Whisper Hollow (39 page)

Danny swallowed hard, and thought about Gabriel. That little body, back turned, trundling away into the dark of night. What must Stanley have felt like, knowing he’d never get to see his son alive again, thinking it would have been partly his fault for letting him go off to war. Or making him go. How do you move on from that?

Without changing his fetal position, Stanley spoke, clear and calm. “I’m having them dreams again. I don’t know if my own grandson knows the truth, or whether he’s going to tell it, and I think maybe I ought to just say it myself and get it over with. I don’t know how much more of it I can take.”

“Mr. Kielar,” Danny started. “Stanley. I know when we talked a month or so ago, back at the Shelter, I said I couldn’t just take my family and up and leave like that. But things haven’t passed over as much as I assumed they would. It’s been hard on Lidia. Been hard keeping it all from Gabe. All these people wanting things from him. It’s nonsense, it is. I know he’s real smart, but he’s not what they’re saying he is. Even Father Timothy said so. Lidia talked to him. Not that I give much mind to that either. But anyway, I’ve been thinking about what you said, getting away from Verra for a while. And, well, I once thought I’d like to go to law school. And, no offense, I really hate working the mines.” He sat back and crossed his legs. “I sent away to the City University of New York for an application. I worked on it every night for a week and sent it off the first of June. ’Course there’s no guarantee I’ll get in. But I thought you’d be interested to know: I hear what you’re saying, and I don’t want any of this to affect my wife or my son, or you for that matter. So maybe that’ll ease you up a bit.”

Stanley dropped his face into his open palms. He sat like that for a moment and then spoke. “I’m losing everybody one by one,” he whispered.

“But isn’t that what you wanted me to do? You said so, plain as day.”

Stanley reached out and grasped Danny’s forearm without looking up. “I did. And I thank you. But you’ve got to know. I’ve already lost damn near everything. You three are the last I have.” He pulled back his hand and sat up, taking a sober breath. “But it’s good, it’s a good idea. Get you above ground, save Lidia and Gabriel from the fear of losing you every shift.”

“I’ll make sure nobody — ” Danny stopped short, craning his neck toward a shriek in the distance. “What was that?”

Stanley shrugged in slow motion, fatigue and alcohol dulling his motor skills. “One of them owls, I’d guess. On the hunt.”

But Danny turned his ear toward it. It didn’t sound like an owl on the hunt. It sounded like something that’d been hunted.

Myrthen led Gabriel down the worn path to the entrance of St. Michael’s. The light of the full moon was so bright it cast shadows along their way.

“Come on now,” Myrthen said without turning her head. “It’s not much farther.”

“I know how far it is,” Gabriel said.

Myrthen raised an eyebrow but didn’t respond. She wasn’t used to children, impertinent or otherwise. Perhaps this was how all almost-four-year-olds were.

But she remembered Gabriel wasn’t like all almost-four-year-olds. She slowed her step, fell back a bit, softened her voice. “How do you know so many things, Gabriel?” she asked, sidling to him and matching his gait.

The ground crunched beneath them, crickets called.

Silently, Myrthen prayed:
Lord, You are a true and faithful witness. Whether this be good or evil, I will obey Your voice.

“I want to go home.”

“You can’t go home now, Gabriel. You heard your father. You’ll stay with me until he returns for you.”

Gabriel’s shoes had come unlaced, and the aglets flopped like two trouts on a line.

“How long do I have to wait?”

Myrthen stopped and turned to him. “As long as you must.” Then she resumed her walk, slow and steady and even.

Her thoughts turned to her cousin Liam — long gone and possibly buried — and her conversation with him nearly nineteen years ago. The voice of God she’d tried to convince him with, knowing all along it was only the deaf leading the blind. And she’d done it; she’d convinced him to play out his revenge such that she would benefit — at last a widow, finally able to fulfill her original pledge to love no one but Jesus.
In our weakness, you remain. When we’re broken
,
you sustain.
And he had done according to her plan. He’d even stayed away all these years as she’d demanded, a miracle that suggested God was on her side. In her widowhood, she’d been freed. But not entirely.

The nightmares kept her captive to the past.

“Gabriel, do you know anything about the mines?”

Gabriel kicked the dirt ahead of each blue canvas shoe. “I don’t want to talk about the mine.”

Myrthen felt her heart quicken. She refused the temptation to look at him directly, remembering what she’d once been told about her particular unflinching blue stare, that it unnerved people.

Though God might allow the living to see ghosts on occasion, the Church forbade the initiation of occult contact with departed souls. Recourse to mediums, interpretation of omens, and conjuring of the dead were all practices to be rejected. Such divination represented a personal desire for power over time,
history, and other people. It contradicted the loving fear man owes to God alone.

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell
 … Myrthen stared straight ahead into the darkness.

“Gabriel, has your daddy or anybody else ever told you about the accident that happened some years ago?”

“Where’s my daddy?”

“He’s gone to retrieve your grandfather, who is no doubt inebriated and in need of special attention. Nothing that a child like you should contend with,” she said. “Quite frankly, I’m shocked he’d expose you to such debauchery.”

“He needs my daddy to take him home.”

The slap of footsteps on the dirt, a wavering hoot in the distance. She nodded. “Just like those miners in the accident I mentioned. Did those miners underground get to go home?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

Gabriel stopped in his tracks and looked at her, the mantilla framing her face despite the June heat. “You know,” he said.

Myrthen slowed to a stop just ahead of him and closed her eyes. She thought fleetingly of John. Over the years and especially since she’d moved back home to Verra after leaving the convent, she had dreams of John trapped underground, clawing at the dirt trying to escape. And in each of them, she served as the only witness. Somehow, she could look down at him as though she could see through the crust of earth that separated them. Through this looking glass — she from her safe, ventilated side of freedom, and he from his tomb — they locked eyes. And each time, again and again, she watched him die.

She always awoke from these dreams cold and sweating, and prayed as many Hail Marys and Our Fathers as it took to
distract her back to sleep. Sometimes in the dream, however, John became her twin sister, and after one of these, she couldn’t lull herself back to sleep. The vision of Ruth screaming and trying to climb out of the undercroft became far too realistic to fade into the drape of night.

“No, actually. I don’t. I know some of them died underground, but …” She swallowed, hard. “But I don’t know exactly why.” She turned slowly back and reached out her hand to his. “Do you?”

Gabriel tucked his hand into his pocket and started walking again, watching the ground pass slowly, step by step, beneath him. The dwarf huckleberry shrubs meant a left turn up ahead to get to the church. Right, if he were to cross over to the cemetery. “
You
know,” Gabriel said again. Then, a moment later: “I don’t want to be here now. I want to find my daddy.”

“Your people are running afoul of the cemetery where the dearly departed are resting!”

Gabriel looked at her, and sniffed once, hard. “My daddy’s there,” he said.

“And he said you’d stay with me.”

“I don’t want to stay with you,” he said.

Myrthen grabbed Gabriel by the upper arm. “You have no choice!” She glared down at him then, ice-blue and insistent. His wide eyes blinked up at her a few times.

Then, in a single fluid movement, he wrenched away from her grasp and took off running.

He was fast, but the moon was bright and Myrthen was smart. She didn’t bother calling his name; she knew he wouldn’t stop even if she did, and besides, she knew where he was going. In an instant, she lifted the hem of her long skirt and went after him.

She could see his shadow bobbing on the mountain floor, could hear his footsteps crunching twigs and slapping the dirt.
Running behind him, she tried to close the gap, but it had been many years since she’d moved herself so quickly through space. Her joints ached at every pace; her lungs filled with fire. A small rut in the path nearly ended the race: she stumbled headlong in fast-motion with her hands outstretched, ready to fall. But she righted herself in time.

Animated with the utmost lively confidence, I come laden with the weight of my sins, to prostrate myself before You.

There. She found him in her sights again, a dozen yards in front of her, running along the perimeter of the cemetery’s iron fence. He seemed to be slowing a bit, perhaps confused by his direction. Was he looking for the gap that she had long ago pried open with a crowbar from the shed behind St. Michael’s, for want of easier access to her sister’s grave? If so, he’d passed it already. Now he would have to run the length of the southern edge and turn up to enter through the proper gate. She didn’t know if she could run that far. Perhaps she should just let him go.

But no, she couldn’t. He knew something, and now that she’d started her line of questioning, she needed to know what it was. The image of John trying to escape the pit — hands bleeding, that panicked, transfixed stare — had her by the throat. She might not have another chance until she died to find out to whom God had assigned the blame.

“Daddy!” Gabriel yelled. “Daddy, where are you?” His voice was high and piercing. “Who-who!” a screech owl called in return. “Who-who!” He ran fast again, but the sugar maples along the path that stretched a hundred feet into the sky choked the moonlight. There came no answer from the cemetery, so he kept running, past the left turnoff to the gate. He must be lost, or else headed somewhere else. Myrthen fought to catch him — how dare he go so far, and now he had started toward the mine, of all places. John’s old cabin was somewhere nearby, she realized, and the thought brought the dream of his exploded
interment again to her mind. She quickened her pace, trying to ignore the burning in her chest, legs, feet.

And then she was nearly upon him. He ran headlong down a hill, straight for the highwall above the mine entrance that had been sheared away sixty years ago when Blackstone had first come in to excavate the pit. When those early workers had gouged out a notch in the mountain face, they’d created a manmade cliff above it. And if Gabriel didn’t stop, he’d go straight off the edge.

“Gabriel, stop!” she screamed. Either the panicked tone or the mere closeness of her voice startled him, and he jumped midstride and glanced over his shoulder. She lunged forward with her hands outstretched, the downhill momentum pitching her forward, and he made a small, wounded sound like a yelp before he leapt away from her once more.

“Look down!” she screamed again. Something about that command made him obey. He slowed to a trot and must have realized where he stood, because his legs stuttered to a stop even while his torso moved forward, an imbalanced inertia that forced him to swim his arms wildly about in order to remain upright. In that moment of uncertainty, Myrthen skidded sideways to a stop beside him and grabbed one of his forearms. A tiny landslide of pebbles rolled past their feet and off the edge of the sheer overburden of rock. A second later, they could hear them landing on the ground below, a faint and gentle sound, like falling rain.

She pumped his arm once, hard, and spoke through a pant. “Do you see what could’ve happened? You could’ve run right off this cliff. What foolishness got into your head, running down here like this?”

“Let me go!” Gabriel said, pulling his arm, and panting along with her. She gripped it like a hawk refusing to release its prey.

“Not until you settle down. And once you do, I want you to tell me what you know.”

He tried to wrench his arm away, but she knew his tricks. She wasn’t going to chase him all over Creation again. She squeezed his arm more tightly.

Gabriel glanced at the ground near his feet and then bent over to grab a stick. It was thicker than a fishing pole, but only as long as his forearm. He clutched one end and raised it above his head, clearly intending to bring it down upon her grasp, a plan that she — older, taller, more wicked, and less desperate — foresaw and intercepted with her free hand. There was an exchange of grips, a flurry of yanking, until somehow each of them ended up holding one end of the stick.

“I want my daddy!”

Myrthen had grown tired, the fight instinct that had earlier charged her system and fueled her chase now replaced by an awareness of the aches throughout her usually inactive body. Her sudden weakness made them a fair match, and they grunted back and forth, silent but for the shortness of breath, until Myrthen finally hissed through clenched teeth, “Your father isn’t here. And instead of whining about that, you should be on your knees giving thanks to your Heavenly Father that I was here to save your life.”

Whose life have you saved?

“What did you say?” she demanded. Gabriel stared at her.

You know what happened. You can’t hide your secrets forever. You can’t hide them from God.

Myrthen felt a white heat crawl over her scalp, felt something inside her go loose. She squinted at Gabriel, searching his face in the moonlight, trying to match the voice with his, but it didn’t fit. What she heard was an angry girlish voice of someone more familiar, a voice that spoke only inside her own mind.

“What did you say?” she said again, whispering this time.