Passover

by Aphrodite Anagnost

“And what about the clock?”

  “What about it,” said the sheriff.

  “It didn’t move by itself. It’s too heavy for the kids.”

  “So it is.”

  “And everyone else was upstairs or outside.”

  “That seems so.”

  “That means that someone has been breaking in, don’t you think? Twice, that person has moved our rifles. He’s drunk my coffee and yanked a chandelier out of the ceiling. He’s also run over one of your deputies with a tractor and probably shot Mr. Creed in the woods.”

  The sheriff was a smart man, but she felt like she was talking to a black hole. “And he’s killed your cat and set a wild horse loose on your farm?” said Wise.

  “That’s what I think now.” Rachel looked into his clever, unblinking eyes, and felt the fluttering in her chest fading.

  Rachel had met Phil while Andrea Wise lay dying in his arms from breast cancer in the hospice room at Shore General. She remembered it well, and was capable of tearing up about it even now.

  Three weeks later, his kids had gotten busted running a crew of pot farmers and had fled to California where they were now employed by olive growers. Only a very few knew his backstory. It embarrassed him. Her too.

  If only the man weren’t so incompetent.

  “I know you didn’t kill my cat, Sheriff,” said Rachel. “I believe you’re an honest man.”

  “Thanks for that, Dr. Shelton. But I don’t think there’s a person alive who could do all that mayhem without being seen.”

  “So what are you suggesting, Sheriff?”

  “I’m flummoxed, Doc. Don’t know what’s going on. But I’m like you, I guess. I’ve seen you work on cadavers, ma’am. You walk all around the body, you look at every inch of skin, get out your swabs, draw blood from the heart. Then, and only then, do you determine the cause of death and sign the papers, or order an autopsy. Isn’t that right?”

  She sighed. “So you’re still looking at evidence?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Now we’re thinking about the Holocaust.”

  “Because of some old papers you found in that cellar?” Rachel sat chilled. A sooty breeze passed through the imperfect window frames of her old brick house.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what does that have to do with ghosts?” She fought the bitterness growing inside her. All this dithering was going to get them killed.

  “I’m not excluding anything.”

  “Sheriff, I think you grew up in the country with rednecks and yahoos, where superstitious people get ideas about events being…unnatural.”

  “I take a lot of convincing, ma’am. Regardless of what you think.”

  “I hope so, Sheriff,” Rachel said, telling herself Wise probably came from a long line of mountain people who handled snakes in church.

  He rose from the table and pushed back his chair. “We should join the others.” Rachel didn’t want to.

  In the living room, her mother was holding yet another séance to ask the spirits inhabiting the house to leave. She bit her lip to keep from shouting. Mommy’s mumbo jumbo was foolish. They were wasting time they didn’t have. Everyone should be looking for an intruder. She pushed against the edge of the table and an unlit candle fell out of its stick. She grabbed the beeswax taper, dug some black dust off its surface with a fingernail, then whipped it across the room where it struck a painting of a cow sulking in a feedlot. Wolfie whimpered as the candle soared by his ear. He scampered back to the pantry and curled himself on his royal purple velveteen pillow.

  Rachel heard her mother’s voice droning.

  “Spirits, if you don’t mean us well, I command you in the name of God to depart.” Beatricia paused as if she actually expected an answer.

  Rachel stopped in front of a strip of masking tape Beatricia had undoubtedly ordered one of the deputies to lay across the threshold separating the two rooms, marking the boundary, her sacred domain.

  “We’ve had enough of your bad behavior, spirits,” Beatricia said, her lids low, eyes rolled upwards. “Only if you are gentle, do we invite your attention.”

  Vanilla votives flickered in the darkening living room. The two deputies and Lev sat surrounded by oversized chenille goose-down-filled pillows on a sofa that seemed to be collapsing in the middle, forcing the three into an awkward snuggle. Zack and Leo hunkered cross-legged on the pumpkin-pie colored Turkish carpet. Dave and Creed weren’t there. Rachel turned and saw their backs through the French doors to the side porch on the west wing. The men were sitting a few yards from the house, on walnut stumps, rifles steadied across their laps. Dave’s head was tilted the same way he tilted it when he was studying a painting. Maybe he was listening to the rain morph from pouring to spitting. Or watching the twilight bats dart after gnats hiding in a garden usurped by the unseasonably tall knee-high mint.

  Beatricia’s tone lacked authority. Rachel knew her mother had practiced the bogus art of summoning spirits, but had no clue about exorcisms.

  “Mom, if you’re serious about cleaning out malevolent spirits, you should call a Catholic priest.” Rachel stood between the columns at the entry to the living room, refusing to cross into her mother’s domain.

  Beatricia’s eyes focused on her daughter. “There’s no Catholic priest within a hundred miles of Zebulon. Only Baptist and Methodist ministers and, oh, a Haitian priest thirty miles up Route 13. But they’ve all left.”

  “I’m so sorry about that, Mother.”

  Beatricia’s silver hair had loosened from its French twist.

  Rachel tried to ignore the strange arrangement of furniture and the new cracks in the plaster while glancing repeatedly at her two boys, who sat in half-lotus upon the pumpkin carpet.

  She admired the way their olive complexions blended with the colors of the rug. Finally, she slapped her leg as if swatting a mosquito. When Zack and Leo looked up at her, she nodded toward their grandmother conspiratorially.

  “I exorcise thee, every unclean spirit, in the name of God the Father, and in the name of Jesus Christ, our lord and judge.” Beatricia began reading from an Internet printout in one hand, magnifiers perched on the tip of her upturned nose. Her other hand held a bouquet of dried sage, which she raised and shook with each utterance. “And in the power of the Holy Spirit, that thou depart from this creature of God, whom our Lord has designed to call unto his Holy temple. I cast out ye noxious vermin through the same Christ our Lord, who shall come to judge the living and the dead, and the world by fire.”

  Beatricia stopped, wrinkled her nose, and sniffed the air.

  Rachel smelled only the pervasive odor of burning firewood and the dampness that lingers after a storm.

  “The room is cleansed,” said Beatricia, serenely. “No. Wait.” She squinted. “There’s a descending darkness. Deep as the Caspian Sea, impenetrable. Thick like mercury. I can’t see anyone’s face. But I can see you, dear.”

  “Zack. Leo,” Rachel said, looking down at her children. “Get up and go to your rooms. Now. Go.”

  “Your face is gone now, too, dear.”

  Rachel wanted to turn back, but waited to hear the kids slam a door upstairs where they’d be safer, at least from the mind-bending experience of their own flesh-and-blood grandmother in yet another wacky trance.

  It’d been a mistake to involve the boys in the séance. She went to the stairwell and heard their feet pounding up the steps to the large closet on the landing, and was glad of it. She’d rather have them in their rooms, but they’d be all right in the little room that had once been the vestibule of the maid’s back stair. It had a love seat, spare tack, and speakers. She smelled Shiva-brand frankincense floating down the stairwell. Zack called the closet his “study” and had decorated it with a celadon bowl of sand. In the middle sat a statue of Pan surrounded by little burnt-out incense sticks. End tables held geodes and a lava lamp. A Middle Eastern rug hung on the wall from the crown molding. Rachel ran back to the living room when she heard the door on the landing scrap
e across the sisal rug and the latch snap shut, indicating the boys were safe. From this. She returned to the living room to find her mother, even more slumped, pale as paste.

  “Many spirits drawn to this house,” said Beatricia, hunched and clutching her chest. “There’s no light between them. Their weight is so heavy.”

  She swayed and nearly fell out of the wingback chair. Her hands drifted aimlessly through the space in front of her. “I can’t feel my fingers,” she said, grasping at the panic button she wore on a macramé cord around her neck.

  “What’s wrong, Mother?”

  “The spirits are pulling at my ankles,” she said. “That putrid smell, like moldy cheese.”

  Rachel hopped over the masking tape and sniffed. Not cheese—more like old books.

  The old woman gasped and coughed. The sheriff and Lev lowered her to the floor. Phil Wise began counting her pulse.

  “Mother, please.”

  Though standing upright Rachel was descending into darkness, too—as if in a night terror—and looking through the eyes of her mother. She heard shouts of alarm, but then saw that the arms reaching out for her were human arms, not the stinking arms of the dead or of imaginary spirits. The darkness slid away. Rachel saw a streak of light. Her vision cleared. She heard far-away voices, coming nearer. She opened her eyes and saw the faces of Lev and the deputies, glowing.

  Her mother had begun drifting away from her physical body.

  “Come back,” whispered Rachel.

  • • • •

  When Beatricia fully awoke, Rachel was perched on the edge of the sofa with a cup of coffee. Wolfie had curled in a chair across from her, staring at her curiously, as if something big were on his mind. The boys were still upstairs.

  Dave and Creed had come in from the side porch, drenched, and were sitting by the stove, which they had fed with wood until it was blazing. Both of the deputies and the sheriff stood by, quietly.

  “Too many ghosts in here,” Beatricia murmured. “I can’t get rid of them.”

  “Honestly, Mother.” Rachel sighed. “If you’re going to say things like that, please don’t say them around Leo and Zack.”

  “The boys might know the ghosts,” said Beatricia, “At least Zack might.”

  “I know you think you’re helping, but you’re not.”

  Dave spoke up. “If Beatricia wants to believe in ghosts, let her. For all we know, she’s right.”

  “If something is in nature, it must obey natural law,” said Rachel. “Ghosts do not obey natural law. Therefore, either they are not in nature or there is no natural law. Watch this.”

  Rachel picked up a King James Bible and held it above the floor. After waiting a moment, she let it fall with a thud.

  “Ah,” said Rachel, “There is natural law. No ghosts.”

  “What if there’re laws of nature that we don’t yet know,” Bea said. “And what if ghosts obey them?”

  “What if there are unicorns?” she snapped.

  “Well, there are ghosts,” said Creed. “Ghost Rider, the Holy Ghost, and the Ghost of a Chance.”

  “I’m tired,” said the old woman, pulling on Rachel’s arm.

  Rachel helped her mother up the winding staircase and tucked her into the feather sleigh bed in the cantaloupe-colored guestroom. She kissed her forehead and watched her shallow, rapid breathing.

  She poked her head into Zack’s room. “You two, stay up here. It’s safer.”

  “Of course it’s safer. Isabel’s protecting us,” said Zack.

  “I don’t feel safe,” said Leo.

  She kissed them both on the tops of their heads then ran to the office to look up Holocaust survivors on the Internet. She gnawed a torn cuticle, tasting blood.

  I’d better get myself a Valium, she thought.

  In the living room, the sheriff rifled through the trunk from the cellar of the burned-down house and decided how to divvy up the evidence. The yellowed newspapers were spread out on the large refectory table in the living room. Lev and Creed took the photographs. Dave settled down in a rocking chair by the wood stove to let his clothes dry and study the tattered pages of a musty copy of New York Magazine of the Arts.

  “So we’re going to look through this stuff and figure out who the killer is?” Deputy Ruiz nervously moistened an eyebrow with her pinky finger.

  We’re going to try, the sheriff thought. Of the two remaining deputies, Crockett was the more reliable. Ruiz was plenty smart, but now she had a tremor. She was a bag of nerves.

  “These papers are forty years old,” said Crockett, stretching out his legs. An unruly stack of documents threatened to topple in front of him. Pen in hand, he began taking notes, pressing hard, shaking the table.

  “That’s right,” said Wise, thumbing through a handful of photos. “I figure the man who saved these papers did the killing, and the reason for the murders has something to do with the Holocaust.”

  Dave looked up. “So now you’re going to tell us what you know?”

  “When I’m sure of something I’ll tell ya' all about it.”

  “I thought a ghost did it.” Crockett paused, pen glued to paper. He looked over at the sheriff.

  “Ghost or not,” Wise said, “I figure who we’re huntin’ for might’ve lost some kin in the Holocaust.”

  “Quite a leap to serial killer.” Ruiz combed fingers through her wavy hair. One of her eyelids was twitching.

  “Our only course of action. Long shot or not. Nothing else to do right now, but read and think.”

  “So, I guess we’re looking for a Jewish man?” said Deputy Ruiz, squinting.

  “Guess so,” said the sheriff, shrugging. “Or a gypsy. But yeah, Jewish is my guess.”

  “Lev says tonight is Passover.” Crockett set aside a page from the stack.

  “Guess everybody has put that together by now,” said the sheriff. “Maybe this killer imagines he’s the angel of death, taking vengeance.”

  “Scary thought.” Ruiz gave the sheriff a phony smile and fingered her cross. “Some person with black, bloody wings visiting houses at night, killing people.”

  “It doesn’t quite work out, though,” said Wise, frowning. “Wasn’t Passover when the murders occurred.”

  “Maybe he was just practicing, or confused.” Ruiz gave a forced laugh.

  She looked about ready to crack. She might have hit on the truth, though. The remark seemed less joke than revelation. Inconsistencies didn’t always matter much.

  When lightning lit the darkening sky, Sheriff Wise rose from the table. He moved to the back window overlooking the north pasture. Clouds black as oil slicks rumbled over the tree line. Between peals of thunder he heard whirring from the office on the second floor. He imagined Rachel downloading and printing something useful. But it brought him no comfort.

  The rain that had been coming in fits and starts all day now was thrashing in swirls against the window like phantoms. I am the voice of the earth, said the voice of the rain, thought the sheriff. The line from Walt Whitman was the only poetry he remembered. The trees in the distance appeared and disappeared. Drowned, like reeds in a vertical sea.

  The sheriff noticed something odd about the tarp. It had been laid over Deputy Leveaux’s body, weighted down at the corners by cinder blocks. But each time the wind gusted, an edge lifted and waved, like a blue hand.

  “Deputy Ruiz,” Wise said, figuring it would be good to give her something else to do. “Something’s the matter with that tarp. Mind getting your rain slick on, to check it out?”

  “Okay,” said Ruiz, chewing a lip. “It’s getting warm in here.”

  “I’ll go with ya',” said Wise.

  Dave got up from the captain’s chair at the table to come study the view beside the sheriff, touching a finger to the steaming window.

  “If you want me to check the horses, I will,” said Lev.

  “It’s your job,” said Dave. “Don’t ask.” Then he blanched. “I’m sorry, Lev. I didn’t mean it like that
.”

  Lev shrugged. “No problem.”

  Deputy Ruiz, Sheriff Wise, and Lev slipped on their rain slickers and walked out, each carrying a flashlight against the falling dark. Lev dodged puddles and the mess of tiny frogs that was erupting in the shallow water, slapping at gnats. He stepped up into the barn. Wise and Ruiz turned and walked over to the tarp, stopped, and stood transfixed.

  Aside from its waving corner, the tarp was lying flat in the rain. Leveaux’s body was obviously gone.

  Ruiz spun around to the sheriff as if she were trying to speak, but couldn’t.

  “Calm down,” said the sheriff, drawing his revolver in spite of his quick intuition there’d be nothing to shoot. “Lev, come out here,” he shouted, loud enough to be heard in the barn.

  “Jesus Christ,” blubbered Ruiz, lowering herself into a shooter’s crouch. She dropped her weapon into the tall, soaked grass, then scrambled to retrieve it.

  Lev came running out of the barn, his flashlight cutting a path through the downpour. “Leveaux’s gone.”

  Wise pointed at the tarp with his pistol. Lev took one look and used his flashlight’s beam to scan invisible targets in the north pasture; then, slipping in panic, he let the beam rise to the threatening sky.

  It had been a mistake to bring Lev, maybe Ruiz too. “Both of you, go inside,” shouted Wise.

  Lev and Ruiz pivoted and ran for the house as if a phalanx of ghosts were chasing behind them.

  Sheriff Wise stood outside. He squatted and lifted the tarp, looking for clues. Where’d he go? There was nothing under the tarp but orchard grass. He rose and moved deliberately toward the house. He took his time, furiously thinking.

  In the kitchen, Wise warmed his spread fingers over the Viking range. Little streams of cold meandered around the room, curling about the furniture and licking at the cabinets. He shuddered. He would have to search the pasture, and maybe the woods behind it that were disappearing into shadow. He waited for Crockett and Creed to put on their rainwear, their fingers fumbling. He would have to use Ruiz again, but was sorry for it. Maybe she needed another chance, wanted or not. She stayed hunched, in her rain gear, doomed to go out again.