The Hawley Book of the Dead (33 page)
Read The Hawley Book of the Dead Online
Authors: Chrysler Szarlan
Caleigh still seemed strangely untroubled. Maybe she was trying to convince herself it was all fine and that the twins would be back any minute. Her eyes were clear of worry, she slept soundly, ate all the food placed before her, played her usual games. She was even talking about plans for Halloween in a few days, what we would do if Grace and Fai were back, what we would do if they weren’t. I tried to be glad that she seemed so unaffected, but it was eerie, too. At nine, I tucked her in on the couch, and in moments she was asleep and dreaming.
Caleigh’s Vision: Fires in the Night
Caleigh was dreaming of the past. Shreds she’d picked up from the string, here and there. The great fire that burned the Hawley Inn to the ground,
where Earl’s and the hardware store now sat, was started when a monkey from a traveling circus pushed over a lantern. The building was lost but the monkey was saved.
The string also told her of the naming of Hell’s Kitchen Road, the strange name she’d asked her Gramps about when they saw the sign at the edge of the forest. He didn’t know, but the string did. Now it seemed normal that the string told her the past, as well as turned the future for her.
Hell’s Kitchen Road had been called North Road until the summer of 1883. Edith Miniter, a teenage girl dressed in a long, pretty ruffled dress, was with her friend Evanore Beebe, walking along the road. They’d come from Wilbraham, sixty miles away, to visit Evanore’s Warriner cousins for the summer. They were picking berries and didn’t notice how dark it was getting, until they saw lights in the trees. They dropped their baskets and ran for home, feeling strange heat and a presence near them. The next morning, berries and baskets were gone without trace. Folks said the devil and his minions made pies in Hell’s Kitchen that night, having scared the berries right away from Edith and Evanore.
But Caleigh saw more. She saw a woman with fiery hair streaming, snakes on her wrists, gathering the baskets, the berries, placing one between her lips, sweet juice running, staining them red. Then she saw children leading cows down the road, red-and-white cows. Behind the cows, she saw her sisters and their horses. They rode right up to the woman, who told them, “Take these berries, plucked for us. We’ll make pies now.”
Caleigh spoke in her sleep. Her mother walked by, heard her say, “Fairy pies, all right.”
After Caleigh was asleep, I climbed the stairs to my office.
The Hawley Book of the Dead
was still sprawled on the floor where I’d thrown it. I picked it up, smoothed its blank pages. Why had it stopped yielding to me, when I was so desperate for knowledge? Why couldn’t I command it
better? If that Book could be a tool to find my girls, then I would learn it, I would find a way to make it bend to my will, never mind Nan’s warning me not to do so. I shook it, tried to make it give up its secrets. That didn’t work.
I thought back to the times it
had
worked. In each instance, I’d been in a kind of trance. I’d come at the Book sideways, not head-on. The way a good horseman approaches a horse. Maybe I could cultivate that state again. Rage and panic didn’t seem to get me anywhere.
I sat with the Book on my lap and idly picked up a deck of Gypsy Witch cards that Caleigh had left on my desk. She liked to use them for every card game and would announce the message on the cards she was dealt, taking the risk that her opponents might recognize the card and guess her hand. But somehow, none of us could keep it in our heads that “Children signify friendly disposition” meant the queen of diamonds, or that “The cat indicates flattery” and also the eight of hearts.
I shuffled the deck and made one card leap and spin. It had been a long time since I’d practiced my sleight of hand. The cards felt thick in my hands, not supple and quick as they used to. I picked up the card, which had landed facedown after its leap. The queen of spades. Its message, for some reason best known to Mlle. Le Normand, supposed creator of Gypsy Witch cards, was that of “Amor.” A sign that someone was thinking of you with great love and longing. I flipped the card back into the deck. Thought of Jolon, pushed the thought back. Made another card jump, hoping for something benign. The cat, with its flat face for flattery, maybe. But up jumped the jack of hearts: the book, which presages the solution of a mystery, affecting one for the better. I could only hope that one would come true. I pulled another card from the deck. The mountains. “The presence of a mighty enemy,” I read on the face of the card, just as mountains loomed up toward me, jagged, unlike any mountains in New England. And suddenly I seemed to be flying over them, over red rock formations that looked fantastical and eerie. On a high ridge I saw a figure in a tuxedo with long tails. A magician, his wand raised toward the east. His stance seemed familiar, his brilliant black hair. But his face was a blur, hidden from me by the velocity of my flight. My brain felt like a fire trapped in
my skull. Fire. The Valley of Fire.
That
was where the magician was, the Valley of Fire, east of Las Vegas. We’d ridden there plenty of times. I recognized the landscape, the red rock hullocks and arches. My body shuddered. Whatever kept me airborne failed. My heart plunged, and I heard the magician shout a word, a magic word. Something came rushing at me then, white with dark marks. It was
The Hawley Book of the Dead
, and I fell into its thick pages.
Rigel Voss once had a wife. Alice, an old-fashioned name. They’d met in a Laundromat. He had gone out to do some shopping, left his clothes in a dryer. When he returned, she was folding them. Not as well as he would have, but still. He felt something stirring, a seed husk cracking inside him. His mother had died when he was in college, and no one had taken care of his basic needs since.
“Come have a coffee with me. Just around the corner. I’d like to thank you,” he said to the top of her golden head. Her small hands were still smoothing his shirts. When she tipped her face up and smiled, a flash of dimples, and freckles, and very white skin, he realized how young she must be. Just a kid. Doing laundry for her mother, maybe. He regretted asking her for coffee. She’d think he was some kind of sicko. “But your mother probably expects you home.”
She laughed. A rasp of a laugh, like a handsaw cutting through pine. “My mother lives in Florida. Nobody expects me home. I know I look about twelve, but I’m on the right side of twenty, old enough for a guy to ask me out.” Her voice was unexpected, deep and sultry. He watched her walk away from him, her long pale hair cut straight across, separated like stems of flowers down her back. She wore cutoff jeans, a white camisole, practically nothing. Moving as if she might be a dancer, graceful, slow, her feet in daisyed flip-flops turned in delicately. She stopped at the glass door, her reflection ghostly. She turned back to him. “You coming?”
They sat drinking coffee from thick mugs while Rigel Voss fell in love. He realized that the girl wasn’t pretty. Her face was a little asymmetrical, one side turned up more than the other. Then there were the freckles; her hazel eyes were more the color of a toad than either gold or green. But he liked her smallness, the deep voice that cracked when she laughed. Her old-timey name seemed sweet to him.
Alice worked in a grocery store, counted money, took night classes in French. They went to Paris for their honeymoon, just before he was assigned to Amherst. She called him her secret agent man. She teased him, when no one else ever had. She was eight months’ pregnant when the disappearing girl ruined them. He still missed her every day, still woke up sweating and parched most nights from his Alice nightmares. He woke from one that morning in a cabin at Candy Cane Park. But if he played his cards right, the red-haired woman, that Revelation, would give him his Alice back. No more nightmares, only golden days with her again.
He decided to stop in the town on his way out to the highway, back to the next phase of his plan. He’d not been to Hawley Village and knew it was a risk, as they’d be alerted, suspicious of strangers. But he had shaved the beard that the arrow man had seen him with. Even if they had a composite, he looked different enough. He’d ditched the SUV in Pittsfield, snagged another car, changed the plates, and had a fresh new identity before the cops even knew to look for him. He was Abel Carmichael, retired roofer. What he’d told the cops when they’d questioned him. It was easy enough, after all the years of being a nowhere man. He’d been prepared. People believed what was right in front of them. So he stopped in Pizza by Earl for coffee, a three-egg breakfast. He sat at the counter, let the conversation swirl around him. It was all about the girls, as he knew it would be.
“What time they go missing?” asked a twenty-something man in a Green Day T-shirt.
“Around supper time day before yesterday. Been all over the news. Where you been, Sam?”
Sam shrugged. “Nowhere special. Just didn’t pay my cable bill.”
“Well, I hope they find them soon.” The waitress, a very thin woman with upswept dyed yellow hair, poured Rigel Voss his coffee as she spoke, then swung around to take the order of a man in plaid flannel. “For their own sake, and mine, too. That helicopter woke me up in the night. I thought they found a pot field. You want the steak?”
“Yeah. And two over, Paula. I think they run away. How else could girls on horses just disappear?”
“If they run away, they’d a found ’em by now.” An older man in carpenter coveralls weighed in. “Where could they go on horses?”
Voss thought he’d better seem curious. “The daughters of that lady magician? I heard it on the news up at Candy Cane Park. Been hunting in Hawley Forest.” He didn’t mention the cops’ visit to him.
“Well, you won’t be hunting there no more till those girls are found. Got the whole forest in an uproar, not letting hunters in, even.”
“Yeah, I heard that. So what happened? Anybody know more than was on the news?”
“I bet they ditched the horses, then went out to the highway and hitchhiked,” the flannel-shirted man said.
The carpenter said portentously, “Naw. It wasn’t that. Horses would’ve run home. Boy, it doesn’t look good. Jolon didn’t find much to speak of, he said. Ran into him at the hardware.” They all fell silent.
“Didn’t find nothing?” Paula held her coffeepot poised.
“Not so he’d say.”
“Well, that’s what I woulda done if I was running away. Hitchhiked, like Scott said.” This from a young woman with
teased hair and long green nails, placing four large coffees in a cardboard tray.
“Aw, Gina, who’d cut our hair if you run away?” The carpenter put an arm around the girl, which she slapped at. “Ray, you old fool. Don’t paw at me.” But she was trying to suppress a smile. “I don’t think it’s funny. That poor woman. I can’t imagine how she feels. I remember seeing her in Vegas, too. She put on a great show.”
The flannel-shirted man turned to her, said in mock surprise, “Hey, when did you go to Vegas? I can’t remember the last time I didn’t see you here in the morning for your coffee buzz.”
She raised her small pointy chin. “Shows how much you know. I’ve been plenty of places. To Vegas twice. The Grand Canyon. Even England. I stayed in a castle there, too.…”
“Oh, yeah. Like you’re some kinda Cinderella. Didn’t find your prince, though, didja?” She swatted at him, too.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter who she is. I just feel bad for the mother.”
“Doesn’t hurt that she’s famous,” Scott said.
Paula, brushing her resplendently clean pink uniform with a napkin, said, “Oh, honey, we all feel bad for her.” She cut the men a look. “Even if she
is
famous. It doesn’t matter. When you lose a child, doesn’t matter who you are. I think you guys ought to be helping search, instead of jawing here.”
“When they makes it known they want volunteers, I’ll sign up. But Jolon, I expect, knows what he’s doing.”
“None better.” Paula reached the coffeepot over Rigel Voss’s cup. “This bollixes up the hunting for you, though. Where you from?”
Voss looked up. “From over New York State. I’ve only been here a couple days.”
“Didn’t get nothing?”
“Nah. Shame about those girls.” He held his hand over the
cup. “And too bad about the hunting. But I should be getting back, anyway. My wife wants to get the kitchen remodel finished before we start for Florida this year. Go to the Keys for the winter.” A few well-chosen facts to make him seem innocuous, normal. It didn’t matter that he had no wife, not anymore, had never been to the Florida Keys. “Thought I’d get my deer for the freezer, but maybe the fishing down south will be better than the hunting this year.” He stood up, stretched, put a two-dollar tip under his plate. “Sure hope those girls get found.” And he slouched out the door, out of Hawley.
I came gasping up from the vision, sweating and parched. I struggled to make sense of what I’d seen. Voss had left the forest. Did he have the girls or not? What did he want from me? And what did the magician I’d seen in the Valley of Fire have to do with it all? I tried to think it through. The Book, Nan had said, would tell me what I most needed to know. Why would I need to know about Rigel Voss’s Alice?
Then it hit me. The Book could transport me, to the past, to other places in the present. More to the point, the Book could take me to Jeremy. Voss must know about the Book. And believe he could force me to use it. He wanted to be with his wife again. He wanted revenge, but he wanted his Alice more. He could use the twins as a bargaining chip. Voss could have them now—they could be bound and gagged somewhere, like Wesley on the day Jeremy died.
But nothing I’d seen, in the Book or in the solid world, made anything clear. Where in all this tangled web
were
my girls?
1
The next day, the sky was threatening. The unsettled air unsettled me, made my throat constrict. The tears caught there, as usual.
Sixty-three hours
, the internal clock told me. I knew if I did start to cry, I’d never stop. I just wanted my life to be normal. I wanted never to have been born with my magical gifts, or at least never crossed paths with Rigel Voss. If it hadn’t been for our long-ago encounter, I’d never have lost Jeremy. The twins would not be missing now. I wanted my family together again. I wanted to have my freedom, no need to hide, to constantly monitor my daughters, to try, then fail, to keep them safe. I wanted more than anything for Jeremy to be alive. I wanted all kinds of impossible things.
