then I heard it
again, that singing, from the other direction, soft on the autumn air. A scream snagged
in my throat. But the scream became a laugh. What I’d heard was only the church
bell, glinting in the sun, sounding in the wind. I laughed at myself until I felt
better. We wouldn’t start living in fear again that day. It was only slightly
haunted Hawley, stuck a few hundred years in the past, that lurked here.

I went down to wake my sleepy twins. We’d go to the fair and
pretend, at least, to be a normal family. I thought again of Jeremy’s favorite
song, and hoped for a golden day.

Main Street teemed with cars and people. The town hall was a hive of
Girl Scouts and farmers. The Ladies Benevolent Society hawked warm apple pie, spicy
chili, fried dough with maple cream. The common overflowed, a bluegrass band played, and
children clambered over hay bales or threw balls into buckets for lime green yo-yos or
purple bears.

I drove down the street, looking for a place to park. I was still slightly
panicked being out in a sea of strangers. But I’d promised the girls. And there
hadn’t been any trace of the Fetch in our wake.

“There it is!” Fai shouted in my ear. Dad’s Packard,
parked in the
church lot, was hard to miss—spring green, long
and low-slung. I parked next to the Suds & Stuff Laundromat, and the girls leapt
from the car.

“All right now, let’s stay together until we find
them,” I called, to no avail. Grace and Fai were already halfway up the block,
their hair bright halos in the sun.

“It’s okay, they know we’re meeting in front of
Elmer’s,” Caleigh reassured me. But I held tight to her hand as we made
our way through the crowd. The sidewalk was overrun with kids and old people, farmers in
feed caps and tourists sporting “Life is good” togs.

“Grand!” Caleigh whooped, racing to her, throwing herself
between Grace and Fai to get at my mother. She was dressed in her gardening clothes, red
clogs, faded and pilled green Fair Isle sweater, wide-legged chinos. She never cared
what she wore, yet somehow managed to emit repose and a spontaneous elegance. She
was
Grand, as the girls called her. Maybe it was her height. Whatever it
was, I hadn’t inherited it from her. I always felt like a pygmy beside my mother.
At least I
had
inherited her greyhound thinness and a wilder version of her
stunning hair. Although hers was now threaded with silver, it was as glorious as ever.
It shone, a Pre-Raphaelite golden red. She was growing it again, as the twins were, for
Locks of Love. She smacked Caleigh on the cheek, then reached for me. I felt her cheek
soft as the petals of the roses she grew. But the worry lines on her brow were
furrowed.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, after she had embraced
me.

“Oh, off looking at some old tractors. You know how he is about
machines. He says he’ll meet us at the pie stall, oh …” She
glanced at her watch. “Now, actually. He says he’s hungry, but he’s
already had blueberry cobbler and doughnuts.”

“Just like Caleigh. She’ll eat her way through the fair. I
hope he’s prepared to be dragged around to every food opportunity
again.”

“And to all the crafts,” Fai reminded me.

“And the crafts. Don’t worry. He’s been briefed. Just
stay with him, and stay
together
.”

My mother and I watched the girls sprint up to the town hall steps. I took
her arm. “You look tired, Mom.”

She waved that idea away. “Not tired.
Just … I don’t know, thinking too much.” She
hesitated, and a strange look came into her eyes, one I’d been seeing more often,
and that worried me. Then it passed like a summer cloud.

“But you! Look at you!” She shed her gracious smile on me. I
felt like a committee meeting she was chairing. Ever since we’d moved to Hawley,
she’d been distant. She always seemed to be deflecting me. And although
she’d been helping me at the Hawley house nearly every day, there had been
something subdued about her. Somehow I felt she was holding back, holding out on me.
Like Nan. The girls had been helping or hindering us every moment, though, so I
hadn’t been able to grill her. Until today.

“
You’ve
been looking better since you moved
back,” she told me. “More like yourself, Reve.”

That annoyed me. “How did you expect me to look after my husband
was murdered, Mom?”

Her eyes flared with an unreadable emotion—not exactly pain, or
shame. Maybe a little of both, mixed in with something elusive. “Oh, honey, I
didn’t mean that.” She hugged me. “Let’s just try to enjoy
the day. They have good weather for it this year. Poured buckets all last fall, I
remember.”

I sighed, decided to let it go for the moment.

We found my dad sitting on the wall outside the town hall, snacking on
apple pie topped with a thick slice of cheddar cheese. Grace and Fai were making gagging
noises, but he was feeding Caleigh a bite from his fork. Unlike my mother, he always
looked as if he had prepared to face the world with care, but something was just a bit
off. He forgot to comb his hair, or his vest was buttoned wrong. But then he’d
smile and his eyes would crinkle and you’d forget any little flaws, his look
bathed you in such kindly warmth. For the fair, he wore a jacket and bow tie, but the
tie was crooked and now dusted with powdered sugar, probably from his breakfast
doughnut. He almost upset his pie on Caleigh’s head when he rose to greet me.

“Sweetheart!” He wrapped me in his arms. “Everything
okay?”

I nodded into his tweedy shoulder.
“Just … watch the girls.”

He looked in my eyes, saw enough to know I was still
troubled. “Of course I will.”

For all his absentminded ways, my father was incredibly observant. So I
left him to shepherd the girls around, and my mother and I went off in search of
treasure. For Mom, it would be interesting old garden tools; for me, maybe an
opportunity to get some answers.

Our first stop was the blueberry cobbler tent. I toyed with the perfectly
sweetened blueberries, the crumbly biscuit. My mother commented again on the fine day,
all the people who’d turned out. Then I plunged in.

“Remember the stories you all used to tell? About the
Revelations.”

The fragrance of apples wafted around us. A woman rolled a red wagon full
of Macouns by. Mom licked her fork speculatively, leaned back in her chair. “Is
that why you moved here? Because of the story of the first Revelation, how she came to
Hawley Five Corners?”

“Not really. I probably wouldn’t have given Hawley one
thought. But Nan … she sent me a note, just after Jeremy died.
Basically commanding me to come here.”

“
Nan
sent you a note?” Her tone was accusing, her
eyes filled with hurt.

“Mom, what’s the big deal?”

She looked down, scraped at her dish again. The sound of the fork on
Styrofoam set my teeth on edge. “Nothing. No big deal. I was
just … surprised, for a minute.”

“I tried to call her yesterday, to invite her to the fair, but you
know she never answers that phone. I tried to talk to her when we went there last week,
but she wouldn’t. Not about why she was insistent we come here. Do you
know?”

“Oh, that’s just Nan. She loves being
mysterious.”

My grandmother had always been eccentric. There were the powers and the
stories of the Dyer women that preoccupied her. And the falconry. Then about twenty
years ago, she’d gotten involved with the Baptist church. She had lived with each
of her three daughters in turn when I was a child. But after I left for Nevada she moved
back into her family home in Bennington, Vermont. A few months later, the Reverend John
Steel insinuated
himself. Nan insisted that she had always hated
living alone, and that’s all she would say. We still had no idea what their
relationship was. The Reverend was three decades younger, and pretty strange himself.
I’d met him only a few times. Enough to know he was odd. But then, so was my Nan.
I always suspected the rift between my mother and Nan had to do with the Reverend,
although neither of them would ever talk about it.

“Anyway, in her note, Nan mentioned the story of the Fetch. Do you
remember it?”

She closed her eyes. Against the sun? Or maybe against the myth?

“Yes. I remember. That’s the one where the father is
spirited off by a creature that haunts a family. One of the stranger tales Nan tells. Of
course it’s one of your father’s favorites. It always gave
you
nightmares.”

“I’ve been calling our stalker the Fetch. Thinking of him
that way, after Nan’s note reminded me of the story. But the note
was … well, pretty cryptic. I’d love to know the
reason
she’s so sure we’ll be safe here. It might make me
feel better. It can’t all be old legends and stories. Or the legends must have
some basis, anyway, if she was that certain. She wrote something about history repeating
itself. What did she mean?”

My mom looked off into the blue distance of the day, thoughtful. “I
really don’t have a clue. But Nan has her own way of seeing things. And telling
things.”

I laughed. “That’s for sure. When I asked, she just said not
to look for trouble. I need to know more, though, and Nan talks in riddles half the
time. She dodges my questions. Maybe because she’s so old, maybe she
doesn’t really remember. But it frustrates me.”

“Nan’s always been like that. Old age is no excuse. She
remembers plenty, but your aunts and I gave up ever trying to get any kind of clarity
out of her. You’re more persistent.”

“You mean stubborn. That’s what Nan said, too.” I
speared a blueberry with my plastic fork. It tasted like the forest. “But,
really, the stories are kind of a blur, like fairy tales you read to me when I was a
kid. I don’t remember all Nan’s tall tales. I remember some of them,
especially the story of the Fetch, and the one about the first Revelation and the
founding of Hawley. I’ve been having dreams about the Revelations. Caleigh has,
too.
It’s a little … I don’t know,
unsettling, I guess.” I mashed another tiny blueberry. “There’s a
painting, an old portrait in the house. I think the woman in it must be a Dyer. One of
the Revelations. Maybe it’s the portrait that triggers the dreams. I wanted to
ask Nan if she knew anything about it, but I never got that far.”

“I don’t remember ever seeing a painting of any of the
Revelations. Do you know the period?”

“I’d say mid-nineteenth century, by her dress, and her hair.
She looks about twenty-five, maybe thirty in the portrait, so she would have been born
around 1840 or 1845.”

“Well, there was Nan’s grandmother,” Mom suggested.
“Those dates seem about right for her.”

“Could she have lived here?”

“I’m not sure. I always
thought
all Nan’s
family lived in Bennington, from pretty far back. Her grandmother was a Revelation,
though. She might have been the last of the family to live in Hawley.” The Dyer
women had scattered over time, but not so very far. Travel was slower and more costly in
the past. Unless you were suspected of being a witch, there wasn’t much incentive
to leave the town you were born in. A woman might move to the next town over. The one
next to that if she met her husband at a barn raising and his family lived twenty or
thirty miles away. “Didn’t Carl Streeter work on the house? Did you ask
him about it?”

“I don’t want to rock that boat. He probably doesn’t
know anything, and … well, it’s creepy, how everyone in town
thinks of the Five Corners.
They
don’t think it’s safe there at
all. They think it’s haunted. The day we got here Carl told me a story. Then he
got all jittery as if he’d done the wrong thing telling me. About the last people
who lived there, and how they just left their possessions and took off all together, all
on the same day. No one seems to know where they went. Have you ever heard anything
about it?” I asked. “I’ve been wondering if any of the Dyers lived
in Hawley then, if there are any family stories.”

“I don’t think so. Nan lived with relatives in Bennington
after her parents died in the Spanish influenza epidemic. Your aunts and I grew up
there. But you knew that. Nan never talked about her childhood much. It
was a bad time for her, losing both her parents that way, within days of each
other. And some of the family history just got lost. Even Nan’s legends are
pretty sketchy. She tells bits and pieces. As you said, they’re like fairy tales,
bedtime stories.”

I knew what my mom meant about the loss of history. Any recorded history
was more likely to be about the men. Some of the Dyer history was lost because the wives
bore different last names than their husbands. Then, after their deaths, they were
buried under their husbands’ names alone. “Mary, wife of John
Smith.” A double whammy of lost connections. I’d seen the stones in the
old boneyards scattered around, like all New Englanders. If you live in New England you
can’t spit without hitting a cemetery.

“Mom, have you ever heard of some kind of book, a book
that’s important in our family? Caleigh and I have been having dreams about a
book, too.”

My mom’s mouth opened, and she made a strangled sound.

“Mom?”

Her eyes went blank, turned dark, like a doll’s eyes. She gasped,
then her hand shot across the table to grab my wrist. She squeezed it, hard.

“Mom! Are you choking?” I leapt up, but suddenly her hand
relaxed its grip, her eyes went back to normal. She smiled at me, then stood up,
stretching her arms to the sky. “Well, let’s go poke around. See if we can
get some information here in town, at the historical society. Maybe we can get a bead on
your painting.”