The red church (9 page)

Storie was rapt now, staring at the sheriff. He didn't know if it was because she found the legend fascinating or whether she was transfixed by her boss's making a fool of himself. "So this second son . . . was he supposed to be the devil or some-thing?"

Littlefield shook his head. "McFall believed this second son had a power equal to Jesus'. And accord-ing to my grandmother, McFall had most of the con-gregation believing it. So the preacher was riding high, dishing out his revelations while the congrega-tion cowered speechless in the pews. And I guess he started getting a little delusional after that."

"After
that
? Like he wasn't before?"

"He started taking advantage," Littlefield contin-ued. "Said he was the instrument of the Lord, and only he could protect them from the second son. Well, he got a woman pregnant, the wife of a soldier who was off fighting at Gainesville. People started whispering then, though they were too afraid to con-front the preacher. Then, one morning following a midnight service
,
one of the parishioners found her young child mutilated at the altar of the red church.

"Well, as crazy as the preacher had been acting, they figured he had played Abraham or something. Only God didn't tell him to stop as he raised the knife, so he chopped up the child as a sacrifice. That Sunday night in 1864, the parishioners showed up for service and hauled the preacher from the pulpit. Somebody climbed up the bell rope and cut it loose, threw it out on the ground where the others stood holding torches."

"They didn't," Storie cut in. Littlefield couldn't tell if she was still mocking him. He decided to bust on through the tale and get it over with. He could feel his neck blushing.

"You know that dogwood by the church door? They hanged him from it."

"So that was that. Except his ghost still haunts the church, right?"

"I guess the Potters and the Mathesons and the Buchanans started feeling a little guilty and decided that maybe 'an eye for an eye' was all fine and dandy, but once a sin was paid for, all was forgiven. They buried him out in the woods, covered him with rocks in a place long forgotten. But they said prayers over his grave even if he didn't deserve them. They even took care of the woman he got pregnant." The police scanner squawked, and a female dis-patcher's voice came over. "Ten-sixty-eight. Ten-sixty-eight on Old Turnpike Road."

The tension in Littlefield's office eased slightly. "Denny Eggers's cows got out again," Littlefield said. A deputy on patrol responded to the call. "Ten-four, base. Unit Four, en route."

"Ten-four," said the dispatcher. The scanner re-turned to broadcasting its ambient hiss. The sheriff looked at Storie. She stood and stretched. "Well, I'd better get out to the church and see if I missed anything yesterday," she said.

She was at the door, with her hand on the knob, when Littlefield spoke. "The woman he got pregnant brought flowers to his grave. They say that three days after the hanging, she came running out of the woods with tears in her eyes, her clothes torn by the tree branches. She said, 'Praise God, the stone's been rolled away.' "

Detective Storie didn't turn around. The sheriff continued, his words spilling over each other, as if he were experiencing an attack of nausea and wanted it to pass. "When she said that, the church bell started ringing. Only the bell had no rope. And no-body was in the church at the time." Storie turned. "So
that's
why you told me all this. That'll really stand up in court." She dropped her voice into a low, professional delivery. " 'Your Honor, I would like to submit as state's evidence thirty-two a tape recording of church bells ringing, made on the night of Mr. Houck's death.' " Littlefield stared into the black pool of his cup of coffee. "Maybe all that has nothing to do with Boonie's death. I sure as hell hope not. A psycho might be able to hide out in the woods for a few weeks, but the bloodhounds would get him sooner or later. Same with a mountain lion. But I hear that one of McFall's descendants is back in town."

"So you expect me to believe in coincidence?" she said. "They didn't teach paranormal investigation at the academy. As for Reverend McFall's ghost, I'll be-lieve it when you can prove it in court."

"I've got an eyewitness for you," he said, his voice tired now, an old man's defeated voice.

"Who?"

He glanced at the Officer of the Year award, glint-ing dully in the morning sun that sliced through the parted blinds. Storie approached his desk. She leaned over it in a position of superiority, like a teacher berating a daydreaming student.

"Who?" she repeated. "Who's going to testify that a ghost committed murder?"

"Me."

SIX

"You?" Storie shook her head.

Littlefield sat back, feeling twice his forty years. The good thing about the past was that you left it farther and farther behind each day. The bad thing was that you also got closer to the day when you could no longer hide from the past. A day of reckoning and judgment.

"I was seventeen," he said, his flesh cold. "It was Halloween night. Back then, and probably still to this day, getting drunk and driving over to the red church was the thing to do on Halloween. Me and a few of my high school buddies loaded into a pickup I bor-rowed from my dad. Well, my kid brother Samuel, he was eleven at the time, saw the beer in the bed of the pickup and said he was going to tell on me." Littlefield rubbed his eyes. He wasn't going to let himself cry in front of a woman or another cop. He cleared his throat. "So I told him he could come along if he'd keep his stupid little mouth shut. We went out to the church—we only lived about two miles away, up near the McFalls at the foot of Buck-horn—and parked in the trees off to one side of the graveyard. We drank the beer and dared each other to go inside the church, you know how teenagers will do."

"Sure I do," Storie said. "I just never expected you to have been such a scofflaw." Littlefield wasn't sure if her sarcasm was designed to provoke him or encourage him to continue. But he'd kept the story bottled up for too long. He'd never had anyone to confide in.

"Naturally, we were all too scared to do it. Like I said, the ghost stories were pretty well known in these parts. Which was funny as hell, because that's where most of us went to church on Sundays. During the day, with all the people there and the sun in the windows, it wasn't scary at all. But at night, with the dark shadows of the woods, your imagination had a lot of room to play.

"So then we got to picking on Samuel, calling him a chicken, as if we were any braver. And, damn me, I was as bad as any of the others. Samuel sat in the bed of that pickup truck, his eyes wide and shiny in the moonlight and his Up quivering. What else could he do but go up to the church?" Storie leaned against the wall. The sheriff glanced at her, but she was staring at the floor, looking un-comfortable. She was a cop. Maybe she was as emo-tionally inhibited as he was and hated this type of intimacy. Well, she could walk out if she wanted. Now that he had started, he was going to finish the story, even if the walls and God were his only audience.

"He went across the graveyard, wearing a cape that was part of his trick-or-treating getup. He was Batman that year, and the cape was a beach towel tied in a knot around his neck. Maybe as he walked, he tried to convince himself that he was a brave superhero."

Littlefield closed his eyes, and it was as if an Oc-tober wind had carried him back to that night. He could almost smell the freshly fallen leaves, the sweet-ness of the late autumn grass, the beer that had spilled in the truck bed, the smoke from the ciga-rettes one of the boys smoked. He continued in a monotone.

"By the time he passed those lonely tombstones, I started feeling a little guilty. I jumped out of the truck and ran across the graveyard to get him and drag him away. I hollered, and I guess he thought I was going to do something to him. He ran up the steps and lifted the latch to the church door, then went inside. The rest of the guys were hooting and moaning, making ghost noises while trying not to snicker.

"I followed Samuel inside the church and closed the door behind me. That's when I got the idea. 'Let's scare the bejesus out of them,' I said, mad at the other guys mostly because I was so much like them. The entryway was dark, but the moonlight spilled through the belfry and lit up that little square where the bell rope used to hang. The hole was about two feet by two feet, too small for most people to squeeze through. But Samuel was slender and wiggly, so I knew he could slip through there if I boosted him up." Unit Four's voice came through on the police ra-dio and interrupted Littlefield's story. "Come in, base. Found the cows, all right. Denny's getting them rounded up. I'll be ten-ten for a few—" Storie crossed the room and cut off the radio, then turned back to Littlefield. Her eyes flicked to the sheriff's face, then away, as if she were as ashamed of his vulnerability as he was. He continued. "I told him, 'Get up there and hide, and I'll run out screaming and say that the Bell Mon-ster got you.' He must have been scared, but I'd always been his hero, and I guess he trusted me that everything would be okay, that nothing bad could happen while I was there. So I boosted him up, and he scrambled through, then I saw his pale face framed in the rope hole. 'When I wave my arms, you kick the bell,' I said. He nodded
,
and I ran outside, waving my arms and screaming like a crazy man.

" 'It g
ot
him, it
got
him,' I yelled. 'The Bell Monster got him.' And all those drunken guys jumped out of the pickup and took off running down the road. I turned and pointed to the belfry, signaling Samuel to ring the bell. I saw his eyes, his white forehead, and the dark mess of his curly hair. And behind him, behind him

. . ."

Littlefield took three swallows of cold black coffee. He looked at the sunlight sneaking around the win-dow shade. He'd never told anybody this part. Except for himself. He'd relived it during a thousand sweaty, sleepless nights.

"The Bell Monster was there," he said, his whisper filling the room.

"It was really just a shadow
,
but it was there. It had sharp edges
,
and it moved toward Samuel. I screamed for real then
,
and I guess Samuel thought it was part of the act. Then he turned around and saw the thing
,
God only knows what it looked like from that close up. He scrambled over the edge of the belfry and started to slide down the roof. It was a short drop, he should have been fine. But that stu-pid cape got caught on a nail or something, and I heard the pop from clear across the graveyard." Lit-tlefield's whisper dropped a notch quieter. "His neck broke."

Littlefield could still see Samuel's startled expres-sion, his eyes and tongue bulging as his body spun beneath the eave of the church. The image had been burned into his retinas, coming to him in dreams and while awake, crisper than a high-definition tele-vision signal, more vivid than any movie. Storie came to him and put a hand on his forearm. "I'm sorry."

The tears came now, hot and wet and stinging, but not enough to flush away the image of his dead brother's face. "We buried him there at the church. Sometimes I think that's the worst part, that we left him buried there forever. The place got what it wanted. The place got
him."
Littlefield wiped his nose on his sleeve. "And here I am, blubbering like an idiot." Storie came closer. "It's okay, Frank," she said, and for a moment he thought she was going to hug him. That would be the final humiliation. He spun so that the back of his chair was facing her.

"I saw him," he said.

"I know. It must have been awful."

"No, not Samuel. I saw
him.
Right when Samuel's neck broke, I saw the Hung Preacher. Just for a sec-ond. He shimmered there at the end of a rope, hang-ing from that goddamned dogwood tree that I've never had the nerve to chop down. He was looking at me like he knew what he'd done. And he was mighty damned pleased with himself."

Littlefield was deflated, tired. He was sorry he'd said anything. How could he expect anyone to be-lieve what he barely believed himself? He knew what had happened that night. He'd
seen
it with his own eyes. But that night existed as if in a separate reality, a private hell, apart from the safe and sane world of Pickett County.

"Did any of your drinking buddies witness any-thing?" Storie asked.
Damn her.
Of course she'd want hard evidence. A broken soul wasn't enough to convince her. His an-ger dried his eyes.

"No," he said, staring at a drug-prevention poster on the wall. "Officially, it was a prank that turned into a tragedy. Freak accident. Of course, the old-timers muttered and added Samuel's death to the legend of the red church. The rest of the world went on with the business of living."

"Except you," Storie said.

Except me.
Storie
did
have a detective's eyes. Little-field ran his hand over his scalp and stood. "Well, now you know your sheriff is apeshit crazy."

"The eyes can play tricks. In my psychology classes, they taught us that bad memories can trigger—" Littlefield sliced his palm across the air to silence her. "I don't give a damn about theories. I know what I saw."