The Witch of Hebron (23 page)

“That’s the Duke’s castle,” Billy said.

“They’ve got a duke here?”

“Not a real one. Just a damn boss grifter. There’s lots of them around. Any town of size that’s left has some boss grifter trying to run the show. I spit on them. They wanted me to join up but I told them to go to hell. Nobody’s the boss of Billy Bones.”

“What’s this duke’s name?”

“What do you care?”

“Just interested.”

“Luke Bliss. Luke the Duke. He makes me laugh. He can barely run that cordwood concern, let alone rule a town. Don’t stand there gaping like a fool. Let’s go.”

They trudged into another residential quarter, this one still intact, if run-down. The wooden houses were sturdy and dignified, in many fanciful styles, formerly the homes of businessmen and professionals in an age when the town’s economy had dimension. Most were now in need of paint. In the oncoming twilight, candles glowed behind curtained windows.

“We’re almost there,” Billy said, “so listen up. Madam Amber, she rules the roost. You can’t give her the high-and-mighty. She loves me like a son, so just follow my lead. There’s eight floozies on board with her. One’s a damn he-she, name of Angel. You steer clear of that one.”

Soon they stood on the broken sidewalk before a large three-story building in the foursquare Italianate style with a cupola on top and a domed lantern on top of that. A wisteria vine clawed tortuously around the pillars and brackets of the front porch. The building had begun its life as Dr. Mortenson’s Progressive Academy for Ladies in 1853, defunct in 1896. For decades after that it was a boardinghouse for single women employed on the Finch-Pruyn Paper Company’s clerical staff. After 1959 it was a six-unit apartment house until the bottom fell out of American life and its present occupant bought it for two ounces of gold. Townspeople joked that it had come full circle to being a kind of ladies’ academy again. The notes of a guitar were audible out on the street, something passionate and austere in the manner of Villa-Lobos.

“Here she is,” Billy said.

A high-pitched laugh erupted somewhere inside, followed by the lower-register bellow of a man. Jasper detected the sweet smell of something baking on the mild evening air. His stomach growled.

“Don’t do that around Madam,” Billy said.

“I can’t help it,” Jasper said.

FORTY-TWO

Brother Jobe and his two companions rode north in fine mild weather, inquiring, as they went, among workers in the fields and orchards whether they had seen a boy on the run. They received no useful intelligence about him whatsoever. They came across a few suspicious holes dug in a remote potato field that suggested food theft by someone desperate. They did not dig any potatoes for themselves, being well provisioned and bound by the ethics of their sect to pay for anything they needed. By late afternoon, riding along the fissured and broken old County Road 30, they arrived at a hill overlooking a lonely farmstead. Seth, who had sharp vision, detected something out of order from a distance.

“I see something dead, yonder, BJ,” he said. “Blood on the ground.”

“Let’s have a look, then.”

They rode down through a squash field to the little goat enclosure behind the house and found the mutilated carcass of a Nubian goat, its head cut off and hindquarters missing. The remains were stiff and flyblown, at least a day dead. Seven other goats milled about them bleating raucously. Their pasture was eaten down to dust.

“Elam, go have a look in that barn, see if there’s any hay or grain. And fetch some water. I saw a hand pump in the dooryard. These critters is suffering.”

Brother Jobe and Seth secured their mounts and went around to the kitchen door. For a house that was not abandoned, it was eerily still. They shared a glance and entered through the kitchen door, almost tripping over the body of an older man that the flies had been enjoying. Brother Jobe pulled a rag out of his coat pocket and held it up to his nose as he stooped to examine the body. He could tell by the disposition of things—the bloating, the blood pooled darkly in the back of the neck where gravity settled it—that the man had been dead for some time.

Seth jerked his head to indicate that they should venture farther within. They searched the downstairs rooms, finding nothing but the general state of clutter and untidiness, and crept carefully upstairs. In one of the bedrooms they found an unconscious woman of middle age tied to a steel bed. Her exertions had caused her to slip off the bed itself so that she was suspended by her bonds just short of a sitting position, semicrucified. Blood had dripped from the abrasions on her wrists all the way down her arms and seeped into the filthy bedsheets. The room stank of her eliminations. But Brother Jobe quickly determined that she was still alive.

Seth cut her bonds and Brother Jobe helped her slump the rest of the way to the floor. She groaned but did not wake up. They heard footfalls on the stairs. Seth drew a hog-leg Colt Bisley .45. The door squeaked open with a push from without. Seth cocked the hammer with his thumb.

“Expecting trouble?” Elam said when he found himself staring down the barrel of Seth’s pistol.

“We found plenty,” Brother Jobe said. “A wickedness without mercy come this way.”

“I saw downstairs,” Elam said.

“Put that ding-dang iron down!” Brother Jobe barked at Seth. “You two bring her outside in the fresh air. Find a clean blanket if you can. And move that man’s body out of the house. I’ll get her some water.”

Minutes later, they had the woman outside on a blanket. Seth propped her up while Brother Jobe carefully held a glass of water to her lips. Some residue of instinct prompted her to take a first swallow. Then reflexes took over. A pint of water later, she opened her eyes, but didn’t speak. Brother Jobe added a few spoonfuls of whiskey and some honey to her glass from his own rations and in a little while she began to cough and sputter. When she cleared her air passage, they let her lie back on the blanket with her head on a lumpy pillow.

“What’s your name?” Brother Jobe said.

“Martha.”

“Who done this to you?”

“I’m filthy,” she said and began weeping.

“It’s all right. We don’t mind.”

“I mind, goddamn it,” she said.

“Seth, go fetch something clean for Martha to put on.”

She continued to weep. Elam went inside and made a fire in the cookstove and heated a bucket of water. He found some soap and tore a bedsheet into rags and carried a chair outside. Seth returned with clean clothes. He and Elam hoisted Martha onto her feet and held her up. Brother Jobe unbuttoned her soiled shift and began swabbing her down with soapy rags. She cried through the entire procedure.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said. “I worked in a nursing facility in my younger days. I done this a thousand times.”

He dried her off with the remaining rags and helped her into the clean outfit: an old pair of green polyester pants and a rose-colored sweatshirt printed with a cartoon roadrunner and a word balloon saying
beep beep
. They set her back down on the blanket. With the late-afternoon temperature dropping, Seth found her a quilt from inside. Brother Jobe took a seat in the chair beside her blanket while Seth and Elam retired to the kitchen to make supper.

“Where’s my papa?” she eventually asked.

“I’m sorry to tell you,” Brother Jobe said, “but someone killed him. We got him out back now.”

Martha cried some more but not as energetically as before, and she stopped rather abruptly. Brother Jobe suspected she was less than shattered by the news.

“We’ll bury him after supper,” he said. “You can choose the spot.”

“All right.”

“You going to tell me who done this?”

“Two boys. One about eighteen, twenty. The other younger. A child.”

“You sit tight while I fetch some pictures.”

Brother Jobe returned with the manila folder and handed her the pencil drawing of Jasper Copeland.

“He was older than this.”

“That there’s an old picture.”

“It might be him then.”

“He’s the son of the doctor down to Union Grove.”

Martha dropped the drawing.

“He claimed to be a doctor,” she said. “Imagine that.”

“Looks like he doctored you folks to a fare-thee-well.”

“I’ll tell you what: You ought to shoot him on sight. Him and his cohort both.”

“I intend to bring them to the law.”

“I wouldn’t take the trouble.”

“Yes, well, we’re for due process and all that.”

“They robbed me and left me for dead.”

“What’d they take?”

“What do you think? Money. The older one, he violated me up there.”

She broke down in tears again.

“I’m sorry,” Brother Jobe said and proffered the water glass. She drank deeply as if trying to wash her insides clean. He waited until her weeping subsided before resuming his questions. “What did he look like, this older boy?”

“Fair-haired. Very skinny. And crazy, too. He made me listen to a song about himself.”

“You don’t say?”

“Oh, he’s very proud.”

“Matter of fact, he crossed my path not a few scant days ago, this selfsame singing bandit.”

“Did he rob you, too?”

“Tried to. I give him a little taste of the Lord’s wrath. In hindsight, I should have served up a man-size portion.”

“If you see him again, you put a bullet in his head.”

“We’ll see about that. Tell me: Do you know the Lord, Martha?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Jesus.”

“You find somebody else to talk about him with.”

“I know you’ve been through a tribulation, ma’am—”

“God doesn’t care when we suffer. I know that now.”

“We have a community down Union Grove way. We’re building a New Jerusalem there one soul at a time. Oh, it’s a sweet corner of the country in this time of hardships and travails. You’re welcome amongst us, if you’d like to come.”

“No thank you.”

“You don’t have to love Jesus right off.”

“I’m not interested.”

“You can think it over, Martha.”

“I thought about it as much as I ever will. You tell me: If your Jesus has power over anything, why don’t you ask him to turn the electric back on and make the world like it used to be.”

“That world is no more, I’m sorry to say. But we can offer fellowship, warm hearts, busy hands, good eats, a place of refuge in the world.”

“I got my own place right here.”

“You can’t stay here now, all alone.”

“Of course I can.”

Brother Jobe drank some of his own whiskey out of an old Lexan expeditionary bottle he carried it in.

“What sort of church man drinks whiskey right out of the jar, anyway?” she said.

Brother Jobe shrugged.

“You’ll be called down to testify,” he said. “Robbery, rape, and murder is serious business.”

“First you got to catch them.”

“We aim to.”

“He’s got a gun, that older one.”

“I know.”

FORTY-THREE

At the end of a long afternoon in the saddle, the Reverend Loren Holder rode around the back end of Lloyd’s Hill in the northern reaches of the county and, just as the doctor’s map indicated, came upon the cottage of Barbara Maglie with its gothic trimmings and aura of mystery. He had the odd notion, looking around, that he no longer knew what time he was living in, whether it was today or yesterday, or some temporal space apart from his personal experience of the world.

Upon his first glimpse of her, she was bent over at the waist picking rosemary stems in one of the several fenced gardens that extended around the cottage like formal outdoor rooms, each with its own geometry of beds, paths, plantings, colors, and scents. He sat atop Lucky watching her for a long moment, feeling light-headed, as if his blood were carbonated. The horse shifted its weight and the saddle creaked just loudly enough so that Barbara Maglie lifted her head and then her upper body, balletically, with a pronounced curve to her spine. She found Loren in her field of view and returned his gaze.

Panic seized Loren as her eyes met his. A chill pulsed through his inner fluxes, urging him to call off what suddenly seemed a foolish adventure, to rein out his horse and return to Union Grove as quickly as possible. But he did not yield to the panic. Instead, as though he were watching himself in a movie, Loren dismounted and led the horse down the path between the house and the sequence of gardens. Barbara Maglie waded through drifts of herbs and late-blooming asters, goldenrods, and cornflowers, and finally stepped through a garden gate fashioned fancifully out of twisted tree limbs.

Loren introduced himself, explained that he was the minister of the Congregational Church in Union Grove, and stated flatly that he had come to see her at the suggestion of his friend Dr. Jerry Copeland, who said that she might be able to help him with a problem of a delicate nature. Barbara Maglie appeared to understand exactly why he was there. Loren felt that she could see completely through him, as though he were one of those plastic models of human anatomy in the science museums of yore, only instead of his heart and liver, his sensibilities were on display and clearly labeled.

“Did he find his boy?” she asked.

“Not yet. We’ve got more men on the search now. Men who were soldiers in the Holy Land, who know what they’re doing.”

“They’ll find him.”

“How do you know?”

“How far can he go in these times?”

Lucky nickered. Barbara Maglie ran her hand along the horse’s big jaw muscle and down his velvet nose. The horse did not flinch at her touch.

“It’s terrible to lose a child,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

“You look healthy.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“Did you bring silver?”

“I did. What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m going to help you.”

“You sound very confident.”

“I am.”

“Do you ever fail?”

“May I call you Loren?”

“Please.”

“Be easy, Loren.”

“I’m trying.”

“You don’t have to try. I’ll take care of you.”