A Minister's Ghost: A Fever Devilin Mystery

by Phillip DePoy

  Every shred of doubt I may have had in my mind about Hiram Frazier had been removed when Skid had confirmed my guess about his roadside activity in Atlanta. There was no doubt that he was the strange man with the key trick.

  In my mind, like a flash of lightning, I saw an image of Hiram Frazier, and the thought that accompanied it made me drop my flashlight. This morning when I’d thrown him out of my truck, he’d grabbed what I mistook for a knife. It turned out to be a set of keys. He’d almost held them up for me to see, but I’d been too agitated to focus on them. Now my mind had reconstructed the image. Had I actually seen Tess and Rory’s keys in his hand?

  The language of his strange “vision,” two girls in a pumpkin, came back to me. The rambling words were clearly a recollection, through what was surely his alcoholic haze, of the girls’ death.

  I bent to pick up the flashlight and was startled by a voice from behind the rhododendrons.

  “Stop throwing that light around,” Orvid whispered. “We’re kind of trying to do this in secret, aren’t we?”

  “Orvid,” I whispered back. “Where are you?”

  He stepped out from behind the tall hedge. He’d donned a black rain poncho that would have made him invisible in the night, but for the white glow of his face.

  “You talked to Skidmore?” he said calmly.

  “Yes,” I said, straightening and keeping the flashlight pointed to the ground. “He told me Hiram Frazier has three outstanding warrants. One of them involves an incident in Atlanta exactly like the scenario I described to you about taking the girls’ car keys.”

  “Seriously?” Orvid asked, stepping closer to me.

  “Absolutely,” I confirmed. “And one of the warrants is for murder.”

  “Murder?” Orvid seemed more amused than surprised.

  “His wife,” I said quickly, “it’s a cold warrant. The case is closed as unsolved.”

  “Well,” Orvid told me heartily, “let’s solve it.”

  He turned and headed toward the railroad tracks.

  “Where are you going?” I said aloud, following him a step or two.

  “To the trestle,” he said without slowing. “I see some people down there.”

  I followed, though I could see no one. He seemed to be certain of what he was doing, which was more than I could say.

  We were fifty feet closer before I could make out human forms. Seven ragged coats tattered in the wind.

  A few spots underneath the trestle seemed relatively dry, and the people there had started a fire in what looked like a rusted barbecue grill.

  They saw us coming. One nudged another and several stood, but none of them moved—or seemed overly concerned. They might even have taken us for kindred spirits. We certainly wouldn’t have been mistaken for any sort of authority figures. They were huddled around the fire, several shivering, all with the same vacant look. These men had learned that, for them, all sensation was bad. Physical, emotional, and spiritual awareness were only doorways to disappointment and pain. The extent to which they could keep from feeling anything was the extent to which they might make it through another night until morning.

  “Evening,” Orvid called out when we drew near.

  One or two men nodded; no one spoke.

  “Can we get next to your fire?” Orvid went on.

  No one moved.

  I brushed my wet hair backward across the top of my head.

  “Or get under there out of the rain?” I ventured.

  One of the men sniffed.

  “We saw your truck,” he said defiantly.

  They knew we weren’t in their tribe.

  “I just want to ask you some questions,” I began, still walking toward them, pasting a smile to my face. “I’m a folklorist, and I collect stories. I was wondering if I could talk with you, and later, if you agree, I’d like to tape-record what you say.”

  “How much?” the man said.

  It was hard to tell his age. His face had been cleaned by the rain but his hair was filthy, ratted to the side of his head, and one of his eyes was milky and swollen.

  “What do you mean, ‘how much’?” I asked amiably.

  “How much you pay for the stories?” His good eye burned into mine.

  I stopped walking. Orvid took my cue.

  “There’s no pay involved,” I said, dropping the smile. “I want to know about the preacher.”

  Another of the men jumped up.

  “See!” he said, his voice a harsh gargle. “I told you that crazy dickweed would get us in trouble. Always gets us in trouble.”

  “So you do know him,” I continued to the man with one good eye.

  “No idea what you’re talking about,” he said, dead cold. “Clear on away from here.”

  He took a step my direction, and the rest of the men stood up. The rough-throated man suddenly had a two-by-four in his hand, several nail points sticking out one side. Another drew a bicycle chain out of some hidden place beside him and began swinging it slowly.

  I sighed.

  “You know the preacher,” I said, as emotionlessly as I could manage. “He’s the one that’s in trouble, not you.”

  “Don’t know a preacher,” the milk-eyed man told me with a crackling laugh. “Do we look like we know a preacher?”

  Orvid turned to me, utterly at peace.

  “You can wait in the truck if you want to,” he said, his voice a motionless, clear pond.

  “What?” I didn’t know what he meant.

  Before he could explain, the man with the two-by-four took several steps in my direction, raising the board high above his head. I stumbled backward quickly.

  In a single fluid move, Orvid somehow managed to place his cane between the man’s ankles, tripping him. The man tumbled to the ground. Orvid backhanded the man’s skull with the thick top of the cane, and the man lay still, facedown in wet grass.

  The others at the trestle were momentarily frozen.

  “No one else will get hurt,” I said quickly, “if any of you can tell us where the preacher’s gone.”

  “What if we don’t know?” the one-eyed man said, still fiery and ready to fight.

  I shook my head and looked down at his fallen comrade.

  “You think this one’s voice sounds bad now?” I said, staring at the fallen man with the two-by-four still loosely in his hands. “Wait until he wakes up after sleeping all night in the cold, wet grass.”

  “If he wakes up at all,” Orvid added amiably.

  “Preacher headed west,” the man with the bicycle chain said quickly. “Adairsville. That’s what we heard.”

  “No, I heard he went back home,” the one-eyed man sneered. “So I guess we don’t really know nothing.”

  “Adairsville is on the way to Chattanooga,” I said steadily, “and his home is in Tennessee.”

  The one-eyed man looked down, cursed something I couldn’t quite hear.

  “Could I come get Georgie?” the man with the bicycle chain said, nodding his head in the direction of the body at my feet. “We’re buddies. He does have an awful sore throat.”

  “Georgie?” I looked down.

  “Come on,” Orvid said wearily. “If we pick the right route, we might see Frazier on the road.”

  “The road?”

  “To Adairsville,” Orvid said, turning his back on the men under the trestle and heading for my truck.

  The highway west was a two-lane blacktop; the twists and turns made a sane driver slow down under the best of conditions, but wet asphalt in the middle of the night slowed my truck to a crawl.

  Orvid had been talkative. He’d kept a steady stream of words going from the time we got into my truck until an hour later as we slowly descended a long, dark slope. I thought it was just idle chatter.

  “What’s the last thing you remember about Tess and Rory?” he asked me. “I mean an actual experience with the girls. Judy talks about them all the time, but I don’t know how anyone else sees them.”

  “I don�
�t know,” I answered, not quite comprehending his question. “Why are you asking me that?”

  “Go on. Try to think of one.”

  His demeanor was so compelling, I somehow felt it necessary to respond the way he wanted me to. I did my best to scan my ravaged mind for images of those sweet faces.

  “Maybe a couple of years ago at Halloween,” I told him slowly, trying to reconstruct my memory, “when Skidmore and I were at the old abandoned Newcomb house. You know the one.”

  “I do. It was empty long before I was born, but the family occasionally talks about taking it back and renovating.”

  “You know it’s where we do our haunted house for Halloween sometimes.”

  “I know. Tell me about it,” Orvid said, a gentle psychologist.

  “It’s perfect for that,” I said, steering the truck onto blacktop. “How it clings to the side of the hill, House of Usher, all the rooms have been ransacked. It’s gray, all semblance of paint long gone. The roof keeps water out in some places, but a tree caved in the porch a long time ago. The whole place was crawling with toads and bugs and field mice.”

  “It used to be the greatest mansion in the county,” Orvid said quietly.

  “Well, it looked great for our purposes, of course. All the walls were weather-beaten, and the lawn was nothing but weeds. From the outside, standing a way off, all you could see was the fallen-down porch, the broken windows, and the holes in the roof. Once you got up close, there was even more damage, and weeds were just as comfortable in the kitchen as in the yard.”

  “Still, there’s a semblance of a road left in front of it,” Orvid ventured. “At one time somebody thought enough of the place to put in a road up to it.”

  “But it doesn’t go anywhere,” I reminded him.

  “Go on with your story,” he sighed.

  “Skid and I got to the place just a little before sundown with the intent of getting set up for this haunted house. Several school groups were due shortly after sunset. I felt a little foolish, a grown man actually planning how to scare the life out of a couple of truckloads of children. But Skidmore was having the time of his life. I think he took it more seriously than the children did.

  “Tess and Rory had helped organize it all, that’s the point,” I went on. “That’s the reason Lucinda encouraged me to do my part. The plan was that the girls would bring the truckloads of kids to the house; Skidmore and I would be the ghosts. Skid brought the sheets.”

  “Sheets?” Orvid protested. “Were you the lamest ghosts in the state?”

  “We were harmless ghosts. There we sat, Skidmore and I, just before sundown, trying on his wife’s good bed linen. I don’t mind admitting that I had a little something to help me get in the spirit of the thing, a nip or two of apple brandy. So by the time the sun set behind the bare pecan trees, it was a wonderful night indeed. Crickets started up, there was an owl in the house, which made just the right sound for our adventure. Light was fading fast from the sky, and the two of us took our places in the living room, squatted down out of sight, with our sheets wrapped around us. Breeze came up and brought a chill. I looked at my watch; it was the very witching time of night.”

  “What kind of parents,” Orvid objected, “would let their little seven-year-olds be taken way back off the road by two teenaged girls to be scared to death by two odd, full-grown men?”

  “When it was announced at several of the churches that there would be a haunted house on Halloween night,” I answered, mock-offended, “we had more than twenty families sign up.”

  “Yet another reason for me to move somewhere else,” Orvid said, grinning.

  “After a little while,” I continued my story, ignoring his taunting, “the moon was completely hidden by clouds. I’d just come back to Blue Mountain and I’d forgotten the real meaning of dark. It was nothing like night in Atlanta. There didn’t seem to be a speck of light in the universe. The moon was hidden, the stars; I could barely see my hand in front of my face. Have you ever heard a peacock cry?”

  “What? No, I don’t think so.”

  “Sounds just like a woman screaming,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “You didn’t know that your crazy relatives had peacocks on that property? There must be dozens of them still wandering around.”

  “After all this time?”

  “They mate,” I assured him.

  “There were peacocks?” He shook his head.

  “They sound like a woman screaming,” I said again, Karloff-like. “Perfect for our play. About that time we heard a truck coming up the road. The kids were singing something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. When they pulled up to the front of the house, the singing stopped. We could hear Tess announcing, in her scary voice, ‘Here it is: the haunted house.’ All the kids let out an oooh and Rory spoke up. ‘It was ten years ago tonight,’ she began, her head poked out the rider’s side so we could all hear her. ‘There was a young couple out riding in the dark. The boy wanted to go to the abandoned farm, but the girl had more sense than that and just wanted to go on home.’ Tess took up again. ‘But the boy wouldn’t hear of it. He took the girl to this very spot.’ At that second, they turned off the headlights and the kids were plunged into darkness. Got a fair scream out of the crowd.”

  “I can just imagine the lawsuits,” Orvid chided.

  “‘The couple’s car was parked right here, just like we are,’ Rory told the kids. ‘And the boy was laughing and joking about how scared the girl was, when all of a sudden, there was a noise from inside the farmhouse.’ Which was our cue, of course, and Skid and I knocked around the loose boards and generally caused a commotion, which made one of the damned peacocks call out. That got an even bigger scream than before. Tess said, ‘What was that?’ and Rory said, ‘I don’t know.’ Skid and I let out a howl, and several of the kids blew out a lung yelling. I could hear Tess over the noise: ‘I was afraid this might happen! We shouldn’t have come here on the anniversary of the night those two went into that house ten years ago.’ Rory said, ‘They never did come back out. And I hear that on Halloween night, after sunset, you can see their ghosts wandering through the ruins.’”

  “Your hint to get up and menace,” Orvid guessed.

  “Right. We popped up and started our ghostly impersonations with our sheets slung over our heads. I thought the kids would die. They were all screaming and crying; calling for their mothers. The problem was that Skid and I had never had practiced this thing, which was a mistake. The girls seemed to think it would be a good idea, since it was so dark, that they turn on their headlights and shine them into the house so the kids could see the ghosts better. Our eyes had adjusted to the dark, and when we were hit with the light, we couldn’t see a thing.”

  “Like someone suddenly shining a flashlight in your eyes,” Orvid accused.

  “Exactly,” I said, belittling his accusation. “We were yelling and making scary sounds as best we could, but we were blind. Skid bumped into me. I tried to get out of his way and tripped over an old board in the floor and fell down against what had been the wall between the kitchen and the living room. The old wall just crumbled, collapsed completely. Made a hell of a noise. So did I. Skid, meantime, had hit his head on something, which caused him to cuss, a rare occasion for him. The kids were still screaming and the lights were still on, and Skid and I assumed we were destroying the entire spooky gestalt, so we thought it best to just disappear like a good ghost should. I made my way crashing through the wall where I had knocked it in and tried to get out the kitchen door. Skid tried to jump out the back window of the living room. Alas, since the lights had crippled us, neither one of us made it. I ended up facedown in the kitchen flailing away at the sheet in which I was tangled, and Skid caught his sheet on the window, ripped it, and he slapped down on the sill hard enough to make him cuss again.”

  “The Three Stooges make a haunted house,” Orvid said, shaking his head.

  “By this time, of
course, we could hear Tess laughing, and Rory was yelling at the kids that the ghosts were mad and they were coming to get everybody, so the kids were still screaming their heads off. Skid called out to me, rubbing his head, ‘I think that went pretty well.’ The girls drove off, and that was that.”

  I fell silent, and the noise of the truck engine took over.

  I didn’t quite know how to communicate to Orvid how much I had enjoyed that night with Skid, the spooky feeling of the place. I was certain that no one was genuinely frightened, but a part of us all liked imagining the ghostly couple. It wasn’t frightening as much as it was comforting. Movies where people are sliced up and worse in a sea of blood and guts, that’s genuinely frightening, mostly because it comes from headlines, happens every day on the streets of New York and Chicago; Atlanta, Miami. I was in favor of The Wolf Man, Dracula—movies in black and white. Bride of Frankenstein, with her white hair and the cobwebs in the corner of the castle. There was no reality to those threats. Nothing about them was believable. They were just for fun. Like a couple of grown men in bedroom sheets jumping around and making noises in an old house.

  And just as I was about to say something to Orvid along those lines, the moon came out from behind the clouds and, small as it was, lit the countryside around us.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a crescent moon this bright, have you?” Orvid mused. “Look at how pretty it makes everything.”

  The breeze picked up, rustled the trees; sent another hundred thousand leaves downward.

  “You enjoyed the haunted house,” Orvid went on.

  “It was good.” I nodded.

  “So that’s a pretty nice memory of the girls,” he said softly. “And fairly significant, what with you playing a ghost and all. Considering.”