The Warrior Heir (7 page)

"All right. Never mind. I just hope they get here soon. I'd like to get out of here as soon as possible."

She's moodier than I remember, Jack thought.

Back in the kitchen, Becka was just closing up the cooler. "This should tide you boys over if Linda won't stop to eat. She really does seem to be on a mission. I'll put your medicine in your duffel," she added pointedly, sliding the big blue bottle in with Jack's clothes. "Don't get so involved in family history that you forget to take it."

And then Will and Fitch arrived, seeming to fill up the kitchen. Will was wearing his varsity jacket, T-shirt, and blue jeans. Fitch wore an army issue camouflage jacket, a bright yellow sweatshirt with the logo of a country music station emblazoned on the front, and gray-green climbing pants with a red necktie threaded through for a belt.

Jack realized that no matter what he wore, he could never match Fitch's display. Fitch played by his own rules, and it never bothered him that the preps called him weird. "Weird is good, strange is bad," Fitch always said. Jack felt a little better.

Chapter Three

Digging Up Dead Relatives

Linda had a heavy foot. She seemed determined to make up at least part of the time they had wasted at school. Whenever Jack, who was riding shotgun, stole a look at the speedometer, it hovered around eighty-five. He had been hoping she might ask him to drive, but realized they would only lose time with him at the wheel.

They passed through a series of tired little towns: a traffic light, a gas station or two. As darkness fell, they began to see the debris of strip mining: heaps of slag and mine tailings. Iron oil rigs crouched like giant mosquitoes in the dusk, sucking the black blood out of the land.

"Have either of you ever been here before?" Will asked.

"My mom brought me down here a few years ago," Jack admitted.
Dragged
was more accurate. Becka had made him walk all over those hills, looking for the family homestead. They never did find it. "My great-great grandmother Susannah lived here. She was quite a character, I guess. She played banjo and fiddle and made killer black cherry wine."

Linda took up the tale without taking her eyes from the road. "Susannah is the one we're looking for. She had the Second Sight, they say. She communed with spirits, read the cards, and had prophetic dreams."

"She sounds like some kind of witch," Fitch remarked.

"Mom's always been into that kind of thing," Jack said, grinning. "It's been rumored that magic runs in our family, you know."

"I'd prefer that to allergies," Fitch said, sneezing.

"Susannah had quite a following around here, mostly women." Linda swerved to miss a groundhog. "In those days, it always seemed to be men who made the future, and women who needed to protect themselves against it."

Jack stared out the window. This home of his ancestors was on the way to nowhere; a place of graveyards, where they dug up the coal and buried the people.

It was fully dark when they reached Coal Grove, the county seat, a town without a traffic light. An ornate old courthouse anchored one end of the square. The stores were all closed, although several cars littered the parking lot next to the movie theatre; light and music spilled from a place called the Bluebird Cafe diagonally across from the courthouse. Friday night in Coal Grove, Jack thought. Even slower than Trinity.

Linda turned the Land Rover down one of the side streets off the square and parked along the curb under a huge maple tree. There were no streetlights, and it was pitch black in the shadow of the great tree.

"Where are we?" asked Will, puzzled. "Aren't we going to the motel?"

"I need to go to the courthouse first," Linda replied, climbing down out of the front seat. She slung a backpack over her shoulder and slammed the car door. It seemed unnaturally loud on the quiet street.

Jack unfolded himself out of the car, feeling a little unsteady on his legs after the long ride. The night air was cool and fragrant, and there was a soft sound of spring peepers from somewhere in the distance. A small dog began barking madly behind a screen door in a nearby house. The porch light went on, and they could see a figure silhouetted behind the screen.

Linda led them across the street and into the parking lot behind the courthouse. A modern brick building crouched on the other side of the parking lot, away from the square. Two police cars were parked next to the building. A mercury vapor light cast a sallow light over the scene.

"But isn't the courthouse closed?" Will persisted.

"Oh, I'm sure it's open late on Friday nights," Linda said. She led the trio along the back of the building, between army green trash Dumpsters and into the shadows of an alley on the far side. She followed the side of the building back until she found what she was looking for: a concrete stairwell with an ancient iron railing that descended below ground level. There was a door at the bottom.

Linda  looked  up   and  down  the   alleyway,  then descended the stairs, motioning for Jack and his friends to follow her. She fumbled with the door—for a moment before it swung open on loudly protesting hinges. She looked back over her shoulder at them. "I told you it was open!" she said, then disappeared inside.

"I have a bad feeling about this!" Jack whispered to Fitch. Fitch shrugged. With Linda in charge, there was nothing to do but follow.

The doorway led into an ancient cellar. The smell of old paper and mildew and damp earth was overwhelming. Aunt Linda produced three powerful flashlights from her backpack. Only, just a little late. "Ouch!" Will had already banged his head on a low ceiling joist.

Jack let the beam of his flashlight play over the walls. They were lined with shelves filled with huge ledgers stamped with gold lettering. Everything seemed to be the same matte gray color, because it was all covered with a thick layer of dust. Fitch was already beginning to sneeze. High on the walls, above the ledger books, were rows and rows of numbered metal boxes.

An ancient wooden staircase provided access to the main floor of the building. Boxes of records were stacked on nearly every step, leaving only a narrow path to the top. Linda found a light switch on the wall by the steps, and the room was suddenly flooded with light.

"What are we looking for?" Jack asked his aunt. "And why can't we come back tomorrow?"

Linda was already lifting a ledger from the wall. She was surprisingly strong, considering her size, and manhandled the huge book onto the sloping reading table in the center of the room. She had a smudge of dirt across the bridge of her nose.

"We're looking for death records," she explained. "We need to find one for your great-great grandmother Downey. I estimate she died between 1900 and 1920. The courthouse won't be open tomorrow, so we'd better do this tonight."

The book on the table was labeled Death Book A. Jack looked over Linda's shoulder. The pages were covered with long columns of spidery writing.
Name. Date of Death. Place of Death. Where Born.
The dates at the front of the book were all in the late 1860s. Linda quickly turned over the yellowing pages, scanning them from top to bottom until she reached the back of the book. It ended about 1875.Too early.

"Couldn't you just write to Columbus to get this information?" Fitch asked, sneezing again. "Or look it up online?"

"They don't have electronic records back this far," Linda replied, lifting the book with Jack's help and replacing it in its slot. "Besides, I'm in a hurry. Now we need to look for Death Book B or C."

The ledgers on the shelves seemed to be in no particular order. The volume next to Book A was labeled BB and was dated 1950s. They split up to scan the spines of the books on all sides of the room. It was a real mixture. Common Pleas Court proceedings. Will books. Land records.

Jack's eyes kept straying to the staircase that led to the main floor. That was the police station he'd seen across the parking lot; he was sure of it. Would a passion for genealogy be considered justification for breaking and entering? Aunt Linda had always seemed to make up rules as she went along, but he'd never known her to break the law.

Then again, perhaps he didn't know her very well.

Will was methodically working his way through a stack of ledgers, no doubt motivated by the fading prospect of a late dinner. "Hey!" he said suddenly. "What dates were you looking for?"

"Early 1900s," Linda replied, moving to look over the book he was examining. "This might be it." She ran her finger down the page, then flipped several pages back. "This is the right time frame." These later entries included information about cause of death, mostly ailments Jack had never heard of: scrofula, dropsy, brain fever. Some he had seen only in history books: consumption, typhoid fever, smallpox. Some deaths were accidental, the descriptions flat:
Drowned. Fell from roof. Kicked by a horse.

Linda's lips moved silently as she turned the brittle pages over. "Here it is!" she said tersely. '"Susannah Downey born 1868; farmer's wife; died 12 May 1900; cause of death: accident.'"

They all gathered around so they could read the scrawled entry.

"She was pretty young,” Jack observed. "Any idea how she died?" He was interested in spite of himself.

"No," Linda replied, transcribing the entry into a notebook she had pulled out of her backpack. "It doesn't say where she lived or where she was buried." She sounded disappointed.

"None of them do," Fitch said. "Is that important?"

"I need to find her grave," Aunt Linda said. "So we have to figure out what cemetery she's buried in. Unless they buried her on their own property. In which case we'd need to check the land records."

They were all concentrating so hard on their find that it took Jack a few seconds to process what he was hearing. He held up his hand for silence, then jerked his head toward the ceiling. There was the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the floor above.

They all froze. There was a bitter, metallic taste in the back of Jack's mouth, and his heart felt like a desperate fish flopping about in his chest. Linda tilted her head back as if she could look through the rough planking into the room above. She let out her breath, a small, animal sound of fear. Then she quickly shut the ledger book and lifted it back into its niche. Almost simultaneously, a door opened at the top of the stairs and a pale rectangle of light appeared in the dark stairwell.

The staircase was between them and the door to the outside. "Go!" Aunt Linda hissed as she made a leap for the light switch. The room was plunged into darkness. Jack stumbled against the center table as he desperately felt his way to the outline of the outside door. Aunt Linda was crashing around behind him, making an unholy racket. What the hell was she doing? He could hear Will and Fitch somewhere ahead of him. He stole a quick look over his shoulder and saw a tall black silhouette at the top of the stairs, framed in the dirty yellow of the mercury vapor lights. He could make out no face or feature. As he watched, it turned to him.

Jack felt the touch of its attention like a physical blow. He staggered, grabbing a filing cabinet for support.

Suddenly Linda was beside him, fiercely pushing him forward. "You! Get moving! I'll meet you at the Bluebird Cafe in half an hour!"

Behind them, Jack heard a muffled exclamation, the sound of something heavy falling, then a string of curses. Will and Fitch must have reached the outside door, because gray light poured in from the stairwell. He scrambled after his friends. Just as he reached the doorway, he heard an explosion. There was a blinding flash of light, then something hit him square in the back, knocking him sprawling onto the concrete pad just outside the door. He came down on his hands and knees, and bit his tongue, hard. Blood tasted salty in his mouth. Then Will and Fitch each grabbed an arm and dragged him up the stairs and down the alleyway. When he finally found his feet, Jack twisted around to see if Linda was behind them, but the alley was empty.

The alley led back to the main square at the front of the courthouse. The street was still deserted. They sprinted across the green and squeezed between the bushes planted around the gazebo. There were three or four feet of space between the evergreens and the cinder block foundation of the building. They crouched there, breathing hard, looking back toward the courthouse, then wide-eyed at each other.

Finally Will spoke. "What the hell was that?"

"What was what?" Jack snapped. He had too many questions of his own to be answering theirs.

"That spooky dude on the stairs, for a start," Fitch replied. "The one with the cool light saber."

"Light saber? Be serious." Jack peered out at the courthouse again.

"Light saber. Flame thrower. Phaser. Electromagnetic de-atomizer. What he shot you with, dude." Fitch swiped at the blood on his face with the back of his hand and attempted a smile.

"Why aren't you dead?" Will demanded. "It should have killed you, so I don't understand why you aren't dead. You're sure you're not hurt?"

"No "Jack said slowly. "A little bruised, maybe. "There was a painful area between his shoulder blades, like he'd been hit in the back by a fast pitch. The only other sensation was a kind of tingling all over his body.

Fitch reached around behind Jack and tugged at his hoodie. It disintegrated in his hand. "Nice shirt," he said, handing the charred shards of cloth to Jack. They had a gunpowder smell, like bottle rockets after a launch. Jack pulled the remains of the sweatshirt off over his head. The entire back was gone. Underneath, his new vest seemed to be in one piece. As a matter of fact, it didn't seem to be damaged at all.

"Good thing you wore your bulletproof vest," Will observed dryly. "Guess me and Fitch didn't get the memo."

Jack looked back at the courthouse, still lit only by the sallow glow of the security light. If an alarm had been raised, why hadn't anyone turned on the lights? And why hadn't the man at the top of the stairs said anything, identified himself?

There was no sign of pursuit. The square and the courthouse were quiet.